CHAPTER XLIV

1838. AGED SIXTY-THREE

A 'NONSENSE PICTURE' OF 1838 WHICH IN 1878 FETCHED £5460 AT AUCTION

From this year onward until after 1845, when his health began to fail, Turner spent more and more time on the Continent, making his beloved impressions of the moment, and producing the unrivalled water-colours of his 'latest phase,' each a 'vision of delight.' The Sketch-Books of the period are records of foreign travel. Venice and the Lake of Lucerne were the places of his heart's choice. I know not how many times he drew the Righi, making the mountain now dark, now pale, now red, now blue; or how many times he painted Venice, her churches, her buildings and her water-ways until in the end the city in the sea became a celestial city in a dream--his dream. The exhibited pictures of 1838 are splendid failures. They included 'Modern Italy' and 'Ancient Italy,' the latter classed by Ruskin among the 'nonsense pictures.' Here is the passage: '"Caligula's Bridge," "Temple of Jupiter," "Departure of Regulus," "Ancient Italy," "Cicero's Villa," and such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class under the general head of "nonsense pictures." 'But so strange a creature is man, so deaf to advice, that this 'Ancient Italy' was sold by auction in 1878 for £5460. Some prize Turner's failures higher than the successes of other men.

'Phryne Going to the Public Bath as Venus--Demosthenes taunted by Aeschines,' I have not seen. It is one of the Turners that were withdrawn from the walls of the National Gallery. Mr. Wyllie describes this procession of dancing girls, madly throwing a white Cupid into the air and pirouetting, as woven into a bewildering maze of light and colour.

'Drawing is neglected, and the most audacious expedients resorted to, increasing the brilliancy and the movement of the throng. Some of the faces are white with vermilion shadows. The head of Demosthenes is twisted out of all likeness to human form. In fact everything is sacrificed to colour.'

Never has Turner been so wilful as he is now at the age of sixty-three. Think of it--sixty-three, and wilder, more revolutionary, more indifferent to convention than a hot-headed youth of twenty-three. 'He paints white sails or buildings up against a sunset, which is a thing impossible.' He disregards drawing and form, and squeezes features 'together into one corner of a face, slanting diagonally across it like handwriting' ... True.

But the magician conquered, not through these wildnesses, but in spite of them. Even when most extravagant, there is enough of the essential Turner to make the picture great. His dreams were too vast for the poor tools at his command; he tripped over his tools, he tripped up over nature; but he did what no other man has ever been able to do. And he could still be magnificently sane when he painted something that his eyes had seen, not something that his chaotic fancy had imagined. The year following the 'Phryne,' he exhibited one of his sanest, and probably his most popular picture--'The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken up,' the last picture of his 'at which no stone was thrown.' And he gave to it a true and trite tag of poetry, which I take the liberty of writing as prose, that the curious reader may amuse himself by trying to recast the line into poetry: 'The flag which braved the battle and the breeze no longer owns her.' The first nine words may be by some esteemed poet: none but Turner would have written the last four words as a line of verse.