Chapter 14

TURNER

I wonder which of you, if seeing this picture for the first time, will realize that you are looking at the old familiar Thames? It would seem rather to be some place unknown except in dreams, some phantasy of the human spirit that we ourselves could never hope to see. And yet, in fact, this is what Turner actually did see one evening as he was sailing down the Thames to Greenwich with a party of friends. Suddenly there loomed up before his eyes the great hull of the _Temeraire_, famous in the fight against the fleet of Napoleon at Trafalgar, and so full of memories of glorious battle, that it was always spoken of by sailors as the _Fighting Temeraire_. At last, its work over as a battleship, or even as a training-ship for cadets, dragged by a doughty little steam-tug, it was headed for its last resting-place in the Thames, to be broken up for old timber. As the _Temeraire_ hove in sight through the mist, a fellow-painter said to Turner: 'Ah, what a subject for a picture!' and so indeed it proved. The veteran ship, for Turner, had a pathos like the passing of a veteran warrior to his grave.

Turner loved the sea, and was very sensitive to its associations with the toils and triumphs of mankind. Born beside the Thames, he grew up among boats and fraternized with sailors all his life. It was impossible for him to be the beholder of such a scene as the _Temeraire's_ approach to her last moorings, save as a poet-painter; and stirred to the putting forth of all his powers, this _Fighting Temeraire_ is his surpassing poem.

It was in 1775, while Reynolds was at the height of his fame, that Turner saw the light, born of obscure parents in an obscure house, but with a gift of vision that compelled him to the palette and the pencil his whole life long. Yet, when he was apprenticed to an architect to learn architectural drawing, he had to be dismissed after two periods of probation because of his absolute inability to learn the theory of perspective or even the elements of geometry. But the time was not far off when he was to become in his turn Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.

The popular distaste, or unborn taste, for landscape, which had prevented Gainsborough from following his natural bent, was changing at last. The end of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a return to nature in art as well as in poetry. Some artists in the eastern counties, older than Turner, were already spending their lives in the not too lucrative painting of landscape. These men took for their masters the seventeenth-century painters of Holland. Old Crome, so called to distinguish him from his son, founded his art upon that of Hobbema, and came so close to him in his early years that it is difficult to distinguish their pictures. In the works of this 'Norwich School' the wide horizons of the Dutch artists often occur. But there is a brighter colour, a fresher green, recalling England rather than Holland. Turner never felt the influence of the Dutch painters so strongly as these artists did. Like Gainsborough, and many another artist before him and since, Turner was to be dominated by the necessity of making a living. At the end of the century a demand arose for 'Topographical Collections,' of views of places, selected and arranged according to their neighbourhood. These were not necessarily fine works of art, but they were required to be faithful records of places. Topographical paintings, drawings, and prints took the place now filled by the photograph and the postcard. Turner found employment enough making water-colour sketches to be engraved for such topographical publications. But sketches that might be mere hack-work became under his fingers magically lovely. We may follow him to many a corner of England, Wales, and Scotland, sketching architecture, mountain, moor, mists, and lakes. His earliest sketches are rather stiff and precise. But he developed with rapidity, and soon painted them in tones of blue and grey, so soft that the stars and the horizons merge into one lovely indefiniteness. Not till much later is there a touch of brighter colour in them such as fires the 'Temeraire,' but in all there is the same spirit of poetry. Turner longed to be a poet, although he could hardly write a correct sentence even in prose. But he was a poet in his outlook upon life; he seldom painted a scene exactly as he saw it, but transfused it by an imaginative touch into what on rare occasions, with perfect conjuncture of mist and weather, it might possibly become. He gave extra height to church spires, or made precipices steeper than they were, thus to render the impression of the place more explicit than by strict copying of the facts. Yet he could be minutely accurate in his rendering of all effects of sky, cloud, and atmosphere when he chose.

Other landscape painters have generally succeeded best with some particular aspect of nature, and have confined themselves to that. Cuyp excelled in painting the golden haze of sunshine, and Constable in effects of storm and rain. But Turner attempted all. Sunset, sunrise, moonlight, morning, sea, storm, sunshine: the whole pageantry of the sky. He never made a repetition of the golden hazes of Cuyp, who in his particular field stands alone; but it was a small field compared with that of Turner, who held the mirror up to Nature in her every mood.

Later in life, Turner travelled in France, Germany, and Italy. In Venice his eyes were gladdened by the gorgeous colours above her lagoons. Henceforth he makes his pictures blaze with hues scarcely dared by painter before. But so great was his previous mastery of the paler shades, that a few touches of brilliant colour could set his whole canvas aflame. Even in the 'Temeraire,' the sunset occupies less than half the picture. The cold colours of night have already fallen on the ship, and there remains but a touch of red from the smoke of the tug.

As Venice enriched his vision of colour, Rome stimulated him to paint new subjects suggested by ancient history and mythology. He knew little of Roman history or classical literature, yet enough to kindle his imagination; witness his 'Rise and Fall of the Carthaginian Empire' in the National Gallery. In these the figures are of no importance. The pictures still are landscapes, but freed from the necessity of being like any particular place. In work such as this, Turner had but one predecessor, the French Claude Lorraine. While the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century were painting their own country beautifully, Claude was living in Rome, creating imaginary landscapes. He called his pictures by the names of Scriptural incidents, and placed figures in the foreground as small and unessential as those of Turner. These classical landscapes, with their palaces and great flights of steps leading down to some river's edge, and the sea in the distance covered with boats carrying fantastic sails, never for a moment make the impression of reality. But they are beautiful compositions, designed to please the eye and stimulate the fancy, and are even attractive by virtue of their novel aloofness from the actual world.

Turner set himself to rival Claude in his ideal landscapes, founded upon the stories of the ancient world. In his picture of 'Dido building Carthage,' he painted imaginary palaces, rivers, and stately ships, in the same cool colouring as Claude, and bequeathed his picture to the National Gallery, on condition that it should hang for ever between two pictures by Claude to challenge their superiority. Opinions are divided as to the rank of Turner's 'Carthage,' so when you go to the National Gallery, you must look at them both and prepare to form a preference.

Turner was incited to this rivalry with Claude by the popularity that painter enjoyed among English collectors of the day, who were less eager to buy Turner's great oil-paintings than those of his predecessor. Incidentally this rivalry was the origin of the great series of etchings executed by or for him, known as _The Book of Studies (Liber Studiorum)_. This book was suggested by Claude's _Libri di Verita_, six volumes of his own drawings (of pictures he himself had painted and sold) made in order to identify his own, and detect spurious, productions. But Turner's book was designed to show his power in the whole range of landscape art. The drawings were carefully finished productions, work by which he was willing to be judged, and many of them he etched with his own hands. His favourite haunts, the abbeys of Scotland and Yorkshire, the harbours of Kent, the mountains of Switzerland, the lochs of Scotland, and the River Wye, he chose as illustrating his best power over architecture, sea, mountain, and river. He repeated several of the same subjects later in oils, such as the pearly hazy 'Norham Castle' in the Tate Gallery.

Turner painted still another kind of imaginary landscape, not in rivalry with any one, but to please himself. Of course you all know the story of Ulysses and the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, in the _Odyssey_ of Homer? Turner chose for his picture the moment when Ulysses has escaped from the clutches of Polyphemus, and sailing away in his boat, taunts the giant, who stands by the water's edge, cursing Ulysses and bemoaning the loss of his sight. Turner has used this mythical scene as an opportunity for creating stupendous rocks never seen by a pair of mortal eyes, and a galley worthy of heroes or gods. The picture is the purest phantasy, even more like a fairy-tale than the story it illustrates. He has made the whole scene burn in the red light of a flaming sunrise, redder by far than the sunset of the old 'Temeraire.'

The story is told of a gentleman who, looking at a picture of Turner's, said to him, 'I never saw a sunset like that.' 'No, but don't you wish you could?' replied Turner. That is what we feel about the sunrise in the picture of Ulysses and Polyphemus. Next to it in the National Gallery hangs another picture called 'Rain, Steam, and Speed'--the Great Western Railway. From the realm of the mythical, this takes us back to the class of scenes of which the 'Fighting Temeraire' is one, actually beheld by Turner, but magically transfigured by his brush. A train is coming towards us over a bridge, prosaic subject enough, especially in 1844, when railways were supposed to be ruining the aspect of the country and were hated by beauty-loving people. But Turner saw romance in the swift passage of a train, and painted a picture in which smoke and rain, cloud and sunset, river and bridge, boats and trees, are all fused in a mist, pearly and golden as well as smutty and grey. When you look at it, you must stand away and look long, till gradually the vision of Turner shapes itself before your eyes and the scene as he beheld it lives again for you.

We saw how Venice opened his eyes to flaming colour. In his pictures of Venice, her magic beauty is revealed by a delicate sympathy, that re-creates the fairy city in her day of glory. Never tired of painting her in all her aspects, at morning, at even, in pomp, and at peace, a sight of his pictures is still the best substitute for a visit to the city itself.

Other artists have interpreted scenery beautifully, and a few have painted ideal landscapes, but who besides Turner has ever united such diversities of power? He continued to paint water-colour sketches to the end of his life, for these were appreciated by a public that did not understand, and neglected to buy, his oil-paintings. He sketched throughout France and Switzerland for various publications as he had sketched in England. Time has not damaged these drawings, as it has the pictures in oil, for to the end of his life Turner sometimes used bad materials. Even the sky of the 'Fighting Temeraire' has faded considerably since it was painted, and others of his oil-pictures are mere shadows of their former selves. It is pathetic to look upon the wreck of work not a century old and to wonder how much of it will be preserved for future generations.

Turner himself deemed the 'Temeraire' one of his best pictures, and from the beginning intended to bequeath it to the National Gallery, refusing to sell it for any price whatever.

There's a far bell ringing, At the setting of the sun, And a phantom voice is singing Of the great days done. There's a far bell ringing, And a phantom voice is singing Of renown for ever clinging To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver, _Temeraire! Temeraire!_ And she's fading down the river, _Temeraire! Temeraire!_ Now the sunset breezes shiver, And she's fading down the river, But in England's song for ever She's the '_Fighting Temeraire_.'[4]

[Footnote 4: _The Fighting Temeraire_. Henry Newbolt.]