Chapter II: Part 2

In 1826 he commenced what was to have been his _magnum opus_ in line engraving--his “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” In this ill-fated work, which was from first to last commercially a failure, he proposed to depict every feature of English and Welsh scenery--cathedral cities, country towns, ancient castles, ruined abbeys, rivers, mountains, moors, lakes and sea-coast; every hour of day--dawn, midday, sunset, twilight, moonlight; every kind of weather and atmosphere. The hundred or more drawings which he made for the work are mostly elaborately finished and of high character. Some are perhaps over-elaborated; in some the figures are carelessly and at times disagreeably drawn; but for imaginative, poetical treatment, masterly composition, and exquisite colour, the best are unsurpassed. I have ventured to say elsewhere, that in my opinion there are at least a dozen drawings in the “England and Wales” series any one of which would alone have been sufficient to have placed its author in the highest rank of landscape art. Two of the series are represented here--Mr. Schwann’s beautiful _Launceston_ (Plate XV.) is the earlier (1827); the striking and very attractive _Cowes_ (Plate XVIII.), belonging to Mr. Yates, is a few years later. Turner was paid at the rate of sixty to seventy guineas apiece--to-day they are worth from one thousand to two thousand five hundred guineas each.

A new phase in his water-colour art of 1830-1836 calls for notice, viz., his numerous small drawings for _vignette_ illustrations, the first and the most important of which were for the far-famed plates of Rogers’s “Poems” and “Italy.” The drawings for these are markedly different from any of his previous work, and many of them strike what I cannot but regard as an unpleasant note. Marvels of execution, delicate, highly imaginative, and poetical in feeling as they are, they are often strangely forced and extravagant in _colour_. And this applies to nearly all his drawings for _vignettes_. Probably his reason for thus falsifying his colour was connected with the form of engraving, as at the same time he was producing some of his finest and sanest work for the “England and Wales,” “Turner’s Annual Tours” (now better known as the “Rivers of France”) and other engravings of ordinary (not vignette) shape. Whatever may have been his motive, it appears to me that owing to this unnatural colouring, the exquisitely engraved vignettes themselves are in many cases finer than the drawings for them.

Many, however, of the small drawings of this time are superb, including several of those on grey paper. In the “Rivers of France” series, _Jumièges_, _Caudebec_, _Saint Denis_, _Rouen from St. Catherine’s Hill_, and _The Light Towers of the Hêve_ (all in the National Gallery), are masterpieces, as are also many of the illustrations to “Scott’s Poetical and Prose Works.” In Turner’s later years he frequently did not sell his drawings for engravings, but lent them to the publishers, charging usually five to seven guineas apiece. He kept many in his possession up to his death, as he did nearly the whole of his sketches. One day he brought the sixty drawings for the “Rivers of France” to Ruskin, rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them to him for twenty-five guineas apiece. To Ruskin’s grief he could not induce his father to spend the money. In later years he tells us he had to pay £1,000 for the seventeen which he gave to Oxford!

A long succession of books were illustrated by Turner between 1830 and 1836, containing in all nearly three hundred and fifty plates, mostly of small size. When it is remembered that he also closely supervised the smallest details in the engraving of each one, and that at the same time he was engaged on a number of oil pictures of the highest importance many of which were finished and exhibited, and others left in various stages of completion (including most of those recently added to the Tate Gallery), it may be doubted if such a volume of work was ever before produced in six years by any painter. With 1838, however, his work for the engravers practically came to an end. He was now a rich man and able to refuse tempting offers for the pictures which he had determined to leave to the nation; as for example his _Old Téméraire_, which a wealthy Midland manufacturer is said to have offered to cover with sovereigns.

From 1838 to 1845, when his health began to fail, he spent an increasing time each year on the Continent, and it was during this period that his water-colour art passed into what many regard as its highest, as it was its latest phase. I refer especially to the magnificent _Sketches_ of this time, the large majority of which are in the National Gallery. He revisited Venice, which had cast her enchantment on him in earlier years, and he returned again and again to the Lake of Lucerne, which, after Yorkshire, was probably, up to the last, of all places in the world the dearest to his heart. It would be difficult to say how many times he drew the town, the lake, the mountains, and especially the Righi. There are the _Red Righi_, the _Blue Righi_, the _Dark Righi_, the _Pale Righi_, and a hundred other versions--each different, each a ‘vision of delight.’ He made drawings also in many neighbouring parts of Switzerland, Piedmont, and Savoy.

The sketches and drawings of this period have all the old delicacy, combined with a greater breadth of treatment, and an amazing wealth and range of colour. Sixty years’ experience had given Turner’s hand--which up to the very last retained its extraordinary delicacy and certainty--a marvellous cunning. In many cases the drawings were swiftly painted, in others carefully stippled in details; usually with a dry brush worked over body-colour. Sir Hickman Bacon’s beautiful _Swiss Lake_ (Plate XXII.), _Lausanne_ (Plate XXV.), _The Seelisberg, Moonlight_ (Plate XXVIII.), Mr. Ralph Brocklebank’s highly finished _Schaffhausen_ (Plate XXIX.), and _Tell’s Chapel, Fluelen_ (Plate XXX.)--which Ruskin believed to be Turner’s last sketch on the Continent--along with most of the reproductions from the National Gallery, are examples of this time.

This last phase of Turner’s art was, however, at the time neither understood nor appreciated, probably owing largely to the new development which had recently taken place in his oil pictures. In these he had set himself, in his old age, the last and hardest tasks of his life--the painting of pure light, of swift movement, of the tumultuous, elemental forces of Nature. Some of the _Venice_ subjects, the marvellous _Snow Storm at Sea_, and the _Rain, Steam and Speed_, were entirely misunderstood and ridiculed. “Blackwood’s Magazine” led the attack, and “Punch” and Thackeray added their satire. No doubt several of his late oil pictures were far-fetched in subject, fantastic in treatment, and eccentric in colour. Probably, also, no one knew better than he that he had not reached the goal of his ambition; but he also knew that his critics understood his aims as little as they did the difficulties which he had to encounter in striving to reach them, and the old man felt the attacks keenly. Ruskin tells us that he came one evening to his father’s house in Denmark Hill, after an especially bitter onslaught on the _Snow Storm at Sea--Vessel in Distress off Harwich_, of 1842, which the critics had described as “soapsuds and whitewash.” Ruskin heard him, sitting in his chair by the fire, muttering to himself at intervals “Soapsuds and whitewash,” again and again and again. “At last,” he says, “I went to him asking, ‘Why he minded what they said?’ Then he burst out ‘Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like. I wish they’d been in it.’” As a matter of fact, Turner had actually been on board the boat at the time lashed to the mast, at the risk of his life.

Nor has the work of his later years always been understood in our days. Not many years ago a distinguished German oculist read a paper at the Royal Institution which was afterwards published in which he endeavoured to prove that what he considered eccentricities of colour in Turner’s later oil pictures were due--not to his attempts to paint the unpaintable--but to a senile affection of his eyes, which caused an unnatural distortion of his vision to yellow in everything. But Professor Liebreich can hardly have been aware that although the oil pictures upon which he rested his theory, being mainly attempts to depict objects or scenery seen in full sunlight, necessarily tended towards yellow as their prevailing colour, yet at the very same time, and up to his death, Turner was daily producing the sanest, most delicate, most refined water-colour drawings in the palest as well as the deepest tones of every colour on his palette! All the Swiss, Venetian and other sketches of 1838 to 1845, which are the crowning glory of the Water-Colour Rooms in Trafalgar Square, were executed during the period when, according to Professor Liebreich, Turner’s sight was permanently and hopelessly affected! No doubt he recognised that water-colour was unsuited as a medium for his new aim at painting pure light, and confined himself accordingly, for such subjects, to oil painting.

The attacks of the critics, however, had had their effect on the public, and Turner in his later years began to find difficulty in selling even his drawings. Ruskin, in his “Notes on his Drawings Exhibited at the Fine Arts Society, 1878,” tells with inimitable charm and pathos how the old painter, returning in the winter of 1842 from a tour in Switzerland, brought back with him a series of important sketches, fourteen of which he placed, as was his custom, in the hands of Griffiths, his agent, with a view to the latter’s obtaining commissions for _finished_ drawings of each. Although the price asked for a large finished drawing was only eighty guineas, and notwithstanding the great beauty of the sketches, nine commissions only could be obtained. Ruskin, his father, Munro of Novar, and Bicknell of Herne Hill, all chose one or more, but other former patrons saw in them what they regarded as a new style, and declined them. Thirty years after, Ruskin--with pride for Turner’s sake, he tells us--sold his _Lucerne Town_ for a thousand guineas; it has since changed hands at two thousand. The _Lake of Constance_, which at the time no one would buy, was given to Griffiths in lieu of his commission; it fetched two thousand three hundred guineas at Christie’s in 1907! After 1845 Turner’s health gradually failed; he continued to work at his oil paintings up to his death in 1851, but, so far as is known, he executed comparatively few water-colour sketches or drawings during his last years.

Little has hitherto been said as to Turner’s _technique_ in water-colour although the subject is one of great interest, but, unfortunately, my point of view is solely that of a student, and _technique_ can only be adequately dealt with by an artist. Much valuable information, however, on the question will be found in Redgrave’s “Century of Painters,” Vol. I., and in Roget’s “History of the Old Water-Colour Society.” From the first he was a great innovator, choosing his materials and often inventing his methods without regard to custom, precedent, or anything but the attainment of the precise effect which he desired at the time. Signs of scraping, spongeing, the use of blotting-paper, etc., are constantly to be seen in his drawings. In some, including one in my own possession, the marks of his thumb are distinctly visible in places. But the result always justified the means employed! With his oil pictures, especially those painted after 1830, his experiments, as we know, were often disastrous in their ultimate effects, but it is extremely rare to find any of his water-colours which have suffered in the smallest degree when they have been properly kept. But alas, as has already been pointed out, only too many, and amongst those some of the finest, have been, and still are being, irretrievably damaged and changed by continual exposure to light, both in Public Galleries and on the walls of their owners.

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In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured to avoid adding to the already sufficient volume of ‘æsthetic criticism’ of Turner’s art, and I shall confine myself now to the briefest summary of what seem to me the distinctive features of his work in water-colour.

What first strikes one in his drawings, apart from their technical skill, is their _individuality_; they always stand out amongst the work of other artists, however great. The chief cause of this is hard to define, but I should say that it is that they almost invariably possess a certain quality of imaginativeness, of what is termed ‘poetry.’ No matter how simple was his subject, he instinctively saw it from its most beautiful, its most romantic side. If it had little or no beauty or romance of its own, he would still throw an indefinable charm round it by some gleam of light, some veiling mist, some far-away distance, some alluring sense of mystery, of ‘infinity.’ And Turner was a true poet, although he had little enough of the look or the manners of one. Throughout his life he was a reader and a voluminous writer of poetry, but his want of education debarred him from ever expressing himself coherently in verse. The same cause, together with his lack of a sense of humour, interfered also with the perfect expression of his art, especially in his classical and religious pictures, and prevented him from seeing what was incongruous or at times unpleasing in them. But only a poet deep-down could have won as he did from Nature her most intimate secrets; could so have caught and so inimitably have portrayed her every mood and charm.

And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur of Nature--a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as Shelley’s--which is perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring attractiveness of Turner’s work. Without it, he would never have toiled as he did all his life, from dawn to dark, year in and year out, observing and recording in those nineteen thousand studies every kind of natural scenery, every changing contour of mist and cloud, every differing form and structure of tree, every movement or reflection in water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.

Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic, yet it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or perfect design do not by themselves attain. By the modern school of landscapists this would probably be regarded as a defect or even a heresy. Pictorial art, they say, should not be ‘literary,’ should not be intellectual. But to me it seems that the work of the highest artists--of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Rembrandt, for example--almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well as to the senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or unintentionally, speaks to mind. As has been well said _apropos_ of Ruskin’s writings on Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the painter himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry more readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony between the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite range of significance and supports an infinite variety of interpretations.”

After Turner had attained manhood--say from 1807 onwards--his _creative_ power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more evident in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter, more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative, topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his drawings, notably in his _Liber Studiorum_ (1807-1819). Leaving aside actual landscapes such as _Solway Moss_, _Ben Arthur_, etc., his creative, imaginative power is seen in such subjects as _Æsacus and Hesperie_, _Peat Bog_, _Procris and Cephalus_, _The Lost Sailor_ and other plates of the _Liber_. It also appears from time to time in later drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the astonishing theory that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end of his life he was not a “creative” artist, merely an _illustrator_, and this idea has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The painter of _The Frosty Morning_, and _Crossing the Brook_ (National Gallery); of _The Guardship at the Nore_ (Lady Wantage); of _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ and _Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus_ (National Gallery); of _The Shipwreck_ (National Gallery), and a dozen other great Sea Pictures, not a “creative” artist? The draughtsman of _Chryses_ (Mrs. T. Ashton), _The Land’s End_ (“Southern Coast”), _The Longships Lighthouse_ (“England and Wales”), _The Alps at Daybreak_ and _The Vision of Columbus_ (“Rogers’s Poems”), _The Plains of Troy_ (“Byron’s Poems”), _The Mustering of the Warrior Angels_ (“Milton’s Poems”)? If these, and scores of others which might be added, are not examples of “creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found? Is Martin’s _Plains of Heaven_ to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such thing as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?

Of Turner’s technical skill in water-colour, there is no need to speak; his command of his material was absolute and has never been equalled. And his sense of design, of balance, of rhythm--of what is termed “style”--was always present. He had caught it at the outset of his career from his close study of Richard Wilson, who had inherited it as a tradition from Caspar Poussin, Claude, and the painters of the seventeenth century. Rarely is there anything tentative about his drawings. They are decisive--the design was almost invariably seen by him as a whole, from the beginning. Often his work did not please him, and if it was finished it was discarded; if unfinished, it was carried no further--as may be seen in several of the drawings recently (1908) exhibited at the National Gallery, and a good many of the oil pictures at the Tate Gallery. He was also emphatically a great colourist--one of the greatest; during the latter half of his life he thought in colour, and composed in colour, and it was with him an integral part of every design. That is why his drawings can never be adequately reproduced by ordinary photography. During middle life, as has been pointed out, his colour at times became forced and florid, but it was never more pure, never more beautiful, never more noble, than in his latest sketches.

At times, no doubt, Turner’s water-colours, especially those executed between 1820 and 1836, have a tendency to undue complexity of design, and to overcrowding both of subject and lights. Possibly to some extent this was due to the prevailing standard of English art and English taste at that time. Then, perhaps even more than now, high finish was too often unduly insisted on. But you will never find too high finish or overcrowding in the drawings which he made _for himself_! His figures, also, were frequently unsatisfactory. It was not that he could not draw them--at first they were dainty and careful, as may be seen in the two early drawings, Plates I. and III. But in his later years he seemed to regard figures simply as points of light, colour or composition--they were always effective as such--and he often treated them carelessly--sometimes even coarsely--to the detriment of some of his otherwise most beautiful works.

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Turner is often claimed by the militant school of landscapists of to-day as one of the first and greatest ‘impressionists.’ In a certain sense no doubt this is true, but his ‘impressionism,’ it seems to me, was wholly different in nature from theirs.

During his life, as we have seen, he made thousands of sketches, some slight, some elaborate, of places, scenery, and natural effects--shorthand memoranda,’ so to speak--many of which may certainly be called ‘impressionist.’ _But all these were founded on, or were intended to add to, his accurate, minute and exhaustive study of natural forms, and a draughtsmanship which has probably never been equalled by any other landscape painter._

Then, as is notorious, he frequently altered certain features of landscapes or buildings to suit the requirements of his pictures--their symmetry, their accent, their colour-scheme--or in order to convey some suggestion as to their meaning. In a letter still preserved, he declares himself opposed to literalism in landscape--“mere map-making” he terms it. And when for any reason he thus altered the actual features of a scene, he still almost always contrived to preserve the _impression_ of it as a whole--usually under its best aspect, at its choicest moment. In this sense also he was an ‘impressionist.’

Again, when towards the close of his life he began to attempt the representation (mainly in oil colour) of pure sunlight--as in his latest _Venice_ pictures; or of form in swiftest movement--as in _Rain, Speed and Steam_; or of the mighty contending forces of Nature--as in his _Snow Storm off Harwich_, he painted _such subjects_ in the only method by which they could be intelligibly rendered. In the same way Whistler, in his Nocturnes, demonstrated for the first time in Western art, the beauty of prosaic and even ugly objects, seen in dim light. Both perforce adopted the ‘impressionist’ method, because it was the only effective, indeed the only possible one.

But to me it appears that there is all the difference in the world between _these_ phases of ‘impressionist’ art and the principles of the modern landscape school, whose works a brilliant set of writers in the press of to-day are continually calling upon us to admire. The advanced ‘impressionists’ both in France and in England seem to go out of their way to represent _the ordinary aspects of nature_ with a manifest determination to avoid any but the vaguest rendering of form, no matter how clearly defined in such circumstances those forms may seem to ordinary Philistine vision. They also ordinarily abjure as ‘literary’ any kind of appeal to the intellectual faculties, and apparently confine their aim to the production of a more or less startling, but generally cleverly managed patterning of light, shade, and colour, obtained usually by means of masses of coarse, solid, and often ragged pigment, carefully arranged so that the effect intended may be found, like a fire-plug, at a certain exact, calculated spot. Surely Turner’s ‘impressionism’ was far removed from this? Surely it is hard that he should be charged with being the precursor of the landscape school to which I have alluded, whatever may be its merits?

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Possibly it is too soon as yet to predict what will be Turner’s ultimate place in art. Like every really great artist (I use the word in its widest sense) he will be judged, not by his defects or his mistakes--even if they be many and palpable--but by the _heights_ to which he attained, and the mark which he has left for others to follow. For myself, I believe that if his water-colours are allowed to remain unfaded for future generations, they, along with his best oil pictures, will be counted worthy to entitle him to a place amongst the greatest painters of all centuries and all schools.

W. G. RAWLINSON.

[In common with the Editor of _The Studio_, I desire to acknowledge
my deep obligations to the various owners of valuable drawings by
Turner, who have kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. There
were, however, others which I should like to have seen represented,
but as these were not available, the Editor desired to replace them
with examples from my own collection. This must explain what will
otherwise seem the undue proportion of the latter.--W. G. R.]

THE TURNER DRAWINGS IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. BY A. J. FINBERG.

The usual way of painting a landscape nowadays is for the artist to take his easel and canvas out into the fields, and to work as far as possible with the scene he is representing before his eyes. The scene, with the artist’s chosen effect, is of course constantly changing, so the artist can work only for a short time each day. The effect itself will probably last for a period varying from a couple of minutes to about half an hour, according to circumstances; but the painter may be usefully employed in getting his work into condition for about an hour before the effect is due, and he may work on for perhaps another hour while the effect is still fresh in his memory. As one sitting of this kind will not enable the artist to carry his work far, it is necessary that he should return day after day to the scene; and if he is determined to paint it entirely on the spot, he must be prepared to devote some months at least to the work.

The habit of painting and finishing pictures entirely out of doors was, I believe, introduced by the Pre-Raphaelites during the fifties, but before this, Constable and other artists had worked largely from rather elaborate colour studies made out of doors. Turner did not work at all in this way. All his pictures were painted in the studio, and generally from very slight pencil sketches. So far as I know he never made even a slight colour study from nature for any of his pictures.

As the methods of work employed by the great artists are of very great interest, I think it will be worth while to take one of his wellknown works and to trace its evolution somewhat in detail. The beautiful drawing of _Norham Castle_, reproduced here (Plate XIV.), will do very well for this purpose.

This drawing was made to be engraved in a series known as the “Rivers of England.” Charles Turner’s really fine mezzotint of it was published in 1824, so the drawing must have been made at least a year or two before this date. The pencil sketch on which it was based was made some quarter of a century earlier--to be quite accurate, in the summer or autumn of 1797.

At that time Turner was a young man of twenty-two, but he had already made his mark as one of the best topographical and antiquarian draughtsmen of the day. He had been a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy for eight years, and publishers and amateurs were beginning to compete for his productions. It was his habit every summer to map out for himself a lengthy sketching tour, his aim being to accumulate in his portfolio a pencil drawing made by himself of every building or natural feature that he might be called upon to illustrate. These subjects were dictated by the taste of the time, which generally ran towards the ruined abbeys and castles of the middle ages. As Turner’s subject-matter was prescribed for him in this way, he did not, like the modern artist, have to waste any time looking for promising subjects. He had merely to study the numerous guide-books that were even then in existence, to make out a list of the more important castles, abbeys, and Gothic buildings, and to hurry from one to the other as fast as the coaches or his own sturdy legs could carry him. The methodical and stolidly business-like manner in which he set about and carried through this part of his work is calculated to shock the gushing and casual temperament of the artist of to-day.

Turner’s programme in 1797 was an extensive one, and, what is much more remarkable, he carried it out. He seems to have taken the coach into Derbyshire, as he had already appropriated everything of interest in the Midland counties. He carried two sketch books with him, each bound handsomely in calf, the smaller with four heavy brass clasps, the larger with seven. The pages in the smaller book measure about 10½ by 8¼ inches, those of the larger about 14½ by 10½. Both these books are now in the National Gallery collection, and will shortly, I hope, be made accessible to students and the general public.

The campaign opens with two drawings of, I think, _Wingfield Manor_, then comes a church with a tall spire on a hill which I cannot identify; then we have one drawing of _Rotherham Bridge_ with the chapel on it, then one of _Conisborough Castle_, single views of the exterior and interior of _Doncaster Church_, three different views of the ruins of _Pontefract Church_, and then two neat drawings of the _Chantry on the Bridge at Wakefield_. It is not till he gets to Kirkstall Abbey that the artist seems to pause in his breathless rush to the North. There are no less than nine drawings of this subject, all made from different points of view; one of these leaves containing the sketch of the Crypt--from which Sir John Soane’s impressive water-colour was made--contains just a fragment of colour, and has been for many years among the drawings exhibited on the ground floor of the National Gallery. In this way we can follow Turner to Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountains and Easby Abbeys, Richmond, Barnard Castle, Egglestone Abbey and Durham, and then along the coast to Warkworth, Alnwick, Dunstanborough, Bamborough and Holy Island. Judging from the drawings, I think it probable that Turner spent the best part of a day at Holy Island, but he got to Berwick in time to draw a general view of the town and bridge, and to make a slight sketch with his limited gamut of colours--black, blue, and yellow only--of the evening effect. The next morning he was up in time to see the sun rise from behind the towers of Norham Castle, and to trace a slight and hurried pencil outline of the main features of the scene. There is only this one sketch of the subject, and it does not contain the slightest suggestion of light and shade or of effect. But there were Kelso and Melrose and Dryburgh and Jedburgh Abbeys close by waiting to be drawn, and Turner evidently felt he must hurry on. Having drawn these ruins in his neat and precise way he turned south and struck into Cumberland. In the larger sketch book a drawing inscribed _Keswick_ follows immediately after one of the views of _Melrose Abbey_. Then comes _Cockermouth Castle_, _the Borrowdale_, _Buttermere_, _St. John’s Vale_, _Grasmere_, _Rydal_, _Langdale_, and _Ulleswater with Helvellyn in the distance_. Then follow in rapid succession _Ambleside Mill_, _Windermere_, _Coniston_, _Furness Abbey_, _Lancaster_, and after a single drawing of _Bolton Abbey_ we find ourselves in York, where the Cathedral and the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey and Bootham Bar must have detained the artist for perhaps two or three days. The tour, however, is not yet at an end, for the Hon. Mr. Lascelles (who became Earl of Harewood in 1820) wants some drawings of Harewood House and of the ruins of Harewood Castle, and Mr. Hewlett wants some subjects to engrave in his forthcoming “Views in the County of Lincoln.” It is, therefore, through Howden, Louth, Boston, Sleaford, and Peterborough that Turner makes his way back to London. He must have been back by September, for among the drawings exhibited at the Royal Academy in the following May was one described as “_A Study in September of the Fern House, Mr. Lock’s Park, Mickleham, Surrey_.” He can, therefore, hardly have been away much more than three months, if so long, but his strenuous vacation had yielded an abundant crop of useful material.

It must have been October before Turner was fairly back in his studio in Hand Court, Maiden Lane, and had settled down to work up this material. By the following April he had four important oil paintings and six water-colours ready for the Exhibition. One of these oil paintings (the _Dunstanborough Castle_) now hangs in the Melbourne National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Duke of Westminster; two others (_Winesdale, Yorkshire--an Autumnal Morning_ and _Morning amongst the Coniston Fells_) hang in the little Octagon room in Trafalgar Square, and the fourth is on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. This is the _Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromack Water_, a really fine painting, though it has darkened considerably. As the first important oil painting in which Turner’s genius was clearly manifested, I should rejoice to see it hanging in Trafalgar Square. The pencil drawing on which it was based contains some work in water-colour, possibly made direct from nature, but the details and general effect have been entirely recast in the finished work. Among the water-colours were the gloomy and superb _Kirkstall Abbey_, now in the Soane Museum, to which I have already referred, and the drawing of _Norham Castle_, with which we are now more particularly concerned.

The drawing exhibited in 1798 is not the one here reproduced. The exhibited drawing is probably the one now in the possession of Mr. Laundy Walters. A photographic reproduction of it was published in Sir Walter Armstrong’s “Turner” (p. 34), and it is worth pausing a moment to compare this with the original pencil sketch and to consider in exactly what relation these two drawings stand to each other.

The usual way of describing the process by which a slight sketch from nature is converted into a finished drawing is to say that the artist copied his sketch as far as it went and then relied upon his memory for the further elaboration that was required. An artist’s memory is assumed to consist of images of the scenes he has witnessed, which he has some mysterious power of storing somewhere in his mind, something like, I suppose, the undeveloped exposures in a Kodak. According to this theory we should have to assume that the particular sight of the sun rising behind Norham Towers which had greeted Turner on the morning he hurried from Berwick to Kelso had been treasured up in the inner recesses of his consciousness, and then some months afterwards, when the appropriate moment came, he had only to select this particular image from among the millions of other images in the same mysterious storehouse, to develop it and copy it on to his canvas. I need hardly add that this desperate theory is quite fanciful and absurd, and in flat contradiction to the teachings of modern psychology.

A description that would not be open to such objections would run something like this: When we are dealing with the processes of artistic creation we have to assume an intelligent human agent, and analogies drawn from purely mechanical sources can only mislead us. We must not assume that an artist’s senses and intellect work like the mechanism of a camera, or in any other abnormal way, unless we have some strong evidence to support us. And we must also remember that a visual image is a useful abstraction in psychology, but in the conscious life of an intelligent human being it is merely an element within the ordinary life of thought and feeling. Let us therefore assume that Turner not only made no effort to retain the exact visual impression of the scene in question, but that he did not even attempt to separate this impression from the general whole of thought and feeling in which it was experienced. The particular matter of sense-perception would then become incorporated in the general idea or the object--in the ordinary way in which sense qualities are preserved in ideas. When Turner therefore sat down to make his picture, what he would have prominently and clearly before his mind would be a general idea of Norham Castle as a ruined border fortress, a scene of many a bloody fray and of much bygone splendour and suffering. In short, his idea would be what the art-criticism of the Henley type used to describe contemptuously as “literary”; that is, it was steeped in the colours of the historical imagination, and was practically the same as that which a man like Sir Walter Scott or any cultivated person of the present time would associate with the same object. Instead, therefore, of having a single image before his mind which he had merely to copy, Turner started with a complex idea, which might, indeed, have been expressed more or less adequately in the terms of some other art, but which he chose on this occasion to express in pictorial terms.

In this way we can understand why Turner did, as a matter of fact, frequently and constantly attempt to express his ideas in the form of verbal poetry, and why, in the drawing we are now considering, he felt himself justified not only in filling out his sketch with details that were neither there nor in the real scene, but also in taking considerable liberties with the facts contained in the sketch, altering them and falsifying them in ways that could not be defended if his aim had been to reproduce the actual scene itself. The colouring too of Mr. Walter’s drawing owes much more to Turner’s study of Wilson’s pictures than to his visual memory of natural scenes; that is to say, the colour is used as an instrument of expression,--as a means to bring the imagination and feelings of the spectator into harmony with the artist’s ideas, as well as to indicate in the clearest possible manner that it was not the artist’s intention to represent the actual scene in its prosaic details.

This picture, with the others exhibited in 1798, settled the question for Turner’s brother artists and for himself that he was a genuinely imaginative artist and not a merely clever topographical draughtsman. The following year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, at the early age of twenty-four, and throughout his long life he always regarded himself as entitled to take any liberties with actual topographical facts that the expression of his ideas demanded.

The success of the first _Norham Castle_ drawing induced Turner to repeat the subject several times. The late Mrs. Thwaites had another water-colour of it in her collection, there are at least three unfinished versions in the National Gallery, and I have seen a version of it in oil. The subject was engraved in the “Liber” from what purported to be the picture in the possession of the Hon. Mr. Lascelles, but really from a fresh design made by the artist. Then Turner painted the subject again for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, and again, about 1822 or 1823, he made the drawing for the “Rivers of England” series, here reproduced. What is so interesting in all this is that the details in each of these versions are different, yet they all seem to have been based on the same pencil sketch. The relative size of the castle varies in each drawing, as well as the details of its embrasures and crumbling masonry; the character of the river banks also varies. In the earlier versions the right bank is steep and rocky, as suiting the solemn and gloomy effect of the subject; in the latest version, where the humble pastoral life of the present is thrown more into prominence, this bank becomes flat and peopled with fishermen, their boats and cows.

In one of the many anecdotes told of Turner he is represented as saying to an artist who had complained of the disappointment he had experienced on revisiting a certain place, “Don’t you know you must paint your impressions”--or words to that effect. I don’t know how true the story is--and I may confess that I have almost got into the habit of disbelieving _all_ the stories told about Turner--but whether true or not this particular anecdote is certainly well invented. Turner knew quite well how large a part his subjective feelings and ideas played in all his work, and it made him shy of revisiting places that had once impressed him. But when he spoke of his “impressions” we must be careful not to suppose that he could have used the expression in the way it is often used now. He did not abstract his particular visual impressions from the emotional and ideational context in which they were experienced. In so far as Impressionism means this kind of abstraction, Turner was never an impressionist. And as his first ideas of places were steeped in the colouring of his own subjective life, so his ideas were ever taking on different hues as his temper and character changed. In this way he could use the same sketch again and again and always get different effects from it; the sensuous datum was merely a point of departure for each fresh improvisation, a form into which he could pour his meditations, but a flexible, plastic form which readily took the shape of its spiritual content.

These considerations may help us to understand what is apt at first to strike the student of Turner’s drawings and sketches as strange and incomprehensible. Turner was always sketching from nature, and often making drawings that contain an amazing wealth of detail and definition, yet the usefulness of his sketches seemed to vary in inverse ratio to their definition and to the time spent upon them. The beautiful drawings never seemed to lead to anything, all the pictures being painted by preference from the slightest and vaguest sketches. Thus the sketch book which contains the sketch of _Norham Castle_ is filled with over ninety drawings, most of them full of detail and delightfully precise and graceful in handling. Turner made good use of most of this material, but the most prolific “breeding” subject--to use one of Richard Wilson’s expressions--was unquestionably the hurried scribble of Norham, which was so slight as not to indicate even the general shape of the ruined tower with precision, and which left the number of windows or embrasures entirely undetermined. But when we see how Turner used his sketches we can easily understand that this absence of definition must often have been a positive advantage to him when he came to paint his pictures. There was less “to put him out,” fewer obstacles in the way of his subjective utterance, the form was more fluid and tractable to his immediate purpose. The more detailed studies were of course not wasted, for the knowledge they gave him enabled him to fill out the slightest hints of his “breeding” subjects with an inexhaustible wealth of plausible detail.

The National Gallery collection contains just on three hundred of Turner’s sketch books, and practically the whole of his work done immediately in the presence of nature. This data enables us to speak with absolute authority upon the difficult question as to the relation between Turner’s art and nature. They prove that he very seldom, if ever, painted a picture simply “out of his head.” In everything he did--even, I believe, in the case of what have been called his classical nonsense pictures--there was a nucleus of immediately perceived fact. This sensuous basis is seldom, if ever, absent from his work, but it is invariably overlaid and distorted by the purely subjective forces of the artist’s personality, which appropriate the data of sense, and mould them into any shape they choose. It is impossible, especially since “Modern Painters” was written, to overlook the important part played by natural fact in all of Turner’s creations, but it is just as important not to overlook the equally obvious and certain truth that Turner never uses nature simply for its own sake, but only as a means of expression. The methods employed in the particular case we have just studied are, with few exceptions, the methods which he adopted during the whole of his career.

Yet Turner did undoubtedly upon occasion paint in oil directly from nature. An instance of this kind is described by Sir Charles Eastlake in “Thornbury” (p. 153, 3rd edition). Eastlake met Turner during his second visit to Devonshire, probably in the summer of 1813, and accompanied him to a cottage near Calstock, the residence of Eastlake’s aunt, where they stayed for a few days. Another artist was with them, a Mr. Ambrose Johns, of Plymouth. It was during their rambles in the neighbourhood of Calstock that Turner gathered the material for his picture of “_Crossing the Brook_.” Eastlake says that “Turner made his sketches in pencil and by stealth,” that is to say, he did not like to have people looking over his shoulder while he was at work. The sketch book Turner used on this occasion is with the others in the National Gallery. But after the three artists had returned to Plymouth, “in the neighbourhood of which he (Turner) remained some weeks, Mr. Johns fitted up a small portable painting-box, containing some prepared paper for oil sketches, as well as the other necessary materials. When Turner halted at a scene and seemed inclined to sketch it, Johns produced the inviting box, and the great artist, finding everything ready to his hand, immediately began to work. As he sometimes wanted assistance in the use of the box, the presence of Johns was indispensable, and after a few days he made his oil sketches freely in our presence. Johns accompanied him always; I was only with them occasionally. Turner seemed pleased when the rapidity with which those sketches were done was talked of; for, departing from his habitual reserve in the instance of his pencil sketches, he made no difficulty of showing them. On one occasion, when, on his return after a sketching ramble to a country residence belonging to my father, near Plympton, the day’s work was shown, he himself remarked that one of the sketches (and perhaps the best) was done in less than half an hour.” “On my enquiring afterwards,” Sir Charles Eastlake adds, “what had become of those sketches, Turner replied that they were worthless, in consequence, as he supposed, of some defect in the preparation of the paper; all the grey tints, he observed, had nearly disappeared. Although I did not implicitly rely on that statement, I do not remember to have seen any of them afterwards.”

There are about a dozen small oil sketches of Devonshire subjects in the National Gallery, which are doubtless part of those made under the circumstances described by Sir Charles Eastlake. They are made on a brownish millboard, prepared with a thin coating of paint and size. On the back of one of them there happens to be some lettering showing that Johns had laid violent hands on the covers of some parts of William Young Ottley’s “British Gallery of Pictures,” then being issued serially. Several of these paintings have long been hung among the exhibited drawings; _e.g._, Nos. 746, 750, 754, 758, and one, No. 849, which has somehow got the obviously incorrect title of _Bridge over River Lugwy, Capel Curig_. These paintings have undoubtedly sunk very much into the absorbent millboard, thus proving that Turner’s remark to Eastlake about the disappearance of the grey tints--which he “did not implicitly rely on”--was justified. But otherwise the work is in good condition, and I have very little doubt that when Mr. Buttery comes to take them in hand, he will be able to bring them back to something like their original freshness. The chief point of interest with regard to them, from our present point of view, is the curious fact that Turner does not seem to have made the slightest use of them in any of the Devonshire pictures he painted on his return. He evidently found his tiny little pencil sketches much more suggestive and adaptable to his purposes. Even the large oil picture of _Crossing the Brook_ is based entirely on his slight and rapidly made little pencil notes. Another point of interest is that even when painting in oil face to face with nature he did not merely copy what he had in front of him. As our illustration shows, these sketches are as carefully composed as his pictures. They are indeed only technically sketches from nature; in reality they are designs for pictures or pictures in miniature, though they happen to have been painted out of doors. Even in working direct from nature Turner remained firmly entrenched in his artistic position as the master of nature. He still retained his power of selection, taking what suited his purpose, ignoring the rest, and supplementing from the stores of his own knowledge what for his purpose were the defects of the momentary image before his eyes.

The fact that Turner always worked in this way makes it exceedingly difficult to separate his sketches from nature from the studies or designs for his pictures. Throughout his sketch books and amongst his loose drawings there are a large number of sketches in colour, and one’s first impulse is to assume that these were made immediately from nature. But careful observation shows that Turner was in the constant habit of working over his pencil sketches in colour when away from the scenes he had depicted. In this way the beautiful little sketch of “_Edinburgh from St. Margaret’s Loch_,” here reproduced (Plate VI.), is much more probably the draft of a picture the artist had in his mind’s eye than a study from nature. But the point whether such a drawing was made “on the spot” or not is relatively unimportant; what is more important is to realise how very small a part the merely imitative or representative study of the colour and tone (as opposed to form) of nature played in Turner’s work. His colour is never merely descriptive. The whole bent of his mind is so essentially pictorial that, whether he works face to face with nature or from what is loosely called “memory,” his slightest sketch as well as his most elaborate work is always an attempt to express a subjective conception, and never a merely literal transcript of what is given in sense-perception.

Perhaps the most important group of drawings in the national collection are those which Turner made during the last ten years of his working life, _i.e._, between 1835 and 1845. These drawings were not made for sale or for exhibition, hence Mr. Ruskin’s description of them as “delight drawings,” because they were done entirely for the artist’s own pleasure and delight. Several of them are reproduced in this volume, among them the beautiful sketch of “_Lucerne_” (Plate XXI.) realized for Mr. Ruskin in 1842, the almost equally fine “_Bellinzona, from the road to Locarno_” (Plate XXIV.), and “_Zurich_” (Plate XXVII.).

These inimitable and delightful sketches have been very widely admired, as they deserve to be, but they have also been praised, somewhat perversely as it seems to me, for their truth and accuracy of representation. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, these sketches “are not, strictly speaking, sketches from nature; but plans or designs of pictures which Turner, if he had had time, would have made of each place. They indicate, therefore, a perfectly formed conception of the finished picture; and they are of exactly the same value as memoranda would be, if made by Turner’s own hand, of pictures of his not in our possession. They are just to be regarded as quick descriptions or reminiscences of noble pictures.” Mr. Ruskin is also unquestionably correct when he adds “that nothing but the pencilling in them was done on the spot, and not always that. Turner used to walk about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, and make a few scratches upon a sheet or two of it, which were so much shorthand indication of all he wished to remember. When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed the pencilling rapidly, and added as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture” (“Ruskin on Pictures,” pp. 86-7).

It is not my intention now to dwell upon the beauty of these incomparable drawings, on their passionate intensity and emotional sincerity, their nervous eloquence and elusive suggestiveness. The point I wish to insist on at present is that they must not be regarded as attempts to reproduce or imitate the merely superficial qualities of physical nature, as attempts to give an accurate representation of effects of air or light, or of the shapes and forms of mountain, water or cloud. The artist is not immersed in the definite character of physical objects. He seems to feel that as a spiritual and self-conscious being he is something higher than the merely natural, and it is as modes of expression of human freedom and self-consciousness that these lyrical fragments must be regarded.