CHAPTER VIII

1800: AGED TWENTY-FIVE

HIS FIRST OIL PICTURES AND EXTRACTS FROM HIS SKETCH-BOOKS

Five more years have passed. Turner has made his North of England tour about which Ruskin wrote so eloquently--and so unconvincingly. Cosmo Monkhouse, while reproving Ruskin for the partial untruth of his beautiful prose, says of that 1797 journey:--

'The effect upon Turner of the fells and vales of Yorkshire and Cumberland seems to have been much the same as that of Scotland upon Landseer: it braced all his powers, developed manhood of art, turned him from a toilsome student into a triumphant master.'

Turner was not yet a triumphant master. He had progressed towards triumph in water-colour, shown in the spacious, harmonious, and atmospheric rendering of 'Derwentwater, with the Falls of Lodore,' and the very beautiful 'Study for a Picture of Norham Castle'--rising golden rocks and rosy sky reflected in the rosy water, one of two early drawings of this subject, displayed in the new Turner Gallery, and reproduced in these pages: but oil was still beyond him. He had not mastered the difficulties of that medium; he could do no better than the dark and dispiriting 'Morning on the Coniston Fells, Cumberland,' and the still darker 'Buttermere Lake,' that for years has been banished to a provincial gallery. The young chief had advanced; he had been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy; he had removed from dingy Hand Court to decorous Harley Street; and he was about to make the acquaintance of Mr. Walter Fawkes, the squire of Farnley Hall, near Leeds, which was to mean so much to him; but he was not yet a triumphant master. Only in his water-colours has he begun to show glimmerings of his golden visions. In oil he is studying detail rather than light; he is pondering over masses looming in dim airless spaces; he has not even yet begun to see the ethereal manifestations of his maturity.

No doubt he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 for the remarkable water-colours that he exhibited in that and in the previous year, which included the powerful sunset-glowing 'Warkworth Castle' now at South Kensington; the gloomy and magnificent 'Kirkstall Abbey' in the Soane Museum, and the 'Norham Castle' with the golden rocks and the rosy sky of dawn.

Norham Castle was Turner's mascot. He painted that picturesque ruin again and again; it appears in the _Liber Studiorum_ and in _The Rivers of England_ series, and 'Norham Castle' is the subject of two of the 'unfinished oils,' disembodied spirits of loveliness, that caused such a sensation when they were exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1906.

In later life, when Turner was travelling with Cadell, the Edinburgh bookseller, making sketches for _Provincial Antiquities_, the artist suddenly raised his hat to the ruins and made them a low bow.

'What are you up to now?' asked Cadell.

'Oh,' was Turner's reply, 'I made a drawing of Norham Castle several years since. It took, and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute.'

Perhaps the interest of this period for students are certain early oil paintings, showing the germs, so meagre of promise, from which his magnificent life-work arose. The small 'Moonlight, a study at Millbank,' exhibited in 1797, is now so dark that the picture seems to be encompassed in a perpetual fog, dominated by a round wafery, whitey-yellow moon; the sprawling 'Morning on the Coniston Fells' of 1798; the 'Caernarvon Castle' of 1800, silhouetted against a cloudy sky, so small and unimposing, that, remembering what Turner became, one has for it a sentimental affection; and the dark, disappearing 'Dolbadern Castle' that hangs in the Diploma Gallery in Burlington House. It was exhibited in 1800; but as Turner was not elected a full Royal Academician until 1802, this can hardly be his Diploma picture. The 'Tenth Plague of Egypt,' exhibited in 1802, has been honoured by a place on the line in the new Turner Gallery at Millbank.

Thomas Green, of Ipswich, is known to fame--or perhaps I should say to the present writer--for the inscription in his diary of the following brief criticism of Turner's oil picture, exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1797, called 'Fishermen Coming Ashore at Sunset, Previous to a Gale ':--

_'June 2nd,_1797.--Visited the Royal Academy Exhibition. Particularly struck with a sea-view by Turner; fishing-vessels coming in, with a heavy swell, in apprehension of tempest gathering in the distance, and casting, as it advances, a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore. The whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist; but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department.'

Dayes, an architectural draughtsman, the master of Girtin, said of Turner:--

'The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing where he could a drawing or picture to copy from, or by making a sketch of any one in the exhibition early in the morning and finishing it at home.'

Another contemporary remarked of Turner, 'He must be loved for his works, for his person is not striking or his conversation brilliant'; a third described him as 'eccentric, but kind and amusing.' Blake, who was one of his pupils, complained of being left quite alone, and Thornbury states that he was too reserved and tongue-tied to be able to teach what he knew, even if he wished to disclose his hard-earned secrets. Turner never disclosed any of his secrets. What he knew he kept.

The _Inventory_ from 1795 to 1800 fills nearly eighty pages of minute records of his sketching tours. On one of the leaves of the 'South Wales' Sketch-Book, dated 1795, I find this, but, with the exception of the words 'Walls x White Lyon Inn,' not in his own handwriting:--

'To Tenby, 20 miles. Walls x White Lyon Inn. Before you visit Tenby view the Castles at Llanstephen and Laugharn (Larn as it is called). Llanstephen Castle stands at the entrance of the River Towy. At Tenby view the cliffs, caverns, rocks, islands, etc., etc.'

The 'Studies near Brighton' Sketch-Book (1796) contains a drawing of pigs and a donkey with this note by Ruskin:--

'Both wonderful, quite beyond telling. There is an etching of Rembrandt's which approaches the upper study, but by no means equals it. Examine it for a quarter of an hour through a magnifying-glass, and you will see something of what it is.'

When Ruskin praised, he--praised.

In another Sketch-Book of this period there is a copy by Turner of Wilson's 'Landscape with Figures'; and in 1797 we find a book full of Wilson copies, and labelled on the back by Turner himself, 'Studies for Pictures. Copies of Wilson.' In the 'Swans' Sketch-Book (1798) Turner has noted on the inside cover in ink a

'Receipt for making an Efficable (?) ointment for Cut ...'

The details of the recipe are confusedly given. On the flyleaf are several scraps of verse, probably his own. One of them runs:--

'Tell me Babbling Echo why, Babbling Echo tell me why, You return me sigh for sigh; When I of slighted love complain You delight to Mock my Pain.'

On the back of a drawing of 'Somerset House' (?) is this (I copy the words just as he wrote them):--

Learn. Substantives No Comparison but by Adjectives, as, good bonne bad, Beau, fine Positive Plus Beau finer Comparative le Plus Beau Superlitive of Finer. Masculine Le White Blanc Positive Whiter Plus Blanc Comparative Whitest Le Plus Blanc Superlitive.'

Later, in the 'Dolbadern' Sketch-Book, he has copied out a list of French pronouns and their translations. There is something pathetic in these attempts of Turner to make up for his lack of education.

The 'Babbling Echo' poem suggests that there may be truth in the early love-story of which some of his biographers make much. That may or may not have soured him; it may or may not have been the reason why he remained a bachelor. I do not think that Turner ever thought seriously about matrimony. His art was his mistress, and to his art to his dying day he was loyal, to the sacrifice of everything else. And he was loyal in his way--or shall I say faithful in his way--to Hannah Danby, who entered his service in 1800 or 1801, a girl of sixteen; who was housekeeper in Queen Anne Street through his long life; and who, in the end, when he had done all his great work, found him dying in hiding as Mr. Booth, 'husband' of Mrs. Booth, in the little house at Chelsea overlooking the river.