Turner's Golden Visions

With my mind full of the visionary Turner, the dreamer and the troubled traveller, I am a little impatient of 'The Golden Bough' of this year; so apparently were the trustees of the National Gallery, as they banished it to Dublin. As to 'St. Michael's Mount,' now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, how beautiful would be the pale gold Mount, rising from a pale gold shore into a grey-blue sky, if the foreground with its fish and figures, boat and lobster-pots, could be banished. The fine and whirling spectacle of the 'Fire at Sea,' that looks so well in its new home at Millbank, was composed, no doubt, from 'The Fire at Sea' Sketch-Book, which has this endorsement by Ruskin: 'A careless book: the fine ships on fire taken out of it and very little left.'

He exhibited another Venice subject this year, probably the Venice about which Thornbury tells a story: how the inevitable Jones, who was showing a picture with a blue sky in it, tried to paint his sky brighter, so as to make it outshine Turner's, which hung alongside. Turner then made his sky still more blue, whereupon Jones painted out his blue sky altogether and put in a white one.

'Ah! Jones,' said Turner, 'you've done me now.'

Here may be told once again the story of the encounter between Gillott the pen manufacturer and Turner, in Thornbury's own words:—

We are told that one day Mr. Gillott, the well-known manufacturer of Birmingham, sallied forth from his hotel, determined at any price to obtain admission to the enchanted house in Queen Anne Street. He was rich, he was enthusiastic—he believed strongly in the power of the golden key to open any door. He arrived at the blistered dirty door of the house with the black-crusted windows. He pulled at the bell; the bell answered with a querulous, melancholy tinkle. There was a long inhospitable pause; then an old woman with a diseased face looked up from the area, and presently ascended and tardily opened the door, keeping the filthy chain up, however, as a precaution. She snappishly asked Mr. Gillott's business. He told her in his blandest voice. "Can't let 'e in," was the answer, and she tried to slam the door. But during the parley the crafty and determined Dives had put his foot in, and now, refusing to any longer parley, he pushed past the feeble, enraged old she-Cerberus, and hurried upstairs to the gallery. In a moment Turner was out upon him like a spider on another spider who has invaded his web. Mr. Gillott bowed, introduced himself, and stated that he had come to buy. "Don't want to sell," or some such rebuff, was the answer; but Gillott shut his ears to all Turner's angry vituperations. "Have you ever seen our Birmingham pictures, Mr. Turner?" was his only remark.

'"Never 'eard of 'em," said Turner.

'Gillott pulled from his pocket a silvery fragile bundle of Birmingham bank-notes (about £5000 worth).

'"Mere paper," said Turner, with grim humour, a little softened, and enjoying the joke.

'"To be bartered for mere canvas," said Gillott, waving his hand at the "Building of Carthage" and its companions.

'"You're a rum fellow!" said Turner, slowly entering into negotiations, which ended in Gillott eventually carrying off in his cab some five thousand pounds' worth of Turner's pictures.'

These old stories, when one has heard them once, are not very exhilarating, but they all have truth in their well of words. It is pleasant to turn from them, and merely to repeat the titles of some of the sketches mentioned before, sounding as beautiful as they look, and to glance at such a delicate drawing as the 'View on the Moselle,' and to follow the river feeling for its level between the flushed hills.

And it is pleasant, too, to know that the time has now come to consider the loveliest of the 'unfinished' oils, the pictures painted for his own delight in moments of exhilaration, that were revealed to the public in 1906. It is probable that the most delicate and evanescent of them were painted at intervals between this year and 1838. Unsigned, unnamed, undated, it is impossible to give them a certain date, and really it does not much matter. Turner painted them; the nation has them: that is all we need to know.

PART SEVEN

1833-1845

FROM A CONSIDERATION OF THE 'UNFINISHED OILS TO' RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED' AND THE LAST SKETCH-BOOKS

CHAPTER XLI

1835: AGED SIXTY

SOME REMARKS ON THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS, AND BLACKWOOD'S ATTACK ON HIS 'VENICE' PICTURE OF THIS YEAR

Ruskin, to whom we owe so much, whose prose delights, consoles, inspires, confuses, bewilders and annoys in turn; who, by his very enthusiasm for Turner, occasionally ill-judged and unfair to other painters, is sometimes of disservice to Turner, has nevertheless constructed an edifice of interpretation, praise and blame that must last as long as the pictures themselves. Certain of Ruskin's phrases are unforgettable; one consists of but two words—'Delight Drawings,' designed to describe the water-colours Turner made during the last ten years of his working life; not done for the engraver or for exhibition, but just for his own pleasure. 'I look upon them,' said Ruskin, 'as more valuable than his finished drawings or his oil pictures, because they are the simple record of his first impressions and first purposes, plans or designs of the pictures which, if he had had time, he would have made of each place.'

Since these words were written, we have learnt to esteem even more highly these 'Delight Drawings,' and to regard them as the final and highest expressions of Turner's genius. With the inward eye I see Turner walking about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, as Ruskin has described, making a few scratches upon a sheet or two, mere shorthand indications of all he wished to remember, then at his inn in the evening completing the pencilling rapidly, and adding 'as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture.'

Thus in the last decade of his life, when he had mastered his craft, turned away from the works of all other painters to the fair face of nature, did Turner produce his 'Delight Drawings.'

Equally quickly, happily and impulsively did he produce the 'unfinished' oils. Could there be a better name for these 'water-colours writ large,' than 'Delight Pictures,' done like the drawings for his own pleasure, in moments of impulse while he was working upon exhibition pictures, much as a man, when writing a history of a county, might break off to record in a hundred words, a 'thing seen,' something of the present, that had spoken to his heart while studying the present manners and customs of the county?

It is impossible to date accurately all the 'Delight Pictures,' a list of which is given in the chapter towards the end of this book describing the sensation caused by the exhibition of the 'unfinished' oils in 1906. The 'Rocky Bay with Figures,' and the 'Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay,' both founded on sepia drawings for the Liber, may have been done as early as 1829 or 1830; the 'Yachting' series certainly belong to 1827; the 'Chain Pier, Brighton,' and the 'Ship Aground' to 1830, and 'The Evening Star' may be as early as 1829, or as late as 1840. Some, the most delicate and evanescent, wonders of light, flushes of colour, may have been painted any time between 1830 and 1840; others, perhaps later, as 'The Burning of the Ships,' and 'Sunrise and a Sea Monster,' which probably belong to the 'Whalers' period. It is impossible to describe them, and as many are reproduced in colour in this volume, the attempt is hardly necessary. The catalogue of the Turner Gallery bravely attempts description and elucidation; but these works were never meant either to be titled or described. I am content merely to look at the crepuscular beauty of the nocturne with the evening star; at the deep green sea lighted near the shore by a gleam of golden sunlight in 'A Rocky Bay with Classic Figures,' unaware until I am told, that Greek galleys are moored in the bay and drawn up on the shore, and that a shadow of a man is haranguing a group of shadowy sailors; at the mist-shrouded castle behind which the sun is rising—Turner the mystic, the initiate in light and colour.

But if these are beautiful, what word can describe the 'Sunrise with a Boat between Headlands,' the 'Hastings,' and the 'Norham Castle, Sunrise,' his final vision of the ruin that he had painted again and again (see Frontispiece). It has now become a mere whisper of light and colour, a half-uttered murmur of the wonder of sunrise. Detail has gone; it is flooded in light; the old familiar foreground has disappeared, leaving only the glory of the sky reflected in the water with the note of red, the blue rampart, and the haze that is all colours. What is to be said about 'Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands'? I look at it, love it, and easily forget the useful information given in the catalogue to the effect that a water-colour similar in composition, once in the collection of the late Sir James Knowles, is said to be a view on the Lake of Lucerne. Hastings, too, Turner painted again and again, but never did he realise so perfectly the atmospheric vision that he once had of ugly Hastings as in this 'Delight Picture,' with the amber and golden sails rising to the pale blue sky, the amber sail strong against the rosy light on the cliffs. And the misty, yellow sunrise of the 'Bridge and Tower,' with the dreamland viaduct spanning the dreamland river, is it not beautiful? But when he painted that stalwart tree to the right, I think Turner's imagination flagged.

Delight Pictures! Delight Drawings! One of the drawings rises before me as I write, a late one done a few years before his death, that exquisite 'Study on the Rhine,' body colour on grey paper, in the collection of Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence. I have no words to describe this wonder of misty blue and gold, with the moon riding in a sky charged with the mystery of essential colour. We are all, like Ruskin, extravagant at times in speaking and writing of the finest work of Turner. A man, long dead, a contemporary, said: 'There are parts of some of them wonderful, and by God, all other drawings look heavy and vulgar.'

A living man said in my hearing: 'They are the finger of God: there is no other way to describe them.'

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

I must now take up the story of Turner's exhibited pictures in 1835, which included 'Line Fishing off Hastings,' now in the Victoria and Albert Museum; 'Venice from the Porch of Madonna della Salute,' now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, signed on a floating plank, the picture which Blackwood attacked; and two versions of the magnificent 'Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons,' one shown at the Royal Academy, the other at the British Institution. Turner had watched the conflagration the year before, as the 'Burning of the Houses of Parliament' Sketch-Book of 1834 tells us. There are also water-colours of this subject in the National Collection, and at Farnley, and a vignette in Sir Edward Tennant's collection. As a nocturne the 'Burning of the Houses of Parliament' is as furious as 'The Evening Star' is peaceful. Dim boats push out into the lurid light reflected in the water; other boats linger in the pools and eddies within the shadow of the bridge; the whole scene is a bustle of colour, from pale primrose on the bridge in shadow, to the hurry of red and yellow in the night sky bright with the illumined smoke. The Royal Academy version was, we are told, almost repainted by Turner on Varnishing Day. 'He finished it on the walls the last two days before the gallery was opened to the public'. The authority is Scarlett Davies, whose letter on the subject I have already quoted: 'I am told it was good fun to see the great man whacking away with about fifty stupid apes standing around him, and I understand that he was cursedly annoyed—the fools kept peeping into his colour-box, examining all his brushes and colours.'

Thornbury tells us that Lord Hill, on looking at the picture, exclaimed: 'What's this? Call this painting? Nothing but dabs.' But upon retiring and catching its magical effects, he added: 'Painting! God bless me. So it is.'

In this year the attacks in the press began, heralded by Blackwood, with a severe criticism of 'Venice from the Porch of Madonna della Salute.' The writer in Blackwood said:—

'Venice, well I have seen Venice. Venice the magnificent, glorious, queenly, even in her decay—with her rich, coloured buildings, speaking of days gone by, reflected in the green water. What is Venice in this picture? A flimsy, whitewashed, meagre assemblage of architecture, starting off ghostlike into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the picture). The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the boats, with their red worsted masts, are as gewgaw as a child's toy, which he may have cracked to see what it is made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its character.'

Poor old Turner! But this 'Venice' as not a good picture. John Ruskin, then sixteen years of age, read the article in Blackwood, read it with indignation, and his brain became a tumult of thoughts, and, when the attack was continued, he wrote a letter. Seven years later that letter became a book, the first volume of Modern Painters.

CHAPTER XLII

1836: AGED SIXTY-ONE

THE RECEPTION OF 'JULIET AND HER NURSE' PROCLAIMS THAT TURNER IS BEGINNING TO LOSE FAVOUR WITH THE PUBLIC

This year, alas! Turner exhibited 'Juliet and her Nurse,' and 'Mercury and Argus.' How strange it is that the hand that was painting Delight Drawings and Pictures for pleasure should also be producing 'Juliet and her Nurse' and 'Mercury and Argus' for exhibition. Even kindly Time has not brought 'Mercury and Argus' into favour. Shown at the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, all a modern critic could say was: 'It is charitable to suppose that it was hastily produced for purposes of exhibition, with a carelessness as to technical structure which time has exposed.' The contemporary attacks on 'Juliet and her Nurse,' following the severe criticism in Blackwood of the Venice picture, provoked Ruskin to write the letter, the germ of Modern Painters, mentioned in the foregoing chapter. This defence by the fiery champion of seventeen was acknowledged by Turner' with thanks but without praise,' and he added, 'I never move in these matters.'

During the journey to Italy, which Turner made this year with Mr. Munro of Novar, I do not suppose that he ever mentioned the name of Ruskin. That must have been rather a difficult journey, as Munro of Novar was suffering from a 'great depression of spirits'; but the trip seems to have been of benefit to Munro. He reports that Turner enjoyed himself in his way—'a sort of honest Diogenes way '—and that he was companionable enough if such teasing questions were avoided as to how he got this or that colour.

Turner never rhapsodised about scenery. His usual morning question during that journey was, 'Have you got the sponge?' He was fond of laconic remarks. One of them I shall always remember. Ruskin, before starting forth on a certain foreign tour, called upon Turner to bid him good-bye, the ardent youth no doubt expecting, hoping for, priceless words of counsel; but Turner was mainly anxious that the young author should not give his parents cause for anxiety on his travels. 'They will be in such a fidge about you,' were his parting words.

CHAPTER XLIII

1837: AGED SIXTY-TWO

'TROUBLES BEGIN TO GATHER ABOUT HIM. NOTHING WILL GO RIGHT'

The pictures exhibited in 1837 did not restore Turner to favour. They included the 'Snowstorm, Avalanche and Inundation,' described as a 'tumult of cloud, wind and raging torrent in the gorge,' the sketch for which he had made on his way to Italy with Munro of Novar; and the 'Departure of Regulus,' which Ruskin included among the 'nonsense pictures.'

Troubles begin to gather about him. Nothing will go right. The beautiful England and Wales series had been received with so little favour that it was decided to discontinue the issue. The stock was put up for auction, but Turner opened negotiations and purchased the whole privately for three thousand pounds. Many of those present were willing to buy portions of the work. To one of these Turner said: 'So, sir, you were going to buy my England and Wales to sell cheap, I suppose—make umbrella prints of them, eh? But I have taken care of that. No more of my plates shall be worn to shadows.'

The dealer tried to explain that he wanted only the printed stock, and Turner seemed to understand, made an appointment, then forgot all about the matter.

Fighting the world of men, he never wearied in finding his way about the world of nature, recording his impressions, and adding with difficulty to his small stock of education. On the first page of the 'Dresden' Sketch-Book is the following:—

'I want to go to Berlin.
Ich will nach Berlin gehen.
I wish to see.
Ich wollte—sehen, etc.'

A little later he comes into his own joys again—twenty-one pages of 'Buildings,' and sixteen of 'Views on River,' with sketches of sunsets and rocks, distant coasts and sailing boats—anything so long as it was beautiful in light, line or movement.

CHAPTER XLIV

1838. AGED SIXTY-THREE

A 'NONSENSE PICTURE' OF 1838 WHICH IN 1878 FETCHED £5460 AT AUCTION

From this year onward until after 1845, when his health began to fail, Turner spent more and more time on the Continent, making his beloved impressions of the moment, and producing the unrivalled water-colours of his 'latest phase,' each a 'vision of delight.' The Sketch-Books of the period are records of foreign travel. Venice and the Lake of Lucerne were the places of his heart's choice. I know not how many times he drew the Righi, making the mountain now dark, now pale, now red, now blue; or how many times he painted Venice, her churches, her buildings and her water-ways until in the end the city in the sea became a celestial city in a dream—his dream. The exhibited pictures of 1838 are splendid failures. They included 'Modern Italy' and 'Ancient Italy,' the latter classed by Ruskin among the 'nonsense pictures.' Here is the passage: '"Caligula's Bridge," "Temple of Jupiter," "Departure of Regulus," "Ancient Italy," "Cicero's Villa," and such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class under the general head of "nonsense pictures." 'But so strange a creature is man, so deaf to advice, that this 'Ancient Italy' was sold by auction in 1878 for £5460. Some prize Turner's failures higher than the successes of other men.

But the magician conquered, not through these wildnesses, but in spite of them. Even when most extravagant, there is enough of the essential Turner to make the picture great. His dreams were too vast for the poor tools at his command; he tripped over his tools, he tripped up over nature; but he did what no other man has ever been able to do. And he could still be magnificently sane when he painted something that his eyes had seen, not something that his chaotic fancy had imagined. The year following the 'Phryne,' he exhibited one of his sanest, and probably his most popular picture—'The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken up,' the last picture of his 'at which no stone was thrown.' And he gave to it a true and trite tag of poetry, which I take the liberty of writing as prose, that the curious reader may amuse himself by trying to recast the line into poetry: 'The flag which braved the battle and the breeze no longer owns her.' The first nine words may be by some esteemed poet: none but Turner would have written the last four words as a line of verse.

CHAPTER XLV

1839: AGED SIXTY-FOUR

'THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE,' AND A SEA-PIECE ON A VISITING-CARD

A party of the Academy Club were journeying to Greenwich, on their annual visit, when the steamer passed a tug with an old battleship in tow.

'There's a fine subject for you, Turner,' said Clarkson Stanfield, And Turner, who could take a hint from anybody, looked, chuckled, ruminated, no doubt made a pencil sketch, and the result was 'The Fighting Téméraire.'

She was launched at Chatham Dockyard in 1798: she had been the second ship in Nelson's division at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Sold out of the service at Sheerness in 1838, she was now being towed to Rotherhithe to be broken up. Her career was ended, but Turner has made the memory of the old wooden warrior immortal. 'The Fighting Téméraire' is too well known to be described. Pages and pages have been written about the picture with scornful comments that the sun and the mast are in the wrong places, and I know not what else. The mast, of course, should not be abaft the funnel; this curious error, or perhaps intention on Turner's part so that nothing should interfere with that black note, was corrected by J. T. Willmore, in his engraving. The 'Téméraire' as popular. No abusive voice, says Ruskin, was ever raised against it. 'And the feeling was just, for of all pictures and subjects not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted.'

An admirer who tried to purchase the 'Téméraire,' had a long interview with Turner in Queen Anne Street, but the painter could not be induced to put a price upon the picture, although he offered to take a commission of the same size at two hundred guineas. There is the usual Varnishing Day story told about the 'Téméraire.' Geddes, who had a portrait hung above, realising that his picture was killed by the dazzle of Turner's sunset, prepared to introduce a showy carpet into the floor of his portrait. He had laid it in with a flat, bright tint of vermilion when Turner appeared. 'Oh, ho! Mr. Geddes,' he cried, and seizing his palette knife loaded on orange, scarlet and yellow. Returning the next day Turner found that the bright vermilion ground in Geddes's picture had been converted into a 'rich, quiet, sober-coloured Turkey carpet.'

Less popular, because it makes no appeal to pathos or sentiment, was another exhibit of this year, with another of the unwieldy titles, 'Ancient Rome, Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus, The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Cæsars restored,' with this quotation, obviously Turner's own composition:—

'The clear stream,
Aye—the yellow Tiber glimmers to her beam,
Even while the sun is setting.'

The 'Venetian Fishing Boat' also shows the 'way he worked,' when working for his own pleasure, not for exhibition—green water, violet hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny sail—lovely.

On a packet which contained a number of drawings in a Sketch-Book, now labelled 'Miscellaneous,' Ruskin inscribed the following: 'Thirty-four pieces of paper, some double. Pencil Outline. Rubbish; only worth looking at for references. It contains many late scrawls of German scenery. Studies of Germany, etc.'

What may have seemed rubbish to Ruskin, pencil scrawls, etc., may have been of vital importance to Turner. How these Sketch-Books evoke the man and the moment. In one of them is 'A Study for a Sea-Piece,' scrawled on a visiting-card, above the name of Mr. J. M. W. Turner, 47 Queen Anne Street, Harley Street. The number of studies of the sea he made during his life certainly exceeded the number of visiting-cards he used.

CHAPTER XLVI

1840: AGED SIXTY-FIVE

A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE TERRIFIC 'SLAVE SHIP' AND THE MILD 'NEW MOON'

What a contrast is the cracked and faded picture 'The New Moon' in the National Collection, also called 'I've lost my boat, you shan't have your hoop,' with its sunset sky and young moon, the reflections still beautiful in the wet sand, to the terrific and impossible 'Slave Ship,' now in America, with its sharks, its huddle of bodies manacled and writhing in the water, and the iron chains floating on the surface, as if they were corks. As Monkhouse justly observes, one of Turner's finest conceptions is spoilt for the want of a little commonsense.

How opinions differ. Of this picture Ruskin wrote: 'I think the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of "The Slave Ship," the chief Academy picture of the exhibition of 1840.' After a long and eloquent description of the sea, without mentioning the sharks, or the bodies, or the chains, he concludes: 'I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.'

I will now quote George Innes, the American painter: 'Turner's "Slave Ship" is the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted. There is nothing in it. It has as much to do with human affections and thought as a ghost. It is not even a fine bouquet of colour. The colour is harsh, disagreeable and discordant.' Hamerton suggested that the opinion of George Innes owes part of its severity to reaction against Ruskin's eloquence.

Among the other pictures of this year were a 'Venice,' now at the South Kensington Museum, the middle distance crowded, the creamy towers beautiful; and the magnificent 'Rockets and Blue Lights,' a tempestuous nocturne, impressionism run riot, which fetched in the Yerkes sale at New York in 1910, £25,000, and which was hailed in the transatlantic newspapers as the finest example of Turner's genius ever seen in the United States. In this year, also, perhaps later, may be placed 'The Arch of Constantine, Rome,' that colour dream with the yellow sunset blazing behind the tree, and the arch looking like a rose red ruin of the imagination. Mr. Alfred Thornton, who has worked out minutely the actual topography of this picture, has come to the conclusion that Turner adhered very closely to the facts, obviously because the facts happened to coincide with his vision. Of the companion picture, 'Tivoli,' Mr. Thornton says: 'The artist seems to have recorded a series of impressions he might have gathered during an evening walk at Tivoli. Scarcely any two parts of the picture are side by side in nature, yet all can be identified with more or less certainty.'

'The Burning of the Ships,' which is the same size as 'The Arch of Constantine' and 'Tivoli,' and probably arises, like them, out of his last visit to Rome, is sheer vision, sheer imagination, perhaps founded on some recollection of naval warfare, or a vague memory of an incident in the Iliad. It is a fantasy of colour and atmosphere. To look closely is to see clouds of smoke rising from distant ships, with suggestions of an arch and buildings, and galleys crowded with rowers; but Turner was beyond form and definition when he painted 'The Burning of the Ships'; he saw only the effect of the fire and the fury, lingering with much loveliness in light.

In 1840 or later he painted many of the water-colours that arrest us by their beauty in the new Turner Gallery, such as 'The Lake of Lucerne, from Fluelen,' the large, unfinished 'Lake with Distant Headlands and Palaces,' and that delight drawing in Mr. Rawlinson's collection called 'In the Vale D'Aosta, a Passing Shower.'

But of all the pictures produced this year the cracked and faded 'New Moon,' with the sunset sky, and the funny additional title, 'I 've lost my boat, you shan't have your hoop,' seems to me the most personal to Turner. He is back in his boyhood at Margate or elsewhere, running on the sands with little companions and dogs at sunset, when the new moon was in the sky, and the world was young,—a mild, pathetic little picture, a strange contrast to the 'Slave Ship.'

CHAPTER XLVII

1841: AGED SIXTY-SIX

HOW TURNER DID IT? HE 'GRASPED THE HANDLE AND PLUNGED THE WHOLE DRAWING INTO A PAIL OF WATER'

Turner was represented by six pictures at the Royal Academy this year—unimportant, not one worthy of his reputation. There was a topographical Venice, which Chantrey bought on Varnishing Day before he had seen it; and the rather decorative, rather splendid, rather fatigued picture called 'Depositing of Giovanni Bellini's three pictures in the Church of the Redentore, Venice,' not one of which modern expert criticism allows to Bellini. Little that would have mattered to Turner; he was concerned with the look of the pageant only, a little confused—gold, red and blue surging in sunlight. No doubt it pleased the old man to add the name of Giovanni Bellini to the famous painters who are associated with the descriptions of his pictures.

The titles of the Sketch-Books of this year evoke all manner of visions of beautiful places and the works associated with them—Lucerne, the Rhine, Thun, Zug, Goldau, Fluelen, Bellinzona, Como, Splugen and Grenoble.

In the Salting Collection at the British Museum is a 'Bellinzona' of the period, faint greens, faint purples, with touches of red, the form all lost in colour, brooded over by the ridge of snow mountains, the pencilled line of which has been left. In the possession of Sir Hickman Bacon is a water-colour simply called 'A Swiss Lake,' the still water reflecting the rosy hills, and the delicate blues and yellows of the sky—just iridescent atmosphere floated upon the paper. I look at it, wonder how it was done, and decide that the explanation by Leitch, the water-colour painter, told by Mr. Shaw Sparrow in The Studio, as to 'how Turner did it,' does not help me.

Leitch informed a friend of Mr. Sparrow's that he once accompanied Pickersgill to Turner's studio, and there watched the great man working, or shall I say composing. There were four drawing-boards, each of which had a handle screwed to the back. After the subject had been lightly sketched in, Turner grasped the handle and plunged the whole drawing into a pail of water by his side. 'Then quickly he washed in the principal hues that he required, flowing tint into tint, until this stage of the work was complete. Leaving this first drawing to dry, he took the second board and repeated the operation. By the time the fourth drawing was laid in, the first would be ready for the finishing touches; and Leitch was greatly impressed by the commonsense of the whole proceeding.'

Commonsense and genius, knowledge and daring, cunning and simplicity: result—Turner's later water-colours.

CHAPTER XLVIII

1842: AGED SIXTY-SEVEN

'THE SNOWSTORM' AND SOME 'FAULTLESS' WATER-COLOURS

I open my thumbed copy of Modern Painters, turn to a certain page in volume I., and read this: '"The Snowstorm," one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner.'

In this appreciation we can go all the way with Ruskin. 'The Snowstorm' in its new home in the new Turner Gallery looks the work of a giant in the interpretation of sea-motion, mist and light.

The 'Snowstorm; Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in shallow water and going by the lead,' was laughed at by the press when it was shown in the 1842 Academy. The parody of the title that appeared in Punch was almost funny; but the old man did not think it funny: 'A Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway; with a ship on fire, an eelipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow,' with the following skit on the Fallacies of Hope:—

'O Art, how vast thy mighty wonders are
To those who roam upon the extraordinary deep;
Maelstrom, thy hand is here,'

Thornbury asserts that the critics of all kinds, learned and unlearned, were furious when it was exhibited; some of them described it as a mass of 'soapsuds and whitewash.'

'Turner,' wrote Ruskin, 'was passing the evening at my father's house, on the day this criticism came out; and after dinner, sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, I heard him muttering low to himself, at intervals, "Soapsuds and whitewash" again, and again, and again. At last I went to him, asking why he minded what they said. Then he burst out, "Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it."'

As a matter of fact, Turner had given himself infinitely more trouble over 'The Snowstorm' than over 'The Fighting Téméraire,' and he had been in considerable danger. To paint 'The Snowstorm,' he had put to sea from Harwich in the Ariel in a hurricane, had made the sailors lash him to the mast, and there the student of sixty-seven remained for four hours studying the awful scene. I look at 'The Snowstorm' to-day, and remember. I am filled with awe at the man's power. No, we do not smile at 'The Snowstorm' now; but certain folk still smile at 'War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet,' depicting an attenuated Napoleon, standing against a blood-red sunset, in the shallows of a tidal pool, on the shore of St. Helena, gazing with folded arms out to sea. Turner failed to make this nobly inspired dream a reality—that is all.

Punch made merry over the 'Exile and the Rock Limpet,' calling it 'The Duke of Wellington and the Shrimp (Seringapatam, early morning),' with another parody of the Fallacies:—

'And can it be, thou hideous imp,
That life is, ah! how brief, and glory but a shrimp!
(From an unpublished poem.)'

And remarked that:—

'The comet just rising above the cataract in the foreground, and the conflagration of Tippoo's widow in the Banyan forest by the sea-shore, are in the great artist's happiest manner.'

'Peace, Burial at Sea of the Body of Sir David Wilkie,' was a vision which Turner completely realised, the poetry, the pathos, the grandeur, the decorative splendour—all. The sails of the steamship are dark against the evening sky, as if in mourning, and amidships, in a blaze of torchlight, the body of Wilkie is being lowered to his watery grave. Stanfield, who saw the picture on Varnishing Day, thought the effect of the sails was 'untrue,' which, of course, they are, but Turner would not alter them. 'I only wish I had any colour to make them blacker,' said the old warrior.

From this picture of peace and solemnity I turn to the peace and loveliness of some 'smaller' water-colours of this, his sunset, period.

Ruskin, in his 'Notes on Turner's Drawings exhibited at the Fine Art Society in 1878,' which is printed as the Epilogue to the volume called Notes on Pictures, tells how in the winter of 1841-42 Turner brought back with him from Switzerland a series of sketches, fifteen of which he placed, as was his custom, in the hands of his agent, Griffith of Norwood, so that he might obtain commissions for finished drawings of each.

Ruskin tells us that 'he made anticipatorily four, to manifest what their quality would be, and honestly "show his hand." Four thus exemplary drawings I say he made for specimens, or signs, as it were, for his re-opened shop, namely:—

1. The Pass of Splugen.

2. Mont Righi, seen from Lucerne, in the morning, dark against dawn.

3. Mont Righi, seen from Lucerne at evening, red with the last rays of sunset.

4. Lake Lucerne (The Bay of Uri) from above Brunnen, with exquisite blue and rose mists and 'mackerel' sky on the right.

The whole story, which is told in Ruskin's most simple and charming style, is too long to be repeated here. Nine commissions only could be obtained, making ten with the one given to Griffith as commission. 'Turner growled, but said at last that he would do them,' and among them was a 'Lucerne Town,' which Ruskin, by hard coaxing and petitioning, obtained his father's leave to promise to take if it turned out well. It did.

What a wonderful realisation of a dream of colour is another water-colour of this period, reproduced in these pages—'Spietz on the Lake of Thun, Looking Towards the Bernese Oberland.'

On the last page of the Ruskin Catalogue, which is now called Epilogue, the old man, most eloquent and most sorrowful, writes:—

'The "Constance" and "Coblentz" here with the "Splugen" (1), "Bay of Uri" (4), and "Zurich" (10), of the year 1812, are the most finished and faultless works of his last period; but these of 1843 are the truest and mightiest ... I can't write any more of them just now.'

About this time Munro of Novar offered twenty-five thousand pounds for the whole contents of the Queen Anne Street Gallery. Turner hesitated, but finally refused. Frith, in his Autobiography, tells the story thus:—

'When Munro of Novar went for his final answer, Turner cried, "No! I won't—I can't. I believe I am going to die, and I intend to be buried in those two (pointing to "Carthage" and "The Sun Rising Through Vapour"), so I can't—besides I can't be bothered. Good-evening!"'

The evening of his life was to last nine years, and Turner found his own way of escape from being bothered.

CHAPTER XLIX

1843: AGED SIXTY-EIGHT

VISIONS OF VENICE AND THE FIRST VOLUME OF 'MODERN PAINTERS'

The two pictures of Venice exhibited in 1843, so changed, so faded, are in their way among the loveliest things Turner ever painted. 'San Benedetto, Looking Towards Fusina,' was formerly known as 'The Approach to Venice,' and I wish that title could have been retained, as one always thinks of it as 'The Approach to Venice,' and always in connection with the companion picture, 'The "Sun of Venice" Going to Sea,' with the name of this immortalised, fishing-boat 'Sol di Venezia' conspicuous on the sail. These two fading visions of Venice are indescribable, although everybody attempts to describe them. An eloquent passage may be found in the essay M. de la Sizeranne wrote for The Studio on 'The Genius of Turner,' from which the following is an extract:—

'Nothing will be found more beautiful than the "Approach" itself. No robe from Tintoretto's brush will be found to possess the splendour of the gondolas conveying us. No Titian—that of the mountains of Cadore, the presence of which we divine, no nimbus about the head of a saint, will equal that sun, no purple these skies, no prayer the infinite sweetness of the dream experienced during those brief, delicious moments. Nothing will be found to compare with the distant vision of that city which, on the horizon, seems to be too beautiful ever to be reached, and appears to recede from the traveller's barque—

Ainsi que Dèle sur le mer,

gilded like youth, silent as dreams, and like happiness unattainable.'

Earlier in the Essay this sensitive writer says:—

'Turner was the first of the Impressionists, and after a lapse of eighty years he remains the greatest, at least in the styles he has treated. That Impressionism came from England is proved by the letters of Delacroix, and demonstrated by M. Paul Signac in his pamphlet on "Neo-Impressionism." ... Turner is the father of the Impressionists. Their discoveries are his. He first saw that Nature is composed in a like degree of colours and of lines, and, in his evolution, the rigid and settled lines of his early method gradually melt away and vanish in the colours. He sought to paint the atmosphere, the envelopment of coloured objects seen at a distance, rather than the things enveloped: and he quickly realised that the atmosphere could not be expressed, except through the infinite parcelling out of things which Claude Lorrain drew in a solid grouping and painting en bloc. He shredded the clouds. He took the massive and admirable masses, the cumuli of Ruysdael, of Hobbema, of Van de Velde, picked the threads out of them, and converted them into a myriad-shaded charpie, which he entrusted to the winds of heaven.'