water-colour, but from a quite early period he employed body-colour in
his sketches, especially whenever speed was necessary. “Body-colour,” it
need hardly be said, is ordinary paint mixed with Chinese white or some
other opaque white substance in place of water, and is frequently used
on a grey or neutral coloured paper, by which means the work is much
more rapid. He had recourse to that method on one memorable occasion. In
1817 he went for a three weeks’ tour in the Rhine district, and during
that time produced no less than fifty drawings of fair size, _i.e._, at
the rate of about three a day. He first stained the paper a uniform
bluish-grey, which, although itself sombre in tone, effectively shows up
the body-colour work, and must have effected an immense economy of time
as compared with ordinary transparent colour. When he returned to
England he took the drawings in a roll straight to Farnley Hall, and Mr.
Fawkes, to his delight, bought them at once for £500. For a long time
they remained in a portfolio unbroken, one of the treasures of the
house, but a few years ago some were dispersed at Christie’s. One of
these, _Goarhausen and Katz Castle_, is reproduced here (Plate X.).
In 1818 Turner went North to make drawings for “The Provincial
Antiquities of Scotland,” an important illustrated work in which Sir
Walter Scott, then in the height of his Waverley fame, was keenly
interested, and for which he was gratuitously writing the letterpress.
Sir Walter wished the illustrations to be given to a fellow Scotsman,
the Rev. John Thomson, of Duddingston, an able landscape painter, but
the publishers insisted that Turner’s was the name in vogue with the
public, and the work was accordingly divided. The drawings, which are
all highly finished and of fine quality, are entirely of Lowland
scenery, including _Bothwell_, _Crichton_, and _Roslyn_ castles, three
or four Edinburgh subjects--one, _Edinburgh from the Calton Hill_, very
striking--and the seaside fortresses of _Tantallon_ and _Dunbar_. They
were afterwards presented by the publishers to Sir Walter in recognition
of his services in ensuring the success of the book, and they remained
at Abbotsford until quite recent years.
In 1819 Turner paid his first visit to Rome, and remained there some
time, going a good deal into English society at the Embassy and
elsewhere. He painted a few oil pictures, but not many water-colours;
among the most interesting is a fine series of studies in the Campagna,
most of which are in the National Gallery. (The “Hakewill” drawings of
Rome were probably all finished before he left England.)
His visit to Rome would appear on the whole to have unfavourably
affected his art. His oil paintings especially, from this time began to
be more and more fantastic in subject, florid in colour, and complicated
in design. No doubt there are brilliant exceptions, such as _Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage_, and others, but the old simplicity and sobriety
had gone. In the water-colours also the tendency to “foxiness” and
florid colour is noticeable, although not so pronounced; it is visible
in the Campagna sketches just alluded to. The change was soon recognised
by his admirers. In 1820 (the year following), I find in the “Annals of
the Fine Arts” the following discriminating criticism of an exhibition
of his works which was held that year at the town house of Mr. Fawkes of
Farnley:--
“Turner appears here in his original splendour and to his greatest
advantage. Those who only know the artist of late and from his
academical works will hardly believe the grandeur, simplicity and
beauty that pervade his best works in this collection.... The
earlier works of Turner before he visited Rome and those he has
done since for this collection are like works of a different
artist. The former, natural, simple and effective; the latter,
artificial, glaring and affected.”
From 1820 until about 1840, apart from his sketches, Turner’s work in
water-colour was almost entirely for engraving. This entailed a great
demand on his time, as he invariably also supervised the execution of
each engraving. Proof after proof had to be submitted to him, to be
returned by him again and again, touched, scraped, and drawn upon for
correction, before he would pass it. As he had an intimate knowledge of
the engravers’ technical processes and always took pains to explain to
them his _reasons_ for the alterations which he required, he gradually
educated them to understand his aims and methods, and so stimulated
their ambition, that the best of their plates mark probably the highest
point which landscape engraving in line has ever touched. I refer
especially to those of “The Southern Coast,” Rogers’s “Poems” and
“Italy,” “Byron’s Works,” “Scott’s Poetical and Prose Works,” and
“Picturesque Views in England and Wales.”
In 1824 we find Turner at work on the well-known “Rivers of England,”
the drawings for which, along with its companion series “The Ports of
England,” have for so many years--too many, alas, for their
welfare--been exposed for long periods and daily copied at the National
Gallery. These show a richer and more elaborate colour-scheme, as
compared with the simpler work of the “Yorkshire” period. An example,
the _Norham Castle_ (No. XIV.), is given here. Both series were well
reproduced in mezzotint on steel, which metal had just begun to
supersede copper for engraving.
In 1826 he commenced what was to have been his _magnum opus_ in line
engraving--his “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” In this
ill-fated work, which was from first to last commercially a failure, he
proposed to depict every feature of English and Welsh scenery--cathedral
cities, country towns, ancient castles, ruined abbeys, rivers,
mountains, moors, lakes and sea-coast; every hour of day--dawn, midday,
sunset, twilight, moonlight; every kind of weather and atmosphere. The
hundred or more drawings which he made for the work are mostly
elaborately finished and of high character. Some are perhaps
over-elaborated; in some the figures are carelessly and at times
disagreeably drawn; but for imaginative, poetical treatment, masterly
composition, and exquisite colour, the best are unsurpassed. I have
ventured to say elsewhere, that in my opinion there are at least a dozen
drawings in the “England and Wales” series any one of which would alone
have been sufficient to have placed its author in the highest rank of
landscape art. Two of the series are represented here--Mr. Schwann’s
beautiful _Launceston_ (Plate XV.) is the earlier (1827); the striking
and very attractive _Cowes_ (Plate XVIII.), belonging to Mr. Yates, is a
few years later. Turner was paid at the rate of sixty to seventy guineas
apiece--to-day they are worth from one thousand to two thousand five
hundred guineas each.
A new phase in his water-colour art of 1830-1836 calls for notice, viz.,
his numerous small drawings for _vignette_ illustrations, the first and
the most important of which were for the far-famed plates of Rogers’s
“Poems” and “Italy.” The drawings for these are markedly different from
any of his previous work, and many of them strike what I cannot but
regard as an unpleasant note. Marvels of execution, delicate, highly
imaginative, and poetical in feeling as they are, they are often
strangely forced and extravagant in _colour_. And this applies to nearly
all his drawings for _vignettes_. Probably his reason for thus
falsifying his colour was connected with the form of engraving, as at
the same time he was producing some of his finest and sanest work for
the “England and Wales,” “Turner’s Annual Tours” (now better known as
the “Rivers of France”) and other engravings of ordinary (not vignette)
shape. Whatever may have been his motive, it appears to me that owing
to this unnatural colouring, the exquisitely engraved vignettes
themselves are in many cases finer than the drawings for them.
Many, however, of the small drawings of this time are superb, including
several of those on grey paper. In the “Rivers of France” series,
_Jumièges_, _Caudebec_, _Saint Denis_, _Rouen from St. Catherine’s
Hill_, and _The Light Towers of the Hêve_ (all in the National Gallery),
are masterpieces, as are also many of the illustrations to “Scott’s
Poetical and Prose Works.” In Turner’s later years he frequently did not
sell his drawings for engravings, but lent them to the publishers,
charging usually five to seven guineas apiece. He kept many in his
possession up to his death, as he did nearly the whole of his sketches.
One day he brought the sixty drawings for the “Rivers of France” to
Ruskin, rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them to him for
twenty-five guineas apiece. To Ruskin’s grief he could not induce his
father to spend the money. In later years he tells us he had to pay
£1,000 for the seventeen which he gave to Oxford!
A long succession of books were illustrated by Turner between 1830 and
1836, containing in all nearly three hundred and fifty plates, mostly of
small size. When it is remembered that he also closely supervised the
smallest details in the engraving of each one, and that at the same time
he was engaged on a number of oil pictures of the highest importance
many of which were finished and exhibited, and others left in various
stages of completion (including most of those recently added to the Tate
Gallery), it may be doubted if such a volume of work was ever before
produced in six years by any painter. With 1838, however, his work for
the engravers practically came to an end. He was now a rich man and able
to refuse tempting offers for the pictures which he had determined to
leave to the nation; as for example his _Old Téméraire_, which a wealthy
Midland manufacturer is said to have offered to cover with sovereigns.
From 1838 to 1845, when his health began to fail, he spent an increasing
time each year on the Continent, and it was during this period that his
water-colour art passed into what many regard as its highest, as it was
its latest phase. I refer especially to the magnificent _Sketches_ of
this time, the large majority of which are in the National Gallery. He
revisited Venice, which had cast her enchantment on him in earlier
years, and he returned again and again to the Lake of Lucerne, which,
after Yorkshire, was probably, up to the last, of all places in the
world the dearest to his heart. It would be difficult to say how many
times he drew the town, the lake, the mountains, and especially the
Righi. There are the _Red Righi_, the _Blue Righi_, the _Dark Righi_,
the _Pale Righi_, and a hundred other versions--each different, each a
‘vision of delight.’ He made drawings also in many neighbouring parts
of Switzerland, Piedmont, and Savoy.
The sketches and drawings of this period have all the old delicacy,
combined with a greater breadth of treatment, and an amazing wealth and
range of colour. Sixty years’ experience had given Turner’s hand--which
up to the very last retained its extraordinary delicacy and certainty--a
marvellous cunning. In many cases the drawings were swiftly painted, in
others carefully stippled in details; usually with a dry brush worked
over body-colour. Sir Hickman Bacon’s beautiful _Swiss Lake_ (Plate
XXII.), _Lausanne_ (Plate XXV.), _The Seelisberg, Moonlight_ (Plate
XXVIII.), Mr. Ralph Brocklebank’s highly finished _Schaffhausen_ (Plate
XXIX.), and _Tell’s Chapel, Fluelen_ (Plate XXX.)--which Ruskin believed
to be Turner’s last sketch on the Continent--along with most of the
reproductions from the National Gallery, are examples of this time.
This last phase of Turner’s art was, however, at the time neither
understood nor appreciated, probably owing largely to the new
development which had recently taken place in his oil pictures. In these
he had set himself, in his old age, the last and hardest tasks of his
life--the painting of pure light, of swift movement, of the tumultuous,
elemental forces of Nature. Some of the _Venice_ subjects, the
marvellous _Snow Storm at Sea_, and the _Rain, Steam and Speed_, were
entirely misunderstood and ridiculed. “Blackwood’s Magazine” led the
attack, and “Punch” and Thackeray added their satire. No doubt several
of his late oil pictures were far-fetched in subject, fantastic in
treatment, and eccentric in colour. Probably, also, no one knew better
than he that he had not reached the goal of his ambition; but he also
knew that his critics understood his aims as little as they did the
difficulties which he had to encounter in striving to reach them, and
the old man felt the attacks keenly. Ruskin tells us that he came one
evening to his father’s house in Denmark Hill, after an especially
bitter onslaught on the _Snow Storm at Sea--Vessel in Distress off
Harwich_, of 1842, which the critics had described as “soapsuds and
whitewash.” Ruskin heard him, sitting in his chair by the fire,
muttering to himself at intervals “Soapsuds and whitewash,” again and
again and again. “At last,” he says, “I went to him asking, ‘Why he
minded what they said?’ Then he burst out ‘Soapsuds and whitewash! What
would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like. I wish they’d
been in it.’” As a matter of fact, Turner had actually been on board the
boat at the time lashed to the mast, at the risk of his life.
Nor has the work of his later years always been understood in our days.
Not many years ago a distinguished German oculist read a paper at the
Royal Institution which was afterwards published in which he endeavoured
to prove that what he considered eccentricities of colour in Turner’s
later oil pictures were due--not to his attempts to paint the
unpaintable--but to a senile affection of his eyes, which caused an
unnatural distortion of his vision to yellow in everything. But
Professor Liebreich can hardly have been aware that although the oil
pictures upon which he rested his theory, being mainly attempts to
depict objects or scenery seen in full sunlight, necessarily tended
towards yellow as their prevailing colour, yet at the very same time,
and up to his death, Turner was daily producing the sanest, most
delicate, most refined water-colour drawings in the palest as well as
the deepest tones of every colour on his palette! All the Swiss,
Venetian and other sketches of 1838 to 1845, which are the crowning
glory of the Water-Colour Rooms in Trafalgar Square, were executed
during the period when, according to Professor Liebreich, Turner’s sight
was permanently and hopelessly affected! No doubt he recognised that
water-colour was unsuited as a medium for his new aim at painting pure
light, and confined himself accordingly, for such subjects, to oil
painting.
The attacks of the critics, however, had had their effect on the public,
and Turner in his later years began to find difficulty in selling even
his drawings. Ruskin, in his “Notes on his Drawings Exhibited at the
Fine Arts Society, 1878,” tells with inimitable charm and pathos how the
old painter, returning in the winter of 1842 from a tour in Switzerland,
brought back with him a series of important sketches, fourteen of which
he placed, as was his custom, in the hands of Griffiths, his agent, with
a view to the latter’s obtaining commissions for _finished_ drawings of
each. Although the price asked for a large finished drawing was only
eighty guineas, and notwithstanding the great beauty of the sketches,
nine commissions only could be obtained. Ruskin, his father, Munro of
Novar, and Bicknell of Herne Hill, all chose one or more, but other
former patrons saw in them what they regarded as a new style, and
declined them. Thirty years after, Ruskin--with pride for Turner’s sake,
he tells us--sold his _Lucerne Town_ for a thousand guineas; it has
since changed hands at two thousand. The _Lake of Constance_, which at
the time no one would buy, was given to Griffiths in lieu of his
commission; it fetched two thousand three hundred guineas at Christie’s
in 1907! After 1845 Turner’s health gradually failed; he continued to
work at his oil paintings up to his death in 1851, but, so far as is
known, he executed comparatively few water-colour sketches or drawings
during his last years.
Little has hitherto been said as to Turner’s _technique_ in water-colour
although the subject is one of great interest, but, unfortunately, my
point of view is solely that of a student, and _technique_ can only be
adequately dealt with by an artist. Much valuable information, however,
on the question will be found in Redgrave’s “Century of Painters,” Vol.
I., and in Roget’s “History of the Old Water-Colour Society.” From the
first he was a great innovator, choosing his materials and often
inventing his methods without regard to custom, precedent, or anything
but the attainment of the precise effect which he desired at the time.
Signs of scraping, spongeing, the use of blotting-paper, etc., are
constantly to be seen in his drawings. In some, including one in my own
possession, the marks of his thumb are distinctly visible in places. But
the result always justified the means employed! With his oil pictures,
especially those painted after 1830, his experiments, as we know, were
often disastrous in their ultimate effects, but it is extremely rare to
find any of his water-colours which have suffered in the smallest degree
when they have been properly kept. But alas, as has already been pointed
out, only too many, and amongst those some of the finest, have been, and
still are being, irretrievably damaged and changed by continual exposure
to light, both in Public Galleries and on the walls of their owners.
* * * * *
In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured to avoid adding to the already
sufficient volume of ‘æsthetic criticism’ of Turner’s art, and I shall
confine myself now to the briefest summary of what seem to me the
distinctive features of his work in water-colour.
What first strikes one in his drawings, apart from their technical
skill, is their _individuality_; they always stand out amongst the work
of other artists, however great. The chief cause of this is hard to
define, but I should say that it is that they almost invariably possess
a certain quality of imaginativeness, of what is termed ‘poetry.’ No
matter how simple was his subject, he instinctively saw it from its most
beautiful, its most romantic side. If it had little or no beauty or
romance of its own, he would still throw an indefinable charm round it
by some gleam of light, some veiling mist, some far-away distance, some
alluring sense of mystery, of ‘infinity.’ And Turner was a true poet,
although he had little enough of the look or the manners of one.
Throughout his life he was a reader and a voluminous writer of poetry,
but his want of education debarred him from ever expressing himself
coherently in verse. The same cause, together with his lack of a sense
of humour, interfered also with the perfect expression of his art,
especially in his classical and religious pictures, and prevented him
from seeing what was incongruous or at times unpleasing in them. But
only a poet deep-down could have won as he did from Nature her most
intimate secrets; could so have caught and so inimitably have portrayed
her every mood and charm.
And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur
of Nature--a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as
Shelley’s--which is perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring
attractiveness of Turner’s work. Without it, he would never have toiled
as he did all his life, from dawn to dark, year in and year out,
observing and recording in those nineteen thousand studies every kind of
natural scenery, every changing contour of mist and cloud, every
differing form and structure of tree, every movement or reflection in
water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.
Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be
seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always
explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic,
yet it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or
perfect design do not by themselves attain. By the modern school of
landscapists this would probably be regarded as a defect or even a
heresy. Pictorial art, they say, should not be ‘literary,’ should not be
intellectual. But to me it seems that the work of the highest
artists--of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Rembrandt, for
example--almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well as to the
senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or unintentionally,
speaks to mind. As has been well said _apropos_ of Ruskin’s writings on
Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the painter
himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry more
readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be
limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony
between the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite
range of significance and supports an infinite variety of
interpretations.”
After Turner had attained manhood--say from 1807 onwards--his _creative_
power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more evident
in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter,
more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative,
topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his
drawings, notably in his _Liber Studiorum_ (1807-1819). Leaving aside
actual landscapes such as _Solway Moss_, _Ben Arthur_, etc., his
creative, imaginative power is seen in such subjects as _Æsacus and
Hesperie_, _Peat Bog_, _Procris and Cephalus_, _The Lost Sailor_ and
other plates of the _Liber_. It also appears from time to time in later
drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the astonishing theory
that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end of his life
he was not a “creative” artist, merely an _illustrator_, and this idea
has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German
writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The
painter of _The Frosty Morning_, and _Crossing the Brook_ (National
Gallery); of _The Guardship at the Nore_ (Lady Wantage); of _Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage_ and _Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus_ (National
Gallery); of _The Shipwreck_ (National Gallery), and a dozen other great
Sea Pictures, not a “creative” artist? The draughtsman of _Chryses_
(Mrs. T. Ashton), _The Land’s End_ (“Southern Coast”), _The Longships
Lighthouse_ (“England and Wales”), _The Alps at Daybreak_ and _The
Vision of Columbus_ (“Rogers’s Poems”), _The Plains of Troy_ (“Byron’s
Poems”), _The Mustering of the Warrior Angels_ (“Milton’s Poems”)? If
these, and scores of others which might be added, are not examples of
“creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found? Is Martin’s
_Plains of Heaven_ to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such thing
as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need
arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael
Angelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?