The range of Turner Prints--His earlier Engravers--His “Liber
Studiorum”--Its etchings, proofs, completed mezzotints--Its money
value--“Liber” Collectors--The “Southern Coast” Series--The “England
and Wales”--The “Richmondshire” Prints--“Ports” and “Rivers of
England”--The Turner Prints secure the Master’s fame.
Turner prints constitute a class apart. The prints which others made
after Turner’s drawings and pictures, the prints he executed to some
extent or wholly himself, the engravings in line and the engravings in
mezzotint, are all of them wont to be collected not so much as part of
the representation of a particular method of work, but rather as the
representation of an individual genius and of a whole school of the
most highly skilled craftsmen.
The Turner prints range in period from a year at least as early as
1794 to a year at least as late as 1856--for though Turner was then
dead, one or two of the finest engravers whom he had employed were at
that date still labouring in the popularisation of his pieces. They
range in size from the dainty vignette a couple of inches high, to
the extensive plate--a wonder of executive skill, yet often, too, a
wonder of misplaced ingenuity--which may be three feet long. Between
them come the very masterpieces of the landscape engraving of last
century--line-engravings like the “Southern Coast”; mezzotint supported
by etching, like the “Liber Studiorum.” They range in value between a
couple of shillings or so--the price, when you can get the print, of a
specimen of the early publications in the “Copper-plate Magazine”--to,
say, well shall we say to £50?--the price of an exceptional proof
of a fine, rare subject in “Liber.” In point of number, those of
which account may reasonably be taken by the student of our greatest
Landscape artists through the charming medium of his prints--or if you
will by the student of Engraving who finds in pieces after Turner alone
a sufficient range of method in the illustration of Landscape--in point
of number those which there need be no desire to ignore or forget,
reach, roundly speaking, to four or five hundred. It is possible to
make the study and acquisition of them the main business of the life of
an intelligent collector.
Mr W. G. Rawlinson is perhaps amongst existing connoisseurs the one
whose knowledge of the engravings by Turner, and after him, is the
widest and most exact. Mr Rawlinson has greatly extended the sum of his
own knowledge since he penned that catalogue raisonné of the “Liber
Studiorum” which remains his only published contribution to the history
of the prints of Turner. The book is of much value; but though, broadly
considered, it remains an adequate and serviceable guide, there must by
this time be a good many corrections in the matter of “States”--rarely
is it that the issue of a First Edition of a descriptive catalogue
of engraved work does not elicit, from one source or another, some
information, the existence of which the author had had no reason to
surmise. And, moreover, it may be hoped that Mr Rawlinson’s more
extended studies in the field of his particular inquiry will bear fruit
some day in the production of another volume, devoted this time to
the tale of the great series of Line-Engravings and the less numerous
productions in pure Mezzotint. “Liber,” remember--the master-work,
which is thus far the only one to have been elaborately discussed or
chronicled by any critic--is the result of a combination of Mezzotint
with Etching. But we will go back a little, and will take the
prints--or such of them as there is cause to mention--in due order.
I recollect Mr Rawlinson saying to me, not many months ago--in speaking
of the little publications of the “Copper-plate Magazine” and of
such-like small and early work--that Turner was never properly engraved
till he was engraved by James Basire; and I think, upon the whole, that
this is true. At a later period, Turner himself protested that he was
never properly, at all events never quite perfectly, engraved, till he
was engraved by John Pye--but then that was for a quite different order
of work from that which occupied him in the first years of his skilled
and accomplished practice. What Mr Rawlinson meant was, that whereas
the engraver--tasteful and in a measure delicate, yet slight and
wanting wholly in subtlety of realisation and treatment--who did the
little prints in the “Copper-plate Magazine,” such as the _Carlisle_
and the _Wakefield_, failed to translate into his art all the really
translatable qualities of the immature yet interesting work to which
he addressed himself, Basire, in the brilliant and solid prints which
served as head-pieces to the “Oxford Almanacks,” from 1799 to 1811, did
the most thorough justice to their mainly architectural themes. It was
in the year in which Basire finished--and Turner’s art, by this time,
had, of course, greatly changed--that there was executed by John Pye
the very work (_Pope’s Villa_) which extorted from Turner what it may
be was his first warm tribute of admiration to anybody who translated
him. But four years before this, Turner, with Charles Turner, the
engraver in mezzotint, had begun the publication of the immortal series
of “Liber Studiorum.”
The set of prints which Turner issued as his “Liber Studiorum”--with
an allusion, tolerably evident, to the “Liber Veritatis” of Claude--is
but one series of several with which the English master of Landscape
occupied himself during the fifty years, or more, of his working life.
But it is the first series that was conceived by him; and it is, in the
best sense, the most ambitious; and it remains the noblest and the most
representative. In its actual execution Turner had a greater hand--an
incomparably greater hand--than in that of any of its successors; and
its scheme permitted a variety, an effective suddenness of transition,
denied to the artist when, in later years, he was depicting that
portion of the county of Yorks which is known as Richmondshire, or
the “Southern Coast,” or the “Rivers of France,” or the “Ports of
England,” or even all the places which it pleased him to choose for
one of the most elaborate of his publications, “The Picturesque Views
in England and Wales.” A long tether was allowed him, unquestionably,
in some of these sets; but in the “Liber”--as it is called, briefly
and affectionately, by collector and student--there was no question of
tether at all. In it, a subject from Classical Mythology might stand
side by side with a subject drawn from English barton and hedgerow--I
am, as it were, naming _Procris and Cephalus_, _Æsacus and Hesperie_,
the exquisite though homely _Straw Yard_, the entirely prosaic _Farm
Yard with a Cock_. The interior of a London church, with its Georgian
altar and its pews cosily curtained for the most respectable of
_bourgeois_, might be presented in near neighbourhood to some study
which Turner had recorded of the eternal hills, or of a great storm
that gathered, rolled over, and passed away from Solway Moss.
[Illustration:
TURNER: _The Straw Yard_.
]
I have used the word “study,” since it is Turner’s own. But each plate
in “Liber Studiorum” is much more than a study. It is a finished
composition. Turner spared neither time nor pains--though in this
case, as in others, he was careful, where that was possible, to spare
money--in making his work all that the wisest lover of his genius might
expect it to be. Whatever rivalry there was with the “Liber Veritatis”
of Claude--the later portions of which were issuing from the house of
Boydell at the very moment that Turner was planning the “Liber”--the
rivalry was conducted upon no equal terms. I say nothing in
depreciation of Claude’s “Liber Veritatis.” In it, one of the greatest
practitioners of mezzotint engraving--Richard Earlom--reproduced, with
learned simplicity, Claude’s masterly memoranda--the sometimes slender
yet always stately drawings in the preparation of which Nature had
counted for something, and Art had counted for more. Claude’s bistre
sketches, by their dignity and style--even the hurried visitor to
Chatsworth may know that--are akin to the landscapes of Rembrandt, to
the studies of Titian. But the artist of the “Liber Veritatis” worked
in haste, worked purposely in slightness, and more than one generation
separated him from the engraver who was to execute the plates. Turner
worked with elaboration, and worked at leisure, and he etched upon the
plates, himself, the leading lines of his composition, and he was in
contact with the engravers, and his directions to these accomplished
craftsmen were rightly fastidious and endlessly minute.
Claude too was an etcher, yet it is not in the “Liber Veritatis”--it
is in the rare and early States of his _Shepherd and Shepherdess
Conversing_, of his _Cowherd_ (“Le Bouvier”), of his _Cattle in Stormy
Weather_--that (as a previous chapter has insisted) we are to find
proof of his skilled familiarity with that means of expression which
Turner employed as the basis of his work in the “Liber.” Claude,
when he etched, etched for Etching’s sake, and used with pleasure
and with ease the resources of the etcher’s art. Turner restricted
Etching within narrower limits. When one remembers the circumstance
that, having etched the outlines, on the plate, he took a dozen or
a score, perhaps, of impressions from it before he caused the work
in mezzotint to be added, it is difficult to assert that he did not
attach a certain value to the etched outlines. And indeed they are of
extraordinary significance and strength: they show economy of labour,
certainty of vision and of hand. It is very well that they, as well
as the finished plates, should be collected. But, in his pleasure in
possessing himself of these rare, noble things, the collector must not
allow himself to forget that they were essentially a preparation and a
sustenance for that which was to follow--for that admirable mezzotint
on which the subtlest lights and shadows of the picture, its infinite
and indescribably delicate gradations, were intended to depend.
Of this Mezzotint it is time to speak. Its employment, though it
proved--as I think I have implied already--wonderfully conducive to
the quality of the “Liber” plates, was not resolved upon at first. The
process of aquatint, in which much work was done about that time--in
which, only a very few years before “Liber” began, Turner’s friend,
Thomas Girtin, had produced some broadly-treated views of Paris--had,
at first, been thought of. Negotiations were opened with Lewis, and
he executed in aquatint one of the plates, which Turner did indeed
eventually use, but which he was careful not to use in the earliest
numbers of the publication. The superiority of Mezzotint he recognised
quite clearly. He employed the best mezzotinters. He busied himself
to instruct them as to the effects that he desired. He learnt the art
himself, and himself mezzotinted, with great exquisiteness, ten out
of the seventy-one plates. He worked, in later stages, upon all the
rest of them; obtaining generally the most refined beauty, but working
in such a fashion as to exhaust the plate with extravagant swiftness.
Then he touched and retouched, almost as Mr Whistler has touched
and retouched the plates of his Venetian etchings. So delicate, so
evanescent, rarity is not an aim, but a need, with them.
The publication of the “Liber”--the great undertaking of the early
middle period of Turner’s art--began in 1807, and its issue was
arrested in the year 1819. It was never completed--seventy-one finished
plates were given to the world out of the hundred that were meant to
be. But Turner had by that time proceeded far with the remainder, of
which twenty plates, more or less finished, testified to a gathering
rather than a lessening strength. By the non-publication of these later
plates, the collector--if not necessarily the student--is deprived of
several of the noblest illustrations of Turner’s genius. Nothing in
the whole series shows an elegance more dignified than that which the
_Stork and Aqueduct_ displays; the mystery of dawn is magnificent in
the _Stonehenge_; and never was pastoral landscape--the England of
field and wood and sloping hillside--more engaging or suggestive than
in the _Crowhurst_.
The mention of these plates--the hint it gives us as to difference
of subject and of aim--brings up the question of the various classes
of composition into which Turner thought proper to divide his work.
His advertisement of the publication affords a proof of how widely
representative the work was intended to be; nor indeed, did the
execution at all fall short of Turner’s hope in this respect. The work
was to be--and we know, now, how fully it became--an illustration of
Landscape Composition, classed as follows: “Historical, Mountainous,
Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.” And further, it is said in the
advertisement, “Each number contains five engravings in mezzotint:
one subject of each class.” But Turner, in these matters, was
extraordinarily unmethodical--I should like to say “muddled.” Each
number did contain five engravings, and they were “in mezzotint,”
with the preparation in etching; but it was by no means always that
there was one subject of each class, for Turner divided the Pastoral
into simple and what he described as “elegant” or “epic” Pastoral (Mr
Roget thinks that the “E.P.” means “epic”), and the very first number
contained a Historical, a Marine, an Architectural subject, but it
contained no Mountainous, for the Pastoral was represented in both of
its forms (“P.” and “E.P.”).
The actual publication was exceedingly irregular. Sometimes two
numbers--or two parts, as we may better call them--were issued at
once. Sometimes there would be an interval of several years between
the issue of a couple of parts. There is no doubt that as the work
progressed Turner felt increasingly the neglect under which it
suffered. Gradually he lost interest in its actual issue--but, never
for a moment in its excellence.
Charles Turner, the admirable mezzotint engraver--who, it should hardly
be necessary to say, was no relation of the greater man--had charge
of “Liber” in its early stages. The prints of the first parts bore
an inscription to the effect that they were “Published by C. Turner,
50 Warren Street, Fitzroy Square.” But in 1811--when three years had
elapsed since the publication of the fourth part--the fifth came out
as “Published by Mr Turner, Queen Anne Street, West”--and “Mr Turner”
meant, of course, the author of the work. Charles Turner, who had
engraved in mezzotint every plate contained in the four parts with
whose publication he was concerned, engraved, likewise, several of
the succeeding pieces. Thus his share in the production of “Liber”
was greater than that of any of his brethren. William Say’s came next
to his in importance--importance measured by amount of labour--and
Mr Rawlinson has pointed out that William Say approached his work
with little previous preparation by the rendering of Landscape. The
remark is, in some degree, applicable to most of Say’s associates. The
engraver in mezzotint, at that time, as in earlier times, flourished
chiefly by reproducing Portraiture. Raphael Smith and William
Ward--great artists who were still living when the “Liber” was
executed, but who had no part in the performance--had been employed
triumphantly, a very little earlier, in popularising that delightful
art of Morland, in which landscape had so large a place. Dunkarton,
Thomas Lupton, Clint, Easling, Annis, Dawe, S. W. Reynolds, and Hodges
complete the list of the engravers in mezzotint who worked upon the
“Liber.” Admirable artists many of them were, but the collector, if
he is a student, cannot forget how much the master, the originator,
dominated over all.
Mr Ruskin and several subsequent writers have written, with varying
degrees of eloquence, of originality, and, I may add, of common sense,
as to the moral, emotional, or intellectual message the “Liber” may
be taken to convey. This is scarcely the place in which to seek to
decipher with exhaustive thoroughness a communication that is on the
whole complicated and on the whole mysterious. The reader may be
referred to the last pages of the final volume of “Modern Painters” for
what is at all events the most impressive statement that a prose-poet
can deliver as to the gloomy significance of Turner’s work. Mr Stopford
Brooke--rich in sensibility and in imaginative perceptiveness--follows
a good deal in Mr Ruskin’s track. I doubt if Mr Hamerton or Mr Cosmo
Monkhouse--instructive critics of a cooler school--endorse the verdict
of unmitigated gloom, and I have myself (in a chapter in a now
well-nigh forgotten essay of my youth) ventured to hold forth upon the
intervals of peace and rest which “Liber Studiorum” shows in its scenes
of solitude and withdrawal: the morning light, clear and serene, in the
meadows below Oakhampton Castle; the graver silence of sunset as one
looks wistfully from heights above the Wye, to where, under the endless
skies, the stream deploys to the river. I am referring, of course, to
the _Oakhampton Castle_ subject, and to the _Severn and Wye_; but the
argument might have been sustained by allusion to many another print.
More important to our present purpose than to settle accurately its
moral mission or to agree upon the sentiment of this or that particular
plate, is it to value properly the sterling and artistic virtues which
“Liber” makes manifest. Of these, however, there is one thing only that
I care to emphasise here. Let all beauties of detail be discovered; but
let us even here, and in lines that are of necessity brief, lay stress
upon the all-important part played in the plates of “Liber” by one
old-fashioned virtue, that will yet be fresh again when some of those
that may seem to supplant it have indeed waxed old. It is the virtue
of Composition. “Liber Studiorum” shows, in passage after passage of
its draughtsmanship, close reference to Nature, deep knowledge of her
secrets; but it shows I think yet more the unavoidable conviction,
alike of true worker and true connoisseur, that Nature is, for the
artist, not a Deity but a material: not a tyrant but a servant. In the
near and faithful study of Nature--and nowhere more completely than in
the prints of “Liber”--Turner did much that had been left undone by
predecessors. But he was not opposed to them--he was allied to them--in
his recognition of the fact that his art must do much more than merely
reproduce. “Nature,” said Goethe, “Nature has excellent intentions.”
And by Composition, by choice, by economy of means, sometimes by very
luxury of hidden labour, it is the business of the artist to convey
these intentions to the beholders of his work. How much does he
receive? How much of himself, of his creative mind, must we exact that
he shall bestow?
Let us come down, immediately, to money matters, and other practical
things for the collector’s benefit.
It is still possible, here and there, in an auction room, to buy an
original set of “Liber Studiorum”--a set, that is, as Turner issued
it--but it is never desirable. For Turner, who was not only a great
poet with brush and pencil, and scraper and etching needle, but an
exceedingly keen hard bargainer and man of business, took horrible
care (or just care, if we choose to call it so) that the original
subscribers to his greatest serial should never get sets consisting
altogether of the fine impressions. He mixed the good with the
second-rate: the second-rate with the bad. It was not till collectors
took to studying the pieces for themselves, and making up collections
by purchase of odd pieces here and there--rejecting much, accepting
something--that any sets were uniformly good. The first fine set,
perhaps, was that, in various States, which was amassed by Mr Stokes,
and passed on to his niece, Miss Mary Constance Clarke. To have the
marks of these ownerships at the back of a print, is--in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred--to have evidence of excellence. Twenty years
ago, one could buy such a print, now and then, at Halsted’s, the
ancient dealer’s, in Rathbone Place; and have an instructive chat to
boot, with an old-world personage who had had speech with “Mr Turner.”
Even now, in an auction room, one may get such a print sometimes.
Another of the very early collectors was Sir John Hippesley, who bought
originally on Halsted’s recommendation, and who--having been for years
devoted to works of other masters--ended by breakfasting, so to speak,
on “Liber Studiorum”: on the chair opposite to him, as he sat at his
meal, a fine print was wont to be placed. Amongst living connoisseurs,
Mr Henry Vaughan and Mr J. E. Taylor, Mr Stopford Brooke and Mr W.
G. Rawlinson, have notable collections of very varying size and
importance. Mr Rawlinson believes much more than I do--if I understand
him aright--in the desirability of possessing engravers’ trial
proofs--in a certain late stage. Most engravers’ proofs are, of course,
mere preparations, curious and interesting, but in themselves far less
desirable than the finished plates to whose effects of deliberate and
attained beauty they can but vaguely approximate. Of course if you are
so exceedingly lucky a man as to have been able to pounce upon the
particular proof which was the last of the series, you possess a fine
and incontestable thing; but generally an early impression of the First
published State represents the subject more safely and assuredly; and,
failing that, an early impression of the Second State; and so on. An
indication of priority is no doubt well--but it is well chiefly for the
feebler brethren. You must train your eye. Having trained it, you must
learn to rely on it. Books and the knowledge of States are useful, but
are not sufficient.
In the few years that elapsed between the establishment of “Liber”
as avowedly fit material for the diligence and outlay of the
collector, and the great sale of the “remainders” in Turner’s
own collection--which only left Queen Anne Street in 1873, some
two-and-twenty years after his death--prices for fine impressions of
the “Liber” plates, bought separately, were high. Then, in 1873, during
that long sale at Christie’s, a flood of prints, and many of them
very fine ones, came upon the market. “Would they ever be absorbed?”
it was asked. They were absorbed very quickly. But just until they
were absorbed, it was, naturally, possible, not only to choose (at
the dealer’s, chiefly, who bought big lots; at the Colnaghi’s and
Mrs Noseda’s, particularly)--it was possible to choose sagaciously,
out of so great a number, and to choose cheaply too. Then “markets
hardened.” The various writings calling attention to the wisdom of
collecting had probably their effect. Then things slackened again.
And now, though rare proofs and very fine impressions--which are what
should be most cared about--hold their own, there is a certain lull
in the activity of buying. The undesirable impression goes for very
little. Yet the fluctuations, such as they are, either way, are
of no vast importance. Of any but the very rarest, or very finest
subjects, six to twelve guineas gets a good First State. Three to six
guineas may be the price of a good Second. A Third or Fourth or Fifth
State fetches less, unless--as in an exceptional instance, like the
_Calm_--it is preferable. Of all the different subjects, the rarest is
_Ben Arthur_. In a fine impression--with the cloudland and the shadows
not impenetrably massive--it is exceedingly impressive. But never as
a thing of power should I rate it above _Solway Moss_ or _Hind Head
Hill_; or, as a thing of beauty, above _Severn and Wye_.
No great collection of the “Liber Studiorum” has been sold of late
years, but if we go back to the year 1887, we can give a few prices
culled from the catalogue of the Buccleuch Sale. An engraver’s
proof of the _Woman with a Tambourine_ fetched £15, 15s. there; an
engraver’s proof of _Basle_, £27; a proof of the _Mount St Gothard_,
which at least must have had the virtue of approaching finish, fell to
Colnaghi’s bid of £55; the First State of the _Holy Island Cathedral_,
which sold for £3, 3s., must either have been poor or monstrously
cheap, though the plate is one in which, even to the collector with the
most trained eye, the possession of the First State is not strictly
necessitated: the subject is among those--and they are not so very
few--in which the Second State, well chosen, is altogether adequate.
The First State of the _Hind Head Hill_ reached £14, 14s.; the First
of the _London from Greenwich_, with its noble panorama of the long
stretched Town and winding river, reached £15, 15s. A proof of the
_Windmill and Lock_ reached £31; a First State of the _Severn and Wye_,
£21; a First State of the _Procris and Cephalus_, £11; a First State of
the _Watercress Gatherers_, £11, 11s. The pure etchings, which I have
written of in an earlier paragraph in this chapter, sell, generally
speaking, for three or four guineas apiece; the etching of the _Isis_,
which is extremely rare, fetched at the Buccleuch auction £13, 13s.
By the Fine Art Society £74 was paid for a First State of the _Ben
Arthur_. The plates least eagerly sought, or in inferior condition,
went for all sorts of prices between a pound or two and four or five
guineas. I think, as far as value may be judged without the presence of
the particular impressions which were sold, the little list I have now
given above may fairly indicate it, but no quite thorough indication
can be got without an immense accumulation of detail, and, on the
reader’s part, an immense knowledge in interpreting it. It is not
unintentionally that we have lingered long over the “Liber.” But more
than one other great series must engage at all events a brief attention.
In 1814 began the famous “Southern Coast” series, which was brought to
an end in 1827. For these prints, engraved in admirable and masculine
“line,” chiefly by the brothers George and William Cooke, Turner had
made water colours, whilst as a preparation for the “Liber,” he had
made but slight though finely considered sepia drawings--mere guides
and hints to himself and the engravers he employed upon the plates:
things whose significance was to be enlarged: not things to be merely
copied and scrupulously kept to. In quite tolerable condition the
ordinary impressions of the “Southern Coast” plates are to be had in
large book-form; but the collector, buying single piece by single
piece, at one or two or three guineas each, seeks generally impressions
before letters or with the scratched title. Of course the variations
in condition are noticeable, but in the firm “line” of the “Southern
Coast,” they are at least much less noticeable than in the delicate and
evanescent mezzotints of “Liber.”
The year in which the publication of the “Southern Coast” was
finished--when prints picturesque and vivid, and in some cases, as
in the _Clovelly_ of William Miller, perfectly exquisite, had been
presented of the most interesting seaboard places between Minehead
and Whitstable--that year was the period at which the publication of
the third great series, the “England and Wales,” was begun. It was
to have extended to thirty parts or more: each part containing four
subjects. But, like “Liber,” it received, on its first issue, no
full and satisfying measure of encouragement, and though it reached
its twenty-fourth part, it did not go further. It was published at
about two guineas and a half a part. “England and Wales” sets forth
with great elaboration of line engraving the characteristics of the
later middle period of Turner’s art, so far as black and white can
set it forth at all. That was the period in which subject was most
complicated and most ample--even unduly ample--and in which Turner
dealt at once with the most intricate line and with all sorts of
problems of colour, atmosphere, illumination. The work of all that
period, from 1827, say, to ten years onwards--with many of its merits,
its inevitable shortcomings, and its immense ambition--the “England and
Wales” represents. The work of various engravers trained by Turner for
the interpretation of all that was most complicated, it will ever be
interesting and valuable. Such prints as _Stamford_, _Llanthony Abbey_,
and the noble _Yarmouth_ stand ever in the front line. The last, like
the _Clovelly_ of the “Southern Coast,” is a work of William Miller,
the old Quaker engraver, whose rendering of Turner’s delicate skies
no other line engraver has approached--not even William Cooke, who
did so well that troop of light little wind clouds in the _Margate_
of the “Southern Coast.” Admirable then, indeed, many of these things
must be allowed to be; and in this sense they are almost unique, that
scarcely anything else has possessed their qualities. Yet on the whole
one admires “England and Wales” with reservations. One’s heart goes out
more thoroughly to “Liber” and to “Southern Coast.”
There are other series which must not be passed over altogether--the
“Richmondshire Set,” of which the first print was executed, I think, in
1820, though the whole volume was not issued till 1823. It too is in
line: the finest print of all, perhaps the _Ingleborough_. Then there
are six “Ports of England”: impressive, varied little mezzotints,
unsupported by etching--prints in one of which Turner has set down,
for all time, his clear, unequalled perception of the beauty of the
Scarborough coast-line. Then there are the “Rivers of England,” with
the noble _Arundel_, the restful _Totness_. Then there are, in line, the
almost over-dainty yet miraculous little prints of “Rivers of France.”
Then there are the wonderful vignettes in illustration of Walter Scott.
These, like the illustrations to the Rogers’ “Poems” and the “Italy,”
with which they have the most affinity, are luminous and gem-like.
The Rogers illustrations of course deteriorate in later editions; the
“Italy” of 1830 and the “Poems” of 1834 are the ones that should be
possessed; and were the present volume of a wider scope and addressed
to the book-collector, I should allow myself to say here what it seems
I do say here, without “allowing myself”--that the collector should
get, if possible, a copy in the original boards, and may give £5 for
that as safely as a couple of sovereigns for a re-bound copy.
Turner is represented on many a side by the engraver’s art, and in most
cases with singular good fortune. For some, there are the vignettes
which have the finish of Cellini work. For some, it may be, the large,
more recent plates, the _Modern Italy_ and _Ancient Italy_, that hang,
I cannot help considering, rather ineffectively upon the wall: too big,
not for their place, but for their method of execution--and yet, like
so many, wonderful. He is represented best of all perhaps in works
of middle scale--in the virile line of the “Southern Coast,” and the
unapproachable mezzotint and etching of the “Liber.” If everything that
he has wrought with brush or pencil were extinguished, these things,
living, would make immortal his fame.