Part 3

In the _Coventry_ and _Worcester_ (Plate XII) there is some flagging of Turner’s power--hints of weariness and a sense of effort. There is some “swelling into bombast” in them. But the _Longships Lighthouse_ (Plate XIII) is one of the most wonderful and flawless drawings ever made by Turner, or any other artist. Turner must have been nearly sixty years of age when he made it, but there are no signs of human weakness in it. It is all pure gold and immortal work. For once Turner had found a subject exactly suited to his genius, “a fit subject for his wit.”

It is of course impossible to do justice in words to the grandeur and terrible beauty of this wonderful drawing, but Mr. Ruskin has so nearly succeeded in this impossible task that I will venture to quote his words. “In the _Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End_, we have clouds without rain--at twilight--enveloping the cliffs of the coast, but concealing nothing, every outline being visible through their gloom; and not only the outline--for it is easy to do this--but the _surface_. The bank of rocky coast approaches the spectator inch by inch, felt clearer and clearer as it withdraws from the garment of cloud--not by edges more and more refined, but by a surface more and more unveiled. We have thus the painting, not of a mere transparent veil, but of a solid body of cloud, every inch of whose increasing distance is marked and felt. But the great wonder of the picture is the intensity of gloom which is attained in warm grey, without either blackness or blueness. It is a gloom, dependent rather on the enormous space and depth indicated, than on actual pitch of colour, distant by real drawing, without a grain of blue, dark by real substance, without a stroke of blackness; and with all this, it is not formless, but full of indications of character, wild, irregular, shattered, and indefinite--full of the energy of storm, fiery in haste, and yet flinging back out of its motion the fitful swirls of bounding drift, of tortured vapour tossed up like men’s hands, as in defiance of the tempest, the jets of resulting whirlwind, hurled back from the rocks into the face of the coming darkness; which, beyond all other characters, mark the raised passion of the elements. It is this untraceable, unconnected, yet perpetual form--this fulness of character absorbed in the universal energy--which distinguishes Nature and Turner from all their imitators. To roll a volume of smoke before the wind, to indicate motion or violence by monotonous similarity of line and direction, is for the multitude; but to mark the independent passion, the tumultuous separate existence of every wreath of writhing vapour, yet swept away and overpowered by one omnipotence of storm, and thus to bid us

Be as a Presence or a motion--one Among the many there--while the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of an instrument,--

this belongs only to Nature and to him.”

And in a later chapter of the same volume (“Modern Painters,” Vol. I.) Mr. Ruskin again refers to this drawing as “a study of sea whose whole organization has been broken up by constant recoils from a rocky coast.” “The entire disorder of the surges,” he continues, “when every one of them, divided and entangled among promontories as it rolls in, and beaten back part by part from walls of rock on this side and that side, recoils like the defeated division of a great army, throwing all behind it into disorder, breaking up the succeeding waves into vertical ridges, which in their turn, yet more totally shattered upon the shore, retire in more hopeless confusion, until the whole surface of the sea becomes one dizzy whirl of rushing, writhing, tortured, undirected rage, bounding, and crashing, and coiling in an anarchy of enormous power, subdivided into myriads of waves, of which every one is not, be it remembered, a separate surge, but part and portion of a vast one, actuated by internal power, and giving in every direction the mighty undulation of impetuous line which glides over the rocks and writhes in the wind, overwhelming the one, and piercing the other with the form, fury, and swiftness of a sheet of lambent fire. And throughout the rendering of all this, there is not a false curve given, not one which is not the perfect expression of visible motion; and the forms of the infinite sea are drawn throughout with that utmost mastery of art which, through the deepest study of every line, makes every line appear the wildest child of chance, while yet each is in itself a subject and a picture different from all else around. Of the colour of this magnificent sea I have before spoken; it is a solemn green grey (with its foam seen dimly through the darkness of twilight), modulated with the fulness, changefulness, and sadness of a deep, wild melody.”

The only drawing in the whole series which can be compared for tragic power with the _Longships Lighthouse_ is the _Lowestoft_. The time represented is an hour before sunrise in winter. A violent storm with rain is passing over the sea; through it the lighthouses and coast are dimly seen. Mr. Ruskin speaks of the “most hopeless, desolate, uncontrasted greys” in this drawing.

26. _Lake Nemi_, circa 1840 (Plate XV).

This representation of the afternoon of a hot and cloudless day was hung immediately above the _Longships_. It is a truly superb drawing, as fine in its way as the _Longships_, yet how different! It is so full of purely sensuous delight that one would suppose it the work of some voluptuary who had turned his back on all the sorrows and terrors of life; one who lived only for the gratification of his senses. That some people should shrink from the sternness and cruelty of _Longships_ I can understand; but I simply cannot imagine how any one accessible to the pleasures of pictorial art can resist the triumphal appeal of this regal and happy drawing. It would be difficult to bring together two other drawings which illustrate so well the truly Shakespearean range of Turner’s mind.

28. _The Rigi at Sunrise--Lake of Lucerne_ (“_The Blue Rigi_”) (Plate XVII).

With a fine sense of congruity Messrs. Agnew hung beside the _Lake of Nemi_ a masterpiece of Turner’s latest manner--“_The Blue Rigi_.” This was painted in 1841, in circumstances described in his own inimitable way by Mr. Ruskin, in the “Epilogue” to his notes on his own collection of Turner’s drawings. There are signs in the drawing that the painter’s age was beginning to tell on him. He was getting near the end of his career as a water-colour painter, though his career as an oil painter lasted a few years longer: for the _Burial at Sea_; _The Opening of the Walhalla_; _Rain, Steam and Speed_; _The Sun of Venice Going to Sea_, and the other late Venetian paintings were yet to come; which supports the contention that water-colour makes sterner demands on the artist’s physique than oil painting. In “_The Blue Rigi_” the laboured execution and trembling touch hint at the artist’s physical disabilities. But these signs of weakness harmonize so well with the subject-matter that they only heighten the pathos of this incomparably beautiful drawing.

I think that Turner made hardly more than a dozen finished drawings after “_The Blue Rigi_.” This was partly because the sustained effort such work demanded was too much for him, and partly because there was no demand among his patrons for such work. But he could still make sketches like the _Mouth of the Grand Canal_ (Plate XXIII), _Lake of Lucerne_: _Brunnen in the Distance_ (Plate XX) and the _Alpine Stream_, marvellous in their freshness of colour, the vigour and delicacy of their washes, and full of poetical suggestion and pictorial enchantment. The old war-horse no doubt regretted that his patrons would give him no opportunities to elaborate these wonderful sketches--for the distinction which modern criticism has obliterated between a sketch and a “finished” drawing was ingrained in Turner’s mind--but we cannot share these regrets. The gain in fullness and authority of statement would have provided little compensation for the loss of delicacy and freshness, and effortless vigour of execution.

But these remarks have taken me slightly out of my chronological course. The following sketches I am inclined to date conjecturally somewhere between 1835 and 1840.

126. _Rheinfels Castle._

Can this drawing be correctly named? It does not seem much like the other drawings and engravings of the old fortress of Rheinfels which I have compared with it. And what is the meaning of “Dib,” which Turner has written in pencil in the foreground? I cannot help wondering whether “Dib” was meant to refer to Dieblich, on the Moselle. If it did, the mountain on the right would be the Niederburg, and the two buildings on the mountain beyond would be the two castles of the Knights of Cobern. Turner passed along this part of the Moselle in 1834. But, as a famous commentator once said, I put forward this suggested emendation without much confidence in its correctness.

115. _A Gorge_ (Plate XXIV).

131. _Alpine Scene._

133. _Swiss Landscape._

I can offer no suggestion as to the identity of the places represented in these sketches, except that _A Gorge_ may be one of the falls of the Reichenbach.

39. _The Rainbow._

This is a strange drawing which I do not understand. The rainbow has only two colours, viz. yellow and crimson lake.

138. _Ehrenbreitstein._

135. _Alpine Stream._

The latter sketch contains an entrancing play of colour and suggestion. What a fine foundation for the airy structure raised above it that band of rich darkness makes which runs straight across the centre of the design! I suppose it represents loose rocks in shadow. Above them a range of mountains, faintly touched with crimson, rises out of the pale blue mist, with an opalescent sky above; on the right a cluster of white roofs carries the eye to a narrow defile. The foreground is just as elusive as the distance and middle distance. There are streams flowing among the stones, but those touches of white, are they birds or foam? And is that a figure on the right almost lost in the shadow of the rocks? What a beautiful dream it all is! And I cannot help wondering what earthly place suggested the dream. It reminds me vaguely of the neighbourhood of Bellinzona. Somewhere north of Lugano I fancy the happy wanderer might chance at daybreak upon some such scene as Turner has suggested.

130. _Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the Distance_ (Plate XX).

There can be no doubt about the locality which furnished the motive of this lovely vision, though I believe some years ago the drawing was described as a “View on the Rhine.” There in the distance are the two Mythens; and there at the edge of the lake is Brunnen. The drawing must have been made at or near Treib, on the Lake of Lucerne.

127. _Mouth of the Grand Canal_ (Plate XXIII).

On the right is the Dogana, with the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in the distance; on the left are tall buildings which once were palaces and are now mostly hotels, among them probably the Palazzo Giustiniani, which became the Hôtel de l’Europe, where Turner put up during his later visits to Venice. It is no good my trying to describe the colour of such a drawing. When it was sold at Christie’s in the Beecham sale an enthusiastic scribe writing in one the newspapers said that it was “as if drawn by a butterfly.” I remember that the expression struck me at the time as--impressionistic, but I think I know what the writer felt. There is something that makes one think of butterflies in its elusiveness and its fluttering beauty of colour.

160. _An Iceberg._

This must have been done about 1845, and it is the latest of Turner’s sketches in the exhibition. It belongs to the time when Beale’s “Voyage” had set him dreaming about icebergs and whalers. There is a draft of some attempted poetry scribbled on the drawing, which I have spent perhaps more time than it is worth in trying to decipher. The only words I can feel sure about are the following:--

--Against all Hope-- No one has lived to tell the tail (_sic!_). No vestige found, nor deck-- no spar or mast--

Those who remember the oil painting called, _Whalers (boiling blubber) entangled in floe-ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves_--it was on loan at the Glasgow Art Gallery when last I saw it--may be able to form some vague idea of what Turner was thinking about when he made this fantastic and almost incomprehensible sketch.

TURNER’S PREDECESSORS

But the wonderful array of Turner’s works was far from exhausting the interest of this memorable exhibition. Grouped round the Turners were about thirty drawings by his predecessors, i.e. English water-colour painters who were born before him, and about seventy drawings by his contemporaries, i.e. artists who were born at or about the same time as Turner, or whose period of work coincided with his lifetime. There were also some drawings by later artists. I propose to speak of the former group in this chapter.

Perhaps the earliest topographical drawings in the exhibition were the two views of Bath, made in 1777, by Thomas Malton, the younger (1748-1804)--the _West Front, Town Hall_ (51) and _Pulteney Bridge_ (55). Though cold and precise these drawings have very great charm, and they are crowded with topographical and antiquarian interest. But they belong to an undeveloped stage of the art of water-colour painting. The details of architecture are drawn carefully and accurately, the figures are life-like though rather stiff, and the indications of light and shade explain the shapes of the buildings and knit the whole composition together. But the drawings do not go beyond this. The few pale washes of colour diversify the surface, but do not suggest either colour or atmosphere. Every object, the roadway, figures, buildings and the sky, has the same texture, which makes the general effect monotonous and abstract.

Though Paul Sandby (1725-1809) was born before the younger Malton, his drawing of _The Swan Inn, Edmonton_ (Plate XXV) is, I fancy, some ten or perhaps twenty years later in point of execution than these Bath drawings; Sandby’s style, however, was always less abstract than Malton’s. Compared with the Bath views this drawing by Sandby is like a window opened on nature; it is flooded with light, the warm sunshine plays on and through the trees, lighting up the road, the figures and the whole scene. Yet Sandby’s care for detail is as great as Malton’s. Each house, each garden, each tree has its individual character fully recorded with unflagging industry and spirit. The spectator’s interest is awakened by the variety of shapes, colours and incidents, and sustained by the artist’s evident alertness and thorough enjoyment of the spectacle. Sandby was one of the first English artists to rob topographical delineation of its abstractness and impersonality. He throws the charm of his genial personality over the scene. And though his work is always alert, interesting and full of charm, this Edmonton drawing is, I think, one of the most delightful of his works that I have seen.

The best drawing by Edward Dayes (1763-1804) in the exhibition was probably the view of _Norwich Cathedral_ (Plate XXVI), which is dated 1793. Dayes, for all his cleverness and skill, was not as likeable a man as Sandby. He seems to have been deficient in geniality, generosity and sympathy. These defects of character show in his work. He often seems bored and ill at ease with his subjects; he was seldom if ever capable of taking the delight and interest in a scene which Sandby took in his Edmonton drawing. There is a certain coldness, not only of colour and effect, but of interest in this Norwich Cathedral drawing. It is nevertheless a clever piece of work, and though perhaps not so truthful and accurate as Malton’s views of Bath, it shows much greater technical skill than they possess.

Turner, I believe, got his first lessons in perspective from Malton’s father’s “Treatise,” and both Sandby and Dayes had a great deal of influence on his early work. Some of the earliest drawings by Turner in existence were copied or adapted from Sandby’s drawings or engravings, and for a short period, about the years 1794 and 1795, his style, handling, and colour were so closely modelled on Dayes’s work that many drawings by the elder artist are mistaken for Turner’s. Indeed, some of Dayes’s best drawings in public and private collections are wrongly attributed to Turner. This is no small compliment to Dayes, and it probably accounts for the want of proper appreciation from which he now suffers.

Of the connection between Turner and the greatest of his predecessors, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799 (?)), it is difficult to speak with much certainty. Nearly all recent writers on Turner say that he was greatly influenced by Cozens’s work; but I have failed to discover any certain evidence of this influence in his early work, unless it be in choosing the same subject--_Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps_--for one of his oil paintings that Cozens had chosen for one of his water-colours. The dominant influence in Turner’s early work, as I have already pointed out, is Richard Wilson rather than John R. Cozens.

But Cozens’s work was greatly admired by some of Turner’s early patrons, especially by Dr. Monro, and tradition says that Dr. Monro induced Turner to copy many of the drawings by Cozens which he possessed. I have found it hard to discover evidence in support of this tradition. I do not remember to have seen a copy of any of Cozens’s works which was unmistakably done entirely by Turner; in the drawings of this kind traditionally attributed to Turner, at least the pencil outlines are nearly always clearly recognizable as by Girtin. Even if we accept these copies as Turner’s, they show that he possessed, at that time, very little appreciation of the higher beauties of Cozens’s work. No attempt is made in them to reproduce either the general effect or the light and shade of the originals; they rob Cozens’s work of its grandeur and austerity, and substitute for these qualities mere prettiness and conventionality.

Indeed it is incorrect to call these drawings copies; they are nothing more than exercises in laying washes and inventing systems of light and shade, based upon Cozens’s work. Their mode of production and purpose may be thus described: the outlines were first drawn in pencil with bold, firm strokes, by a careless and free hand, which bears remarkable resemblances to that of Girtin. These outlines must have been done direct from Cozens’s drawings, but what was done afterwards seems to have been done without reference of any kind to them. These outlines were then given to another artist, who clothed them according to his own fancy with a commonplace arrangement of light and shade. That these exercises in blue and grey tinting and the arrangement of light and shade were done by Turner we cannot know for certain, but the tradition that they were, seems too insistent to be ignored. Though the characteristic beauties of Cozens’s work counted for little or nothing in these academical exercises, yet they show that Turner was brought early into contact with the work of the first great master of English water-colour painting, and so far as this work exercised any influence on him it must have been to his advantage.

Cozens was represented in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition by no less than nine drawings. The largest and most important was the _Lake Albano_ (44), with the Castel Gandolfo in the middle distance. An excellent reproduction in colour of this impressive drawing was published in “The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours” (THE STUDIO, 1918). Cozens was the first English artist to suggest in his drawings something of the grandeur and beauty of the Alps. _A Swiss Valley_ (Plate XXVII) is one of his finest drawings of this kind. It owes much of its dramatic effect to its magnificently designed sky, which is as daring as it is original. The scene represented is probably in the Splügen Pass. Less moving, less dramatic, are the two Roman views. _In the Farnesina Gardens_ (Plate XXVIII) is a pensive sylvan scene of great elegance and charm. The _Villa Negroni_ (Plate XXIX) is a wonderfully fascinating and original design with its noble group of pines and cypresses silhouetted against the sky. In the foreground we get the brow of the hill on which the trees are standing, with sheep feeding near an ancient statue; the ruins on the left, in the middle distance in the plain below, are fragments of the Claudian Aqueduct, those on the right are some of the Neronian arches. The Villa Negroni was situated near the Porta S. Giovanni. It has now ceased to exist and its place has been taken by the Casino Massini.

It is interesting to compare Cozens’s view of _Lake Nemi_ (Plate XXX) with Turner’s two drawings of the same subject, one made nearly twenty years later from Hakewill’s sketch, the other drawn from his own impressions fifty years later. The earlier view, like the Cozens, shows the town of Gensano on a hill in the middle distance, with Monte Circello and the Mediterranean in the distance. There is less exaggeration in Cozens’s drawing than in the Turners, and a certain gauntness and strangeness repels one at the first glance as much as Turner’s charm and glow of colour attract. Yet when one gets over the first feeling of strangeness in this drawing, as well as in all of his works, it exerts a very potent charm over the imagination. His drawings are unequal, but when he is at his best, as in the _Lake Albano_ and the _Villa Negroni_, they possess a haunting beauty which almost overawes the spirit. Such works “draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full vitality and music.”

TURNER’S CONTEMPORARIES

The greatest of Turner’s contemporaries, John Constable (1776-1837), never took seriously to water-colour painting. He was not like Turner, equally at home with all pictorial mediums, with oil, water-colour, pastel, with etching and mezzotint engraving. That he could work freely and well in water-colour is proved by drawings from his hand in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the Salting Bequest at the British Museum. But he was happier with oil paint; and when his powers had matured he used water-colour mainly for slight and hasty notes, like _Landscape with Cottage_ (123) in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition. I imagine that an artist like Mr. Wilson Steer would be delighted with this brilliant sketch, which has many affinities with his own work in water-colour. The other contribution by Constable to this exhibition was a large unfinished drawing of _Derwentwater_ (161). This is little more than what artists call a “lay-in”; it consists mainly of preliminary washes of pale colour. “Well begun is half done” the moralists tell us; but having made so good a beginning Constable seems to have hesitated and finally abandoned the work.

Turner’s friend and youthful rival, Thomas Girtin, was born in 1775, the same year as Turner, but he died in 1802, at the early age of twenty-seven. A life so tragically short did not permit of the production of a large and varied body of work. Towards the end of his short career he devoted much time to his great panorama of London, which after being exhibited in Spring Gardens is said to have been sold, “about the year 1825,” to some person in Russia and has not been heard of since. The number of his water-colours is therefore limited, and all of them are not entirely worthy of his genius and deservedly high reputation.