Part 4

Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic, yet it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or perfect design do not by themselves attain. By the modern school of landscapists this would probably be regarded as a defect or even a heresy. Pictorial art, they say, should not be ‘literary,’ should not be intellectual. But to me it seems that the work of the highest artists--of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Rembrandt, for example--almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well as to the senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or unintentionally, speaks to mind. As has been well said _apropos_ of Ruskin’s writings on Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the painter himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry more readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony between the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite range of significance and supports an infinite variety of interpretations.”

After Turner had attained manhood--say from 1807 onwards--his _creative_ power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more evident in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter, more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative, topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his drawings, notably in his _Liber Studiorum_ (1807-1819). Leaving aside actual landscapes such as _Solway Moss_, _Ben Arthur_, etc., his creative, imaginative power is seen in such subjects as _Æsacus and Hesperie_, _Peat Bog_, _Procris and Cephalus_, _The Lost Sailor_ and other plates of the _Liber_. It also appears from time to time in later drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the astonishing theory that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end of his life he was not a “creative” artist, merely an _illustrator_, and this idea has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The painter of _The Frosty Morning_, and _Crossing the Brook_ (National Gallery); of _The Guardship at the Nore_ (Lady Wantage); of _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ and _Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus_ (National Gallery); of _The Shipwreck_ (National Gallery), and a dozen other great Sea Pictures, not a “creative” artist? The draughtsman of _Chryses_ (Mrs. T. Ashton), _The Land’s End_ (“Southern Coast”), _The Longships Lighthouse_ (“England and Wales”), _The Alps at Daybreak_ and _The Vision of Columbus_ (“Rogers’s Poems”), _The Plains of Troy_ (“Byron’s Poems”), _The Mustering of the Warrior Angels_ (“Milton’s Poems”)? If these, and scores of others which might be added, are not examples of “creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found? Is Martin’s _Plains of Heaven_ to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such thing as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?

Of Turner’s technical skill in water-colour, there is no need to speak; 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.

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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?

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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.