Part 2

The introduction of the huntsmen, horses and dogs in the foreground of the Cassiobury drawing gives it a sporting and jovial character which is thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of the place. Turner was quick in noting characteristic details of this kind and used them with propriety and effect. Yet the drawing has a fine spaciousness and stateliness which the artist’s noble patron would appreciate. I believe this water-colour must have been lower in tone and darker in colour when it was first done than it is now. The pencil drawing from nature of the mansion from which the water-colour was painted is in the “Fonthill” Sketch Book, p. 41. The curious will find it reproduced in my book on “Turner’s Sketches and Drawings.”

34. _Lake of Thun_, 1809 (Plate VI).

Fortunately this drawing is dated, otherwise one would be tempted to consider it as having been painted some years earlier. It was sketched during Turner’s first tour in Switzerland, in 1802, and may have been begun soon afterwards. It is Wilsonian in colour, but a certain massiveness and heaviness in the design suggest that he was thinking rather too much of the composition of Poussin and the old masters. It is in an excellent state of preservation.

18. _Castle of Chillon_, 1810 (Plate VII).

Another fruit of the 1802 tour in Switzerland, and, like the preceding drawing, painted for Sir J. E. Swinburne. It is more beautiful than the _Lake of Thun_. The colour is a lovely harmony of deep blues, russet browns and dull crimsons. There is no formalism or heaviness in the design. I hope the fortunate owner of this exquisite drawing will keep it carefully from undue exposure to a strong light, as the blues in it are very sensitive to such influences. When once they have faded they can never be coaxed back. So many of Turner’s drawings of this kind have been ruined by exposure to the light that one cannot but be anxious that this, one of the most beautiful of them all, should be preserved for the delight of the coming generations.

Turner seems to have repeated this subject, as I remember another version of it in Mrs. Stern’s possession which was sold at Christie’s in 1908. Doubtless there are some slight differences in the two drawings, but the design and general effect were similar. Mrs. Stern’s drawing had the same restraint and elegance as this one.

21. _Patterdale Old Church_, circa 1810 (Plate VIII).

Another well-preserved drawing. The indigo and other blues are unfaded. When this drawing was exhibited at the Royal Academy (Old Masters) in 1886, it was described in the catalogue as the original of an engraving of this subject which was published in Mawman’s “Excursion in the Highlands,” 1805. This must be incorrect. The “P.P.” (Professor of Perspective) at the end of Turner’s signature proves it to be a later drawing, as Turner was not elected Professor of Perspective till 1807.

36. _Vale of Pevensey, from Rosehill Park_, circa 1816.

One of a series of views of Rosehill, Sussex, (now known as Brightling Park) and of places in the neighbourhood, made for Mr. John Fuller, M.P., about 1816. These drawings were inherited by Sir Alexander Acland-Hood, who sold them at Christie’s in 1908. The present drawing has suffered from exposure to a strong light. The indigo having disappeared the general effect is lighter and the colour warmer than when it was first painted. Yet in spite of this, how fine the drawing is! Its complexion, one might say, has changed, but all its native nobility of character remains. How splendidly the subject is conceived, what a glorious composition it makes, yet how truthful and sympathetic the drawing is as a representation of the rolling downs of Sussex, its lusty and happy trees, its exhilarating vistas of the distant sea and rugged coast-line. The elaborate and beautifully drawn pencil study from which this picture was painted is in the National Gallery, in the “Views in Sussex” Sketch Book (Turner Bequest, CXXXVIII, p. 19). The drawing was engraved in aquatint by J. C. Stadler (the same size as the original) for Mr. Fuller, printed in colours, and finished by hand. These prints, Mr. Rawlinson tells us, are excessively rare.

17. _Mayence and Kastel_, 1817.

19. _Lurleiberg: the Bend of the River_, 1817.

35. _Rolandswerth Nunnery and Drachenfels_, 1817 (Plate IX).

37. _Mayence_, 1817.

These are four out of the fifty-one Rhine drawings which Turner made for Mr. Walter Fawkes in the summer and autumn of 1817. Thornbury dates these drawings 1819, which is a mistake, and says that they were done “at the prodigious rate of three a day.” But no man, not even Turner, marvellously rapid worker as he was, could have produced these fifty-one drawings at such a rate. What really happened was this: the sketches for these drawings were actually made in twelve days, between August 18 and 30, 1817; the fifty-one water-colours were then painted from these pencil sketches between the end of August and November 13 (the day Turner handed the complete series “in a slovenly roll” to Mr. Fawkes at Farnley Hall). We do not know exactly where the work was done, but it was probably partly at inns, for Turner could work anywhere and under any conditions, and partly when staying with Lord Darlington at Raby Castle, or with Lord Strathmore at Hylton Castle or Gibside. The documentary evidence which has enabled me to correct Thornbury’s statements is given in detail in my account of “Turner’s Water-Colours at Farnley Hall” (THE STUDIO office).

The drawings of this series are not hurried sketches from nature, they are carefully pondered and perfectly elaborated works of art. The painting of the dark cloud crossing the sun in the _Mayence and Kastel_ is a striking instance of Turner’s technical mastery. It must have been floated on while the paper was wet and allowed--or rather made--to run into just the right shapes. Its evanescent effect, its melting, imperceptible gradations, could have been got in no other way.

The broad calm river, the spacious design, and the beautifully drawn rocks in the _Rolandswerth Nunnery and Drachenfels_ (Plate IX) make it a delightful drawing. This view must have been taken from near Oberwinter, looking north, in the direction of Bonn.

Nearly all the drawings in this series were painted over a grey preparation, put on over the white paper before the work was begun. By wiping out or scraping away this preparation the white paper was laid bare and Turner was thus enabled to get his high lights and his general effect of light and dark very rapidly. But the presence of the grey preparation forces the drawings into a low key and makes grey the predominant note in the colour scheme. The colour harmonies are, therefore, generally silver rather than golden. The drawing of _Mayence_ is, however, an exception to the rule, as it is painted direct upon the white paper without any grey preparation. It therefore stands out from its companions as being more limpid in workmanship and more luminous in effect than they are.

129. _Florence from Fiesole_, circa 1817.

134. _Turin, from the Church of the Superga_, do.

137. _Lake of Nemi_, do.

These three drawings were made as illustrations to James Hakewill’s “Picturesque Tour of Italy,” and they were worked from Hakewill’s sketches, as Turner at that time had never visited Italy. They formed part of Mr. Ruskin’s collection and were exhibited at the Fine Art Society’s galleries in 1878. It is stated in the text of Hakewill’s book that the view of _Florence from Fiesole_ was “taken from the garden of the Franciscan convent at Fiesole,” but Mr. Ruskin has pointed out that the little bend of wall within which some monks are standing in the foreground on the left is not really a part of the Franciscan garden, but is one of the turns of the road in the ascent to Fiesole.

Mr. Ruskin regarded the _Turin, from the Superga_ as one of his “very chiefly valued possessions.” And well he might. It is indeed a most exquisite and delightful piece of work. Each time I see it, it gives me a fresh thrill of pleasure; its colour is so cheerful and happy, the subject-matter is so well chosen--the contrast between the distant snow-clad mountains and the comfortable sheltered existence of the people of the city--and the design is so daring, so original, and carried out with such consummate skill and resource.

Mr. Ruskin tells us that the inlaid diamond-shaped mosaics in the pavement, which complete the perspective of the distance, are Turner’s own invention. “The portico is in reality paved with square slabs of marble only.” Perhaps Turner mistook some indications in Hakewill’s sketch for these insertions, or perhaps he felt that the bare space in the foreground wanted variety and calmly invented this artifice for the purpose. I notice that though these diamond-shaped mosaics look quite plausible and satisfactory in the drawing, Turner has altered them in the engraving, reducing the width of the black band and introducing another lozenge within the white centre.

The _Lake of Nemi_ is, as Mr. Ruskin said, “consummate in all ways.” He goes on to point out how the light trees on the right have been left while the distant lake and crags were being finished; and that the towers and buildings of the Capuchin’s Convent high up on the right were painted before the sea horizon, “which is laid in afterwards with a wash that stops before touching the houses.” The town beyond the convent is Gensano, and the distant mountain on the Mediterranean is Monte Circello.

153. _Valley of the Washburne, near Farnley_, circa 1818 (Plate XIV).

136. _Steeton Manor, near Farnley_, do. (Plate XVIII).

32. _Scarborough_, 1818.[B]

Between 1812 and 1818, Turner made a series of nearly fifty drawings of views of Farnley Hall, inside and outside, and of places of interest in the grounds and in the neighbourhood. The _Valley of the Washburne_ (Plate XIV) shows us the first stages through which most of these drawings passed. The whole subject is drawn very carefully in chalk on brown paper. A few touches of body-colour in the foreground and a slight wash over part of the sky begin the later stages, but then the drawing was for some reason carried no further. Yet one cannot regret this, for there is such a freshness, such overflowing vigour and happiness in what has been done that the most exigeant criticism can demand no more. This is a good example of what I have noticed repeatedly, that Turner’s drawings were always delightful at each stage of their development; and from the commencement they had a certain completeness and finality. They never suggest “work.” They always look as though the artist were just enjoying himself by putting down on the paper, without any effort whatever, the thoughts which had taken possession of his mind.

I do not know why this drawing was not “carried on,” as Turner would have expressed it. There is a superb and completely finished water-colour of a very similar view of the banks of the Washburne in the Farnley Hall collection, so perhaps Mr. Fawkes did not want another drawing of quite the same subject.

When I was at Farnley a few years before the war, I went to the Washburne intending to make a sketch of this picturesque view. But I found the banks covered with such a dense overgrowth of trees that the little river was entirely shut out from sight. The rocky crest of the Chevin was, however, still unaltered, and there was Caley Park on the slopes very much as when Turner had drawn it; and there was Leathley Church with its square tower, the Farnley place of worship, where the late owner of Farnley, the Rev. Ayscough Fawkes, was for many years incumbent.

_Steeton Manor House_ (Plate XVIII) is near Skipton. This drawing is on a smaller scale than most of the series.

The Fawkeses, in Turner’s time, were fond of Scarborough, and Turner was sometimes there in their company. Mr. Fawkes bought Turner’s large drawing of Scarborough which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811 (there is a repetition of this drawing in the Wallace Collection). But by 1818, when Mr. Morland Agnew’s lovely drawing was made, Turner’s style had changed. The earlier “Scarborough” is reserved and stately in design, but its breadth verges on emptiness. It is as though the artist was a little afraid of nature and was determined to keep her at arm’s length, for fear of offending the shades of Poussin, Claude and the other great old masters. But by 1818 he had got over his shyness. He had by then taken nature to his bosom. He delights in the sheer loveliness and infinite variety of English scenery. His manner of painting has become more sensitive and refined, to enable him to render the subtle qualities of form and atmosphere. Our modern theorists tell us that if an artist is in love with what he sees and bent on reproducing it, he ceases to “express himself” and becomes a mere mechanic. But this is because they fail to understand that healthy and imaginative artists do not sit at home in the dark anxiously feeling their pulse and worrying about their emotions and their moods. When Turner painted this lovely drawing of Scarborough he was as passionately absorbed in the variety and ever-changing beauty of physical nature as a poet like Wordsworth. The eye was the organ of his mind and spirit. He not only looked at nature, but he understood her, and loved her with intense and self-forgetting devotion. A drawing like this proves--what nobody should ever doubt--that an artist may be a realist and also a poet.

The late Mr. Francis Bullard has drawn attention (in a privately printed catalogue of some of Turner’s engravings which he generously presented to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) to some valuable remarks by Mr. Santayana on the subject of naturalism in poetry which apply with so much force to Turner’s realism that I will venture to quote them. After pointing out that our interest in nature need not necessarily be shallow and egotistical, Mr. Santayana writes: “Our emotion may be ingenuous; it may be concerned with what nature really is and does, has been and will do for ever. It need not arise from a selfish preoccupation with what these immense realities involve for our own persons, or may be used to suggest to our self-indulgent fancy. No, the poetry of nature may be discerned merely by the power of intuition which it awakens and the understanding which it employs. These faculties, more, I should say, than our moodiness or stuffy dreams, draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full vitality and music. Naturalism is a philosophy of observation, and of an imagination that extends the observable; all the sights and sounds of nature enter into it, and lend it their directness, pungency, and coercive stress. At the same time, naturalism is an intellectual philosophy; it divines substance behind appearance, continuity behind change, law behind fortune. It therefore attaches all those sights and sounds to a hidden background that connects and explains them. So understood, nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as well as sensuous variety. Before the sublimity of this insight, all forms of the pathetic fallacy seem cheap and artificial. Mythology, that to a childish mind is the only possible poetry, sounds like bad rhetoric in comparison. The naturalistic poet abandons fairyland, because he has discovered nature, history, the actual passions of man. His imagination has reached maturity.”

By the time the _Valley of the Washburne_ and _Scarborough_ drawings were made Turner’s imagination had reached its maturity. In much of his work done after this period one misses something of the earlier freshness, spontaneity, and what, for want of a better word, I must call “integrity.”

These shortcomings are most noticeable in his large oil paintings. The Wordsworthian calm and absolute sincerity of the earlier paintings, like _The Frosty Morning_, Lord Essex’s _Walton Bridges_, the _Windsor_ and the _Abingdon_, give place to the Byronic _Bay of Baiæ_ (1823), the two _Mortlakes_ (1826-27), _Dido Directing the Equipment of the Fleet_ (1828) and the _Ulysses and Polyphemus_ (1829). Instead of the profoundly imaginative realism of the earlier works, we get the unrest of romanticism, with its vague and empty pomp, its cloying self-indulgence, its warm, voluptuous atmosphere. Yet even in the rush of romantic intoxication Turner could often touch the deepest chords of our imagination, especially in his water-colours, with works of the most intense sincerity and sublime insight. We have two examples of such works in the present exhibition, _The Longships Lighthouse_ and the _Lowestoft_.

But before coming to these drawings, which form part of the “England and Wales” series, I must refer to the following subjects:--

29. _Florence, from near San Miniato_, circa 1825 (Plate XVI).

23. _Saumur_, circa 1829 (Plate X).

132. _Wilderness of Sinai_, circa 1832-34 (Plate XIX).

This view of Florence is the earliest example in the exhibition of an Italian scene painted from Turner’s own impressions. Yet in spite of this it seems to me to miss something of the charm of the drawings made from Hakewill’s sketches. It is richer in colour and more gorgeous in effect than they; yet it suggests, at least to my mind, more of the opera than of reality. It might have been painted as an illustration to Byron’s “Childe Harold.” It has been stated that this drawing was engraved in “The Keepsake” for 1828, and Mr. Rawlinson says (in his valuable book on “The Engraved Work of Turner”) “there are two apparently identical drawings of this subject, one in the possession of Lord Northbourne, the other in the possession of Mr. J. Beecham.” But the foreground and figures in this drawing (which was once in Sir Joseph Beecham’s collection) are different from those in the engraving. I think therefore that Lord Northbourne’s version, which I do not remember to have seen, must be the original from which “The Keepsake” engraving was made.

_Saumur_ (Plate X), on the other hand, was engraved for “The Keepsake” for 1831, and it was republished in Heath’s “Gallery of British Engravings.” It has a magnificent sky, full of the moving pageantry of the heavens, and it is superbly designed. Another and different view of this subject was engraved in the “Rivers of France.” One would hardly recognize the chateau of the Queen of Sicily, on the rock by the bridge, as the same building in the two engravings.

The _Wilderness of Sinai_ (Plate XIX), like the Hakewill drawings, was done from the sketch of an amateur, a Major Felix. Turner always lavished more than his usual care and labour on such work. For sheer delicacy and cunning of hand it would be hard to find its equal. The engraving was published in Finden’s “Landscape Illustrations of the Bible” (1836). The rock in the foreground is said by the Arabs to be the one which Moses struck when the Israelites were athirst. The alert figures in the foreground and the two mounted men beyond show how well Turner could draw such things when he wanted to.

We have now to turn our attention to the “England and Wales” series, the most ambitious of Turner’s publications, which occupied much of his time between 1825 and 1838. The scheme as originally planned was to include one-hundred-and-twenty drawings, but the venture was financially unsuccessful and it was abandoned after about a hundred drawings had been made and engraved. Posterity has not endorsed the contemporary indifference to this series. The plates are probably the best known and most widely appreciated of all Turner’s engravings, and the original drawings are certainly the most popular and most eagerly sought after by collectors of his water-colours. They are eminently characteristic of the artist; full to overflowing of evidence of his extraordinary knowledge, powers of observation and incomparable technical skill, and they display freely all his faults of mind and character. Parts of his work are like Shakespeare’s, incorrect, capricious and wanton. Like Shakespeare his imagination was crowded with a tumultuary confusion of images. He had all Shakespeare’s reckless and unquestioning confidence in himself and in his own powers, so that his work often seems vehement and negligent. But if he had Shakespeare’s faults he had also much of Shakespeare’s greatness. We have only to change the word poet to painter to apply Dryden’s encomium of Shakespeare to him. “All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too.... I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind.... But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.”

The “England and Wales” series was represented in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition by eight beautiful drawings:--

30. _Saltash_, 1825 (Plate XXI).

22. _Prudhoe Castle_, circa 1826 (Plate XXII).

24. _Windsor Castle_, circa 1829.

20. _Richmond Bridge--Play_, circa 1830 (Plate XI).

33. _Coventry_, circa 1832.

25. _Worcester_, circa 1833 (Plate XII).

27. _The Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End_, circa 1834 (Plate XIII).

31. _Lowestoft_, circa 1835.

The most glorious in colour of these drawings is, I think, the _Windsor Castle_, but the _Richmond Bridge_ (Plate XI) runs it very close. The latter subject is interesting because it was the first water-colour by Turner which Mr. Ruskin acquired; “my father buying it for me,” he tells us, “thinking I should not ask for another--we both then agreeing that it had nearly everything _characteristic_ of Turner in it, and more especially the gay figures!” Mr. Ruskin was naturally very much attached to this drawing and he was never tired of trying to analyse it; but “after thirty years’ endeavour, I finally surrender that hope--with all similar hopes of ever analysing true inventive or creative work.” He drew attention, however, as an instructive piece of composition, to the way the parasols in the foreground repeat and reverse the arches of the bridge, and the feather head-dresses of the ladies repeat the plumy tossing of the foliage. These are merely Turner’s habitual tricks of composition. We find these habits of design in most of his earlier and later work, but the results are not always equally fortunate. One of the most exquisite and perfect examples of this practice of placing and grouping the figures and objects so as to repeat or emphasize the most salient features of a landscape, is afforded in my opinion by the large oil painting of _Walton Bridges_, which was painted in 1809 for the Earl of Essex. In some of the later drawings and paintings the results are not always so happy.

The execution of the _Richmond Bridge_ is unequal. The group of figures in the foreground on the right is imperfectly imagined and fumbling in touch, but the smaller figures on the left are vivid and alert; the big group of trees on the right, with the sunlight striking athwart them, is dashed in with extraordinary vigour and certainty. The drawing is in splendid condition, and the general effect is breezy, reckless, gorgeous--and, I cannot help thinking, a trifle vulgar, probably on account of the gay foreground figures. It certainly has everything “characteristic” of Turner, the beauties and the defects.