CHAPTER VI

THE ‘LIBER STUDIORUM’

The object of this chapter--The first ‘Liber’ drawings were made at W. F. Wells’s cottage at Knockholt, Kent--‘Bridge and Cows’--Development of the so-called ‘Flint Castle’--Mrs. Wells--View of ‘Basle’--‘Little Devil’s Bridge’ and ‘London from Greenwich’--‘Martello Towers, Bexhill,’ and ‘Kirkstall Crypt’--Scene at Isleworth--The etching of the ‘Raglan Castle’ and ‘Source of the Arveron’ plates--Suggestion for the better exhibition of the ‘Liber’ drawings.

The _Liber Studiorum_ is an important aspect of Turner’s genius--so important that it seems to deserve a chapter to itself, even in so summary an investigation as the present. Yet from the point of view of its subject-matter, it is evident that the ‘Liber’ does not throw into relief any side of Turner’s art not amply illustrated in his paintings. What light the sequence of ‘Pastoral’ subjects throws upon the gradual development of his conception of realistic art, has already been touched upon in the previous chapter. But there remains one point of view from which it seems to me the ‘Liber’ possesses a special interest for our present study. In these designs we can study the formal elements of Turner’s art freed from the disturbing influence of colour. Each plate is primarily an arrangement in line and light and shade, and the requirements of what I may call melodic invention are considered before those of mere representation; that is to say, the emphasis is always on the subjective and constructive side of art, as opposed to its power of reproduction of the elements immediately given in ordinary perception.

Especially important from this point of view are those subjects, generally amongst the earlier plates, in which considerable alterations were made during the course of execution. An examination of a few of the cases in which there are important differences between the first preliminary drawing and the completed engraving is certainly well within the limits of our present inquiry; and such comparisons are worth making for their own sake, as they bring out very clearly certain characteristics of all pictorial art, and especially of Turner’s, which are not easily grasped when our observations are complicated by the presence of colour.

The first drawings executed for the work were made in October 1806, when Turner was on a visit to Mr. Wells, at Knockholt, in Kent. One of Mr. Wells’s daughters has told us that it was mainly on her father’s advice that Turner decided to undertake the work. But he required ‘much and long continued spurring’ before he could be induced to make a beginning. ‘At last,’ we are told, ‘after he had been well goaded, one morning, half in a pet he said, “Zounds, Gaffer, there will be no peace with you till I begin--well, give me a sheet of paper there, rule the size for me, tell me what I shall take.” The lady adds, ‘I sat by Turner laughing and playing whilst he made the drawings,’ ‘and before he left us the first five subjects which form the first number were completed and arranged for publication greatly to my dear Father’s delight.’ (The letter is given _in extenso_ in Mr. Rawlinson’s _Liber Studiorum_, 2nd edition, pp. xii and xiii.)

One of the subjects executed at Knockholt was almost certainly the faded sepia drawing which hangs at present in the National Gallery, under the title of ‘Bridge and Cows’ (No. 504, N. G.); the engraving made from it was published (without a title) as the first ‘Pastoral’ subject in the first part of _Liber_.

This drawing is slightly faded, but the fading does not altogether account for its feeble and commonplace look. The design itself is feeble, the draughtsmanship petty, and the character of the figures and trees weak and amiable. These objects are not actually ‘out of drawing’--that is to say, incorrect from a physiological or botanical point of view, but they are sadly lacking in intention. They have a listless air, and seem to take very little interest either in themselves or in each other. They seem, indeed, to be mildly wondering why they are there at all. In a word, it is just the sort of drawing that an artist would make when external circumstances induced him to sit down to ‘do something,’ while no strongly-felt subject-matter within him was urgently demanding expression.

This drawing (it is in reverse of the engraving) was traced on to the copper, and the etching was made from it by Turner himself. The etching is practically an accurate copy of the drawing: the objects represented are the same in each, and neither the actions nor positions of any of the figures have been altered. Yet in the etching there is a perceptible briskening-up of everything. It all hangs together better than in the drawing. In some way the whole now seems to have come to life in the artist’s imagination. In the drawing we can see him laboriously bringing the parts together: in the etching he has infused the breath of life into them.

The change is due entirely to the execution. The line which defines the contours of the chief objects has lost its listlessness. It is now instinct with intention. Everywhere it hurries along, building up the design as a whole while defining the parts. The compulsion of the whole makes itself felt in every detail. It is certainly difficult to put into words the difference between the two versions, but I believe every one who will take the trouble to compare them carefully will be sure to feel it. In the two works there is an actual difference in the quality of the artist’s stream of consciousness, and the difference makes itself felt in the workmanship, though, in all probability, he himself was quite unaware of the difference in his frame of mind, and regarded the etching as simply a mechanical process of transference from one medium to another. Yet from a psychological point of view, the impulsion of his mind was in each case in a contrary direction. In the drawing the scene as a whole was being laboriously invoked piecemeal, a collection of objects was being formed into a sum total; in the etching the subject as a whole is a real and living thing, guiding the artist’s hand and moulding all the details into kinship with itself.

The whole now feels that certain of its parts require adjustment, _i.e._ demand to be brought into more intimate cohesion with the general purpose. The contrast between the rigidity of the dead branches of the willow on the right, and the springiness of the living branches nearer the foreground, calls out for clearer and

more emphatic statement. The dance and sweep of the foliage, the bending bridge, the falling bank, require steadying by a bolder assertion of the straight horizontal line of the distant hills. The soft and rounded undulations of the tree-tops, running right across the upper part of the drawing, give a somewhat featureless though amiable character to it; in the etching, greater prominence is given to the harsher lines of the rigid white wall of the distant cottage and its sloping roof, as well as to the supports and planks of the rustic bridge. In this way, without altering the position of a single part of the design, or introducing any new matter, the whole is transformed; instead of a mere collection of parts, related to each other by a kind of chance or indifferent contiguity, we have now a definite whole, fused through and through into conceptual and emotional unity. The objects before our eyes have ceased to be merely indifferent and external facts; they have now become elements or members of a richly coloured whole of thought and feeling.

The careful and rather timid-looking drawing described as ‘Flint Castle’ (Plate XXXVI.), is certainly another of the designs made at the cheerful Knockholt cottage. On the margin of this drawing the artist has scribbled some verses, which I suppose one of the merry party had discovered in a book or magazine,[19] and which they were all delighted with. Probably the discoverer was Mrs. Wells, for the young ladies were too young to care much for books, and the only scrap of information we possess about their mother seems to suggest that she was something of a bluestocking, and what is now sometimes called a ‘féministe.’ Among the sketches in one of Turner’s pocket-books there is the following jotting:--‘There is not a quality or endowment, faculty or ability which is not in a superior degree possest by women.--_Vide_ Mrs. Wells, Knockholt, Oct.’ The poem itself is not strictly germane to our present study, but as there lingers about it a faint echo of those scenes of ‘fun and merriment’ which one of Turner’s young playmates recalled in after years, I cannot deny myself the pleasure of transcribing it.

‘A Row of Poplars in disgrace Because they would not stop their pace Or grew unnecessarily tall, Their Master came and topped them all.

Some neighbourly poplars stood hard by Beheld their growth with jealous eye, Now saw--exulting--cried “How near is pride to earth allied.”

“Friends,” said the poplars in disgrace, “You see the fault of making haste, Ambition’s greatness caused our woe. Ambition shun, mind how you grow, For while you run you are bare below.”’

The drawing, like the poem, is not a remarkable one. As a design it differs little from the average work of accomplished landscape draughtsmen like Westall, Arnald, Daniell, etc. But from a comparative point of view it is of singular interest, as the differences between this preliminary drawing and the published engraving are greater than those in any other _Liber_ subject. It starts as a rather jejune and drawing-masterlike composition, and comes out finally as one of the most vigorous and impressive marine designs in the whole series.

The etching was made by Turner himself. As the spacing and arrangement of the etching differ considerably from those of the drawing, it is most likely that an intermediate study was made. The changes, however, might very well have been made on the tracing-paper used to transfer the original design to the copper, and this would naturally have been destroyed as soon as it had been used. When the design had been drawn on the copper and bitten in, a few proofs were taken of the etching, and over one of these Turner set to work again with washes of sepia to guide Charles Turner, the engraver, who was to mezzotint the plate. This second design is now in the National Gallery (No. 522) and has been reproduced here as Plate XXXVII.

Of course we cannot hope to grasp the whole difference that has taken place in this second version of the design. But here are two drawings made by the same hand, within a short space of time of each other, of the same size and the same subject, yet one is obviously a work of genius, and the other is as tame and lifeless as its companion is vivid, energetic, and full-blooded. The comparison is worth making, not, indeed, that there is the slightest hope that any of us may learn from it how to work such miracles, but because it will help to impress upon us the importance of the form or ‘style’ of a work of art, as opposed to the objects it represents,--the importance of ‘mere technique’; it will also give us some insight into the real nature of artistic expression,--will show us how far removed the whole process is from that pious and passive reproduction of what is ‘given’ in sense-perception which plays such a large and dangerous part in current practice. Let us see therefore what we can discover.

In the first place it is evident that in the second version of the subject the design has been what artists call ‘pulled together.’ The foreground boat on the left (it is of course on the right in the plate) has been made, if not actually bigger, yet more important as a mass, by the addition of the sails of a second boat immediately behind it. The apparent height of the boat has been increased by dropping the height of the man standing in the cart in the water beside it, and by making the horses, carts and men relatively smaller. The castle in the distance has been shifted nearer to the boat, the height of the two masts of the boat in the middle distance which abut on to the castle have been reduced, so that the masts and sails of its neighbour on the right seem higher and bigger. More has been made of the men, boats, etc., at the foot of the low hills which appear on the right of the drawing, and the foreground group of men and horses has been shoved nearer to the figure of the man just entering the water, and, to make the connection firmer, the cask and grappling irons on the ground have been carefully added.

But it is useless merely cataloguing these changes, if we cannot discover the reasons for them. Is all this shuffling and rearrangement for the sake of balance and visual harmony? No doubt to some extent it is. But notice in the remodelled design the effect of that firm straight line of the distant sea in the centre, and the way the distant castle rises out of it. That is the nerve of the whole design. See how all the other lines and shapes fret the eye with their sharp and jagged forms, and yet lead it inevitably back to that one untroubled space. All this artfully calculated playing with lights and shadows, this complicated conspiracy of lines and forms, is assuredly something more than an aimless trifling with appearances. In that untroubled stretch of water we cannot but feel the steady, never-resting, inexorable march of the real powers of nature. It brings the whole mighty background of human life into the drawing; and this real spiritual presence sets the daily toil and hardship of everyday life in a new light, solemnising it, dwarfing it, yet not crushing it. It is as though we had heard the rustle of the wings of eternity in the passing moment. To do this, to produce this effect unerringly and with logical certainty upon every normally constituted Englishman who looks carefully at the drawing, cannot exactly be the chance result of a diligent shuffling and reshuffling of mere shapes and shadows. There is something of divinity in it. The shapes and shadows have meaning, and this timeless and spaceless meaning is the life-blood that animates and transfigures these bald signs and symbols. If art deals only with appearances, we must remember that appearance is also a form of reality, and that form and content can be so closely interwoven that the distinctions of our meddling understanding may become idle and misleading.

It is only from some such point of view as this that we can hope to grasp the full importance of what clever people call ‘mere technique.’

Let us turn now to the ‘Basle’ design. Although this engraving was published in the first part of _Liber_, I am inclined to doubt whether the preliminary drawing was made in the Wells’s cottage. This design is based upon a sketch made at Basle in 1802, and it is hardly likely that Turner would have had this sketch-book with him when he went to spend a few days with his friends in Kent. Moreover, the first sepia drawing is not with the others in the National Gallery. Mr. Rawlinson believes that it passed into the hands of an American collector ‘many years ago’ (_Liber Studiorum_, p. 19). But we have Turner’s etching of the subject, and if we compare this with the drawing made from nature, which certainly formed the ground-work of the subject, we see clearly what a great difference there really is between two processes which modern uncritical thought persistently confounds--between the process of ‘drawing what you see’ and ‘copying nature faithfully,’ and the process of artistic construction and invention.

Generally, with the really creative artists the two processes go on simultaneously or are fused into one, but here for once we find them separated. The pencil drawing was made as a simple record of facts; the etching was made some five or six years later, and it is curious to see what liberties Turner felt it was necessary and justifiable to take with his original record, before his notion of the requirements of a work of art could be satisfied.

In the drawing from nature the width of the river seems to dwarf the height of the buildings; in the engraving Turner seems to have felt that the height of the buildings ought to form the keynote of the whole design. First, therefore, the two towers of the Cathedral are carried well up above the house by the bridge, the gable of this building being reduced in size, so that it shall not compete in importance with the Cathedral towers. In the drawing, the buildings recede gradually and gently from the bridge, while in the etching, they are pushed into square step-shaped masses, thus emphasising the idea of weight and height. These impressions are further strengthened by deliberately making the supports of the bridge smaller and more fragile than they were in the drawing; in the engraving the straddling supports of the slender wooden bridge give it an air of weakness which makes the buildings at its side seem all the more firmly set by contrast.

These are only a few of the more obvious points of difference, but if the comparison were pursued further, we should find that every sweep of line and silhouette of the original material has been reconsidered and recast before it was allowed to form part of the new construction. I will not pretend that I regard the result obtained in this case as one of the great achievements of the series, but our observations are useful, I think, as showing the habitual thoroughness and earnestness which Turner brought to all his work. His attitude towards the matter in hand is always active and creative. His alterations are not always for the better--indeed, it is open to argument whether some of the changes made in this Basle subject were quite advantageous, but the fact remains that whatever he took up he threw himself heart and soul into, that he felt bound to recreate it from within, and that a mere cold and passive reproduction of the given would have seemed to him a cowardly shrinking from his artistic mission. He feels that he is responsible for the effect the shapes and arrangement of his subject make upon the spectator’s imagination, and that to attempt to apologise for a tame and uninteresting subject by saying, ‘It was so,’--‘It is quite true,’--would have seemed to him an unworthy evasion of his work.

How incapable Turner was of copying even one of his own drawings accurately is clearly shown by the etching of the ‘Little Devil’s Bridge’ (R. 19). When we compare this with the original drawing (No. 476, N. G.) we find that almost every form in the design has been recast, not always to its individual advantage from the point of view of realisation, but with an invariable gain in the direction of greater general cohesion. Note, for example, how the straight tree trunk nearest the bridge in the drawing gets bent slightly to the left, just to make you feel the toughness and obstinacy of the tree itself. The fir-trees on the left, too, are more realistic in the drawing, but they are more forcible and dramatic in the engraving.

As we have been able to reproduce Turner’s original pencil study from nature for the ‘London from Greenwich’ plate, the reader will be able to make his own comparison with the published design. The preliminary sepia drawing for the engraving (No. 493, N. G.) forms an intermediate step between the two, a stage, as it were, in the process by which Turner’s mind took complete possession of the subject. In the sepia drawing, the artist has not yet fully realised the exact rôle the main building has to play in the whole arrangement. When we turn to the engraving we find that the whole character of the mass formed by the hospital has been changed. In the drawing it forms a straggling mass, somewhat like a chance medley of wharves and warehouses, in the engraving this mass has been patted together into a solid and definite structure. The distant parts of the building have been raised, and they now tell as a rigid horizontal line. The gain to the hospital in dignity and in individuality is extraordinary, and its stiff straight lines are exactly what was wanted to throw emphasis on the subtlety and delicacy of the slow sweep of the distant river.

The drawing for the ‘Martello Towers, Bexhill,’ plate is a very tame affair, and the finished plate is only saved from comparative

failure by its fine sky. Yet it is worth comparing the two to trace out the subtle differences which spring up under Turner’s hand in the etching. All the objects are forced into shapes that act more powerfully on the imagination, everywhere the tendency of the line is towards emphasis and distinctness.

In the ‘Kirkstall Crypt’ (R. 39), the design is also recast in the etching. The group of cows is altered, the foreground pillar is made thinner, the space between the two columns in the centre is widened out, and the aperture in the wall above the cows on the left is made light, instead of dark. These changes are all for the better. A careful study of these seemingly trivial alterations is valuable as an instance of the subtleties of design upon which all really fine art depends.

As these remarks indicate, I am in agreement with the general opinion that the engravings represent Turner’s intentions more fully than his preliminary drawings. But though this is generally the case, there are exceptions, and the most notable is, I think, that of the plate sometimes known as ‘Twickenham--Pope’s Villa,’ and sometimes as ‘Garrick’s Temple and Hampton Court,’ but which really represents a scene at Isleworth. In this case the drawing (Plate XL.) is much finer than the plate, although Turner etched the subject himself. But somehow the spacing of the whole is much less felicitous in the engraving than in the drawing. The rendering of the trees, too, is more conventional, but this is a characteristic of nearly all the plates, and is due to the difficulties of the medium, it being impossible to get the same subtlety of tone and delicacy of form in etching and mezzotint that can be got with a pen and wash on paper.

This question of the comparative conventionality of the foliage in the engravings induces me to say a few words about one of the loveliest renderings of woodland scenery in the whole series--the so-called ‘Raglan Castle’ (R. 58).[20] This is one of the plates that Turner mezzotinted himself, yet because the etched lines are not so free and supple as those of the preliminary drawing (No. 865, N.G.), it has been assumed that Turner left the etching to be done by one of his engravers, probably Dawe. This assumption is one that I cannot accept. The lettering on the plate, ‘Drawn and Engraved by J. M. W. Turner, etc.,’ points to the conclusion that Turner was responsible both for the etching and the mezzotinting. And when we compare the etching with the drawing, a number of slight but successful differences emerge, which no engraver would either have attempted to make or could have made if he had desired to do so.

‘The Source of the Arveron’ (R. 60), another of the plates ‘drawn and engraved’ by Turner, has also had its etching condemned and attributed to Dawe. If the plate is really so fine as all the critics of this kind insist, it is curious that the etching can be so poor as they say and yet not affect the excellence of the whole. This is inconsistent with the proper appreciation of the important role the etched lines play in all these mezzotints. That Turner regarded the etching as far more important than the scraping is shown by the simple fact that he undertook (nominally at least) to do it all himself, but he had no hesitation in handing the scraping over to the engravers.

These general considerations are further strengthened when we compare the finished plate (I am speaking only of the etching in the published states, and not of the rare ‘first state’ of the etching in the late Mr. J. E. Taylor’s collection) with the preliminary study made for it, now in the National Gallery (No. 879). The size and proportions of the plate differ from those of the drawing, so the etching could not have been traced from it, while the etching nowhere follows the drawing with the accuracy one would expect if it were merely an engraver’s copy. There is no authority in this drawing for the shapes given to the crests of the distant mountains in the centre, nor for the shapes of the upper portions of the nearer mountains on the left. The lower parts of the design are also modified from the forms in the drawing in exactly the way Turner habitually recast all the drawings he etched. It is also hard to suppose that Dawe or anybody but Turner could have recast the vague shapes of the disappearing ridge of the glacier on the left in the masterly way this has been done in the etching, or that anybody but Turner could have invented, on the strength of the loose indications in the drawing, the masterly lines that give definition to the stretch of valley against which the ice of the glacier is relieved. The shapes of the

first two upright pines near the centre have also been recast by the mind and hand of the master, not copied by another hand from the indications given in the drawing. Alterations have also been introduced in the character of the stems and their branches which a professional engraver would not dare to make in an ostensible copy; the same remark applies also to the tops of the pines on the right. For these reasons, I think, those critics are mistaken who deny that the workmanship of the whole plate is Turner’s. And the mistake has arisen to a large extent, I feel inclined to add, through attaching too much importance to _a priori_ notions of technical mastery. As the late Mr. Arthur Strong very justly said, we are inclined to start with an idea that masters are always masterly and classical, and we often end by finding that they have left nothing behind them quite worthy of our preconceived ideas of what they ought to have done.

These are a few of the points suggested by a comparison of the preliminary designs for the _Liber_ plates with the finished engravings. But to get any good out of it every student must take the trouble to make these comparisons for himself. Should my remarks succeed in inducing even a few adventurous spirits to make such an experiment, I shall feel satisfied that I have done something towards spreading an intelligent interest in the marvellous process of artistic creation. Perhaps, too, some day in the future, the authorities of the National Gallery may see their way towards the display of these drawings so that such a process of intelligent study may be performed without the inconvenience which the present arrangement entails. It is probably not necessary to have the whole series of drawings on exhibition at the same time, but if those that are exhibited could be accompanied by the finished engravings, and, where possible, by one or two proofs of the unfinished states, I believe the gain to the public would be considerable.