Early English Water-Colour Drawings of the Great Masters

The “England and Wales” series was represented in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition by eight beautiful drawings:—

30. Saltash, 1825 (Plate XXI).

22. Prudhoe Castle, circa 1826 (Plate XXII).

24. Windsor Castle, circa 1829.

20. Richmond Bridge—Play, circa 1830 (Plate XI).

33. Coventry, circa 1832.

25. Worcester, circa 1833 (Plate XII).

27. The Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End, circa 1834 (Plate XIII).

31. Lowestoft, circa 1835.

The most glorious in colour of these drawings is, I think, the Windsor Castle, but the Richmond Bridge (Plate XI) runs it very close. The latter subject is interesting because it was the first water-colour by Turner which Mr. Ruskin acquired; “my father buying it for me,” he tells us, “thinking I should not ask for another—we both then agreeing that it had nearly everything characteristic of Turner in it, and more especially the gay figures!” Mr. Ruskin was naturally very much attached to this drawing and he was never tired of trying to analyse it; but “after thirty years’ endeavour, I finally surrender that hope—with all similar hopes of ever analysing true inventive or creative work.” He drew attention, however, as an instructive piece of composition, to the way the parasols in the foreground repeat and reverse the arches of the bridge, and the feather head-dresses of the ladies repeat the plumy tossing of the foliage. These are merely Turner’s habitual tricks of composition. We find these habits of design in most of his earlier and later work, but the results are not always equally fortunate. One of the most exquisite and perfect examples of this practice of placing and grouping the figures and objects so as to repeat or emphasize the most salient features of a landscape, is afforded in my opinion by the large oil painting of Walton Bridges, which was painted in 1809 for the Earl of Essex. In some of the later drawings and paintings the results are not always so happy.

The execution of the Richmond Bridge is unequal. The group of figures in the foreground on the right is imperfectly imagined and fumbling in touch, but the smaller figures on the left are vivid and alert; the big group of trees on the right, with the sunlight striking athwart them, is dashed in with extraordinary vigour and certainty. The drawing is in splendid condition, and the general effect is breezy, reckless, gorgeous—and, I cannot help thinking, a trifle vulgar, probably on account of the gay foreground figures. It certainly has everything “characteristic” of Turner, the beauties and the defects.

In the Coventry and Worcester (Plate XII) there is some flagging of Turner’s power—hints of weariness and a sense of effort. There is some “swelling into bombast” in them. But the Longships Lighthouse (Plate XIII) is one of the most wonderful and flawless drawings ever made by Turner, or any other artist. Turner must have been nearly sixty years of age when he made it, but there are no signs of human weakness in it. It is all pure gold and immortal work. For once Turner had found a subject exactly suited to his genius, “a fit subject for his wit.”

It is of course impossible to do justice in words to the grandeur and terrible beauty of this wonderful drawing, but Mr. Ruskin has so nearly succeeded in this impossible task that I will venture to quote his words. “In the Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End, we have clouds without rain—at twilight—enveloping the cliffs of the coast, but concealing nothing, every outline being visible through their gloom; and not only the outline—for it is easy to do this—but the surface. The bank of rocky coast approaches the spectator inch by inch, felt clearer and clearer as it withdraws from the garment of cloud—not by edges more and more refined, but by a surface more and more unveiled. We have thus the painting, not of a mere transparent veil, but of a solid body of cloud, every inch of whose increasing distance is marked and felt. But the great wonder of the picture is the intensity of gloom which is attained in warm grey, without either blackness or blueness. It is a gloom, dependent rather on the enormous space and depth indicated, than on actual pitch of colour, distant by real drawing, without a grain of blue, dark by real substance, without a stroke of blackness; and with all this, it is not formless, but full of indications of character, wild, irregular, shattered, and indefinite—full of the energy of storm, fiery in haste, and yet flinging back out of its motion the fitful swirls of bounding drift, of tortured vapour tossed up like men’s hands, as in defiance of the tempest, the jets of resulting whirlwind, hurled back from the rocks into the face of the coming darkness; which, beyond all other characters, mark the raised passion of the elements. It is this untraceable, unconnected, yet perpetual form—this fulness of character absorbed in the universal energy—which distinguishes Nature and Turner from all their imitators. To roll a volume of smoke before the wind, to indicate motion or violence by monotonous similarity of line and direction, is for the multitude; but to mark the independent passion, the tumultuous separate existence of every wreath of writhing vapour, yet swept away and overpowered by one omnipotence of storm, and thus to bid us

this belongs only to Nature and to him.”

And in a later chapter of the same volume (“Modern Painters,” Vol. I.) Mr. Ruskin again refers to this drawing as “a study of sea whose whole organization has been broken up by constant recoils from a rocky coast.” “The entire disorder of the surges,” he continues, “when every one of them, divided and entangled among promontories as it rolls in, and beaten back part by part from walls of rock on this side and that side, recoils like the defeated division of a great army, throwing all behind it into disorder, breaking up the succeeding waves into vertical ridges, which in their turn, yet more totally shattered upon the shore, retire in more hopeless confusion, until the whole surface of the sea becomes one dizzy whirl of rushing, writhing, tortured, undirected rage, bounding, and crashing, and coiling in an anarchy of enormous power, subdivided into myriads of waves, of which every one is not, be it remembered, a separate surge, but part and portion of a vast one, actuated by internal power, and giving in every direction the mighty undulation of impetuous line which glides over the rocks and writhes in the wind, overwhelming the one, and piercing the other with the form, fury, and swiftness of a sheet of lambent fire. And throughout the rendering of all this, there is not a false curve given, not one which is not the perfect expression of visible motion; and the forms of the infinite sea are drawn throughout with that utmost mastery of art which, through the deepest study of every line, makes every line appear the wildest child of chance, while yet each is in itself a subject and a picture different from all else around. Of the colour of this magnificent sea I have before spoken; it is a solemn green grey (with its foam seen dimly through the darkness of twilight), modulated with the fulness, changefulness, and sadness of a deep, wild melody.”

The only drawing in the whole series which can be compared for tragic power with the Longships Lighthouse is the Lowestoft. The time represented is an hour before sunrise in winter. A violent storm with rain is passing over the sea; through it the lighthouses and coast are dimly seen. Mr. Ruskin speaks of the “most hopeless, desolate, uncontrasted greys” in this drawing.

26. Lake Nemi, circa 1840 (Plate XV).

This representation of the afternoon of a hot and cloudless day was hung immediately above the Longships. It is a truly superb drawing, as fine in its way as the Longships, yet how different! It is so full of purely sensuous delight that one would suppose it the work of some voluptuary who had turned his back on all the sorrows and terrors of life; one who lived only for the gratification of his senses. That some people should shrink from the sternness and cruelty of Longships I can understand; but I simply cannot imagine how any one accessible to the pleasures of pictorial art can resist the triumphal appeal of this regal and happy drawing. It would be difficult to bring together two other drawings which illustrate so well the truly Shakespearean range of Turner’s mind.

28. The Rigi at Sunrise—Lake of Lucerne (“The Blue Rigi”) (Plate XVII).

With a fine sense of congruity Messrs. Agnew hung beside the Lake of Nemi a masterpiece of Turner’s latest manner—“The Blue Rigi.” This was painted in 1841, in circumstances described in his own inimitable way by Mr. Ruskin, in the “Epilogue” to his notes on his own collection of Turner’s drawings. There are signs in the drawing that the painter’s age was beginning to tell on him. He was getting near the end of his career as a water-colour painter, though his career as an oil painter lasted a few years longer: for the Burial at Sea; The Opening of the Walhalla; Rain, Steam and Speed; The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, and the other late Venetian paintings were yet to come; which supports the contention that water-colour makes sterner demands on the artist’s physique than oil painting. In “The Blue Rigi” the laboured execution and trembling touch hint at the artist’s physical disabilities. But these signs of weakness harmonize so well with the subject-matter that they only heighten the pathos of this incomparably beautiful drawing.

I think that Turner made hardly more than a dozen finished drawings after “The Blue Rigi.” This was partly because the sustained effort such work demanded was too much for him, and partly because there was no demand among his patrons for such work. But he could still make sketches like the Mouth of the Grand Canal (Plate XXIII), Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the Distance (Plate XX) and the Alpine Stream, marvellous in their freshness of colour, the vigour and delicacy of their washes, and full of poetical suggestion and pictorial enchantment. The old war-horse no doubt regretted that his patrons would give him no opportunities to elaborate these wonderful sketches—for the distinction which modern criticism has obliterated between a sketch and a “finished” drawing was ingrained in Turner’s mind—but we cannot share these regrets. The gain in fullness and authority of statement would have provided little compensation for the loss of delicacy and freshness, and effortless vigour of execution.

But these remarks have taken me slightly out of my chronological course. The following sketches I am inclined to date conjecturally somewhere between 1835 and 1840.

126. Rheinfels Castle.

Can this drawing be correctly named? It does not seem much like the other drawings and engravings of the old fortress of Rheinfels which I have compared with it. And what is the meaning of “Dib,” which Turner has written in pencil in the foreground? I cannot help wondering whether “Dib” was meant to refer to Dieblich, on the Moselle. If it did, the mountain on the right would be the Niederburg, and the two buildings on the mountain beyond would be the two castles of the Knights of Cobern. Turner passed along this part of the Moselle in 1834. But, as a famous commentator once said, I put forward this suggested emendation without much confidence in its correctness.

115. A Gorge (Plate XXIV).

131. Alpine Scene.

133. Swiss Landscape.

I can offer no suggestion as to the identity of the places represented in these sketches, except that A Gorge may be one of the falls of the Reichenbach.

39. The Rainbow.

This is a strange drawing which I do not understand. The rainbow has only two colours, viz. yellow and crimson lake.

138. Ehrenbreitstein.

135. Alpine Stream.

The latter sketch contains an entrancing play of colour and suggestion. What a fine foundation for the airy structure raised above it that band of rich darkness makes which runs straight across the centre of the design! I suppose it represents loose rocks in shadow. Above them a range of mountains, faintly touched with crimson, rises out of the pale blue mist, with an opalescent sky above; on the right a cluster of white roofs carries the eye to a narrow defile. The foreground is just as elusive as the distance and middle distance. There are streams flowing among the stones, but those touches of white, are they birds or foam? And is that a figure on the right almost lost in the shadow of the rocks? What a beautiful dream it all is! And I cannot help wondering what earthly place suggested the dream. It reminds me vaguely of the neighbourhood of Bellinzona. Somewhere north of Lugano I fancy the happy wanderer might chance at daybreak upon some such scene as Turner has suggested.

130. Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the Distance (Plate XX).

There can be no doubt about the locality which furnished the motive of this lovely vision, though I believe some years ago the drawing was described as a “View on the Rhine.” There in the distance are the two Mythens; and there at the edge of the lake is Brunnen. The drawing must have been made at or near Treib, on the Lake of Lucerne.

127. Mouth of the Grand Canal (Plate XXIII).

On the right is the Dogana, with the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in the distance; on the left are tall buildings which once were palaces and are now mostly hotels, among them probably the Palazzo Giustiniani, which became the Hôtel de l’Europe, where Turner put up during his later visits to Venice. It is no good my trying to describe the colour of such a drawing. When it was sold at Christie’s in the Beecham sale an enthusiastic scribe writing in one the newspapers said that it was “as if drawn by a butterfly.” I remember that the expression struck me at the time as—impressionistic, but I think I know what the writer felt. There is something that makes one think of butterflies in its elusiveness and its fluttering beauty of colour.

160. An Iceberg.

This must have been done about 1845, and it is the latest of Turner’s sketches in the exhibition. It belongs to the time when Beale’s “Voyage” had set him dreaming about icebergs and whalers. There is a draft of some attempted poetry scribbled on the drawing, which I have spent perhaps more time than it is worth in trying to decipher. The only words I can feel sure about are the following:—

Those who remember the oil painting called, Whalers (boiling blubber) entangled in floe-ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves—it was on loan at the Glasgow Art Gallery when last I saw it—may be able to form some vague idea of what Turner was thinking about when he made this fantastic and almost incomprehensible sketch.

TURNER’S PREDECESSORS

Though Paul Sandby (1725-1809) was born before the younger Malton, his drawing of The Swan Inn, Edmonton (Plate XXV) is, I fancy, some ten or perhaps twenty years later in point of execution than these Bath drawings; Sandby’s style, however, was always less abstract than Malton’s. Compared with the Bath views this drawing by Sandby is like a window opened on nature; it is flooded with light, the warm sunshine plays on and through the trees, lighting up the road, the figures and the whole scene. Yet Sandby’s care for detail is as great as Malton’s. Each house, each garden, each tree has its individual character fully recorded with unflagging industry and spirit. The spectator’s interest is awakened by the variety of shapes, colours and incidents, and sustained by the artist’s evident alertness and thorough enjoyment of the spectacle. Sandby was one of the first English artists to rob topographical delineation of its abstractness and impersonality. He throws the charm of his genial personality over the scene. And though his work is always alert, interesting and full of charm, this Edmonton drawing is, I think, one of the most delightful of his works that I have seen.

The best drawing by Edward Dayes (1763-1804) in the exhibition was probably the view of Norwich Cathedral (Plate XXVI), which is dated 1793. Dayes, for all his cleverness and skill, was not as likeable a man as Sandby. He seems to have been deficient in geniality, generosity and sympathy. These defects of character show in his work. He often seems bored and ill at ease with his subjects; he was seldom if ever capable of taking the delight and interest in a scene which Sandby took in his Edmonton drawing. There is a certain coldness, not only of colour and effect, but of interest in this Norwich Cathedral drawing. It is nevertheless a clever piece of work, and though perhaps not so truthful and accurate as Malton’s views of Bath, it shows much greater technical skill than they possess.

Turner, I believe, got his first lessons in perspective from Malton’s father’s “Treatise,” and both Sandby and Dayes had a great deal of influence on his early work. Some of the earliest drawings by Turner in existence were copied or adapted from Sandby’s drawings or engravings, and for a short period, about the years 1794 and 1795, his style, handling, and colour were so closely modelled on Dayes’s work that many drawings by the elder artist are mistaken for Turner’s. Indeed, some of Dayes’s best drawings in public and private collections are wrongly attributed to Turner. This is no small compliment to Dayes, and it probably accounts for the want of proper appreciation from which he now suffers.

Of the connection between Turner and the greatest of his predecessors, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799 (?)), it is difficult to speak with much certainty. Nearly all recent writers on Turner say that he was greatly influenced by Cozens’s work; but I have failed to discover any certain evidence of this influence in his early work, unless it be in choosing the same subject—Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps—for one of his oil paintings that Cozens had chosen for one of his water-colours. The dominant influence in Turner’s early work, as I have already pointed out, is Richard Wilson rather than John R. Cozens.

But Cozens’s work was greatly admired by some of Turner’s early patrons, especially by Dr. Monro, and tradition says that Dr. Monro induced Turner to copy many of the drawings by Cozens which he possessed. I have found it hard to discover evidence in support of this tradition. I do not remember to have seen a copy of any of Cozens’s works which was unmistakably done entirely by Turner; in the drawings of this kind traditionally attributed to Turner, at least the pencil outlines are nearly always clearly recognizable as by Girtin. Even if we accept these copies as Turner’s, they show that he possessed, at that time, very little appreciation of the higher beauties of Cozens’s work. No attempt is made in them to reproduce either the general effect or the light and shade of the originals; they rob Cozens’s work of its grandeur and austerity, and substitute for these qualities mere prettiness and conventionality.

Indeed it is incorrect to call these drawings copies; they are nothing more than exercises in laying washes and inventing systems of light and shade, based upon Cozens’s work. Their mode of production and purpose may be thus described: the outlines were first drawn in pencil with bold, firm strokes, by a careless and free hand, which bears remarkable resemblances to that of Girtin. These outlines must have been done direct from Cozens’s drawings, but what was done afterwards seems to have been done without reference of any kind to them. These outlines were then given to another artist, who clothed them according to his own fancy with a commonplace arrangement of light and shade. That these exercises in blue and grey tinting and the arrangement of light and shade were done by Turner we cannot know for certain, but the tradition that they were, seems too insistent to be ignored. Though the characteristic beauties of Cozens’s work counted for little or nothing in these academical exercises, yet they show that Turner was brought early into contact with the work of the first great master of English water-colour painting, and so far as this work exercised any influence on him it must have been to his advantage.

Cozens was represented in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition by no less than nine drawings. The largest and most important was the Lake Albano (44), with the Castel Gandolfo in the middle distance. An excellent reproduction in colour of this impressive drawing was published in “The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours” (The Studio, 1918). Cozens was the first English artist to suggest in his drawings something of the grandeur and beauty of the Alps. A Swiss Valley (Plate XXVII) is one of his finest drawings of this kind. It owes much of its dramatic effect to its magnificently designed sky, which is as daring as it is original. The scene represented is probably in the Splügen Pass. Less moving, less dramatic, are the two Roman views. In the Farnesina Gardens (Plate XXVIII) is a pensive sylvan scene of great elegance and charm. The Villa Negroni (Plate XXIX) is a wonderfully fascinating and original design with its noble group of pines and cypresses silhouetted against the sky. In the foreground we get the brow of the hill on which the trees are standing, with sheep feeding near an ancient statue; the ruins on the left, in the middle distance in the plain below, are fragments of the Claudian Aqueduct, those on the right are some of the Neronian arches. The Villa Negroni was situated near the Porta S. Giovanni. It has now ceased to exist and its place has been taken by the Casino Massini.

It is interesting to compare Cozens’s view of Lake Nemi (Plate XXX) with Turner’s two drawings of the same subject, one made nearly twenty years later from Hakewill’s sketch, the other drawn from his own impressions fifty years later. The earlier view, like the Cozens, shows the town of Gensano on a hill in the middle distance, with Monte Circello and the Mediterranean in the distance. There is less exaggeration in Cozens’s drawing than in the Turners, and a certain gauntness and strangeness repels one at the first glance as much as Turner’s charm and glow of colour attract. Yet when one gets over the first feeling of strangeness in this drawing, as well as in all of his works, it exerts a very potent charm over the imagination. His drawings are unequal, but when he is at his best, as in the Lake Albano and the Villa Negroni, they possess a haunting beauty which almost overawes the spirit. Such works “draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full vitality and music.”

TURNER’S CONTEMPORARIES

That he was not well represented in this exhibition is hardly surprising. But he had at least one fine architectural drawing in his best manner—the ruins of the Lady Chapel of Fountains Abbey (57); The Road through the Village (2), and three specimens of his earlier work, Winchelsea Church (140), St. Augustine’s Priory, Canterbury (141), and Kenilworth (Plate XXXI). These early drawings were made soon after the termination of his apprenticeship to Edward Dayes, and they bear evident marks of Dayes’s influence. St. Augustine’s Priory was done from a sketch by a Mr. James Moore, an amateur who at one time employed Dayes to work up his sketches, but who afterwards engaged Girtin for the same purpose. Moore’s pencil drawing which provided the material for this water-colour is now in the Ashmolean Museum, to which it was generously presented by Mr. Thomas Girtin, the great-grandson of the artist.

The view of Lincoln (Plate XXXII), which is attributed to Girtin, bears very little resemblance to Girtin’s characteristic style of work. The composition is too crowded for Girtin, and the drawing and painting of the cathedral are quite unlike Girtin’s treatment of architecture. I cannot but feel that this attribution to Girtin was made without proper consideration. Yet the drawing is a fine one, and it is evidently the work of a gifted and accomplished artist. In my opinion it is much more probably the work of Peter De Wint than of Girtin. De Wint spent a good deal of time at Lincoln, at first as a visitor to William Hilton, his fellow-apprentice at J. R. Smith’s. Hilton’s sister afterwards became De Wint’s wife. The treatment of the architecture is exactly in his manner.

De Wint (1784-1849) was represented in the exhibition by about a dozen other drawings, amongst them the High Torr, Derbyshire (38) and Crowland Abbey (14). The most delightful was probably the early River Scene (12), a very peaceful and happy design, though slightly faded in colour. John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) was born only seven years later than Girtin. He came to London in 1798, and a few years afterwards became a member of the sketching society which Girtin had founded. Two of his early drawings were in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition, and both of them show that he had learnt much from Girtin. The less successful of the two, the Bridge over River near a Town (Plate XXXIII), is dated 1803. As in others of Cotman’s early drawings the architecture is tortured into strange and fantastic shapes which destroy all ideas of probability. The bridge in this drawing looks as though a moderate breeze would blow it over; it is certainly unsafe for traffic. There can, I think, be no doubt that this is a representation of the old Welsh Bridge at Shrewsbury. The drawing is worked almost entirely in brown, though some dark blue has been introduced in parts. The general effect is muddy, and the washes have been rubbed and worried, as though the artist had often been in difficulties with his work. The other drawing, Gormire Lake, Yorkshire (Plate XXXIV), though it must have been painted about the same time, for it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1804, is more successful and already contains evidence of that distinctive manner of working with which Cotman’s name is connected. Like the Shrewsbury drawing, it is painted almost entirely in brown and blue, but the washes have not been worried. The richly blotted washes preserve all their freshness and lustre. Their beautiful quality gives a charm and dignity to the drawing which is worthily supported by the massive simplicity of the design. The placing of the cattle in the water, and the two figures at the side of the tarn, is worthy of Cotman’s impeccable sense of design. As the dignity and authority of such a drawing are the result of selection and the ruthless omission of irrelevancies, every detail which is admitted must possess significance and must contribute actively to the general effect. The two oars carried on the shoulder of the man in the foreground are good examples of the telling use Cotman could make of what, to other artists, might be insignificant details. The force and grandeur of the whole design may be said to depend entirely on the lines made by these oars, for without them the spell would be broken.

In A Lake Scene (Plate XXXVI) we see how sedulously Cotman developed the characteristic qualities of his style. Eschewing the charms of colour, he concentrates all his powers on the massive simplicity of design and the correct and happy placing of every detail. The Church in Normandy (Plate XXXVII), done in pencil with a few washes of sepia, is a good example of his intelligent and accomplished architectural work. His latest drawing, Rouen (Plate XXXV), belongs to the period when he was influenced by, and attempted to rival, Turner’s brilliance of colour. The design is firmly built up, but the absence of emphasis gives it rather an academic air. For once Cotman has abandoned his usual method of painting. The effect of light and brilliance is obtained by an extensive use of the knife or razor over all the sky and distance, and some of the foreground. I do not remember having seen any other drawing by Cotman in which the knife has been so freely used.

Samuel Prout (1783-1852) was actually a year younger than Cotman, yet he seems to have belonged to an earlier generation of artists. We somehow feel towards Cotman as to a contemporary. The things he cared most about, perfection of workmanship and design, are disengaged from the accidents of time. That is what we mean, I suppose, when we class him among the immortals. Compared with Cotman, Prout is mortal, and bound rather heavily with the shackles of time and circumstance. His work was always in the mode of his day, and as fashions change his work appears old-fashioned. This large drawing of Folkestone (Plate XXXIX) certainly looks to me old-fashioned; I am almost tempted to say frumpish. But as I happen to be fond of old-fashioned things, I like it very much. There is a clumsiness, a heavy-handedness, about the workmanship which harmonizes very happily with the subject-matter. The composition is wanting in fineness of feeling and perception. There is a certain awkwardness in the way the church on the cliff projects over the roof of the wooden hut in the foreground, which might easily have been avoided with a little tact and cunning. But the whole drawing is so vigorous, so solid and strong, that it seems to express the blunt, downright habits of thought and feeling of the typical Englishmen of the early part of the nineteenth century. As our rude forefathers spoke, so Prout painted. His Coast Scene (79) has much of the bluntness and directness of the Folkestone, but not the same fullness and authority of statement. A Road through a Village (162) comes nearer the Folkestone in these respects, but the choice of subject-matter is not so fortunate. These are all comparatively early drawings of Prout, done before he turned foreign tourist and became a fashionable drawing-master. His later manner is exemplified by two pleasing drawings of architectural “bits” in Normandy (113 and 119). The touch is still clumsy, but it has become systematized, and something of the old sincerity seems to have gone.

John Varley (1778-1842) is an attractive figure in the history of English water-colour painting, but his work rarely seems quite worthy of his obvious powers. Perhaps he did too much. In 1808 he sent fifty-two drawings to the exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and between 1805 and 1812 his exhibits actually amounted to three hundred and forty-four. No wonder so many of his drawings are uninspired and commonplace. Yet he had great technical ability and the right sort of feeling, as drawings like Bala Lake (65) and A Welsh River (71) prove. All he wanted was something of Cotman’s concentration and scrupulousness. As it is, his best works are often his unpretentious sketches done direct from nature, of which the view of Leyton, Essex (Plate XXXVIII) is a very good example; it is brisk, alert, genial and convincing.

William Turner (1789-1862) was one of the many pupils of John Varley. After leaving Varley he settled in Oxford, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He is generally called William Turner of Oxford, to distinguish him from the other Turner. This view of Kingley Vale, Chichester (Plate XL), bears little resemblance to Varley’s broad and dashing style. This was painted towards the end of the artist’s life, as it was exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1851, when it figured in the catalogue as View from the side of Bow Hill, on the South Downes, near Chichester, looking over the Groves of Yew Trees, and Stoke Park, toward the Sea. This is a full and accurate description of the subject, as Kingley Valley is at the foot of Bow Hill. To the modern eye, which is perhaps over-fond of broad and slap-dash work, there is rather too much insistence on details and small forms in this drawing; but in an unambitious drawing, aiming at nothing more than topographical interest, this is not necessarily a fault. There is a certain naïveté and truthfulness about the record which gives it great charm. The subject, too, is well chosen, the effect of sunlight is successfully rendered, and the stretch of blue distance is restful to the eye and agreeable to the imagination.

George Fennell Robson (1788-1833) painted little but Scottish lake and mountain scenery. He was fond of dramatic effects of storm and cloud, and his work is powerful, accomplished and well sustained. Ben Venue, from Lanrick (Plate XLI) is as good an example of his masculine style as one could find. It is probably the drawing which was exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1851, under the title Ben Venue, from the head of Loch Achray. The meadow on the left is Lanrick Mead, which was the gathering-place of the Clan Alpine.

The two largest drawings in the exhibition were Copley Fielding’s (1787-1855) two sea-pieces, The Pilot Boat (Plate XLII) and Seaford, from Newhaven Pier (76). I have confessed on other occasions that I cannot share the general enthusiasm for Copley Fielding’s work. It is, I acknowledge, nearly always pleasing in effect; but it strikes me as superficial, and it lacks the “bite,” the tremendous energy of mind and inexhaustible knowledge of Turner’s work. But these two large drawings are very favourable specimens of Fielding’s style. They are cheerful in colour, breezy in effect, and full of movement. The Pilot Boat is probably the better of the two; but I wish there was more sense of weight and the power of resistance in the waves. The date on the Seaford drawing is indistinct. When it was exhibited at the Old Masters at Burlington House in 1908, the compiler of the catalogue read the date as “1858,” which must surely be a mistake, as Fielding died in 1855. I think I am right in reading the date as “1830,” but it is difficult to identify this particular drawing among the list of Fielding’s exhibited works, as there are several titles which might fit it. I think it is probably the Pier at Newhaven, Sussex, No. 85, in the Water-Colour Painters’ exhibition of 1830; but it might also be the Scene at Entrance of Newhaven Harbour, No. 161, which was exhibited the following year, or No. 205, Scene at Newhaven in the same exhibition.

After Cotman and Turner I think David Roberts (1796-1864) was the most skilful draughtsman of architecture of his time. He was not perhaps a great artist; the oil paintings with which he delighted the public of his own time leave us now unmoved, in spite of their eminently respectable qualities. They are too sedate to have a strong effect on the imagination. But his work with the point—pencil, chalk or etching-needle—is delightfully easy, graceful and accomplished. A Ruined Abbey (109) is certainly a view of Melrose Abbey. It was probably drawn in 1836, about the same time as the view of Durham (121), which happens to be dated, “Sep. 14, 1836.” I believe an artist can only draw and paint well the scenes of his native country; but Roberts’s public was bored with English and Scottish views, and very much preferred his Spanish and Eastern subjects. Roberts was at Granada in February 1833, when the picturesque street scene here reproduced (Plate XLIII) must have been drawn.

We have now finished our review of the large group of works by Turner’s contemporaries which was included in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition. But, as I have said before, there were also a few drawings by later artists—by H. G. Hine (1811-1895), E. M. Wimperis (1835-1900) and Thomas Collier (1840-1890). It was probably a mere accident that these three artists belonged to the Institute of Painters in Water-Colours (now the Royal Institute), while nearly all the leading artists in the group of Turner’s contemporaries belonged to the “Old” Water-Colour Society. There is little evidence of Turner’s influence in the works of Wimperis and Collier. It would be more accurate to describe these artists as the successors of De Wint than of Turner. They carried on the De Wint tradition of healthy realism and freely handled washes with great success; yet each artist preserves his individuality, and their works are steadily increasing in value. The fine drawing of Beeston Castle by Collier (Plate XLIV) is an excellent specimen of his spirited and truthful work.

Alexander J. Finberg

NOTE

The Numbers given after the titles of the Illustrations refer to the Catalogue of Messrs. Agnew’s Exhibition which will be found at the end of the Volume.