CHAPTER XL

1834: AGED FIFTY-NINE

SOME OLD STORIES AND SOME AGELESS COLOUR STUDIES

Turner, in his sixtieth year, is on the threshold of the period when colour and light were more and more to obsess him to the exclusion of form and detail. In the _Inventory_, there are books labelled simply 'Colour Studies,' and among the water-colours connected with his 'Meuse-Moselle-Rhine' tour are some bearing such suggestive titles as 'Crimson Ruins,' 'Vermilion Towers,' 'Tower in Sunbeam,' 'Blue Hills,' 'Ruins with Rainbow.' In the 'Colour Studies' Sketch-Book there are nearly fifty pages described merely as 'Colour Sketches'; and on the last page are several lines of illegible verse. Also, after a sketch of a 'Ruined Castle on a Rock' a recipe 'said to be an infallible cure for the bite of a mad dog.'

In the 'Oxford and Bruges' Sketch-Book he breaks into this:--

'Old Tom, of Christ Church, Oxford. What? is it you Old Tom that keep this row every night? What? is it right that _you_ should summon us to bed at nine continually all the year round? Is it fair that you, Tom, should thus deal with us every night?'

With my mind full of the visionary Turner, the dreamer and the troubled traveller, I am a little impatient of 'The Golden Bough' of this year; so apparently were the trustees of the National Gallery, as they banished it to Dublin. As to 'St. Michael's Mount,' now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, how beautiful would be the pale gold Mount, rising from a pale gold shore into a grey-blue sky, if the foreground with its fish and figures, boat and lobster-pots, could be banished. The fine and whirling spectacle of the 'Fire at Sea,' that looks so well in its new home at Millbank, was composed, no doubt, from 'The Fire at Sea' Sketch-Book, which has this endorsement by Ruskin: 'A careless book: the fine ships on fire taken out of it and very little left.'

He exhibited another Venice subject this year, probably the Venice about which Thornbury tells a story: how the inevitable Jones, who was showing a picture with a blue sky in it, tried to paint his sky brighter, so as to make it outshine Turner's, which hung alongside. Turner then made his sky still more blue, whereupon Jones painted out his blue sky altogether and put in a white one.

'Ah! Jones,' said Turner, 'you've done me now.'

Here may be told once again the story of the encounter between Gillott the pen manufacturer and Turner, in Thornbury's own words:--

We are told that one day Mr. Gillott, the well-known manufacturer of Birmingham, sallied forth from his hotel, determined at any price to obtain admission to the enchanted house in Queen Anne Street. He was rich, he was enthusiastic--he believed strongly in the power of the golden key to open any door. He arrived at the blistered dirty door of the house with the black-crusted windows. He pulled at the bell; the bell answered with a querulous, melancholy tinkle. There was a long inhospitable pause; then an old woman with a diseased face looked up from the area, and presently ascended and tardily opened the door, keeping the filthy chain up, however, as a precaution. She snappishly asked Mr. Gillott's business. He told her in his blandest voice. "Can't let 'e in," was the answer, and she tried to slam the door. But during the parley the crafty and determined Dives had put his foot in, and now, refusing to any longer parley, he pushed past the feeble, enraged old she-Cerberus, and hurried upstairs to the gallery. In a moment Turner was out upon him like a spider on another spider who has invaded his web. Mr. Gillott bowed, introduced himself, and stated that he had come to buy. "Don't want to sell," or some such rebuff, was the answer; but Gillott shut his ears to all Turner's angry vituperations. "Have you ever seen our Birmingham pictures, Mr. Turner?" was his only remark.

'"Never 'eard of 'em," said Turner.

'Gillott pulled from his pocket a silvery fragile bundle of Birmingham bank-notes (about £5000 worth).

'"Mere paper," said Turner, with grim humour, a little softened, and enjoying the joke.

'"To be bartered for _mere_ canvas," said Gillott, waving his hand at the "Building of Carthage" and its companions.

'"You're a rum fellow!" said Turner, slowly entering into negotiations, which ended in Gillott eventually carrying off in his cab some five thousand pounds' worth of Turner's pictures.'

These old stories, when one has heard them once, are not very exhilarating, but they all have truth in their well of words. It is pleasant to turn from them, and merely to repeat the titles of some of the sketches mentioned before, sounding as beautiful as they look, and to glance at such a delicate drawing as the 'View on the Moselle,' and to follow the river feeling for its level between the flushed hills.

And it is pleasant, too, to know that the time has now come to consider the loveliest of the 'unfinished' oils, the pictures painted for his own delight in moments of exhilaration, that were revealed to the public in 1906. It is probable that the most delicate and evanescent of them were painted at intervals between this year and 1838. Unsigned, unnamed, undated, it is impossible to give them a certain date, and really it does not much matter. Turner painted them; the nation has them: that is all we need to know.