his command of his material was absolute and has never been equalled.
And his sense of design, of balance, of rhythm--of what is termed
“style”--was always present. He had caught it at the outset of his
career from his close study of Richard Wilson, who had inherited it as a
tradition from Caspar Poussin, Claude, and the painters of the
seventeenth century. Rarely is there anything tentative about his
drawings. They are decisive--the design was almost invariably seen by
him as a whole, from the beginning. Often his work did not please him,
and if it was finished it was discarded; if unfinished, it was carried
no further--as may be seen in several of the drawings recently (1908)
exhibited at the National Gallery, and a good many of the oil pictures
at the Tate Gallery. He was also emphatically a great colourist--one of
the greatest; during the latter half of his life he thought in colour,
and composed in colour, and it was with him an integral part of every
design. That is why his drawings can never be adequately reproduced by
ordinary photography. During middle life, as has been pointed out, his
colour at times became forced and florid, but it was never more pure,
never more beautiful, never more noble, than in his latest sketches.
At times, no doubt, Turner’s water-colours, especially those executed
between 1820 and 1836, have a tendency to undue complexity of design,
and to overcrowding both of subject and lights. Possibly to some extent
this was due to the prevailing standard of English art and English
taste at that time. Then, perhaps even more than now, high finish was
too often unduly insisted on. But you will never find too high finish or
overcrowding in the drawings which he made _for himself_! His figures,
also, were frequently unsatisfactory. It was not that he could not draw
them--at first they were dainty and careful, as may be seen in the two
early drawings, Plates I. and III. But in his later years he seemed to
regard figures simply as points of light, colour or composition--they
were always effective as such--and he often treated them
carelessly--sometimes even coarsely--to the detriment of some of his
otherwise most beautiful works.
* * * * *
Turner is often claimed by the militant school of landscapists of to-day
as one of the first and greatest ‘impressionists.’ In a certain sense no
doubt this is true, but his ‘impressionism,’ it seems to me, was wholly
different in nature from theirs.
During his life, as we have seen, he made thousands of sketches, some
slight, some elaborate, of places, scenery, and natural
effects--shorthand memoranda,’ so to speak--many of which may certainly
be called ‘impressionist.’ _But all these were founded on, or were
intended to add to, his accurate, minute and exhaustive study of natural
forms, and a draughtsmanship which has probably never been equalled by
any other landscape painter._
Then, as is notorious, he frequently altered certain features of
landscapes or buildings to suit the requirements of his pictures--their
symmetry, their accent, their colour-scheme--or in order to convey some
suggestion as to their meaning. In a letter still preserved, he declares
himself opposed to literalism in landscape--“mere map-making” he terms
it. And when for any reason he thus altered the actual features of a
scene, he still almost always contrived to preserve the _impression_ of
it as a whole--usually under its best aspect, at its choicest moment. In
this sense also he was an ‘impressionist.’
Again, when towards the close of his life he began to attempt the
representation (mainly in oil colour) of pure sunlight--as in his latest
_Venice_ pictures; or of form in swiftest movement--as in _Rain, Speed
and Steam_; or of the mighty contending forces of Nature--as in his
_Snow Storm off Harwich_, he painted _such subjects_ in the only method
by which they could be intelligibly rendered. In the same way Whistler,
in his Nocturnes, demonstrated for the first time in Western art, the
beauty of prosaic and even ugly objects, seen in dim light. Both
perforce adopted the ‘impressionist’ method, because it was the only
effective, indeed the only possible one.
But to me it appears that there is all the difference in the world
between _these_ phases of ‘impressionist’ art and the principles of the
modern landscape school, whose works a brilliant set of writers in the
press of to-day are continually calling upon us to admire. The advanced
‘impressionists’ both in France and in England seem to go out of their
way to represent _the ordinary aspects of nature_ with a manifest
determination to avoid any but the vaguest rendering of form, no matter
how clearly defined in such circumstances those forms may seem to
ordinary Philistine vision. They also ordinarily abjure as ‘literary’
any kind of appeal to the intellectual faculties, and apparently confine
their aim to the production of a more or less startling, but generally
cleverly managed patterning of light, shade, and colour, obtained
usually by means of masses of coarse, solid, and often ragged pigment,
carefully arranged so that the effect intended may be found, like a
fire-plug, at a certain exact, calculated spot. Surely Turner’s
‘impressionism’ was far removed from this? Surely it is hard that he
should be charged with being the precursor of the landscape school to
which I have alluded, whatever may be its merits?
* * * * *
Possibly it is too soon as yet to predict what will be Turner’s ultimate
place in art. Like every really great artist (I use the word in its
widest sense) he will be judged, not by his defects or his
mistakes--even if they be many and palpable--but by the _heights_ to
which he attained, and the mark which he has left for others to follow.
For myself, I believe that if his water-colours are allowed to remain
unfaded for future generations, they, along with his best oil pictures,
will be counted worthy to entitle him to a place amongst the greatest
painters of all centuries and all schools.
W. G. RAWLINSON.
[In common with the Editor of _The Studio_, I desire to acknowledge
my deep obligations to the various owners of valuable drawings by
Turner, who have kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. There
were, however, others which I should like to have seen represented,
but as these were not available, the Editor desired to replace them
with examples from my own collection. This must explain what will
otherwise seem the undue proportion of the latter.--W. G. R.]
THE TURNER DRAWINGS IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. BY A. J. FINBERG.
The usual way of painting a landscape nowadays is for the artist to take
his easel and canvas out into the fields, and to work as far as possible
with the scene he is representing before his eyes. The scene, with the
artist’s chosen effect, is of course constantly changing, so the artist
can work only for a short time each day. The effect itself will probably
last for a period varying from a couple of minutes to about half an
hour, according to circumstances; but the painter may be usefully
employed in getting his work into condition for about an hour before the
effect is due, and he may work on for perhaps another hour while the
effect is still fresh in his memory. As one sitting of this kind will
not enable the artist to carry his work far, it is necessary that he
should return day after day to the scene; and if he is determined to
paint it entirely on the spot, he must be prepared to devote some months
at least to the work.
The habit of painting and finishing pictures entirely out of doors was,
I believe, introduced by the Pre-Raphaelites during the fifties, but
before this, Constable and other artists had worked largely from rather
elaborate colour studies made out of doors. Turner did not work at all
in this way. All his pictures were painted in the studio, and generally
from very slight pencil sketches. So far as I know he never made even a
slight colour study from nature for any of his pictures.
As the methods of work employed by the great artists are of very great
interest, I think it will be worth while to take one of his wellknown
works and to trace its evolution somewhat in detail. The beautiful
drawing of _Norham Castle_, reproduced here (Plate XIV.), will do very
well for this purpose.
This drawing was made to be engraved in a series known as the “Rivers of
England.” Charles Turner’s really fine mezzotint of it was published in
1824, so the drawing must have been made at least a year or two before
this date. The pencil sketch on which it was based was made some quarter
of a century earlier--to be quite accurate, in the summer or autumn of
1797.
At that time Turner was a young man of twenty-two, but he had already
made his mark as one of the best topographical and antiquarian
draughtsmen of the day. He had been a regular exhibitor at the Royal
Academy for eight years, and publishers and amateurs were beginning to
compete for his productions. It was his habit every summer to map out
for himself a lengthy sketching tour, his aim being to accumulate in his
portfolio a pencil drawing made by himself of every building or natural
feature that he might be called upon to illustrate. These subjects were
dictated by the taste of the time, which generally ran towards the
ruined abbeys and castles of the middle ages. As Turner’s subject-matter
was prescribed for him in this way, he did not, like the modern artist,
have to waste any time looking for promising subjects. He had merely to
study the numerous guide-books that were even then in existence, to make
out a list of the more important castles, abbeys, and Gothic buildings,
and to hurry from one to the other as fast as the coaches or his own
sturdy legs could carry him. The methodical and stolidly business-like
manner in which he set about and carried through this part of his work
is calculated to shock the gushing and casual temperament of the artist
of to-day.
Turner’s programme in 1797 was an extensive one, and, what is much more
remarkable, he carried it out. He seems to have taken the coach into
Derbyshire, as he had already appropriated everything of interest in the
Midland counties. He carried two sketch books with him, each bound
handsomely in calf, the smaller with four heavy brass clasps, the larger
with seven. The pages in the smaller book measure about 10½ by 8¼
inches, those of the larger about 14½ by 10½. Both these books are now
in the National Gallery collection, and will shortly, I hope, be made
accessible to students and the general public.
The campaign opens with two drawings of, I think, _Wingfield Manor_,
then comes a church with a tall spire on a hill which I cannot identify;
then we have one drawing of _Rotherham Bridge_ with the chapel on it,
then one of _Conisborough Castle_, single views of the exterior and
interior of _Doncaster Church_, three different views of the ruins of
_Pontefract Church_, and then two neat drawings of the _Chantry on the
Bridge at Wakefield_. It is not till he gets to Kirkstall Abbey that the
artist seems to pause in his breathless rush to the North. There are no
less than nine drawings of this subject, all made from different points
of view; one of these leaves containing the sketch of the Crypt--from
which Sir John Soane’s impressive water-colour was made--contains just a
fragment of colour, and has been for many years among the drawings
exhibited on the ground floor of the National Gallery. In this way we
can follow Turner to Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountains and Easby Abbeys,
Richmond, Barnard Castle, Egglestone Abbey and Durham, and then along
the coast to Warkworth, Alnwick, Dunstanborough, Bamborough and Holy
Island. Judging from the drawings, I think it probable that Turner spent
the best part of a day at Holy Island, but he got to Berwick in time to
draw a general view of the town and bridge, and to make a slight sketch
with his limited gamut of colours--black, blue, and yellow only--of the
evening effect. The next morning he was up in time to see the sun rise
from behind the towers of Norham Castle, and to trace a slight and
hurried pencil outline of the main features of the scene. There is only
this one sketch of the subject, and it does not contain the slightest
suggestion of light and shade or of effect. But there were Kelso and
Melrose and Dryburgh and Jedburgh Abbeys close by waiting to be drawn,
and Turner evidently felt he must hurry on. Having drawn these ruins in
his neat and precise way he turned south and struck into Cumberland. In
the larger sketch book a drawing inscribed _Keswick_ follows immediately
after one of the views of _Melrose Abbey_. Then comes _Cockermouth
Castle_, _the Borrowdale_, _Buttermere_, _St. John’s Vale_, _Grasmere_,
_Rydal_, _Langdale_, and _Ulleswater with Helvellyn in the distance_.
Then follow in rapid succession _Ambleside Mill_, _Windermere_,
_Coniston_, _Furness Abbey_, _Lancaster_, and after a single drawing of
_Bolton Abbey_ we find ourselves in York, where the Cathedral and the
ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey and Bootham Bar must have detained the artist
for perhaps two or three days. The tour, however, is not yet at an end,
for the Hon. Mr. Lascelles (who became Earl of Harewood in 1820) wants
some drawings of Harewood House and of the ruins of Harewood Castle, and
Mr. Hewlett wants some subjects to engrave in his forthcoming “Views in
the County of Lincoln.” It is, therefore, through Howden, Louth, Boston,
Sleaford, and Peterborough that Turner makes his way back to London. He
must have been back by September, for among the drawings exhibited at
the Royal Academy in the following May was one described as “_A Study in
September of the Fern House, Mr. Lock’s Park, Mickleham, Surrey_.” He
can, therefore, hardly have been away much more than three months, if so
long, but his strenuous vacation had yielded an abundant crop of useful
material.
It must have been October before Turner was fairly back in his studio in
Hand Court, Maiden Lane, and had settled down to work up this material.
By the following April he had four important oil paintings and six
water-colours ready for the Exhibition. One of these oil paintings (the
_Dunstanborough Castle_) now hangs in the Melbourne National Gallery, to
which it was presented by the late Duke of Westminster; two others
(_Winesdale, Yorkshire--an Autumnal Morning_ and _Morning amongst the
Coniston Fells_) hang in the little Octagon room in Trafalgar Square,
and the fourth is on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. This is
the _Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromack Water_, a really fine
painting, though it has darkened considerably. As the first important
oil painting in which Turner’s genius was clearly manifested, I should
rejoice to see it hanging in Trafalgar Square. The pencil drawing on
which it was based contains some work in water-colour, possibly made
direct from nature, but the details and general effect have been
entirely recast in the finished work. Among the water-colours were the
gloomy and superb _Kirkstall Abbey_, now in the Soane Museum, to which I
have already referred, and the drawing of _Norham Castle_, with which we
are now more particularly concerned.
The drawing exhibited in 1798 is not the one here reproduced. The
exhibited drawing is probably the one now in the possession of Mr.
Laundy Walters. A photographic reproduction of it was published in Sir
Walter Armstrong’s “Turner” (p. 34), and it is worth pausing a moment to
compare this with the original pencil sketch and to consider in exactly
what relation these two drawings stand to each other.
The usual way of describing the process by which a slight sketch from
nature is converted into a finished drawing is to say that the artist
copied his sketch as far as it went and then relied upon his memory for
the further elaboration that was required. An artist’s memory is assumed
to consist of images of the scenes he has witnessed, which he has some
mysterious power of storing somewhere in his mind, something like, I
suppose, the undeveloped exposures in a Kodak. According to this theory
we should have to assume that the particular sight of the sun rising
behind Norham Towers which had greeted Turner on the morning he hurried
from Berwick to Kelso had been treasured up in the inner recesses of his
consciousness, and then some months afterwards, when the appropriate
moment came, he had only to select this particular image from among the
millions of other images in the same mysterious storehouse, to develop
it and copy it on to his canvas. I need hardly add that this desperate
theory is quite fanciful and absurd, and in flat contradiction to the
teachings of modern psychology.
A description that would not be open to such objections would run
something like this: When we are dealing with the processes of artistic
creation we have to assume an intelligent human agent, and analogies
drawn from purely mechanical sources can only mislead us. We must not
assume that an artist’s senses and intellect work like the mechanism of
a camera, or in any other abnormal way, unless we have some strong
evidence to support us. And we must also remember that a visual image is
a useful abstraction in psychology, but in the conscious life of an
intelligent human being it is merely an element within the ordinary life
of thought and feeling. Let us therefore assume that Turner not only
made no effort to retain the exact visual impression of the scene in
question, but that he did not even attempt to separate this impression
from the general whole of thought and feeling in which it was
experienced. The particular matter of sense-perception would then
become incorporated in the general idea or the object--in the ordinary
way in which sense qualities are preserved in ideas. When Turner
therefore sat down to make his picture, what he would have prominently
and clearly before his mind would be a general idea of Norham Castle as
a ruined border fortress, a scene of many a bloody fray and of much
bygone splendour and suffering. In short, his idea would be what the
art-criticism of the Henley type used to describe contemptuously as
“literary”; that is, it was steeped in the colours of the historical
imagination, and was practically the same as that which a man like Sir
Walter Scott or any cultivated person of the present time would
associate with the same object. Instead, therefore, of having a single
image before his mind which he had merely to copy, Turner started with a
complex idea, which might, indeed, have been expressed more or less
adequately in the terms of some other art, but which he chose on this
occasion to express in pictorial terms.
In this way we can understand why Turner did, as a matter of fact,
frequently and constantly attempt to express his ideas in the form of
verbal poetry, and why, in the drawing we are now considering, he felt
himself justified not only in filling out his sketch with details that
were neither there nor in the real scene, but also in taking
considerable liberties with the facts contained in the sketch, altering
them and falsifying them in ways that could not be defended if his aim
had been to reproduce the actual scene itself. The colouring too of Mr.
Walter’s drawing owes much more to Turner’s study of Wilson’s pictures
than to his visual memory of natural scenes; that is to say, the colour
is used as an instrument of expression,--as a means to bring the
imagination and feelings of the spectator into harmony with the artist’s
ideas, as well as to indicate in the clearest possible manner that it
was not the artist’s intention to represent the actual scene in its
prosaic details.
This picture, with the others exhibited in 1798, settled the question
for Turner’s brother artists and for himself that he was a genuinely
imaginative artist and not a merely clever topographical draughtsman.
The following year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, at
the early age of twenty-four, and throughout his long life he always
regarded himself as entitled to take any liberties with actual
topographical facts that the expression of his ideas demanded.
The success of the first _Norham Castle_ drawing induced Turner to
repeat the subject several times. The late Mrs. Thwaites had another
water-colour of it in her collection, there are at least three
unfinished versions in the National Gallery, and I have seen a version
of it in oil. The subject was engraved in the “Liber” from what
purported to be the picture in the possession of the Hon. Mr. Lascelles,
but really from a fresh design made by the artist. Then Turner painted
the subject again for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, and again, about 1822 or
1823, he made the drawing for the “Rivers of England” series, here
reproduced. What is so interesting in all this is that the details in
each of these versions are different, yet they all seem to have been
based on the same pencil sketch. The relative size of the castle varies
in each drawing, as well as the details of its embrasures and crumbling
masonry; the character of the river banks also varies. In the earlier
versions the right bank is steep and rocky, as suiting the solemn and
gloomy effect of the subject; in the latest version, where the humble
pastoral life of the present is thrown more into prominence, this bank
becomes flat and peopled with fishermen, their boats and cows.
In one of the many anecdotes told of Turner he is represented as saying
to an artist who had complained of the disappointment he had experienced
on revisiting a certain place, “Don’t you know you must paint your
impressions”--or words to that effect. I don’t know how true the story
is--and I may confess that I have almost got into the habit of
disbelieving _all_ the stories told about Turner--but whether true or
not this particular anecdote is certainly well invented. Turner knew
quite well how large a part his subjective feelings and ideas played in
all his work, and it made him shy of revisiting places that had once
impressed him. But when he spoke of his “impressions” we must be careful
not to suppose that he could have used the expression in the way it is
often used now. He did not abstract his particular visual impressions
from the emotional and ideational context in which they were
experienced. In so far as Impressionism means this kind of abstraction,
Turner was never an impressionist. And as his first ideas of places were
steeped in the colouring of his own subjective life, so his ideas were
ever taking on different hues as his temper and character changed. In
this way he could use the same sketch again and again and always get
different effects from it; the sensuous datum was merely a point of
departure for each fresh improvisation, a form into which he could pour
his meditations, but a flexible, plastic form which readily took the
shape of its spiritual content.
These considerations may help us to understand what is apt at first to
strike the student of Turner’s drawings and sketches as strange and
incomprehensible. Turner was always sketching from nature, and often
making drawings that contain an amazing wealth of detail and definition,
yet the usefulness of his sketches seemed to vary in inverse ratio to
their definition and to the time spent upon them. The beautiful drawings
never seemed to lead to anything, all the pictures being painted by
preference from the slightest and vaguest sketches. Thus the sketch book
which contains the sketch of _Norham Castle_ is filled with over ninety
drawings, most of them full of detail and delightfully precise and
graceful in handling. Turner made good use of most of this material, but
the most prolific “breeding” subject--to use one of Richard Wilson’s
expressions--was unquestionably the hurried scribble of Norham, which
was so slight as not to indicate even the general shape of the ruined
tower with precision, and which left the number of windows or embrasures
entirely undetermined. But when we see how Turner used his sketches we
can easily understand that this absence of definition must often have
been a positive advantage to him when he came to paint his pictures.
There was less “to put him out,” fewer obstacles in the way of his
subjective utterance, the form was more fluid and tractable to his
immediate purpose. The more detailed studies were of course not wasted,
for the knowledge they gave him enabled him to fill out the slightest
hints of his “breeding” subjects with an inexhaustible wealth of
plausible detail.