[Contents]
[Index]: [A], [B], [C], [D], [E], [F], [G], [H], [I], [J], [K], [L], [M], [N], [O], [P], [Q], [R], [S], [T], [U], [V], [W], [Y], [Z]
[List of Plates]

TURNER’S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

THE PASS OF FAÏDO, ST. GOTHARD

WATER COLOUR, 1844.

TURNER’S SKETCHES
AND DRAWINGS

By
A. J. F I N B E R G
WITH 100 ILLUSTRATIONS
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

All the Drawings are in the National Gallery, unless otherwise specified.

(The numbers, etc., in brackets refer to the position of the Drawings in the Official Inventory.)

TURNER’S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

INTRODUCTORY

The nature of our subject-matter—The difference between sketches and finished works—The character of our subject-matter, as embryonic forms of artistic expression, prescribes the method of study we must adopt—Our method is broadly chronological—But to follow Turner’s work year by year in detail would carry us beyond the limits of our present undertaking—I have, therefore, broken up Turner’s career into eight stages or phases of development.

THE object of the following pages is to re-study the character of Turner’s art in the light of his sketch-books and drawings from nature.

During Turner’s lifetime his rooted objection to part with any of his sketches, studies, or notes often formed the subject of ill-natured comment. Yet we owe it to this peculiarity that the drawings and sketches included in the Turner Bequest at the National Gallery comprise practically the whole of the great landscape painter’s work done direct from nature. The collection is, therefore, of very great psychological interest. It shows clearly upon what basis of immediately presentative elements the airy splendour of Turner’s richly imaginative art was built: and amongst the twenty odd thousand sheets of drawings in all stages of elaboration, the embryonic forms of most of the painter’s masterpieces can be easily traced.

A careful examination of the drawings shows that Turner’s objection to part with his sketches and notes was not the outcome of a blind and deeply ingrained passion for accumulation, but that it was the necessary result of the painter’s clearly defined conception of the radical difference between the raw material of the painter’s art, and its fully articulated products—the difference between mere sketches and studies and fugitive memoranda, and the fully elaborated works of art to which such preliminaries are subservient, but with which they should never be confused. From Turner’s point of view the properly finished pictures were all that the public had a right to see or possess; the notes and studies were meant only for his own eye. Even in his later years, when he consented to exhibit what he expressly called a ‘record’ of a scene he had witnessed, he grumbled when it was admired and treated as a picture, although in this case the ‘record’ was not a hurried memorandum, but a fully elaborated attempt ‘to show what such a scene was like.’[1]

The method of our study must be determined by the general character of our subject-matter. Our main business is with fragmentary records, hurried memoranda, half-formed thoughts, and tentative designs. We must not and cannot treat these dependent and embryonic fragments as independent entities; we cannot pick and choose amongst them, or love or dislike them entirely for their own sakes, as we can with complete works of art which contain within themselves the grounds of their own justification or insufficiency. To grasp the significance of our sketches and studies we must study the goal towards which they are striving. We must not be content to admire even the most beautiful of these sketches entirely for its own sake, but must study them for the sake of their connection with the works which they were instrumental in producing.

These considerations have also weighed with me in the selection of the numerous illustrations with which the publishers have generously enriched this volume. On the whole I have chosen the illustrations rather for the light they throw on Turner’s conception of art and methods of work than for their own individual attractiveness; but the glamour of execution is so invariably present in all that came from Turner’s hand, that few of these drawings will be found which do not possess a very powerful aesthetic appeal of their own.

In dealing with Turner’s work from the point of view I have indicated, we are forced to touch upon problems which the prudent art critic is apt to avoid. In studying the relation between the preliminary sketches and studies and the finished works into which they were developed, we find ourselves plunged into the midst of some of the most baffling difficulties of psychology and aesthetic. In attempting even to describe the relation between the more rudimentary and the more fully articulated processes of artistic expression, we are forced, whether we like it or not, to face the problems of the relation between form and content, between treatment and subject, between portrayal and portrayed; and we cannot go far without finding ourselves obliged to reconsider the common-sense ideas of Truth, Nature, and Art. We cannot avoid such problems if we would. If I face them, therefore, instead of emulating the discretion of my elders, it is, I am sure, from no ingrained love of abstractions, but rather from an overpowering interest in all the concrete forms of pictorial art.

The separation of aesthetic from art-criticism which is so much favoured at present, though it eases the labour of thought both to the art-critic and to his readers, seems to me otherwise inexcusable and fraught with serious artistic and intellectual dangers. Art-criticism cut adrift from general principles cannot help degenerating into a blatant form of self-assertion or an immoral form of practical casuistry—a finding of good reasons for anything you have a mind to; and aesthetic, divorced from all living contact with the concrete phenomena of art, is one of the dullest as well as the most useless of studies. But this is not the place to set forth in detail or defend my conception of the function and methods of art-criticism. I will merely say that I regard it as a form of rational investigation of the phenomena of pictorial art; it has no immediate practical aim; and it does not propose to prolong or intensify the enjoyment which works of art provide.

We find then that we cannot study Turner’s sketches in isolation from his finished works. But to follow his completed work year by year in detail would obviously carry us beyond the limits of our present undertaking. I have, therefore, broken up Turner’s career into eight facets or aspects. In the first chapter I deal with his seven years’ apprenticeship, from 1787 to 1793, using his sketches to throw light on his youthful aims and methods. The second chapter, covering the years 1793 to 1797, deals with the work of the topographical draughtsman. I then study the gloomy and romantic side of Turner’s art, when he was mainly under the influence of Richard Wilson and of the churchyard and charnel-house sentiment of Edward Young and Joseph Warton. The fourth chapter is devoted to Turner’s early sea-pieces, and the next to his work as a painter of what his contemporaries called ‘Simple Nature.’ This phase of Turner’s art is difficult to describe in a few words. One way would be to call it a phase of Wordsworthian naturalism, but it must be remembered that it was not an echo or a by-product of Wordsworth’s poetry, but an independent and simultaneous embodiment in another form of art of sentiments common both to Wordsworth and to Turner. Pictures like Turner’s ‘Frosty Morning’ and ‘Windsor’ were as new, as unprecedented, as Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems. This side of Turner’s art shows him as the founder of a genuinely national school of homely realism, as the head of the Norwich school and the master of David Cox, De Wint, Callcott, and the rest.

The sixth chapter deals with the designs engraved in the Liber Studiorum, and the sketches on which they were based. The seventh is devoted mainly to the work engraved in the Southern Coast, Richmondshire, Scott’s Antiquities, the Rivers and Ports, and the England and Wales series, the work by which the artist is perhaps best known. My eighth chapter treats of the period when signs of mental decay began to be apparent. These years saw the production of what have been called the first Impressionistic pictures. Then, by way of bringing to a head some of the observations on the nature of artistic expression which our investigations have forced upon our notice, I have added a final chapter dealing mainly with the relation between Art and Nature. The subject-matter of this chapter is not so attractive as that of the others, but I do not think it right to omit it.

This selection of the facets of Turner’s dazzling and complex genius is necessarily arbitrary and incomplete. The aspects I have chosen to throw into relief can make no pretence to be exhaustive. They must be taken as a poor but necessary device for the introduction of a kind of superficial order into our present task—as a concession to the weakness and limitations of the powers of the student, rather than as a successful summary of the multifarious forms into which one of the most prolific and many-sided creative activities of modern art has poured itself. And the threads of this living activity which I have sought to isolate, never existed in isolation. Turner was not at one period of his life a romantic and at another a pseudo-classic or Academic painter, a sea-painter at one time, and a painter of ‘simple Nature’ at another. Turner was always a sea-painter and a topographer, a romantic, a pseudo-classic, and an impressionist, as well as a master of homely realism. While he was painting ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ he had the ‘View of High Street, Oxford’ on his easel; the ‘Abingdon’ and the ‘Apollo’ were painted at the same time as were the ‘Frosty Morning’ and the ‘Dido and Aeneas.’ He could paint a huge dull empty canvas like ‘Thomson’s Lyre’ when his muse was putting forth its lustiest and most vigorous shoots; he could give us ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ when his powers seemed stifled amid the fumes of early Victorian sentimentality. His genius is hot and cold like Love itself, a fine and subtle spirit that eludes the snares of our plodding faculties. But unless we desire merely to bedazzle and intoxicate our senses, we cannot afford to dispense with the poor crutches upon which our pedestrian intellect must stumble.

CHAPTER I
SEVEN YEARS’ APPRENTICESHIP—1787-1793

Turner’s first drawings—‘St. Vincent’s Tower’—Turner’s copies and imitations—His debt to Art—Work with Mr. Hardwick—Oxford sketches—‘Radley Hall’—Drawings from the Antique—The Bristol sketch-book—End of the apprenticeship.

THE legend runs that Turner’s first drawings were exhibited in his father’s shop-window, ticketed for sale at prices ranging from one to three shillings.

There is nothing improbable in this story, though the drawings referred to by Thornbury,[2] as having been bought by a Mr. Crowle under these conditions, do not happen to have been made by Turner. I have not, indeed, been able to discover any drawing which can confidently be said to have been purchased from the barber’s shop in Maiden Lane, but there are some in the National Gallery which show us exactly what kind of work Turner was capable of producing at the time when he might have resorted to this rough and ready method of attracting patronage.

A typical drawing of this kind is the brightly-coloured view of St. Vincent’s Tower, Naples, reproduced on Plate I. of the present volume. It is oval in shape, measuring about 8 × 10 inches, and has evidently been cut out without mechanical assistance, as the curves of the oval are somewhat erratic. As the youthful artist had not visited Italy at this period, I thought it probable that this drawing was based upon the work of some other artist, and I was fortunate enough to be able to trace it to

PLATE I

ST. VINCENT’S TOWER, NAPLES

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1787

PLATE II

CENTRAL PORTION OF AN AQUATINT BY PAUL SANDBY, AFTER FABRIS

PUBLISHED 1 JAN., 1778

its source. It is copied and adapted from an aquatint by Paul Sandby, after Fabris, published on 1st January 1778, entitled ‘Part of Naples, with the Ruin’d Tower of St. Vincent.’ Sandby’s engraving is a large one (about 13¼ × 20 inches), and comprises an extensive view of the harbour and bay of Naples, with the Castel dell’ Uovo in the middle distance, and St. Elmo crowning the buildings on the right. Turner has picked out as it were the pictorial plum of this mass of topographical information. He has set the ruined tower boldly in the centre of his design, and has used only just so much of the surrounding buildings and scenery as was necessary to make an appropriate background or setting for it. He has reduced the Castle of the Egg to insignificance, and closed up his distance with appropriate but imaginary mountains. In the engraving a passing boat with figures divides our interest with the tower. Turner has suppressed it. He has also reduced the size of the quay upon which the tower stands, thus increasing the apparent height of the tower. The few meagre weeds clinging to the battlements in the engraving have developed luxuriantly in Turner’s drawing, thus adding considerably to its picturesqueness. The foreground figures seem to have been adapted from those in the engraving.

It is probable that these slight differences between the engraving and the water-colour were made involuntarily, for it is evident that Turner did not have the engraving under his eyes while he was making the drawing. He had probably seen the engraving in some shop-window, and had made a hasty pencil sketch of the part that interested him. That he was working from a somewhat perfunctory sketch and not direct from the original is proved by the fact that he has introduced three arches into the building on the quay immediately at the foot of the tower, instead of the two in Sandby’s engraving. But in the engraving there is a small rounded turret on the battlements of the quay which comes just in front of the place where Turner has introduced his third arch. It is clear that he mistook the indication of this turret in his rough sketch for a third arch in the building beyond.

It would, of course, be imprudent to suppose that Turner chose to work in this way partly from memory, with the deliberate intention of giving his imagination freer play; he was probably forced to do so by the material exigencies of his position. But certainly this way of working was admirably calculated to strengthen his memory and call into play his innate powers of arrangement and adaptation.

The colour scheme, which is probably the artist’s own invention, is light and pleasing. The golden rays of the setting (? rising) sun are painted with evident enjoyment. The warm yellow light of the sun is transfused over the whole of the sky, turning the distant clouds into crimson. The keynote of the colour is thus orange yellow, passing through pink to burnt sienna. In spite of the lightness of the colour the drawing was worked over a black and white foundation, light washes of Indian ink having been used to establish the broad divisions of light and shade in the design. These washes afterwards formed the ground-work of the greys and cooler colours, being warmed in parts (as in the tower) with washes or touches of pink and burnt sienna, or worked up into more positive hues by subsequent washes of blue and yellow.

The handling of the drawing—the sharp decided touches, the neatness and dexterity of its washes, and the rapid march of the whole work—shows what a hold the idea of a unified work of art had already obtained over Turner’s mind. The clear, determined workmanship shows that he must have been thinking of the whole from the beginning, and not of the representation of a number of separate natural objects.

This childish effort seems to me of great interest as marking with extraordinary clearness the point of departure of Turner’s art. From the beginning he sees things pictorially, as elements in a conceptual whole, not as isolated and independent objects. His sense of design—both as the faculty of expression as well as of formal arrangement—is thus developed, while the merely representative qualities of art are ignored or at least subordinated. This early grasp of the idea of pictorial unity is obviously the result of Turner’s study of works of art, and not of his study of nature. Since Mr. Ruskin’s labours it will not be possible for any student to overlook the enormous profit which Turner derived in his subsequent work from his unwearied observation of the phenomena of nature; it is well, therefore, to be careful not to overlook the prior debt which Turner had contracted to art, and the extraordinary advantage his early grasp of pictorial unity gave him in appropriating the multifarious variety of natural shapes and colours.

The other drawings of this period in the National Gallery only serve to emphasise Turner’s indebtedness to art. Some of these are plain straightforward copies. The most elaborate of these is the copy of ‘Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower’ which has long been exhibited in the Turner Water Colour rooms (No. 613, N.G.). This is copied from an engraving by J. Basire published in the Oxford Almanack for the year 1780. The colouring, however, is original. This copy is signed and dated, ‘W. Turner, 1787.’ Among the other copies is a pencil outline of the Old Kitchen, Stanton Harcourt, from the engraving in Grose’s Antiquities. There is also a coloured drawing, somewhat similar in size and shape to that of St. Vincent’s Tower, of Dacre Castle, Cumberland. I am unable to say from what engraving this is copied or adapted.[3] It may have been a slightly earlier effort than the Neapolitan subject, as the Indian ink underpainting is less skilfully done and the general effect is heavier and more monotonous.

These drawings, made, I believe, between Turner’s twelfth and fourteenth years, show the youthful artist in the act of acquiring the rudiments of that pictorial language which he was to use in after years with such mastery and ease. We see him acquiring this language by intercourse with his fellows who use it, not, as is the modern way, through the course of a random study of nature. He is learning from tradition, and the thought of the artistic community as expressed in the current pictorial language is gradually forming and moulding his ideas. He is imitating those around him, as a child imitates the words of its nurse and mother.

On the present occasion, I need do no more than call attention in passing to the immense advantage Turner enjoyed in being initiated thus early and in this easy and natural way into the sphere of art. He was thus saved from those years of futile and heart-breaking experiment to which the modern system of nature study dooms all those students whose native powers are not entirely deadened by its influence. The habit thus early forced upon him of regarding himself as an actual producer, i.e. as a maker of articles with a definite market value, must also have been beneficial to him. The existence of a class of real patrons, whose tastes had to be consulted and whose pockets contained actually exchangeable coin of the realm, must have placed some insistence upon the social aspect of art, and have helped to prevent the boy from making the mistake which so many subsequent artists have made, of considering their work merely as a means of self-expression, instead of as a means of super-individual or universal communication. Another important result of these early employments was the facility and mastery in the use of his material which they gave him. Between the water-colours of different periods of Turner’s career there are the most astonishing contrasts of subject-matter and sentiment, but in all of them one finds the same inimitable grace, strength, and dexterity of workmanship, the same unequalled technical mastery over the medium; and this purely executive address—this ‘genius of mechanical excellence,’ to use Reynolds’s expression—could have been attained only as the result of an early familiarity with this particular form of artistic expression.

About his fourteenth year (1789) Turner was placed with an architect, Mr. P. Hardwick. It seems to me doubtful whether he was regularly apprenticed, or was intended to take up the study of architecture from a practical point of view. The evidence upon this point is extremely limited, but what little there is points to his employment upon purely pictorial tasks, such as the dressing out of projects or views of buildings with a plausible arrangement of light and shade and a pleasing setting of landscape background. We know that Mr. Hardwick built the New Church at Wanstead,[4] and that Turner made for his master a water-colour drawing both of the old church which was pulled down and the new one that took its place. I have not been fortunate enough to trace the

PLATE III

RADLEY HALL: SOUTH FRONT

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1789

present owner of these drawings, but the water-colour of the old church was exhibited at the Old Masters (R.A.) in 1887. There is, however, in the National Gallery a pencil outline of the new church, squared for enlargement, which shows no signs of training in the practical work of the architect’s profession.

The earliest of Turner’s sketch-books now in the National Gallery was in use during the period of this connection with Mr. Hardwick. A pencil sketch of a church by the river, easily recognisable as Isleworth Old Church, with barges moored beside the bank, is probably the note from which the water-colour was made which Mr. Hardwick’s grandson lent to the Old Masters in 1887. Most of the other drawings, however, appear to have been made during a stay near Oxford. There are sketches of Clifton Nuneham (then Nuneham Courtenay), near Abingdon; of Radley Hall, between Abingdon and Oxford; of a distant view of Oxford; a sketch of a ruined tower which may represent Pope’s Tower in the ruins of the Harcourts’ house at Stanton Harcourt, and two drawings of Sunningwell Church, a village about two miles from Radley and three from Abingdon. As Turner’s uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, his mother’s elder brother, after whom he was named, was then living at Sunningwell, it is probable that these drawings were the result of a summer holiday spent with his relative.

These drawings represent Turner’s first attempts to draw from nature. They are characterised by an absence of blundering and a sense of pictorial logic and requirements which could only belong to a beginner whose eye and hand had already been disciplined in the production of works of art. One cannot but feel that the mould into which the immediate experiences of the artist were to be cast had already been firmly set before his pencil was placed upon the paper, nay, before the particular sights in question were actually seen. In other words, the pictorial formula into which the material gathered from nature was to be worked up had been clearly determined before the artist set out to gather such material for himself. Turner’s confidence in the unbounded felicity of immediate contact with nature was not commensurate with that of modern artistic theorists. He does indeed entrust himself to the open fields, but it is not until he has armed himself with a stout though flexible panoply of artistic convention.

But though the draughtsmanship is conventional, I do not think it can fairly be called mannered. The actual statements made are made with the utmost simplicity and directness. In the drawings of Sunningwell Church (on p. 12 of the sketch-book), of Radley Hall (pp. 9 and 14), and of Isleworth Old Church (p. 22), the general proportions and main facts of the buildings are noted with deliberate and methodical care. The artist knows what facts he will want when he comes to make his finished water-colours, and he takes those facts and calmly ignores all the particular effects of light and shade, colour and accident which his experience of other artists’ work had shown him would not be useful to him. Thus there is a strongly marked selective activity at work, which gives what I think can be more correctly described as style than as manner. Yet I should not be surprised to find the term mannerism applied to the curiously monotonous calligraphic scribbles which stand for trees and clouds in these drawings. That they are conventional and singularly indefinite I readily admit, yet they are not deliberately learnt ‘ways of doing trees’ like those, for instance, which a student of J. D. Harding’s teaching might adopt. They are as they are because their immediate function is clearly determined by their ultimate purpose. In making his finished water-colour drawing at home the trees and clouds, as well as the whole system of light and shade, were merely the docile instruments of pictorial effectiveness. The exact shape of each tree and cloud in his drawing, and even their exact positions, were determined as the work progressed by purely pictorial requirements. A detailed statement of the exact shape of any particular tree or cloud in the actual scene from which the sketch was made would therefore have been not only of no use to the artist, but a positive hindrance, as it would have complicated the problem of formal arrangement before the artist, even if it did not actively hinder its solution. In these sketches from nature Turner therefore takes his skies and foliage for granted as much as possible, merely hinting at their general existence in a loose and tentative way.

But if the charge of mannerism cannot be fairly brought against the sketches made face to face with nature, it is otherwise with the water-colours which were afterwards elaborated from them. Drawings like the view of ‘Radley Hall,’ reproduced on Plate [III.], and the ‘View of the City of Oxford’ might almost be said to consist of little else than mannerisms. The manner of doing trees and skies and of arranging the planes of the scene is taken over directly from Paul Sandby, as are also the method of working in transparent washes and the gamut of colours used. The ‘View of Oxford’ is indeed nothing but a feeble echo of some of Sandby’s fine drawings; it tells us little of Turner himself, beyond an indication of a certain liking for scenes of this kind. Perhaps the most noteworthy point in the drawing is the demonstration it affords of the superior development of his sense of tone to his sense of form; the buildings sway to and fro in the wind, the foliage is childish and ridiculous, but the difference between the broad expanses of ground and sky is clearly marked, and the limpid sky gives an undeniable charm to it all.

There is perhaps a little more of himself in the view of ‘Radley Hall.’ The way the tree-trunks seem to blow themselves out, and toss themselves this way and that, while their branches explode in the wildest and most fantastic contortions,—all this is given with such keen and frank enjoyment, that it points to something more than a mere passive reproduction of a purely technical recipe. The trees in those drawings of Sandby which Turner had studied do indeed behave in this way, but Turner identifies himself so closely with the inner meaning of these forms that they become his own legitimate property. The sense of exuberant freedom in the trees is intensified by contrast with the rigid restraint of the building in the middle distance. It is as though the boy’s imagination was glad to get away from the realm of necessity and disport itself in aimless gambols through space, free from the encumbrance of inert matter and of the laws of gravitation. It is this habit of getting at the inner emotional content of the pictorial conventions he adopts, that stamps Turner’s whole career of imitation and appropriation with its peculiar character, making him invariably richer for all his borrowings, and more original for all his imitations.

These two drawings were made in 1789, during the artist’s fourteenth year. About the beginning of 1790 he joined the schools of the Royal Academy, acting, it is said, upon the advice of Mr. Hardwick. During part of 1790 and for the next two or three years he worked in what was then called the ‘Plaister Academy,’ i.e. from casts taken from the antique. Laborious chalk and stump drawings of the Apollo and Antinoüs of the Belvedere, the Venus de’ Medici, and the Vatican Meleager, as well as of the more robust forms of the Diskobolos and Dying Gaul, are still in existence to demonstrate the diligence with which he pursued these uncongenial studies. Such work must have given his masters a singularly poor and misleading opinion of his talents. In June, 1792, he was admitted to the Life Class, while still continuing to attend the Antique. This academic training, however, must have been useful as an antidote, or at least as a supplement, to the topographical work to which all his spare time was devoted.

He seems to have spent his holidays in 1791 partly with his uncle at Sunningwell and partly with some friends of the family, the Narraways, at Bristol. The sketch-book in use at this time is now in the National Gallery. The volume was never a handsome one,—it was probably stitched and bound by the artist himself—but its present appearance is deplorable; the cardboard covers are broken, the rough and ready backing is almost undone, a number of the leaves have been cut or torn out, and the remainder are in a generally dirty and dilapidated condition. In spite of these disadvantages it gives us a valuable glimpse of Turner’s interests and acquirements at the age of sixteen.

Our first impression is that his year’s work drawing from the cast has produced hardly any perceptible effect. The drawings of buildings are in some cases even more perfunctory than those in the ‘Oxford’ Sketch-Book. The sketch of Bath Abbey Church (on page 14 of the book), for example, is not a very creditable performance for an ambitious Royal Academy student. Its carelessness, however, may have been due to limited opportunities, but we must remember that this hasty scrawl, with the assistance of a few written notes and diagrams, was sufficient to enable the artist to produce afterwards an elaborate water-colour of the subject. A still more elaborately wrought and

PLATE IV

VIEW ON THE AVON, FROM COOK’S FOLLY

WATER COLOUR AND INK. ABOUT 1791

carefully considered water-colour was the result of another sketch (on the reverse of page 16) in this book, a view of ‘Stoke, near Bristol, the seat of Sir H. Lippencote,’ now in the possession of Mrs. Thomas. This pencil sketch is quite as perfunctory as that of Bath Abbey. It is evident that nature ‘put him out’ or that the artist’s youthful impatience induced him to hurry over the first stages of his work. These sketches from nature were merely means to an end, and so long as they contained sufficient hints to set his subsequent work going he was perfectly satisfied. However, in some of the drawings where the first sketch from nature has been worked over subsequently (as in the water-colour of Captain Fowler’s seat on Durdham Downs [on pp. 17a and 18]), we can trace an increased delicacy of hand, an added capacity for dealing with complex and irregular forms, and greater knowledge of the natural forms of trees.

But it is evident that the wild and romantic scenery of the Avon gorge made a deeper impression on the young artist’s imagination than the spick and span seats of the gentry. The ruins of Malmesbury Abbey are sketched from every available point of view, and there are hurried and clumsy sketches of ‘The Ruins of a Chapel standing on an Island in the Severn,’ ‘A View of the Welsh Coast from Cook’s Folly,’ and others of ‘Blaze Castle and the Deney and Welsh Coast,’[5] and the ‘Old Passage.’ The drawing described as a ‘View from Cook’s Folley (sic), looking up the River Avon with Wallis Wall and the Hot Wells’ (reproduced on Plate [IV.]), shows clearly the bent of Turner’s mind towards the wildness and freedom of nature, as well as his strong love of ships.

If it were our intention to follow Turner’s work year by year, we should have to study in detail the drawings of Oxford, Windsor, Hereford and Worcester, and especially the Welsh and Monmouthshire sketches which belong to the years 1792 and 1793. As it is, it is sufficient for our purpose to notice that the work of these two years shows a gradual increase of power in making sketches from nature. The young artist slowly gathers confidence in himself. Nature ceases to ‘put him out,’ to fluster him with her multitudinous details and ever-varying effects. He begins to treat nature as a conquered enemy, and there is just a suspicion of youthful impertinence in the cool and methodical way in which he gathers up the kind of facts he wants, and ignores everything that does not come within the scope of his pictorial formulas. But by this time it is evident that his period of apprenticeship is at an end, and that we must turn our attention to the work of the brilliant young topographical draughtsman.

CHAPTER II
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN—1793-1796

Welsh tour of 1793—‘St. Anselm’s Chapel’—Turner’s topographical rivals—Midland tour of 1794—Topographical and antiquarian draughtsmanship—Its main interest is not embodied in the work—The marvellous petit-maítre—The ‘Cottage Interior’—Light and shade as a means of expression—The sketch-books of 1795 and their contents—‘High Force of Tees’ or ‘Fall of Melincourt’?

AMONG the five drawings by which Turner was represented in the exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1794, one was a view of the Devil’s Bridge, Cardiganshire. This was doubtless one of the first results of the sketching tour in Wales made in 1793. We can readily believe that Turner’s imagination was powerfully impressed by the wild and gloomy scenery of the country and its romantic ruins, but his efforts to embody his impressions were not at first very successful. For the moment his powers as an architectural draughtsman were more in evidence than his powers of expressing grand and gloomy ideas. The romantic turn of his mind had to be more fully developed before it could command public support, and for the time being this phase of his art seemed swamped in the flood of topographical employment which the immediate success of his less ambitious drawings in the 1794 exhibition brought him.

In a contemporary press notice, preserved among the Anderdon collection of catalogues in the Print Room of the British Museum, Turner’s drawings of ‘Christchurch Gate, Canterbury,’ and the ‘Porch of Great Malvern Abbey, Worcestershire,’ are said to be ‘amongst the best in the present exhibition. They are the productions,’ the writer continues, ‘of a very young artist, and give strong indications of first-rate ability; the character of Gothic architecture is most happily preserved, and its profusion of minute parts massed with judgment and tinctured with truth and fidelity. This young artist should beware of contemporary imitations. His present effort evinces an eye for nature, which should scorn to look to any other source.’

The first of the drawings which called forth this praise is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Ruskin Bequest), the other is probably the ‘Malvern’ now in the Manchester Whitworth Institute (No. 73). The critic’s remark about the danger of ‘contemporary imitations,’ which I take to mean the danger of Turner imitating the works of contemporary artists, may probably account for his neglect to mention another drawing exhibited at the same time, which strikes the present-day observer as a more accomplished and remarkable effort than either the ‘Malvern’ or ‘Christchurch Gate.’ I allude to the drawing described in the R.A. catalogue as ‘St. Anselm’s Chapel with part of Thomas à Becket’s Crown—Canterbury Cathedral,’ which I take to be the drawing now in the Manchester Whitworth Institute (No. 272). This is a work of infinite patience and wary skill, a remarkable combination of far-sighted knowledge of ultimate effects united with the utmost delicacy, firmness, and patience of execution. These qualities do not seem to me so clearly marked either in the Christchurch Gate or Malvern drawings, but very likely to the contemporary observer, especially to one avid of originality, the drawing of ‘St. Anselm’s Chapel’ may have appeared more ordinary or conventional.[6]

The success of these drawings established Turner’s position as one of the foremost architectural and topographical draughtsmen of the day. But we must not make the mistake of supposing that Turner’s success was the result of an absence of serious rivals. De Loutherbourg, Dayes, Hearne, Wheatley, Sandby and Rooker were by no means unworthy rivals. Nor must we jump to the conclusion that Turner, at the age of nineteen, had outstripped such competitors in any but the purely topographical branches of their profession. The best of the older men were artists of wide sympathies and ambitions, who could not rest satisfied within the narrow limits of purely topographical work. They looked upon such work as a kind of necessary drudgery, useful from a pecuniary point of view, but not calling for the whole-hearted exercise of all their talents and enthusiasm. Dayes, to whom Girtin was apprenticed, and from whom Turner had learnt a great deal, seems to have detested topographical work, in spite of the skill and delicate charm with which he treated it. All his enthusiasm was reserved for figure subjects in the grand manner, for which there was no market. In this 1794 exhibition he had four illustrations for Dr. Aitken’s Environs of Manchester, which have the perfunctory look of work done against the grain, and a ‘View of Keswick Lake,’ which may possibly have been the slight and charming drawing of this subject now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, too small and fragile a thing to attract much attention. The versatile and brilliant De Loutherbourg did not exhibit this year; Hearne also was absent. Rooker had five of his delicately-accomplished but rather prosaic drawings. Paul Sandby had two views of Rochester Castle, and ‘A View of Vintners at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman’s Turkey Paper Mills,’ where the excellent paper upon which almost all Turner’s drawings were made was manufactured. Wheatley sent no landscapes this year, and Girtin, Turner’s senior and rival, had a single exhibit, a ‘View of Ely Minster,’ the first drawing he had had accepted by the Academy. The result of this state of things was that Turner’s architectural and topographical work was pitted against only the perfunctory or tired work of his older rivals. For the moment all his indefatigable patience and amazing energy and skill were concentrated on this one point of attack, with immediately decisive results.

Turner had now achieved an honourable footing in his profession. Dr. Monro bought his ‘Anselm’s Chapel’ and gave him commissions for many other drawings. Booksellers found his name an attraction. With publishers ready to buy his drawings, though at prices that would merely excite the derision of a modern artist, and with patrons like Dr. Monro ready to encourage his more ambitious efforts, his opportunities of travel were greatly enlarged.

Turner spent the summer of 1794 making a tour of the midland counties of England. Northampton, Birmingham, Lichfield, Shrewsbury, Wrexham, Chester, Matlock, Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Peterborough, Cambridge and Waltham were among the places he visited. The views published in the Copper Plate Magazine during the next three years of Nottingham, Bridgenorth, Matlock, Birmingham, Chester, Peterborough and Flint were made from sketches taken on this journey, as were also those of King’s College, Cambridge, Flint, and Northampton, published in the Pocket Magazine during 1795. But these were the least important results of the tour. The work into which Turner threw all his enthusiasm and ambition was sent to the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1795, which contained no less than eight of his important and highly-finished drawings. The best known of these are the ‘Peterborough Cathedral; West Entrance,’ which was included in Messrs. Agnews’ 1908 annual exhibition of water-colours—it had suffered somewhat from the light and had been restored, but was still an impressive work; the ‘Welsh Bridge, Shrewsbury,’ now No. 276 in the Manchester Whitworth Institute, a carefully wrought and exquisitely accomplished drawing; and the ‘Cathedral Church at Lincoln’ (Plate [V.]) now in the Print Room. This elaborately finished drawing, I am inclined to think, played an important part in Turner’s development. It is almost the only drawing I know from his hand which has a papery and unconvincing general effect, which is monotonous and insensitive in its textures, and hard and metallic in its details. For once in a way Turner seems to have deferred to the ideals of elaboration of the ordinary connoisseur, who likes to see every detail in every part of a work pushed to its highest point of finish. For these reasons the drawing must have been very generally admired when it was first exhibited, but Turner could not have been satisfied at all with his own work, for he promptly abandoned the style. This is the most ‘mappy’ of all Turner’s drawings, and we know that for the rest of his life he had the greatest horror of this quality.

When we examine the pencil drawings made from nature on this tour we find them all severely governed by the ends they were intended to serve. The sketches for the publishers’ work

PLATE V

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL

WATER COLOUR EXHIBITED AT ROYAL ACADEMY, 1795

(Print Room, British Museum)

PLATE VI

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST

PENCIL. 1794

are generally made in a small note-book (about 4½ × 6¾ inches in size). They are invariably in pure outline, without the slightest suggestion of light and shade—nothing but the scaffolding of the more important shapes upon which the final designs were to be elaborated. On such a small scale the ease and grace of Turner’s touch are not much in evidence. The sketches are severely business-like, and done as quickly and with as little effort as possible. There is more effort and feeling in the casual studies with which the leaves of this sketch-book are interspersed. The accompanying sketch (Plate [VII.]) of a pony standing ready saddled gives a good idea of the mature wisdom of Turner’s style of sketching at this period, its determination to grasp the larger truths of form and structure, as well as the quickness, readiness, and versatility of his powers of perception.

The drawings for the more ambitious subjects are generally made on larger and separate pieces of paper about 8 × 10½ inches in size. On this scale the delicate play of the artist’s wrist becomes appreciable. The dominant impression left by a glance through these drawings is one of excessive orderliness and methodical neatness. There is no hurry, no scamped or perfunctory work, still less are there any signs of dilatoriness or even slowness. The artist’s respect for relevant fact is equalled by his appreciation of the value of time. His calm objective outlook, his steady, unwavering grasp of general principles enable him at every point to economise his labours, to store up the record of the greatest possible amount of material facts (i.e. of facts material to his purpose) with the utmost celerity, clearness, and the least possible expenditure of manual effort. This is particularly noticeable in the treatment of the towers in the Lincoln Cathedral drawing (Plate [VI.]), where every advantage has been taken of the repetition of forms. A possible, though not a very satisfactory, way of doing justice to the predominance of conceptual over purely visual elements in this work, would be to say that the artist has here drawn with his head rather than his eye, that he puts down not so much what he sees as what he understands.

I am tempted to linger for a moment over the placid and self-contained air of this phase of Turner’s work, because we shall so soon get into an altogether different atmosphere, and because we shall understand Turner’s after work all the better the more clearly we grasp the character of the work we are now examining. The self-contained air to which I allude is connected in my mind with the character and limitations of topographical work. Now the essential character of topographical and purely antiquarian work is that it does not aim primarily at expressing the imaginative or emotional effects of the objects it represents. It takes these imaginative or emotional interests for granted, relying indeed on them for the ultimate justification of its work; but the work, as topographical and antiquarian, aims directly only at an adequate representation of the particular scenes or buildings with which it is concerned. There is, as it were, a tacit division of labour; the artist being called upon to record accurately and vividly a certain scene or building, merely as a scene or building, while the spectator is expected to supply the requisite mental associations and emotional colouring. The artist draws a castle, we will say, as a mere object of sight, while the spectator is supposed to remember that the castle was built by such and such a king, and that certain moving events took place in it or near it. This division of labour simplifies the work of the topographical artist, reducing his business to a clear-cut affair of definite visual facts. Hence the Oriental stolidity of Turner’s topographical work, its Oriental patience, neatness, and precision. In a drawing like the ‘Lincoln Cathedral’ Turner is as wholly immersed in the succession of particular material facts as a Japanese or Chinese artist. As with the Japanese and Chinese artists the material facts are not there entirely for their own sakes; in Turner’s case they imply an antiquarian interest, as the Eastern artists’ work implies an added religious or poetical significance. But the point to which I desire to draw attention is, that this added significance is not embodied in the work itself. It is something extraneous and fortuitous, and the work itself falls apart into something dependent. It is in fact an accessory, a work of mere illustration, not an independent work of art.

We shall have to return to this subject in our next chapter, when we find Turner wrenching himself free from the trammels of topography and antiquarianism to soar into the regions of

PLATE VII

PONY AND WHEELBARROW

PENCIL. 1794

artistic freedom. In the meantime we will turn our attention to the topographical drawings which Turner sent to the exhibition of 1796.

Of the eleven drawings by which Turner was represented at the Royal Academy this year, nine were apparently of a topographical character. I have only been able to examine two of these recently—the ‘Transept and Choir of Ely Minster,’ in the late Mr. R. F. Holt’s collection, and the ‘Llandaff Cathedral,’ in the National Gallery (Exhibited Drawings No. 795). If we may judge from the rather cold impression these two drawings make upon us, it is probable that they owe their existence rather to the artist’s professional diligence than to any overmastering impulse towards artistic expression. But the work, if not particularly enthusiastic, is distinguished by its thoroughness and workman-like spirit. Every mechanical difficulty is fairly faced and mastered with imperturbable coolness, patience, and dexterity. So palpably is the artist’s attention fixed upon the executive side of his art, especially in the ‘Llandaff Cathedral,’ that a contemporary prophet might well have been excused if he had seen in it only the promise of the making of a marvellous petit-maître, and had declared that its author could not be possessed of a spark of native genius.

Perhaps if we could see either of the two other drawings which, to judge from their titles, were neither topographical nor antiquarian in subject, we might find evidence which would induce us to modify this dominant impression of intellectual coldness and unruffled placidity. In particular, the title ‘Fishermen at Sea’ seems to suggest possibilities of romantic expressiveness, especially when we know that the subject was treated by the same hand that was to give us in a few years’ time the ‘Calais Pier,’ Lord Iveagh’s ‘Fishermen on a Lee-Shore,’ and the ‘Shipwreck.’ But this drawing has not been traced, and the second drawing, the ‘Internal (or interior) of a Cottage,’ has apparently shared the same fate.

There is, however, a slight possibility that the latter subject may be correctly identified with the small drawing in the National Gallery, exhibited under the title of ‘Cottage Interior’ (406 N.G.). This drawing has been, somewhat rashly, supposed to represent the underground kitchen beneath the barber’s shop in Maiden Lane. There are absolutely no grounds for such an assumption, and a moderately careful examination of the drawing shows that it does not represent an underground kitchen or room of any kind. It is clearly a room on the ground-floor, but the lower part of the window has been curtained off, with the object of getting a picturesque arrangement of light and shade, and this fact may have lent some plausibility to the suggestion that the light was falling through a grating above. If I am right in identifying this drawing with the 1796 exhibit the study was made at Ely, as the catalogue informs us.

But whether this drawing was exhibited at the Academy or not, it clearly belongs from internal evidence to the latter part of 1795 or the beginning of 1796. It therefore offers us an interesting connecting link in the development of Turner’s art, showing the line of study which turned the youthful topographer into the romantic artist.

Yet there is little of the romantic spirit on the face of this drawing. A poor interior bathed in gloom, with a narrow stream of light falling on an old woman sitting beside a copper and surrounded by an array of pots and pans. But it is significant, because it bears witness to the direction of Turner’s mind to the study of light and shade as a separate vehicle of expression. In the topographical drawings proper, light and shade is not used for its emotional effect, but simply as a means of representation, that is to say, to bring out the shapes and details. In the ‘Interior’ we see Turner beginning to isolate the system of light and shade, to study and grasp its possibilities as a separate factor of artistic expressiveness.

But if we turn to the sketch-books containing the record of Turner’s summer wanderings in 1795, we find no lack of evidence of the essentially artistic cast of his mind, and of his wide sympathies with nature. His journeys this year were mainly confined to portions of the coast-line, to the Isle of Wight, and the south coast of Wales from Chepstow to Pembroke Bay. It was not by any means the first time he had seen the sea, but he was then able to study it more closely than before, and under its wilder aspects and conditions.

The outward appearance of the two principal sketch-books used this year bears clear indication of bright professional prospects. These handsome calf-bound volumes, each with four brass clasps, put forward solid claims to respect—claims which a young artist standing alone without a backing of influential patrons would shrink from advancing. Opening the book devoted to the Isle of Wight subjects, we find the first page headed in ink with the words ‘Order’d Drawings,’ and underneath a record of subjects and sizes of drawings to be made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare and Mr. Charles Landseer, the engraver. In the South Wales book we find the record of further commissions from these two patrons, and others from Viscount Maiden, Dr. Mathews, Mr. Laurie, Mr. Lambert, Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Kershaw. These indications suggest that the drawings in these volumes were not made entirely for the artist’s own use and enjoyment. They are certainly for use, as their neat and careful array of details proves, but they were also destined to bear the scrutiny of possible patrons, and excite, if possible, a desire in their breasts to see them carried out in a more elaborate medium. This may account for a certain smugness or primness in much of the work itself, for its faint suggestion of youthful conceit and a priggish air of conscious rectitude.

The sketching tour opens at Winchester, and we can follow the artist to Salisbury and Southampton. We then find him suddenly at Newport, in the Isle of Wight. The remainder of the book is devoted to this island. At Newport Turner was chiefly interested in Carisbrook Castle. We can then trace his footsteps southward to Ventnor and along the South-West coast to the Needles; thence back to Newport, with a visit to Brading, where he made a delightful drawing, partly finished in water-colour, of Bembridge Mill.

The workmanship throughout is admirably deft, graceful and accomplished. It is not, however, till the artist gets to the open sea round the Needles that his imagination seems stirred at all. In the centre of the drawing on page 39 stands the blunt face of the chalk cliffs; on the left, the incoming waves play round a few broken stumps of rock. Between the cliffs and the spectator there is a small bay in which some fishermen’s boats ride on the rising tide. The waves play prettily with the boats, but these are carefully tethered fore and aft, thus showing that their owners have learnt to mistrust the gracefully advancing waters. In the distance the cold dark volume of sea seems to justify these suspicions. Gradually a sense of the sternness of the eternal conflict between the sea and the dry land impresses itself on our minds. The whole coast seems in the clutch of a ruthless and never-resting foe. In some scenes the high cliffs seem to stand proudly and defiantly in the water; here they are in full retreat, the havoc of the foreground proving that the soft chalk is crumbling at the touch of its pitiless enemy.

And now we can see the usefulness of the discipline and training of topographical draughtsmanship. Confronted with a scene like this, which powerfully stirs his emotions, the artist is not forced to remain dumb; he has an organ of expression ready to his hand. The supple pencil-point hurries its suggestive outlines over the paper. There is yet time to add some record of the more delicate passages of modelling, and to suggest something of the colour of the water and cliffs. The artist’s brush is as docile as his pencil. There is no experimental blotting and splashing; every touch is expressive, and the pressure of haste only adds greater certainty to the swift touches. The artist has to stop before he has tinted half his paper, but he has torn out the heart of his subject.

Leaving the Isle of Wight, Turner made his way to South Wales, passing through Wells. The scenery of South Wales is of a wilder description than that of the Isle of Wight, and it must have touched his imagination profoundly. But thanks to his ready science, his hand never falters; all the ruined castles and abbeys, the water-mills and water-falls, the details of the rocky coast-line, the white-crested waves and tangled forests, are bundled with celerity into neat little outlines and stored ready for future use. Among the subjects are the castles of Kidwelly, Carew, Laugharne, Llanstephen and Goodrich, and they are drawn as they had never before been drawn or will be again. One of the views of Carew Castle will serve the artist thirty years later when he comes to treat this subject for his ‘England and Wales’ series. But to me the most significant drawing in

PLATE VIII

MELINCOURT FALL, VALE OF NEATH

PENCIL, PART IX WATER COLOUR, 1793

the book is the waterfall on page 8. The whole subject is drawn in with the pencil as usual, and then just the most important part is finished in water-colour. This piece of water-colour work is an admirable example of Turner’s sensitiveness to impressions, his quickness and readiness, and the adaptability of his methods. The rocks and the crystalline facets of the water at the top of the fall are painted in with sharp staccato touches, while the skilful dragging of the dry brush suggests the dissolving of the water into spray with extraordinary vivacity.

This drawing forms our eighth illustration, though no reproduction can do justice to it. Mr. Ruskin admired the work warmly, and it formed part of the selection he made for the Oxford Loan Collection. He named the drawing the ‘High Force of Tees,’ but I believe this description to be incorrect. In the sketch-book the leaf on which the drawing is made follows immediately a drawing of the water-mill at Aberdulâs, and a note made on the fly-leaf of the book, written by Turner for his own guidance on the tour, mentions that the ‘Rocks and Water-fall’ near Aberdulâs were ‘well worth attention.’ The nearest waterfall to Aberdulâs is the cascade formed by the river Clydach, known as the Fall of Melincourt. I have therefore ventured to substitute this title for Mr. Ruskin’s ‘High Force of Tees.’

An artist so sensitive to the subtlety and mystery of natural scenery, as these sketch-books show Turner to have been, and one so unusually gifted to express these qualities, could not long be confined within the prosaic limits of topographical and antiquarian work.

CHAPTER III
THE SUBLIME—1797-1802

Change from pure form to light and shade—‘Millbank’ and ‘Ewenny Priory’—Contrast between ‘Ewenny’ and ‘Llandaff’—The transition from objectivity to subjectivity—The growth of taste for the Sublime—There are no sublime objects, but only objects of sublime feeling—No guidance but from art—The Wilson tradition—The two elements in the sketches and studies of this period, (1) The study of Nature, and (2) The assimilation of the Wilson tradition—In the 1797 sketches these two operations are kept distinct—The North of England tour and its record—‘Studies for Pictures: Copies of Wilson’—The two operations begin to coalesce in the 1798 and 1799 sketches—The origin of ‘Jason’—The Scotch (1801) and Swiss (1802) tours.

THERE is an evident connection between such a study of light and shade as the ‘Interior of a Cottage’ (406 National Gallery) and at least two of the exhibits in the exhibition of 1797. One of these, the ‘Moonlight, a study at Millbank,’ was probably Turner’s first exhibited oil painting; the other, ‘Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire,’ I am inclined to regard as the first drawing in which the budding genius of the young artist was authoritatively announced. It is impossible to be sure whether the direction of Turner’s attention to the subtler problems of light and shade led him to turn to oil painting as a more suitable medium for the expression of such effects, or whether his resolution to explore the resources of the more complex medium had the effect of directing his attention to the expressional qualities of light and shade. The ‘Millbank’ bears on its face the evidence of Dutch influence (Van der Neer, Van Goyen, etc.) as well as of inexperience of the technical requirements of the new medium. This inexperience renders the work

PLATE IX

INTERIOR OF RIPON CATHEDRAL: NORTH TRANSEPT

PENCIL. 1797

insignificant with regard to the development of the artist’s personality, but the bent of his mind towards the mystery and expressiveness of darkness is notable.

In the water-colour of ‘Ewenny Priory’—now one of the chief treasures of the Cardiff Art Gallery (Pyke-Thompson Bequest)—Turner’s genius is less hampered by technical difficulties. If this be indeed the drawing that was exhibited in 1797[7] it shows an amazingly rapid development in the artist’s powers, especially when we compare it with the ‘Llandaff Cathedral’ (790, National Gallery), which was exhibited only twelve months earlier. The ‘Llandaff’ is merely the work of a clever and skilful topographical draughtsman, the ‘Ewenny’ is the work of a powerful imaginative artist. The gloomy interior of the Norman ruin is no longer an object to be measured, dated, classified and labelled. It is no longer an ‘interesting specimen’ that we have set before us. The artist has now broken with the ordinary, every-day world of sense-experience, and we plunge with him into the world of the imagination, where objects are no longer separated from and held over against the self; they now throb and tingle with our own emotional life.

This change of aim—we may speak of it for the sake of brevity as the change from objectivity to subjectivity—is accompanied by a change of method in the workmanship of the two drawings. In the ‘Llandaff’ (as in the ‘Lincoln’) the forms of all the objects are made out with the greatest possible clearness. When the artist has told us as clearly and precisely as possible the exact shape of every object from his chosen point of view, we feel that he has done all that he set out to do, and all that we can reasonably demand from him. Then these objects are left standing side by side in relative independence of each other and of us; they have no necessary connection one with the other, like the parts of a piece of music, or the points of an argument. Their only bond of union is the abstract one of space. The whole effect is of something severed from direct experience; the objects represented have an unreal air of permanence and immutability, with something of the intellectual coldness and aloofness of a diagram or mathematical symbol.

In the ‘Ewenny’ drawing we are brought into contact with objects which have not yet been severed from the emotional colouring of immediate experience. Instead of a series of abstract spatial determinations, appealing only to the abstract understanding, we now have a presentation fraught with the infinite suggestiveness of living, sensible experience. Each object represented is now no longer held over against the self as something alien, something indifferent to and independent of humanity, like the laws of the physical sciences; each object has now become merely a moment in the affective life of an individual. It therefore touches our own feelings, challenges our hopes and fears, appeals intimately to our sympathies with the contagion of the emotions of an actual companion. We cannot remain indifferent to such an appeal if we would. Unless our nerves tingle as the eye plunges from the familiar objects of the foreground into the gloom beyond, the picture has not begun to exist for us. But immediately it touches our inner life into responsive activity the picture becomes transformed from so much indifferent paper and pigment into an aspect of our own affective life. We have caught the contagion of the artist’s emotional experience, in which the objects of his representation were submerged.

I am far from wishing to suggest that the distinction between the two kinds of art which I have endeavoured to indicate is either very obvious or easy to grasp. But it is, I am convinced, a very real and a very weighty distinction, and as such is worthy of the most careful study. But, however carefully we study the matter, and however profoundly convinced we may be that the distinction is firmly grounded in the essential nature of art itself, yet we can never hope to describe it in the precise terms of the exact sciences. We can never hope to understand the exact nature of the ties which bind the expressive symbols of Romantic art to the echoes they awaken with mathematical certainty in the breast of each individual. The problem of the relation between thought and feeling still agitates the rival schools of philosophy, and this is not the place to discuss such matters. What is immediately important

PLATE X

CONWAY FALLS, NEAR BETTWYS-Y-COED

WATER COLOUR, ABOUT 1798

for us is to see that Turner’s art has passed from one stage of growth to another, and to realise for ourselves as best we can the nature of this progression. To me it seems clear that the line of Turner’s personal development is following roughly the line upon which the artistic faculty of mankind has developed; that the transition from topography to the stage we have now entered upon coincides in part with the movement from Classic to Romantic art, from the art which is in bondage to the world of external reality, to the art which moves and has its being in the inner world of our ideas and feelings. The ‘Llandaff’ and ‘Lincoln’ belong to the classic (or the pseudo-classic, if you will) art of the eighteenth century, while the ‘Ewenny’ inaugurates the Romantic art of the nineteenth century. On its technical side the change is from form to tone, from a system of predominantly unemotional space-determinations to a medium which is more immediately in contact with the inward feeling of all self-conscious beings.

In moving from the Augustan point of view towards the Romantic, Turner was but walking in an already well-beaten track. During the last half-century the influence of Milton had been growing, the taste for the gloomy, the mysterious and the picturesque had found expression in Young’s Night Thoughts, in Gray’s Elegy, in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and had found critical exponents in Warton’s History of English Poetry, and in Burke’s Essay On the Sublime and Beautiful, (1756). Dr. Percy’s Reliques had found many readers and admirers, and Macpherson’s Ossian had stirred the enthusiasm of Europe. In painting Richard Wilson and De Loutherbourg had struck the same note of gloomy grandeur.

Now the essence of this kind of art—the Sublime—is not merely to strike the spectator dumb with amazement or terror, but also to make him feel that man’s moral freedom is superior to the most terrible forces of Nature.[8] The mere representation of the fearful and terrible sights of inorganic nature is therefore not by itself enough to evoke a feeling of the sublime; before he can do this the artist must also excite in the spectator the consciousness of his power to overcome or resist such objects. It is therefore a purely subjective feeling that the artist has to represent, though this feeling is directed towards or centred round a certain definite series of objects. But these objects as coloured with the strength and resolution of the heroic mood—the mood of Kant’s animi strenui[9]—cannot properly be said to exist as natural objects. The real subject of the artist’s work is therefore, strictly speaking, the invisible and the intangible, a mere mood of the soul, an attitude of our own mind towards certain objects of thought.

Of course we should all have been justified before the feat had been accomplished, in declaring that it was impossible for pictorial art to paint the invisible, but now that it has been accomplished we have no alternative but to recognise the fact. Common-sense says the thing is impossible, and experience proves to us that common-sense is wrong. The careful student of modern criticism will know how splendidly Mr. Ruskin fought against experience in this matter and how he was worsted. I am really sorry for common-sense. To paint the invisible and intangible—it is a hard nut to crack. But I protest we have no choice in the matter. The thing is there before us. It is a pity it is not quite so simple and easy as we should like it to be, but it is best, I think, to face the difficulties honestly.

Turner’s problem, then, as a painter of the sublime, was one in which the mere study of natural objects could not help him. He might search out the most fearful sights in nature, watch the loftiest waterfall of the mightiest river, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes, lightning flashes and storms, but these objects alone, though they might stimulate his feeling of moral freedom, could not show him how to express this faculty of moral resistance which ‘gives us,’ as Kant says, ‘the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.’[10] There was no help for Turner in this task but in the works of those artists who had succeeded in expressing such emotions, and it was to Wilson and De Loutherbourg that Turner went, not to learn how to represent natural objects as such, but to learn how to use such objects as the media of inward perceptions and ideas. De Loutherbourg’s influence was mainly in the direction of rhodomontade and melodrama, but Wilson’s, though not

PLATE XI

CONWAY CASTLE

PENCIL. ABOUT 1798

devoid of danger, led Turner safely into the enchanted regions of romance.

The three chief expressive—as distinguished from representative—factors in Wilson’s work are darkness of tone, the scheme of colour, and the quality of the paint. I am inclined to think that the general darkness of Wilson’s pictures is the necessary result of the kind of subjects he treated. The darkness is necessary to tune the mind of the spectator to gloomy and tragic thoughts,—to spread over his mind what Johnson calls ‘a general obscurity of sacred horror, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.’ In his worst pictures this darkness of key readily passes into emptiness and blackness; but in his best pictures this darkness ranges through a gamut of subdued and glowing colour, which relieves the gloom and comforts us as it were in our distress. The tone and colour are thus to some extent determined by the character of the objects represented; the tone by their general emotional effect, and the colour scheme as conditioned by the tone, though controlled within rather wide limits by the natural colours of the objects represented. But the third element, the quality of the paint, seems altogether independent of the objects represented. It seems to reveal only the artist’s attitude towards these objects. It is as thoroughly subjective as the emotional vibration in the voice of an excited speaker. Under this term, the quality of the paint, I include all the immediate presentative elements of painting, the thickness or thinness of the impasto, the way the paint is put on, the signs of the brushwork, everything, in short, that tells us how the artist felt towards the objects he was representing.

The main object of Turner’s study during the period we are dealing with was the assimilation of the Wilson tradition, his study of the facts of Nature, simply as facts, falling into the second place. For a time the two lines of study are kept distinct. On the one hand, the work of neat and systematic note-taking face to face with nature is continued, and on the other hand, a number of studies aiming at the embodiment of the artist’s subjective attitude make their appearance. The final synthesis of the two factors, the without and the within, is of course only arrived at in the finished work of art, but the contents of the sketch-books of this period fall easily apart, according as they lean either in the direction of the particular facts or in the direction of the emotional synthesis.

The drawings made during the tour in the north of England, which Turner made in the summer of 1797, belong almost entirely to the first kind. In one sketch-book we find most of the more important ruined abbeys and castles of Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland drawn with the most delightful ease, accuracy, and charm. Here we have Kirkstall Abbey drawn from every available point of view, Ripon Cathedral, studied both without and within, Barnard and Richmond Castles, Dunstanborough, Bamborough, Durham Castle and Cathedral, Warkworth, Lindisfarne and Norham. The drawing of the interior of Ripon Cathedral, reproduced as Plate [IX.], is merely an average example of the kind of work that Turner now seemed to produce without the slightest effort. The most complicated structure and detail now presented no difficulties to his well-trained eye and hand. The ease with which he mastered all the material forms that met his eye may have left his mind at leisure to enjoy the moral atmosphere of the buildings, may have left his imagination free to range backward over its past history; but there is no trace of emotion or imagination in the graceful play of these clear-cut, accurate, and methodical outlines.

Melrose Abbey formed the highest point north in this journey. Leaving Melrose, Turner struck across to Cumberland, no doubt passing through Carlisle to Keswick. After the bustle and noise of much of the northward half of his journey, the peace and quiet of the English lakes must have been noticeable. In looking through the hundred or more pencil sketches made at Keswick, Buttermere, Ullswater, Patterdale, Windermere, Coniston, etc., one is struck by the absence of the conventional note of Romantic horror. There is no trace of what used to be called the bold and appalling singularities of nature.[11] There is indeed a marked absence of human activity in these drawings. We are alone with

PLATE XII

RUINED CASTLE ON HILL

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1798

nature, but nature’s aspect is generally peaceful and friendly. The mountains are high, but we enjoy climbing them and the fine views we get there. Their shapes above all interest us immensely. They do not strike us at all as appalling singularities, but as replete with an infinite grace and variety, under which we feel a fundamental reasonableness, an intuitive sense of intelligible design. And then there are not only the bare shapes, but their wonderful clothing of light and shade; the play of the gleams of sunlight and the long shadows across the deep bosoms of the hills, and the games the wreaths of mist and cloud play with the distant mountain-tops, and the wild races of the mountain-torrents over their favourite tracks. Occasionally there is time for more than the regulation pencil outline. Then the brush and a few colours come out, and a stretch of the distance wakes from its cold abstraction into life. Such sketches as ‘The Head of Derwentwater, with Lodore Falls and the entrance to Borrowdale,’ the ‘Hills of Glaramara,’ and ‘Buttermere Lake’ (Exhibited Drawings, No. 696), were produced in this way. In these we see beautiful effects of mist, with the sun playing through them, noted with subtle sympathy and accuracy, but the general effect is not at all gloomy; it is rather one of peace, serenity, and gladness.

This is the raw material out of which Turner set to work in the autumn and winter of 1797 to manufacture some important oil pictures full of gloom and wrath. The young artist reminds me of Johnson’s acquaintance who had resolved to be a philosopher, but found his native cheerfulness always breaking through. Turner’s unaffected delight in Nature certainly stood in the way of his aspiration towards the sublime. But he was not a man to be easily thwarted. We can trace in the pictures exhibited in 1798 the conflict between the elements given in perception and the subjective requirements of the artist, but by sheer diligence and strength of will he succeeded in moulding his cheerful perceptions into concepts full of gloom and horror. The picture of ‘Buttermere’ (N.G., at present on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter) is based on a pale and delicately-charming water-colour drawing (696, N.G.), but little of the charm or delicacy of the original sketch survives in the oil painting, which is ruthlessly swamped in more than Wilsonian blackness. He succeeded best where the record of his perceptions was slightest. There are several sketches of Norham Castle, but they are all in pencil and very slight. For some reason or other the artist was evidently in a hurry. Perhaps partly because of this insufficient note-taking, here was a favourable subject round which his imagination was free to play, unhampered by any very clearly determined immediate perceptions. The picture of Norham Castle, exhibited at Somerset House in 1798, was Turner’s first distinct success in this kind of work, and he repeated the subject several times.

A small green-covered pocket-book, which still bears Turner’s label, ‘Studies for Pictures: Copies of Wilson,’ gives us a glimpse of the processes by which the sights of nature were converted into works of art. Here we see the subjective impulses of the artist struggling into expression; the artist’s love of gorgeous colour and dramatic effect nourishing itself and forging a material form for its own support. Among the designs in this interesting little book are several marine and coast subjects, a shipwreck, an interior of a forge with men busy casting an anchor, some river scenes, a rainbow standing over a dark city, several church interiors, and some studies of turbulent skies. It is difficult to distinguish Turner’s studies for his own pictures from his copies of Wilson, but one of the drawings is probably a copy of Wilson’s ‘Morning,’ and another, of his ‘Bridge of Augustus at Rimini.’ I have not been able to see either of these original pictures, so as to compare them with Turner’s copy, but a comparison of the copy with the engraving by Joseph Farington, published by Boydell, shows some important discrepancies in the arrangement of the light and shade. The character of these discrepancies leads one to suppose that they were not made intentionally by Turner, but were the result of his attempt to reproduce the general effect of the picture from memory. He may have made a slight pencil sketch of the picture in some gallery, and washed in the general effect afterwards from memory.

This is, of course, only a supposition, but it is somewhat strengthened by examination of a larger and more elaborate copy of Wilson’s ‘Landscape with Figures,’ a picture now in the National Gallery (No. 1290). That Turner’s water-colour is intended to be a copy is proved by the endorsement on its back—‘Study from Wilson,’

PLATE XIII

STUDY OF FALLEN TREES

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1798

PLATE XIV

CAERNARVON CASTLE.

PENCIL. 1799

but when we compare it with the original we find that the various discrepancies in the copy can only be accounted for by supposing that Turner was working to a considerable extent from memory. I admit the evidence is not conclusive, but I do not think we shall be far wrong if we take it that Turner did not at this time make any elaborate copies of Wilson’s pictures, but that he studied them closely and enthusiastically, and relied more upon his memory than his notes.

In the sketches made during the following years we find that these two separate operations show a tendency to coalesce. Turner has evidently taken a dislike to his earlier map-making style, and tries hard to see nature like Wilson. His sketches from nature become slighter and more hurried. In his efforts towards breadth he comes very near emptiness, and in his attempts to get away from his neat bit-by-bit style of work he often comes near downright clumsiness and carelessness.

The summers of 1798 and 1799 were largely spent in North Wales. Here he found exactly the material that chimed in with the mood of sternness and gloom he wished to express: steep, convulsive mountains, wild valleys and broken passes, the bare skeletonlike ribs of broken ships aground on lonely estuaries, massive ruins of huge castles perched on inaccessible crags, gnawed to the bone as it were by the wind and rain and remorseless Time.

His mental grasp has clearly broadened. He no longer sees buildings as isolated objects, but they now fall into their places as incidents in the wide panorama of the country. Nothing is now drawn for itself; the trees are emanations from the ground, the dry land and the waters are kinsmen, the stones in the foreground are parts of the distant mountains, and the mountains huge elder brothers of the pebbles by the river-side. The bubbling waters are but clouds made captive, the clouds the freed souls of the brooks, the trees the organ of their transformation; and castles like Conway, standing with their roots plunged deep into their rocky foundations, seem but rocks raised to a higher power. The distinction between human art and physical nature is everywhere broken down. The spirit of life in nature is identified with the volitions and passions of the artist’s own soul: he has become sensible ‘to the moods of time and season, to the moral power, the affections and the spirit of the place.’[12]

This state of mind is closely akin to the mood in which the myths of the Old World had taken shape. Small wonder, then, if the broken and withered branches of a stricken tree writhing among vigorously shooting brushwood should suggest to Turner’s mobile fancy the idea of snakes and dragons. The sketch here reproduced (Plate [XIII.]) strikes me as probably the origin of the picture of ‘Jason’ which was exhibited in 1802.

In 1800 or 1801 Turner made a tour through the Highlands of Scotland. The immediate results were slightly disappointing, but the experience gained undoubtedly contributed to the effectiveness of the work done during the first visit to Switzerland, made in 1802. In the Scotch sketches Turner had hit upon a method of working that enabled him to cover a great deal of ground in a short space of time, and which had the additional advantage of exercising his memory, and of making his sketches from nature more like the first draughts of his finished pictures than like so many unfused notes or memoranda. All the more promising scenes he met with were sketched slightly in chalk upon large sheets of paper prepared with a wash of light brown. These sketches were seldom carried far before the actual scenes, but as soon after as was convenient—possibly at the inn in the evening—these skeletons were filled up from the artist’s retentive memory and ever-ready invention. In this way he was able to fortify himself against the multiplicity of nature’s irrelevant facts, and to find a ready form of expression for the reaction of his own mind upon the sights of nature.

Colour was very little used in the Scotch sketches, all the larger drawings—numbering, I think, between forty and fifty—being worked entirely in black and white. But a considerable number of the Swiss drawings are coloured, though, I believe, none of them directly from nature. Turner’s procedure in the case of these drawings appears to have been practically the same as with the Scotch series, but after the skeleton sketch from nature had been elaborated with pencil and white and black chalk, colour was sometimes resorted to, less as a record of facts

PLATE XV

CASSIOBURY: NORTH WEST VIEW

FRENCH. ABOUT 1800.

PLATE XVI

BLAIR’S HUT ON THE MONTANVERT AND MER DE GLACE

WATER COLOUR. 1802

of local colour, than as an additional instrument of expression of the subjective mood. Among the drawings elaborated in this way are the sketches upon which several of the Farnley drawings (the large ‘Mer de Glace, Chamounix,’ ‘Falls of the Reichenbach,’ ‘Pass of St. Gothard,’ ‘Blair’s Hut, Mer de Glace,’[13] etc.), were based. In some cases the finished works are less impressive than the first sketches, which are almost overpowering in their concentrated vehemence and gloomy majesty. But we must beware of regarding these as simple sketches from nature. They are more strictly studies for pictures than sketches from nature, and it is hardly too much to say that they owe more of their energetic emotional appeal to the Wilson tradition, which Turner had by this time thoroughly assimilated, than to the immediate inspiration of nature.

CHAPTER IV
THE SEA-PAINTER—1802-1809

Connection between marine painting and the sublime—Turner’s first marine subjects—The ‘Bridgewater sea-piece’—‘Meeting of the Thames and Medway’—‘Our landing at Calais’ and ‘Calais Pier’—‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’—‘Guisborough Shore’ and ‘Dunbar’ sketch-books—‘The Shipwreck’—‘At the Mouth of the Thames’—‘The Nore,’ ‘Sheerness,’ etc.—‘Death of Nelson.’

WE have studied in the preceding chapter the first phase of Turner’s genuinely creative work. We have seen the artist tear himself free from the trammels of the prosaic understanding, with its clear-cut distinctions between external nature and subjective thought and feeling, and plunge whole-heartedly into the concrete world of the poetic imagination. The accomplished draughtsman of the visible has developed into the perfervid poet of the invisible. Objective reality, as such, is shattered and trampled ruthlessly underfoot.

‘Woe! woe!
Thou hast destroy’d
The beautiful world
With violent blow
’Tis shiver’d! ’tis shatter’d!
The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter’d!
Now we sweep
The wrecks into nothingness!
Fondly we weep
The beauty that’s gone!
Thou, ’mongst the sons of earth,
Lofty and mighty one,
Build it once more!
In thine own bosom the lost world restore!’

The distinction between percipient and object is brushed aside, and the external world becomes the medium and the means of manifestation of inward perceptions and ideas. How far the external world can be built up again in the bosom of the self-conscious subject depends largely upon the opportunities and genius of the individual.

In pictures like the ‘Kilgarran Castle,’ ‘Norham Castle,’ and ‘The Trossachs’—to take perhaps the three most successful works of the kind of art we have been studying—the mind only partially coalesces with its objects. Such art only deals with a limited range of subject-matter, and it treats its objects rather as foils to the contemplative mind than as having significance and worth in themselves. The terrors of inorganic nature are not represented for their own sake, but are paraded to mark the triumph of the moral freedom that rises superior to them. The artist is therefore forced to do violence to external nature, to subdue it and degrade it into a symbol of what is antagonistic in his own conscious experience. Yet by sheer force of artistic treatment all this hostile and negative matter is brought within the realm of art, and made into an object in which the self-scrutinising spirit of man finds itself mirrored.

But the sublime lies only on the threshold of beauty. It succeeds, in so far as it does attain its effect, only by making extreme demands upon the acquired culture and reasoning powers of the spectator. The sublime cannot be adequately represented by any sensuous object, but the very inadequacy of these objects can stir up and evoke this feeling in the properly prepared spectator.

There are ampler possibilities of beauty in the realm of the sea painter. At first sight it may seem that the change is merely a change from one region of inorganic nature to another, from rocks, torrents and glaciers, to the stormy and impetuous sea. But if we examine the substance of Turner’s marine pictures carefully, we find that they contain elements which lend themselves more readily to a systematic unity in sensuous form. In his mountainous pieces Turner found room for very little immediate human interest. Man and his everyday occupations are banished from the steep and rocky places he chooses to represent, as incompatible with the gloomy, awe-struck feeling he wishes to evoke. The only immediate link with the feelings and interests of those for whom he worked which these pictures contained, was the shattered masonry of a castle built in the recesses of the past by men long since dead, but whose purposes and fate still awoke echoes in the historical imagination of the present. In his marine subjects Turner entered more closely into relation with the substantive interests of his time. During the Napoleonic wars the sea had come to be recognised as the chief safeguard of the nation. The dangers of the sea, the courage and skill of her sailors, were England’s only bulwarks against the invincible legions of Napoleon. The gathering of the French armies of invasion along the shores of Brittany, the flotillas of gun-boats and flat-bottomed boats safely moored at Boulogne and Ambleteuse, focussed the attention of the nation upon a point outside the limited and varying interests of the individual citizen, and united them all in the same community of hopes and fears. The existence and welfare of the nation were at stake, the need of self-sacrifice was felt, and the individual became animated with the common sentiments of the nation. The stress of circumstance woke up what I may call the merely physical and material nation into a self-conscious spiritual unity, thinking the same thoughts and throbbing with the same emotions.

At such a moment the poet’s and the artist’s task is made comparatively easy. Their individual experiences are charged with a universal import; their art rises to the dignity of a public function. They have only to be true to their own impulses to realise the absolute beauty of eternal life. And it was happily at such a moment in the life of the English nation that Turner wearied of his ruined castles and terrifying mountains—of the picturesque in general—and devoted himself to marine painting.

The list of Turner’s exhibited works shows that he was early drawn to the sea and sailors. In 1796 he exhibited a drawing called ‘Fishermen at Sea,’ the next year another entitled ‘Fishermen coming Ashore at Sunset, previous to a Gale,’ and in 1799 there were two oil pictures, one of ‘The Battle of the Nile,’ and the other of ‘Fishermen Becalmed previous to a Storm—Twilight.’ I have not, unfortunately, been able to see any of these works, but some studies and drawings in the National Gallery made about 1796 show that Turner began his career as a marine painter under

PLATE XVII

STUDY FOR THE “BRIDGEWATER SEA PIECE” PEN AND INK, WASH, AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT 1801

PLATE XVIII

STUDY OF A BARGE WITH SAILS SET

PEN AND INK, WASH, AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT 1802

the marked influence of Rowlandson, George Morland and De Loutherbourg. There is one animated little drawing with brown ink outlines of sailors getting some obstreperous pigs on board a small coasting vessel in a strong gale of wind. Apparently the cart has been driven into the sea beside the vessel, an impossible feat in such a sea; the sea must also be too deep for the wheels of the cart to rest on the ground, and if the wheels touch the bottom there is not enough water for the two boats. But in spite of these minor defects the subject provides scope for a fine animated group of men in the cart struggling with the pigs, who have determined to precipitate themselves into the water rather than go where they are wanted.

That Turner was not altogether satisfied with his design is proved by the existence of two other versions of the same subject. In one of these the motive of the cart in the sea has been abandoned. The cart is now placed in the foreground on the beach, and the rearing horses and struggling and shouting men are clearly inspired by Rowlandson’s and De Loutherbourg’s treatment of similar themes. These drawings are in pencil outline only, but there is also a rather elaborate water-colour of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to the rocks, with huge glassy-coloured waves in the manner of De Loutherbourg.

Turner’s unfamiliarity with the sea no doubt accounted to some extent for its attraction. His imagination was here free to disport itself untrammelled by the bonds of experience, and safe from the irksome yoke of the familiar. When we come to study Turner’s first important sea-piece, the fine picture in the Bridgewater House collection of ‘Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen endeavouring to put their Fish on Board’—first exhibited in 1801, we can see how little art is bound to depend upon the individual artist’s personal experience. Turner had painted landscapes before he knew the country, and buildings before he had seen them, so now he paints sea-pieces before he has been to sea. There is no evidence to show that he had ventured out of sight of land before 1802, and then it was only to cross the Channel from Dover to Calais. But before this he had exhibited not only the Bridgewater picture to which I have referred, but a large ‘Battle of the Nile’ (1799), Lord Iveagh’s superb ‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’ (1802), and the almost equally fine ‘Ships bearing up for Anchorage’ (1802), in the Petworth gallery.

It is true that he had used to the uttermost the few opportunities which had fallen in his way of observing the sea from the shore, and that he had some little experience of ships and sailors in rivers and on the coast. (See, for example, the series of sketches of boats’ crews towing men-of-war in the River Usk, in the ‘Cyfarthfa’ Sketch-Book of 1798.) What direct knowledge of this kind he possessed he naturally used, but there can be no doubt that the main body of his knowledge as well as inspiration was derived not at first-hand, but indirectly, at first, through the pictures of English painters like De Loutherbourg, and later, through the pictures and drawings of the Dutch sea-painters. The point is worth the attention of those who treat the close connection between art and nature which happens to exist just at present as an inherent characteristic of pictorial art, and make much of this supposed characteristic in opposition to the freedom of music. When we cease to keep our attention riveted on the naturalistic art of the present, we soon find indications that the essential forms of pictorial art are as much independent constructions of the creative mind as the forms of music.

In the group of studies for pictures of the sea which are related to the Duke of Bridgewater’s picture, we see Turner playing with pictorial forms with as much freedom as a musician plays with his notes. The horizontal line of the sea, the heaving waves, the masses of light and dark in the sky, the stolid forms of the big ships, the instability of the smaller boats,—these are notes which Turner never seems wearied of evoking, and weaving into ever fresh combinations. The demands of mere representation count for almost nothing in these entrancing drawings. The artist draws simply because he loves his artistic symbols, loves weaving them into designs, and because his gift of melodic invention is inexhaustible.

The group of drawings to which I refer seems to have been made originally in a small book, solidly bound in calf. On one of the covers Turner has printed boldly in ink ‘Studies P,’ and ‘Shipping,’ which means, doubtless, Studies for Pictures of Shipping. The paper is blue with a coarse surface, similar to

PLATE XIX

FISHERMEN LAUNCHING A BOAT IN A ROUGH SEA

PEN AND INK AND WASH. ABOUT 1802

PLATE XX

STUDY FOR “SUN RISING THROUGH VAPOUR”

BLACK AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT 1804

that commonly used by students in the French ateliers, and known as Michallet paper. The designs were generally roughly pencilled in, and were then carried further in pen and ink, with bold washes of Indian ink. White chalk was also freely used. The book was in use before 1799, as it contains a number of studies for the painter’s diploma picture of Dolbadarn Castle. These studies are made in coloured chalks, most of them still very effective, although they have wasted a good deal of their force upon the pages that have been pressed down over them. This is, I believe, one of the few occasions on which Turner has been known to work in pastel. Doubtless many of the shipping designs were never carried out, but among them there are studies for the large water-colour of Carnarvon Castle exhibited in 1800, and for the two water-colours of Pembroke Castle, one (now belonging to Mrs. Pitt Miller), exhibited in 1801, and the other (the glorious one now belonging to Mr. Ralph Brocklebank), exhibited in 1806.

But the actual studies for the ‘Bridgewater Sea-piece’ were made in a much larger book, a book which seems to have been devoted at first to the purpose of making life studies at the Academy classes. But it contains only about half a dozen drawings of this kind, while about sixty pages are devoted to studies of pictures, some historical, like the ‘Deluge,’ etc., but most of them sea-pieces. The paper is coarse blue, like the smaller book, the size of the leaves being 17 × 10½ inches, and most of the studies are continued over the two open pages. Throughout the book one recognises a certain sense of pride and exaltation in the mere size of the paper, and in the unchecked freedom with which the artist’s hand and imagination could disport themselves.

One of the earliest studies for the ‘Bridgewater Sea-piece’ represents simply a straight line of sea with two ships on it in the distance, one foreshortened, the other in profile. In the extreme distance is a line of white chalk suggesting a strip of sunlight on a distant coast. The idea is so bald and empty and so unlike the final result that one would not connect the study with the picture did it not bear Turner’s inscription, ‘Duke’s Picture,’ in the margin.

The next study shows that Turner’s mind is occupied with the idea of filling up the emptiness of the middle distance and foreground. On the left we have two fishing-boats pitching to the right in shadow, while the two frigates ride at anchor in the distance, very much as in the first sketch. The two groups are united simply by the cast shadow on the water thrown by the fishing-boats in the direction of the frigates (Plate [XVII.]).

The next study shows the artist trying to find a more interesting way of uniting the two groups. Here the two motives are tied together as it were by a small rowing-boat with men in it half hidden in the trough of the waves. The group of fishing-boats is also slightly altered, their sails accentuating their common swaying motion. In this drawing the various objects are no longer juxtaposed in a seemingly casual or arbitrary way. A subtle bond of union has sprung up between them. The rowing-boat rocks the reverse way to that of the large group of sailing vessels. The two rocking motions reinforce and explain one another. The movement of each gains in vividness, and they both increase the intensity of our perception of the steadiness and weight of the boat riding at anchor out there on the right. In this way the sea comes to life in its effects, and the design is ready to be transferred to the canvas and for further elaboration.

This playing with our feelings of equilibrium and movement constitutes one of the prime factors of Turner’s enjoyment in his earlier sea-pieces. He is taking possession of his new realm, getting his sea-legs as it were. We see this plainly in the beautiful little picture of ‘The Meeting of the Thames and Medway’ in the National Gallery. (This is a small version of the larger picture now in America. There is also another equally fine small version in the University Galleries, Oxford.) The strong heaving wave on which the buoy dances in the foreground sets the main motive of the picture—the play of wind and waves—clearly forward. The small boat with the four men in it is flung sideways and upward. We feel it as the light plaything of the heavy waves. In the middle distance there are two groups of heavier craft with sails set, one group, on the left, coming straight towards us, the other group scudding straight across the picture plane, just about to disappear out of the frame on the right. The dancing buoy and the light rowing-boat in the foreground make us feel at once the

PLATE XXI

STUDY FOR “THE SHIPWRECK”

PEN AND INK AND WASH. ABOUT 1805

weight and bulk of these sailing hoys. We feel them settling down in the mettlesome sea, gripping it tight as a rider grips his horse with his knees, while they fling out their sails to the wind. They are like living, panting, quivering animals. In the far distance rides a large frigate at anchor, and the firm base line of the horizon might stand as a symbol of the self-possession, strength of will, and unity of the conscious self, which delights in differences, while never entirely losing itself in the multifarious maze of experience.

In our sketch-book there are some of the undeveloped germs of this picture. In these sketches parts of the design have been firmly grasped, but the whole movement has not yet come to light. In the fine drawing running across pages 90 and 91, for example, the action of the two scurrying hoys on the right, together with the rocking boat in the foreground, is clearly marked. But there is nothing to counterbalance the swift rush of these boats. If we look at this study with the remembrance of the final design in our minds we feel there is something missing. We want the heavy waddling hoys on the left coming towards us, with their hulls jammed deep in the waves; we want something to give us a sense of solidity, something, as it were, to hold on to, to steady ourselves in the sway and rush.

All these trial sketches, this laborious piecing together of the designs, suggest that Turner was not trying to realise something that he had actually seen. No doubt this was the case, yet we must not hastily conclude that he was simply making it all up out of his head, as the common saying runs. His smaller sketch-books show that he had constantly watched such scenes. The object of his trial sketches was therefore to find an adequately expressive form which would do justice to the wealth of his experience. He was not trying simply to make an abstractly beautiful composition. His task was rather to knit together into conceptual unity his wide range of experience, and then to body this forth in a carefully selected and articulated sequence of sensuous signs.

But some of the pages of the book in which the sketches referred to above occur, prove that the well-known picture of ‘Calais Pier’ is in the main an attempt to realise a scene that Turner had actually witnessed. On pages 58 and 59 there is a vigorous drawing in black and white chalk inscribed ‘Our landing at Calais—nearly swampt.’ The packet boat had evidently had a rough crossing, and now the passengers are being landed in boats with considerable difficulty. In this sketch the boat seems to have stuck on the harbour bar, and, beyond, the packet which the passengers have just left is lowering its mainsail. Another sketch shows the small boat flung finally on the shore with the passengers struggling among the surf. The picture is no doubt an attempt to realise the scene which presented itself immediately on the arrival of the packet boat, before the passengers began to land. This was Turner’s general idea, but the composition had to be invented and appropriate details found to sustain and reinforce the main idea.

This incident occurred in 1802, and we have to go back to the previous year to find what seem to me the materials used in the construction of Lord Iveagh’s superb ‘Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather,’ a picture that will be fresh in the public mind, as it formed one of the chief attractions at the exhibition of English pictures at the Franco-British Exhibition held in London last year (1908). Two little pocket-books, used during Turner’s journey to the Scotch lakes, are filled with drawings of the heavy billows of the North Sea thundering on a lee shore. The first book was used on the Yorkshire coast, the other on the wild coast between Berwick and Edinburgh. The Yorkshire book bears Turner’s label, ‘Guisborough Shore,’ on the back. It consists of a small number of pages of coarse blue paper. These pages are filled with magnificent impressions of waves dashing against rocks, and of dark, heavy fishing-boats silhouetted against the foaming white sea. The ‘Liber’ design of the ‘Coast of Yorkshire near Whitby’ (R. 24) was doubtless suggested on this occasion.

The other book, the ‘Dunbar’ sketch-book as Turner named it, consists of leaves of stout Whatman coated with washes of a murky pinkish brown. The advantage of using white paper prepared in this way is, that the artist can get his lights by simply using his knife to scratch away the preparation. This book contains sketches of the ruins of Roslin Castle, the Bass Rock, Tantallon and Dunbar Castles. The wild and disconsolate scenes

PLATE XXII

MEN-OF-WAR’S BOATS FETCHING PROVISIONS (1)

PENCIL ABOUT 1808

between St. Abb’s Head and Dunbar seem to have deeply impressed Turner’s imagination. As we turn over the leaves of this book we seem to hear ‘the sombrous and heavy sound of the billows successively dashing against the rocky beach’ that Scott speaks of in his description of Fast Castle in the Bride of Lammermoor. The artist seems too excited to draw in his old static fashion. The stretches of sullen sea are sketched again and again, the white crests of the incoming waves being dug out furiously with the knife. But only the large masses of light and dark are indicated. Here we have a stretch of cold light in the sky with the dark sea and cliffs looming against it, the whole vague and fragmentary, but irresistibly impressive. But perhaps the most eloquent pages in the book contain two glorious studies of storm-tossed waves. We are looking out from the shore, with the waves breaking at our feet. Even in his more elaborate work Turner has never suggested the tremendous weight and power of the sea-waves so vividly as in these hurried and tiny sketches. The furious work with the knife on both sides of the paper has reduced it almost to a rag; but the rag is eloquent, and such studies as these help us to understand how it was that Turner could paint the sea so very much better than any artist either before his time or since.

‘The Shipwreck,’ one of the most successful of Turner’s early sea-pieces, was painted in 1805. The picture is doubtless a ‘composition’ in which Turner has endeavoured to sum up his knowledge of the sea, but, as was usual with him, it contains a nucleus of directly observed fact. These two sides of his art, tireless and the most searching observation, and the subsequent artistic manipulation of what he had seen and felt, are clearly displayed for us in two little ragged paper-covered note-books labelled by the artist ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Shipwreck 2.’ The first contains the succinct record of an actual shipwreck, the second the series of trial compositions which he made before the final design of the picture was fixed.

Eight of the pages of the first book—it only contains sixteen pages in all—have long been exhibited among the Turner water-colours in the National Gallery. They are framed together, and numbered 535. They represent so many different views of a barque going to pieces on the shore. There can be no doubt of the veracity of these bold, masterly pen sketches; as Mr. Ruskin says of them, ‘I believe even those who have not seen a shipwreck, must recognise, by the instinct of awe, the truth of these records of a vessel’s ruin’ (Ruskin on Pictures, p. 221). In the margin of one of the drawings Turner has scribbled ‘Pepper (?) bargh Vessel. Hemp. O. Iron bundles like Hoop.’ The scenery vaguely suggests the coast of Kent to me,—possibly Gravesend.

These sketches are so impressive that one would have thought that Turner would have been satisfied to take any one of them as a basis for a picture. But his mind seemed unsatisfied until he had exalted actuality into something of epic grandeur. The second little book shows how he set to work to make his pictures express a clearer intention and a wider mental outlook than any single incident could.

The first sketch shows us a large ship settling down at the bows, with a single rowing-boat in the foreground. We are far away from the shore. The tragedy is intensified by taking place on the high seas, but the presentment is evidently too bare and matter-of-fact for the artist. In the next sketch the ship is turning over towards us, though slightly to the right, so that we see its decks plainly, with the masts foreshortened towards us. Somewhat nearer to us is a welter of boats and figures, with a fishing-boat with sails set on the right, all placed low down in the trough of the sea. On page 13, the vessel is turned half over towards us, but to the left. The fishing-boat in the foreground sailing into the picture also has its mast and sails sloping violently to the left. This swing in the same direction of the two most prominent objects in the design strikes us as monotonous, and doubtless for this reason excited Turner’s disapproval. On page 16, the vessel is brought nearer and made a more prominent object in the design. It is now turned over away from us and slightly to the left. The welter of boats and figures is placed beyond the vessel, instead of in the foreground. In another sketch the ship lies on its side helpless on the right of the design, its masts and rigging in the water stretching right across the picture. Another of the sketches has been reproduced as Plate XXI. This is, perhaps, a little more fully realised than some of the others. It seems to have been drawn straight off in pen and ink, then the stormy sky and waves were indicated with an impetuous wash of

PLATE XXIII

MEN-OF-WAR’S BOAT FETCHING PROVISIONS (2)

PENCIL. ABOUT 1808

Indian ink, which was then thumbed, dabbed, and coaxed to give the requisite modelling. The sweep of the waves, their vicious choppy spurts and explosions of spray, are given with a directness and simplicity of means that I believe would have excited the admiration of Korin himself.

I need not continue to describe all the pages in detail. The point of interest is that Turner tried successively every possible movement in the sinking of a big ship and looked at them from every possible point of view. Then he finally decided that his second sketch was the most suggestive and striking, so he took it up again, and after considerable modification in the details, developed it into the completed work.

Between 1805 and 1809 Turner must have spent a good deal of his time sailing up and down the lower reaches and the mouth of the Thames. The contents of several sketch-books prove this. In one there is a view of the Dutch coast with Flushing in the distance, evidently drawn from the sea. But the subjects as a rule are nearer home. In the book labelled ‘River and Margate’ the subjects range from the Fishmarket at Hastings to Cobham and Walton Bridges. These include sketches near London Bridge, at Purfleet, Greenwich, Gravesend, Southend, Herne Bay, and Margate. But these are only treated as backgrounds to the ships and boats. We have pages and pages of wherries and Thames barges bundling along with all sails set past massive ships of the line at anchor, all drawn as swiftly as they seem to move. These are almost too slight for reproduction, but the two animated scenes of men-of-war’s boats victualling, reproduced as Plates XXII. and XXIII., give an excellent idea of the spirit in which Turner worked on these occasions. Looking out to sea we see a number of ships of the line riding at anchor. Round the landing-stages in the foreground are the ships’ boats taking in stores of bread, hay and straw, sheep and fish. The day is fine, but there is evidently a wind blowing; the sea is choppy; there is plenty of spray about, and the pennants stand out taut from the masts of the big ships in the offing. It is all drawn with a few hurried, nervous pencil outlines, nothing is described in detail, yet the whole scene is brought as vividly before us as the most elaborate oil-painting could bring it.

Another little book, labelled ‘Boats. Ice,’ shows that Turner was no mere fair weather sailor. The sketches were evidently made during a severe winter. The book starts off with several lurid sunsets. On page 9 we see some boatmen on their barges, a church, probably Gravesend Church, in the distance. The sun has disappeared behind a bank of clouds. These have the word ‘grey’ scribbled over them. Over a few hurried lines of pencil radiating from a centre behind these clouds are the suggestive words ‘Fire and Blood.’ On page 12, we have a stretch of river with a distant group of trees on the left looming through the fog. The river is strewn with fragments of ice. On the right a single boat is visible, its tall mast and stays standing out boldly against the sky. Above, the upper part of the sun’s face is just appearing through the clouds. This slight, sensitive sketch is helped out for the artist—though for the imaginative spectator it hardly needs such help, so eloquent is it—by scribbled notes of colour; ‘Boat ... yellow,’ the water in the foreground, ‘Greenish Black in Shadows. Ice white and grey.’

On the next page we find two barges with brittle fragments of ice hanging round them. On page 16, there is a barge moored beside what seems to be a huge iceberg, with two figures on it, though it may only be a rocky shore distorted by snow and ice into its fantastic appearance. But the sketch on the next page looks emphatically like an iceberg. The following sketch is here reproduced (Plate [XXIV.]), so the reader may judge for himself what it is. To me it looks like floating icebergs, the foremost one containing a wrecked vessel embedded in its surface. This page was cut out by Mr. Ruskin and exhibited at Oxford with the title, ‘The Inscrutable.’

Turner has summed up these experiences of his in a group of absolutely unrivalled sea-pieces. Pictures like Mr. F. H. Fawkes’s ‘Pilot hailing a Whitstable Hoy,’ Mr. G. J. Gould’s ‘The Nore,’ Mr. P. A. B. Widener’s ‘Meeting of the Thames and Medway,’ and Lady Wantage’s ‘Sheerness,’ seem to me beyond all question the most glorious pictures of the sea ever painted. The finest Dutch pictures of this kind, with all their admirable qualities, do not seem ever to get beyond a certain prosaic outlook. This matter-of-fact effect is enhanced by—if it is not altogether due to

PLATE XXIV

‘THE INSCRUTABLE”

PENCIL. ABOUT 1808

it—the ruthless display the artists make of their special knowledge of the construction and rigging of their vessels. I believe Turner’s knowledge of this kind was almost as exhaustive as theirs, but whether as full or more limited, he made a better use of what he did know. His objects are never there simply for themselves. They are always subordinated to a genuinely imaginative conception. His pictures, therefore, are not the work of a man with a professional speciality. They are real epics of the sea. From their own imaginative point of view their workmanship is almost perfect. Their style is sonorous and weighty. They are as solemn and majestic in conception as they are manly in feeling. They have something of that ‘beauty which, as Milton sings, hath terror in it.’ Together ‘they move in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood’—the noblest sequence of poems ever dedicated to the majesty of the sea.