CHAPTER LIX

1910: THE NEW 'TURNER GALLERY' AT MILLBANK

So, at last, fifty-nine years after his death one of the wishes of his muddled will is almost obeyed--that his works should be hung 'in a room or rooms, to be added to the National Gallery, and to be called "Turner's Gallery."'

It would have been better if the new Turner Gallery had adjoined the National Gallery; but that seems to have been impossible. At present the exhibited portion is distributed thus: 129 oils and 467 water-colours, etc., at the Tate Gallery; 20 oils and a large selection of water-colours at the National Gallery; and 31 oils and other works in the provinces. The Salting Bequest water-colours are in the British Museum, and there are also many examples, varying from his first to his last period, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with several oil pictures. Besides these there is the unexhibited portion of the Bequest, and the numerous oil pictures and water-colours in private and public collections in this country and abroad, making the largest amount of work ever produced single-handed by any artist.

There is one word only to describe the setting of the new Turner Gallery, the word magnificent. There are five rooms on the main floor, and four on the ground floor. The walls of the two large rooms or halls are covered with a rich Venetian red silk brocade, the walls of the others are hung with gold canvas.

The first new Turner Room is 34 yards long, nearly 11 yards wide, and 13 yards high. I hardly knew the old, familiar masterpieces. At first I saw nothing but that gorgeous red brocade, sweeping over the walls, probably the colour Turner himself used (but certainly in a cheaper material) in his own gallery in Queen Anne Street. Red may have been his favourite colour, but we must remember that in his Queen Anne Street Gallery, the walls were covered with pictures, so that the red hangings were barely visible.

In the new Turner Gallery the eyes see first the dominating red walls,--then the pictures. No work is skied. All the pictures are on the line, arranged chronologically, from the dark 'Tenth Plague of Egypt' of 1802, to the flaming 'Fire at Sea' of 1834. How well, sombre but glowing, they all look. Hanging together are those early, grandiose, masterful canvases, a challenge to the art world of his day, the 'Calais Pier,' the 'Nelson,' and 'The Shipwreck.' Opposite, on the line for the first time, is the vast 'England: Richmond Hill,' vastly entertaining.

At one end of the room hangs the well-loved, cool, and temperate 'Crossing the Brook,' and at the other end, facing it, that mighty effort of his imagination, 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,' almost dwarfed, strange to say, by its companions the whirling 'Medea,' and the flaming 'Fire at Sea.' Here and there are the quieter works, pastoral and appealing, done in 1809, when his mind was happy and at rest, the 'Bligh Sand,' and the 'River Scene with Cattle,' so tranquilly aglow.

The next room is hung with the best of the 'unfinished' oils. The red silk brocade is almost too overpowering for the aerial loveliness of the 'Sunrise' pictures, for that magical' Hastings,' with the tawny sail, and the crepuscular delicacy of 'The Evening Star.' The pearly 'Yachting' series stands the ordeal better, and that glorious riot of colour, 'Interior at Petworth,' actually flaunts the red brocade. The old warrior pictures look better than ever--'The Fighting Téméraire,' the 'Burial of Wilkie,' and that swift foreshadowing of Impressionism, 'Rain, Steam and Speed.' If Turner, mad for fame, as for art, could have seen these two rooms, one hung with the pictures he did for exhibition, the other with those he did for joy! If only he could have had prevision of this year of his triumph!

The other seven rooms hung with gold canvas--just right--contain a selection of his water-colours, finished and unfinished, oil beginnings, and others. The water-colours range from the copy of 'Folly Bridge,' which he made at the age of twelve, to such visions of his later years, when definition became lost in light, and form in colour, as 'Ravine and Tower,' and 'The Via Mala,' and certain dreams from the 'Rheinfelden' and 'Heidelberg' Sketch-Books, that one looks at with wonder and joy, and again with wonder and joy.

There is a room of his early water-colours with two exquisite interpretations of 'Norham Castle'; there is a room of the sepia drawings for the _Liber Studiorum_, with a case in the middle containing twenty-one supreme water-colours, dominated, at the end of the case, by the 'Venetian Fishing Boat'--a fairy thing flashing green, blue, and gold; and elsewhere there is a range of his water-colours, each a treasure; but I think my choice would fall upon 'Sunshine on the Sea,' everything omitted except--sunshine upon the sea.

On the ground floor, approached by a staircase (on the stair walls hang three of his colossal failures, 'Waterloo,' 'The Deluge,' and 'Pilate'--do not look at them!--), are four more rooms. One contains seventeen 'beginnings' of oil pictures, painted about 1807, never exhibited before in public, but probably shown in his studio in Queen Anne Street in 1808, to tempt patrons to commission 'finished' pictures from them. Times have changed. We value beginnings now. Another ground-floor room is hung with large 'unfinished' early water-colours, including a lovely beginning in a rosy flush, of 'Coniston Old Man,' and an atmospheric filmy blue 'Valley with Mountains.'

An adjoining room contains the oils on thin veneer, painted between 1805 and 1810, and first exhibited in 1908. My choice would be 'Tree Tops and Sky.' And the last room of all, a light, cheerful apartment, as it should be, includes his last four pictures, painted the year before he died, and other magnificent failures and experiments. Here is a picture of the period when he was haunted by the idea of Whalers in Arctic seas; and when he muddled off a final beauty in despair of Venice at sunset with a blue sky and ragged clouds; and when he tried to see 'The Angel Standing in the Sun,' driving Death before him, Turner then being seventy-one; and other dreams by this amazing man, whose art vision endured, not only to the end, but became more ethereal and dehumanised and seer-like as his physical frame shrank and tottered.

All that is over. The immortal part of him remains, and this is the year of his final triumph, long delayed. He who loved fame and praise, and spent much of his life pitting himself against his contemporaries and predecessors, would chuckle to know that his works in the new Catalogue of the Tate Gallery extend to 144 pages, while all the other artists represented have but 264 pages between them.

It was almost a shock to return from these golden lower rooms to the two large galleries on the main floor, adorned with the rich red silk brocade, that dazzles and distresses. I cannot like these red, flaming walls, but there is no doubt that the pictures look finer than they did in Trafalgar Square. Indeed, we seem to see some of them for the first time. I never realised before what a stupendous work is the 'Snowstorm--Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, Making Signals.' One could spend an hour studying the swirl of the waves and the whirl of the storm, the movement of those deep water waves, and the lights that gleam in and through them. Incline your head a little to the right, and there is 'A Ship Aground,' with the tugging movement of shallow water, the reflections and the gleams portrayed with equal skill. Then turn your eyes still further to the right, and there is 'Rain, Steam, and Speed' and the 'Burial of Wilkie.' For some reason or another--the red walls, or the wonderful lighting of the gallery, or the flame of Turner that in this year of his triumph spiritualises our perceptions--these pictures seem to have taken on more delicate delicacies of eolour, new intricacies of vision.

And what about the 'Interior at Petworth,' that Mr. MacColl has bravely hung in the place of honour in the gallery where 'The Evening Star' and 'The Fighting Téméraire' dispute for our allegiance? The 'Interior at Petworth' is a puzzle to almost everybody. I watched a nice father and his nice little daughter, who had been talkative before most of the Turners, stand in front of this orgy of colour--dumb. Then the little girl said: 'Daddy, what does it mean?' And he after a long pause and another long look said, very seriously, as if he were a little ashamed: 'I don't know what it means, my dear.'

How I longed to say to them: 'Friends, Turner didn't mean you to know what his "Interior at Petworth" means. He didn't mean you to see it. It's like this. He was a great artist, almost miraculous, with extraordinary faculties and power of work, and an ambition, that was almost a mania, to excel all other painters, living and dead, and to make the public of his day realise what a mighty man he was. So he painted his big exhibition pictures, every inch finished, understandable by everybody, classical, pastoral, homely, heroic--"The Bay of Baise," "Crossing the Brook," the "Frosty Morning," and "The Fighting Téméraire"; but that was only half his life. He was mad about drawing and painting; he never rested; he was always making experiments, trying to capture the fleeting loveliness of dawn or sunset, the pomp of high noon, and the splendour of colour in hot sunshine that to some artists is as intoxicating as wine. He never meant such experiments, done to relieve his surcharged soul, to be seen; he never exhibited them. It is we, valuing every scrap from Turner's hand, who are responsible for their exhibition; it is we who have brought to the light of day these attempts of the wizard, the old man mad about art, to force painting to realise what others would have thought to be unrealisable. They are wonderful. Folk will come from the end of the world to see them.

'Friends, how that room at Petworth came to be in that awful disarray I know not. It looks like a nightmare spring-cleaning, with no witness of the fury but the streaming sun. Turner looked on the sight--that's certain; was intoxicated by the orgy of colour, painted it in one swift hour, and having cased his soul, hid his colour-cry, as men hide their love poems in youth.'

Thus would I have spoken to that nice father and nice child; but while I was rehearsing my remarks, they had moved on. I sought them, and found the twain in one of the lower rooms where some of the early water-colours are displayed, 'unfinished,' because they were painted for love, not for exhibition, and love had said in them all that love can say.

I found the father and child standing just where I would like them to have been--before those two exquisite drawings hanging by the window, looking, not like paint, but like vapours of iridescent colour--the rosy flush of 'Coniston Old Man,' and the filmy blue of 'Valley with Mountains.'

Father and child were silent, but there was something in their eyes more eloquent than words. Then her hand stole into his and was clutched tight. My eyes moistened too. For I was looking upon the visible signs of invisible things. Love made those drawings, and the watchers were quickened by their loveliness. The father's grasp grew tighter on the small hand as she blinked away the mist in her eyes.

I should like to have explained, to that nice father and child, the Sketch-Books, the unseen part of Turner's prodigious achievement, the studies direct from Nature for his own use, records as he called them. Throughout his life his procedure seems to have been always the same--the sketch or the mere note direct from Nature, on which later, sometimes years later, he based an oil picture, or a water-colour for the engravers.

He could always, when he had once 'wrenched himself free from the trammels of topography and antiquarianism,' make a vital sketch from Nature, but it took him years to master oil-painting. The dark, heavy, early 'Buttermere Lake' was made from 'a pale and delicately charming water-colour.' There is not an artist who would not be delighted to study, in the Sketch-Books, the slight vital suggestions and to compare them with the finished works--the beginning and the end of his Hornby, Heysham, Watchet, Boscastle, Bolton; to look at the vigorous studies from which the 'Bridgewater Sea Piece,' and 'The Shipwreck' were made, and to swoop down upon that astonishing foreshadowing of Impressionism, 'Men Chatting Round the Fireplace at Petworth,' made during the visit to Petworth when he was fifty-five, from which his dream, world-well-lost period dated: Turner the visionary, who, like Wordsworth at the end, passed into regions where feeling is almost too mystical, too rarefied for expression, and indeed can only be expressed by allusion and suggestion.

The Turner Sketch-Books are as valuable, in their way, as, say, a discovery of diaries kept by Shakespeare from the day he first left Stratford to the hour he returned home full of honours and wisdom. Turner died in hiding--by choice; and, to our great advantage, he hoarded his Sketch-Books, as he hoarded his 'unfinished' works, meant only for his own eyes, those gleaming, grey-blue eyes that never lost their sparkle, and that saw and controlled his hand to paint a 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus 'for fame, and a 'Teasing the Donkey at Petworth' for joy.