1840: AGED SIXTY-FIVE
A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE TERRIFIC 'SLAVE SHIP' AND THE MILD 'NEW MOON'
What a contrast is the cracked and faded picture 'The New Moon' in the
National Collection, also called 'I've lost my boat, you shan't have
your hoop,' with its sunset sky and young moon, the reflections still
beautiful in the wet sand, to the terrific and impossible 'Slave Ship,'
now in America, with its sharks, its huddle of bodies manacled and
writhing in the water, and the iron chains floating on the surface,
as if they were corks. As Monkhouse justly observes, one of Turner's
finest conceptions is spoilt for the want of a little commonsense.
How opinions differ. Of this picture Ruskin wrote: 'I think the
noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest
certainly ever painted by man, is that of "The Slave Ship," the chief
Academy picture of the exhibition of 1840.' After a long and eloquent
description of the sea, without mentioning the sharks, or the bodies,
or the chains, he concludes: 'I believe, if I were reduced to rest
Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.'
I will now quote George Innes, the American painter: 'Turner's "Slave
Ship" is the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted. There is
nothing in it. It has as much to do with human affections and thought
as a ghost. It is not even a fine bouquet of colour. The colour is
harsh, disagreeable and discordant.' Hamerton suggested that the
opinion of George Innes owes part of its severity to reaction against
Ruskin's eloquence.
Among the other pictures of this year were a 'Venice,' now at the South
Kensington Museum, the middle distance crowded, the creamy towers
beautiful; and the magnificent 'Rockets and Blue Lights,' a tempestuous
nocturne, impressionism run riot, which fetched in the Yerkes sale at
New York in 1910, £25,000, and which was hailed in the transatlantic
newspapers as the finest example of Turner's genius ever seen in the
United States. In this year, also, perhaps later, may be placed 'The
Arch of Constantine, Rome,' that colour dream with the yellow sunset
blazing behind the tree, and the arch looking like a rose red ruin
of the imagination. Mr. Alfred Thornton, who has worked out minutely
the actual topography of this picture, has come to the conclusion
that Turner adhered very closely to the facts, obviously because the
facts happened to coincide with his vision. Of the companion picture,
'Tivoli,' Mr. Thornton says: 'The artist seems to have recorded a
series of impressions he might have gathered during an evening walk
at Tivoli. Scarcely any two parts of the picture are side by side in
nature, yet all can be identified with more or less certainty.'
'The Burning of the Ships,' which is the same size as 'The Arch of
Constantine' and 'Tivoli,' and probably arises, like them, out of
his last visit to Rome, is sheer vision, sheer imagination, perhaps
founded on some recollection of naval warfare, or a vague memory of
an incident in the _Iliad._ It is a fantasy of colour and atmosphere.
To look closely is to see clouds of smoke rising from distant ships,
with suggestions of an arch and buildings, and galleys crowded with
rowers; but Turner was beyond form and definition when he painted 'The
Burning of the Ships'; he saw only the effect of the fire and the fury,
lingering with much loveliness in light.
In 1840 or later he painted many of the water-colours that arrest us by
their beauty in the new Turner Gallery, such as 'The Lake of Lucerne,
from Fluelen,' the large, unfinished 'Lake with Distant Headlands and
Palaces,' and that delight drawing in Mr. Rawlinson's collection called
'In the Vale D'Aosta, a Passing Shower.'
But of all the pictures produced this year the cracked and faded 'New
Moon,' with the sunset sky, and the funny additional title, 'I 've lost
my boat, you shan't have your hoop,' seems to me the most personal to
Turner. He is back in his boyhood at Margate or elsewhere, running
on the sands with little companions and dogs at sunset, when the new
moon was in the sky, and the world was young,--a mild, pathetic little
picture, a strange contrast to the 'Slave Ship.'