Chapter XLV: Part III: Chap. 5,) as well as of the herbage upon the rocks (3)

The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude, one of them excessively bad in color, the other a grand thought, and yet one of the kind which does no one any good, because everything in it is reciprocally sacrificed; the foliage is sacrificed to the architecture, the architecture to the water, the water is neither sea, nor river, nor lake, nor brook, nor canal, and savors of Regent's Park; the foreground is uncomfortable ground,--let on building leases. So the 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." There never can be any wholesome feeling developed in these preposterous accumulations, and where the artist's feeling fails, his art follows; so that the worst possible examples of Turner's color are found in pictures of this class; in one or two instances he has broken through the conventional rules, and then is always fine, as in the Hero and Leander; but in general the picture rises in value as it approaches to a view, as the Fountain of Fallacy, a piece of rich northern Italy, with some fairy waterworks; this picture was unrivalled in color once, but is now a mere wreck. So the Rape of Proserpine, though it is singular that in his Academy pictures even his simplicity fails of reaching ideality; in this picture of Proserpine the nature is not the grand nature of all time, it is indubitably modern,[14] and we are perfectly electrified at anybody's being carried away in the corner except by people with spiky hats and carabines. This is traceable to several causes; partly to the want of any grand specific form, partly to the too evident middle-age character of the ruins crowning the hills, and to a multiplicity of minor causes which we cannot at present enter into.

Sec. 43. His views of Italy destroyed by brilliancy and redundant quantity.

Neither in his actual views of Italy has Turner ever caught her true spirit, except in the little vignettes to Rogers's Poems. The Villa of Galileo, the nameless composition with stone pines, the several villa moonlights, and the convent compositions in the Voyage of Columbus, are altogether exquisite; but this is owing chiefly to their simplicity and perhaps in some measure to their smallness of size. None of his large pictures at all equal them; the Bay of Baiae is encumbered with material, it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good picture, and yet is so crude in color as to look unfinished. The Palestrina is fall of raw white, and has a look of Hampton Court about its long avenue; the modern Italy is purely English in its near foliage; it is composed from Tivoli material enriched and arranged most dexterously, but it has the look of a rich arrangement, and not the virtue of the real thing. The early Tivoli, a large drawing taken from below the falls, was as little true, and still less fortunate, the trees there being altogether affected and artificial. The Florence engraved in the Keepsake is a glorious drawing, as far as regards the passage with the bridge and sunlight on the Arno, the Cascine foliage, and distant plain, and the towers of the fortress on the left; but the details of the duomo and the city are entirely missed, and with them the majesty of the whole scene. The vines and melons of the foreground are disorderly, and its cypresses conventional; in fact, I recollect no instance of Turner's drawing a cypress except in general terms.

The chief reason of these failures I imagine to be the effort of the artist to put joyousness and brilliancy of effect upon scenes eminently pensive, to substitute radiance for serenity of light, and to force the freedom and breadth of line which he learned to love on English downs and Highland moors, out of a country dotted by campaniles and square convents, bristled with cypresses, partitioned by walls, and gone up and down by steps.

In one of the cities of Italy he had no such difficulties to encounter. At Venice he found freedom of space, brilliancy of light, variety of color, massy simplicity of general form; and to Venice we owe many of the motives in which his highest powers of color have been displayed after that change in his system of which we must now take note.

Sec. 44. Changes introduced by him in the received system of art.

Among the earlier paintings of Turner, the culminating period, marked by the Yorkshire series in his drawings, is distinguished by great solemnity and simplicity of subject, prevalent gloom in light and shade, and brown in the hue, the drawing manly but careful, the minutiae sometimes exquisitely delicate. All the finest works of this period are, I believe, without exception, views, or quiet single thoughts. The Calder Bridge, belonging to E. Bicknell, Esq., is a most pure and beautiful example. The Ivy Bridge I imagine to be later, but its rock foreground is altogether unrivalled and remarkable for its delicacy of detail; a butterfly is seen settled on one of the large brown stones in the midst of the torrent. Two paintings of Bonneville, in Savoy, one in the possession of Abel Allnutt, Esq., the other, and, I think, the finest, in a collection at Birmingham, show more variety of color than is usual with him at the period, and are in every respect magnificent examples. Pictures of this class are of peculiar value, for the larger compositions of the same period are all poor in color, and most of them much damaged, but the smaller works have been far finer originally, and their color seems secure. There is nothing in the range of landscape art equal to them in their way, but the full character and capacity of the painter is not in them. Grand as they are in their sobriety, they still leave much to be desired; there is great heaviness in their shadows, the material is never thoroughly vanquished, (though this partly for a very noble reason, that the painter is always thinking of and referring to nature, and indulges in no artistical conventionalities,) and sometimes the handling appears feeble. In warmth, lightness, and transparency they have no chance against Gainsborough; in clear skies and air tone they are alike unfortunate when they provoke comparison with Claude; and in force and solemnity they can in no wise stand with the landscape of the Venetians.

The painter evidently felt that he had farther powers, and pressed forward into the field where alone they could be brought into play. It was impossible for him, with all his keen and long-disciplined perceptions, not to feel that the real color of nature had never been attempted by any school; and that though conventional representations had been given by the Venetians of sunlight and twilight, by invariably rendering the whites golden and the blues green, yet of the actual, joyous, pure, roseate hues of the external world no record had ever been given. He saw also that the finish and specific grandeur of nature had been given, but her fulness, space, and mystery never; and he saw that the great landscape painters had always sunk the lower middle tints of nature in extreme shade, bringing the entire melody of color as many degrees down as their possible light was inferior to nature's; and that in so doing a gloomy principle had influenced them even in their choice of subject.

For the conventional color he substituted a pure straightforward rendering of fact, as far as was in his power; and that not of such fact as had been before even suggested, but of all that is _most_ brilliant, beautiful, and inimitable; he went to the cataract for its iris, to the conflagration for its flames, asked of the sea its intensest azure, of the sky its clearest gold. For the limited space and defined forms of elder landscape, he substituted the quantity and the mystery of the vastest scenes of earth; and for the subdued chiaroscuro he substituted first a balanced diminution of oppositions throughout the scale, and afterwards, in one or two instances, attempted the reverse of the old principle, taking the lowest portion of the scale truly, and merging the upper part in high light.

Sec. 45. Difficulties of his later manner. Resultant deficiencies.

Innovations so daring and so various could not be introduced without corresponding peril: the difficulties that lay in his way were more than any human intellect could altogether surmount. In his time there has been no one system of color generally approved; every artist has his own method and his own vehicle; how to do what Gainsborough did, we know not; much less what Titian; to invent a new system of color can hardly be expected of those who cannot recover the old. To obtain perfectly satisfactory results in color under the new conditions introduced by Turner, would at least have required the exertion of all his energies in that sole direction. But color has always been only his second object. The effects of space and form, in which he delights, often require the employment of means and method totally at variance with those necessary for the obtaining of pure color. It is physically impossible, for instance, rightly to draw certain forms of the upper clouds with the brush; nothing will do it but the pallet knife with loaded white after the blue ground is prepared. Now it is impossible that a cloud so drawn, however glazed afterwards, should have the virtue of a thin warm tint of Titian's, showing the canvas throughout. So it happens continually. Add to these difficulties, those of the peculiar subjects attempted, and to these again, all that belong to the altered system of chiaroscuro, and it is evident that we must not be surprised at finding many deficiencies or faults in such works, especially in the earlier of them, nor even suffer ourselves to be withdrawn by the pursuit of what seems censurable from our devotion to what is mighty.

Notwithstanding, in some chosen examples of pictures of this kind, I will name three: Juliet and her Nurse; the Old Temeraire, and the Slave Ship: I do not admit that there are at the time of their first appearing on the walls of the Royal Academy, any demonstrably avoidable faults. I do not deny that there may be, nay, that it is likely there are; but there is no living artist in Europe whose judgment might safely be taken on the subject, or who could without arrogance affirm of any part of such a picture, that it was _wrong_; I am perfectly willing to allow, that the lemon yellow is not properly representative of the yellow of the sky, that the loading of the color is in many places disagreeable, that many of the details are drawn with a kind of imperfection different from what they would have in nature, and that many of the parts fail of imitation, especially to an uneducated eye. But no living authority is of weight enough to prove that the virtues of the picture could have been obtained at a less sacrifice, or that they are not worth the sacrifice; and though it is perfectly possible that such may be the case, and that what Turner has done may hereafter in some respects be done better, I believe myself that these works are at the time of their first appearing as perfect as those of Phidias or Leonardo; that is to say, incapable in their way, of any improvement conceivable by human mind.

Also, it is only by comparison with such that we are authorized to affirm definite faults in any of his others, for we should have been bound to speak, at least for the present, with the same modesty respecting even his worst pictures of this class, had not his more noble efforts given us canons of criticism.

But, as was beforehand to be expected from the difficulties he grappled with, Turner is exceedingly unequal; he appears always as a champion in the thick of fight, sometimes with his foot on his enemies' necks, sometimes staggered or struck to his knee; once or twice altogether down. He has failed most frequently, as before noticed, in elaborate compositions, from redundant quantity; sometimes, like most other men, from over-care, as very signally in a large and most labored drawing of Bamborough; sometimes, unaccountably, his eye for color seeming to fail him for a time, as in a large painting of Rome from the Forum, and in the Cicero's Villa, Building of Carthage, and the picture of this year in the British Institution; and sometimes I am sorry to say, criminally, from taking licenses which he must know to be illegitimate, or indulging in conventionalities which he does not require.

Sec. 46. Reflection of his very recent works.

On such instances I shall not insist, for the finding fault with Turner is not, I think, either decorous in myself or like to be beneficial to the reader.[15] The greater number of failures took place in the transition period, when the artist was feeling for the new qualities, and endeavoring to reconcile them with more careful elaboration of form than was properly consistent with them. Gradually his hand became more free, his perception and grasp of the new truths more certain, and his choice of subject more adapted to the exhibition of them. But his powers did not attain their highest results till towards the year 1840, about which period they did so suddenly, and with a vigor and concentration which rendered his pictures at that time almost incomparable with those which had preceded them. The drawings of Nemi, and Oberwesel, in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq., were among the first evidences of this sudden advance; only the foliage in both of these is inferior; and it is remarkable that in this phase of his art, Turner has drawn little foliage, and that little badly--the great characteristic of it being its power, beauty, and majesty of color, and its abandonment of all littleness and division of thought to a single impression. In the year 1842, he made some drawings from recent sketches in Switzerland; these, with some produced in the following years, all of Swiss subject, I consider to be, on the whole, the most characteristic and perfect works he has ever produced. The Academy pictures were far inferior to them; but among these examples of the same power were not wanting, more especially in the smaller pictures of Venice. The Sun of Venice, going to sea; the San Benedetto, looking towards Fusina; and a view of Murano, with the Cemetery, were all faultless: another of Venice, seen from near Fusina, with sunlight and moonlight mixed (1844) was, I think, when I first saw it, (and it still remains little injured,) the most perfectly _beautiful_ piece of color of all that I have seen produced by human hands, by any means, or at any period. Of the exhibition of 1845, I have only seen a small Venice, (still I believe in the artist's possession,) and the two whaling subjects. The Venice is a second-rate work, and the two others altogether unworthy of him.

In conclusion of our present sketch of the course of landscape art, it may be generally stated that Turner is the only painter, so far as I know, who has ever drawn the sky, (not the clear sky, which we before saw belonged exclusively to the religious schools, but the various forms and phenomena of the cloudy heavens,) all previous artists having only represented it typically or partially; but he absolutely and universally: he is the only painter who has ever drawn a mountain, or a stone; no other man ever having learned their organization, or possessed himself of their spirit, except in part and obscurely, (the one or two stones noted of Tintoret's, (Vol. II., Part III. Ch. 3,) are perhaps hardly enough on which to found an exception in his favor.) He is the only painter who ever drew the stem of a tree, Titian having come the nearest before him, and excelling him in the muscular development of the larger trunks, (though sometimes losing the woody strength in a serpent-like flaccidity,) but missing the grace and character of the ramifications. He is the only painter who has ever represented the surface of calm, or the force of agitated water; who has represented the effects of space on distant objects, or who has rendered the abstract beauty of natural color. These assertions I make deliberately, after careful weighing and consideration, in no spirit of dispute, or momentary zeal; but from strong and convinced feeling, and with the consciousness of being able to prove them.

Sec. 47. Difficulty of demonstration in such subjects.

This proof is only partially and incidentally attempted in the present portion of this work, which was originally written, as before explained, for a temporary purpose, and which, therefore, I should have gladly cancelled, but that, relating as it does only to simple matters of fact and not to those of feeling, it may still, perhaps, be of service to some readers who would be unwilling to enter into the more speculative fields with which the succeeding sections are concerned. I leave, therefore, nearly as it was originally written, the following examination of the relative truthfulness of elder and of recent art; always requesting the reader to remember, as some excuse for the inadequate execution, even of what I have here attempted, how difficult it is to express or explain, by language only, those delicate qualities of the object of sense, on the seizing of which all refined truth of representation depends. Try, for instance, to explain in language the exact qualities of the lines on which depend the whole truth and beauty of expression about the half-opened lips of Raffaelle's St. Catherine. There is, indeed, nothing in landscape so ineffable as this; but there is no part nor portion of God's works in which the delicacy appreciable by a cultivated eye, and necessary to be rendered in art, is not beyond all expression and explanation; I cannot tell it you, if you do not see it. And thus I have been entirely unable, in the following pages, to demonstrate clearly anything of really deep and perfect truth; nothing but what is coarse and commonplace, in matters to be judged of by the senses, is within the reach of argument. How much or how little I have done must be judged of by the reader: how much it is impossible to do I have more fully shown in the concluding section.

I shall first take into consideration those general truths, common to all the objects of nature, which are productive of what is usually called "effect," that is to say, truths of tone, general color, space, and light. I shall then investigate the truths of specific form and color, in the four great component parts of landscape--sky, earth, water, and vegetation.

FOOTNOTES

[6] Not the large Paradise, but the Fall of Adam, a small picture
chiefly in brown and gray, near Titian's Assumption. Its companion,
the Death of Abel, is remarkable as containing a group of trees
which Turner, I believe accidentally, has repeated nearly mass for
mass in the "Marly." Both are among the most noble works of this or
any other master, whether for preciousness of color or energy of
thought.

[7] The triple leaf of this plant, and white flower, stained purple,
probably gave it strange typical interest among the Christian
painters. Angelico, in using its leaves mixed with daisies in the
foreground of his Crucifixion had, I imagine, a view also to its
chemical property.

[8] This is no rash method of judgment, sweeping and hasty as it may
appear. From the weaknesses of an artist, or failures, however
numerous, we have no right to conjecture his total inability; a time
may come when he may rise into sudden strength, or an instance occur
when his efforts shall be successful. But there are some pictures
which rank not under the head of failures, but of perpetrations or
commissions; some things which a man cannot do nor say without
sealing forever his character and capacity. The angel holding the
cross with his finger in his eye, the roaring red-faced children
about the crown of thorns, the blasphemous (I speak deliberately and
determinedly) head of Christ upon the handkerchief, and the mode in
which the martyrdom of the saint is exhibited (I do not choose to
use the expressions which alone could characterize it) are perfect,
sufficient, incontrovertible proofs that whatever appears good in
any of the doings of such a painter must be deceptive, and that we
may be assured that our taste is corrupted and false whenever we
feel disposed to admire him. I am prepared to support this position,
however uncharitable it may seem; a man may be tempted into a gross
sin by passion, and forgiven; and yet there are some kinds of sins
into which only men of a certain kind can be tempted, and which
cannot be forgiven. It should be added, however, that the artistical
qualities of these pictures are in every way worthy of the
conceptions they realize; I do not recollect any instances of color
or execution so coarse and feelingless.

[9] It appears not to be sufficiently understood by those artists
who complain acrimoniously of their positions on the Academy walls,
that the Academicians have in their own rooms a right to the line
and the best places near it; in their taking this position there is
no abuse nor injustice; but the Academicians should remember that
with their rights they have their duties, and their duty is to
determine among the works of artists not belonging to their body
those which are most likely to advance public knowledge and
judgment, and to give these the best places next their own; neither
would it detract from their dignity if they occasionally ceded a
square even of their own territory, as they did gracefully and
rightly, and, I am sorry to add, disinterestedly, to the picture of
Paul de la Roche in 1844. Now the Academicians know perfectly well
that the mass of portrait which encumbers their walls at half height
is worse than useless, seriously harmful to the public taste, and it
was highly criminal (I use the word advisedly) that the valuable and
interesting work of Fielding, of which I have above spoken, should
have been placed where it was, above three rows of eye-glasses and
waistcoats. A very beautiful work of Harding's was treated either in
the same or the following exhibition with still greater injustice.
Fielding's was merely put out of sight; Harding's where its faults
were conspicuous and its virtues lost. It was an Alpine scene, of
which the foreground, rocks, and torrents were painted with
unrivalled fidelity and precision; the foliage was dexterous, the
aerial gradations of the mountains tender and multitudinous, their
forms carefully studied and very grand. The blemish of the picture
was a buff-colored tower with a red roof; singularly meagre in
detail, and conventionally relieved from a mass of gloom. The
picture was placed where nothing but this tower could be seen.

[10] I have not given any examples in this place, because it is
difficult to explain such circumstances of effect without diagrams:
I purpose entering into fuller discussion of the subject with the
aid of illustration.

[11] The inscription is to the following effect,--a pleasant thing
to see upon the walls, were it but more innocently placed:--

CAMPO. DI. S. MAURIZIO
______

D I O
CONSERVI A NOI.
LUNGAMENTE
LO ZELANTIS. E. REVERENDIS
D. LUIGI. PICCINI.
NOSTRO
N O V E L L O P I E V A N O.
______

G L I E S U L T A N T.
PARROCCHIANI

[12] The quantity of gold with which the decorations of Venice were
once covered could not now be traced or credited without reference
to the authority of Gentile Bellini. The greater part of the marble
mouldings have been touched with it in lines and points, the
minarets of St. Mark's, and all the florid carving of the arches
entirely sheeted. The Casa d'Oro retained it on its lions until the
recent commencement of its Restoration.

[13] Indeed there should be no such difference at all. Every
architect ought to be an artist; every very great artist is
necessarily an architect.

[14] This passage seems at variance with what has been said of the
necessity of painting present times and objects. It is not so. A
great painter makes out of that which he finds before him something
which is independent of _all_ time. He can only do this out of the
materials ready to his hand, but that which he builds has the
dignity of dateless age. A little painter is annihilated by an
anachronism, and is conventionally antique, and involuntarily
modern.

[15] One point, however, it is incumbent upon me to notice, being no
question of art but of material. The reader will have observed that
I strictly limited the perfection of Turner's works to the time of
their first appearing on the walls of the Royal Academy. It bitterly
grieves me to have to do this, but the fact is indeed so. No
_picture_ of Turner's is seen in perfection a month after it is
painted. The Walhalla cracked before it had been eight days in the
Academy rooms; the vermilions frequently lose lustre long before the
exhibition is over; and when all the colors begin to get hard a year
or two after the picture is painted, a painful deadness and opacity
comes over them, the whites especially becoming lifeless, and many
of the warmer passages settling into a hard valueless brown, even if
the paint remains perfectly firm, which is far from being always the
case. I believe that in some measure these results are unavoidable,
the colors being so peculiarly blended and mingled in Turner's
present manner as almost to necessitate their irregular drying; but
that they are not necessary to the extent in which they sometimes
take place, is proved by the comparative safety of some even of the
more brilliant works. Thus the Old Temeraire is nearly safe in
color, and quite firm; while the Juliet and her Nurse is now the
ghost of what it was; the Slaver shows no cracks, though it is
chilled in some of the darker passages, while the Walhalla and
several of the recent Venices cracked in the Royal Academy. It is
true that the damage makes no further progress after the first year
or two, and that even in its altered state the picture is always
valuable and records its intention; but it is bitterly to be
regretted that so great a painter should not leave a single work by
which in succeeding ages he might be estimated. The fact of his
using means so imperfect, together with that of his utter neglect of
the pictures in his own gallery, are a phenomenon in human mind
which appears to me utterly inexplicable; and both are without
excuse. If the effects he desires cannot be to their full extent
produced except by these treacherous means, one picture only should
be painted each year as an exhibition of immediate power, and the
rest should be carried out, whatever the expense of labor and time
in safe materials, even at the risk of some deterioration of
immediate effect. That which is greatest in him is entirely
independent of means; much of what he now accomplishes
illegitimately might without doubt be attained in securer
modes--what cannot should without hesitation be abandoned.
Fortunately the drawings appear subject to no such deterioration.
Many of them are now almost destroyed, but this has been I think
always through ill treatment, or has been the case only with very
early works. I have myself known no instance of a drawing properly
protected, and not rashly exposed to light suffering the slightest
change. The great foes of Turner, as of all other great colorists
especially, are the picture cleaner and the mounter.