failure by its fine sky. Yet it is worth comparing the two to trace out the subtle differences which spring up under Turner’s hand in the etching. All the objects are forced into shapes that act more powerfully on the imagination, everywhere the tendency of the line is towards emphasis and distinctness.

In the ‘Kirkstall Crypt’ (R. 39), the design is also recast in the etching. The group of cows is altered, the foreground pillar is made thinner, the space between the two columns in the centre is widened out, and the aperture in the wall above the cows on the left is made light, instead of dark. These changes are all for the better. A careful study of these seemingly trivial alterations is valuable as an instance of the subtleties of design upon which all really fine art depends.

As these remarks indicate, I am in agreement with the general opinion that the engravings represent Turner’s intentions more fully than his preliminary drawings. But though this is generally the case, there are exceptions, and the most notable is, I think, that of the plate sometimes known as ‘Twickenham—Pope’s Villa,’ and sometimes as ‘Garrick’s Temple and Hampton Court,’ but which really represents a scene at Isleworth. In this case the drawing (Plate XL.) is much finer than the plate, although Turner etched the subject himself. But somehow the spacing of the whole is much less felicitous in the engraving than in the drawing. The rendering of the trees, too, is more conventional, but this is a characteristic of nearly all the plates, and is due to the difficulties of the medium, it being impossible to get the same subtlety of tone and delicacy of form in etching and mezzotint that can be got with a pen and wash on paper.

This question of the comparative conventionality of the foliage in the engravings induces me to say a few words about one of the loveliest renderings of woodland scenery in the whole series—the so-called ‘Raglan Castle’ (R. 58).[20] This is one of the plates that Turner mezzotinted himself, yet because the etched lines are not so free and supple as those of the preliminary drawing (No. 865, N.G.), it has been assumed that Turner left the etching to be done by one of his engravers, probably Dawe. This assumption is one that I cannot accept. The lettering on the plate, ‘Drawn and Engraved by J. M. W. Turner, etc.,’ points to the conclusion that Turner was responsible both for the etching and the mezzotinting. And when we compare the etching with the drawing, a number of slight but successful differences emerge, which no engraver would either have attempted to make or could have made if he had desired to do so.

‘The Source of the Arveron’ (R. 60), another of the plates ‘drawn and engraved’ by Turner, has also had its etching condemned and attributed to Dawe. If the plate is really so fine as all the critics of this kind insist, it is curious that the etching can be so poor as they say and yet not affect the excellence of the whole. This is inconsistent with the proper appreciation of the important role the etched lines play in all these mezzotints. That Turner regarded the etching as far more important than the scraping is shown by the simple fact that he undertook (nominally at least) to do it all himself, but he had no hesitation in handing the scraping over to the engravers.

These general considerations are further strengthened when we compare the finished plate (I am speaking only of the etching in the published states, and not of the rare ‘first state’ of the etching in the late Mr. J. E. Taylor’s collection) with the preliminary study made for it, now in the National Gallery (No. 879). The size and proportions of the plate differ from those of the drawing, so the etching could not have been traced from it, while the etching nowhere follows the drawing with the accuracy one would expect if it were merely an engraver’s copy. There is no authority in this drawing for the shapes given to the crests of the distant mountains in the centre, nor for the shapes of the upper portions of the nearer mountains on the left. The lower parts of the design are also modified from the forms in the drawing in exactly the way Turner habitually recast all the drawings he etched. It is also hard to suppose that Dawe or anybody but Turner could have recast the vague shapes of the disappearing ridge of the glacier on the left in the masterly way this has been done in the etching, or that anybody but Turner could have invented, on the strength of the loose indications in the drawing, the masterly lines that give definition to the stretch of valley against which the ice of the glacier is relieved. The shapes of the

first two upright pines near the centre have also been recast by the mind and hand of the master, not copied by another hand from the indications given in the drawing. Alterations have also been introduced in the character of the stems and their branches which a professional engraver would not dare to make in an ostensible copy; the same remark applies also to the tops of the pines on the right. For these reasons, I think, those critics are mistaken who deny that the workmanship of the whole plate is Turner’s. And the mistake has arisen to a large extent, I feel inclined to add, through attaching too much importance to a priori notions of technical mastery. As the late Mr. Arthur Strong very justly said, we are inclined to start with an idea that masters are always masterly and classical, and we often end by finding that they have left nothing behind them quite worthy of our preconceived ideas of what they ought to have done.

These are a few of the points suggested by a comparison of the preliminary designs for the Liber plates with the finished engravings. But to get any good out of it every student must take the trouble to make these comparisons for himself. Should my remarks succeed in inducing even a few adventurous spirits to make such an experiment, I shall feel satisfied that I have done something towards spreading an intelligent interest in the marvellous process of artistic creation. Perhaps, too, some day in the future, the authorities of the National Gallery may see their way towards the display of these drawings so that such a process of intelligent study may be performed without the inconvenience which the present arrangement entails. It is probably not necessary to have the whole series of drawings on exhibition at the same time, but if those that are exhibited could be accompanied by the finished engravings, and, where possible, by one or two proofs of the unfinished states, I believe the gain to the public would be considerable.

CHAPTER VII

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS, OR ‘WHAT YOU WILL’—1813-1830

In all this Turner’s attitude seems entirely passive or receptive.

His amazingly rapid growth seems to be merely an effortless assimilation of the moral atmosphere of his time. All that was fairest and of good repute in the common spiritual heritage of the people seems to have passed insensibly into his thoughts and feelings. His art is a social or national phenomenon, so impersonal (or superpersonal) that it is difficult to point to traces of the mere individual in his work. The individual is lost in his universal function. The man himself is nothing but the voice or thought of what Hume has called ‘a man in general.’ Yet his work is as far removed as any work can be from the vagueness and coldness of the abstract universal. Behind every touch of his hand and every thought or idea in his mind beats the pulse of a full-blooded and passionate personality. Only, by some miracle, this man happens to be free from the local prejudices and limitations that deflect the judgment and sympathies of most men from the one true standard.

This education of Turner’s sympathies and feelings was the work, we have seen reasons for concluding, of the poets and artists whom he loved and admired. In the light and warmth of their ideal creations his own high instincts were quickened into life and activity. Under their influence he had entered into the common spiritual world, and they had given the direction to his impulses and ideas regarding things human and divine. But education must be a lifelong process, and there comes a time in the growth of each individual when the need of something more clear-cut and permanent than his own impulses and desires, however wholesome they may be, declares itself. As Plato pointed out long ago, to secure the happiest results of the best ‘musical’ education, something more than a merely ‘musical’ education is needed. We have now reached that period in Turner’s life when the lover of beautiful sights and thoughts and feelings must make a determined effort to unify these manifold beauties by an explicit principle, to exchange opinion for knowledge, if he is to preserve the advantages he has already won. In life there is no standing still, no resting upon our gains. We must go forward to higher victories, or find our arms tarnish and our gains dissipate themselves. But it may well be doubted whether art is capable of reaching a higher point of beauty than that which Turner had already reached. Forced to its extreme limits beauty insensibly passes into something which is at once more and less than beauty. Such pictures as the ‘Frosty Morning,’ ‘Windsor,’ and ‘The Trout Stream’ are, perhaps, the most beautiful that art is capable of producing. And the example of Wordsworth, who did strive upward to ‘an intelligence which has greatness and the vision of all time and of all being,’ is not on all points reassuring. His poetry, simply as poetry, did suffer from his philosophic studies. There may be something in the very nature of the human soul which sets bounds to the creation or expression of beauty.

But Turner was not like Wordsworth. He was for good and ill essentially and solely an artist. The play of shapes and colours was probably dearer to him than food or raiment. Having by sheer good fortune carried his art to its highest attainable pitch of beauty before he had reached his fortieth year, he was placed in an embarrassing position. The dialectical movement of beauty would now carry him outside his art, into regions where the individual man might reap rich gains, but where the artist could reap only sorrow and disappointment. The artist in Turner was stronger than the man. He loved the sensuous medium of art more than the spiritual beauty into which the current of traditional wisdom had carried him. The remainder of his life is therefore dedicated to the passionate and audacious development of the material beauties of his art.

We have now to trace in his works the gradual encroachments of the purely sensuous side of his art. For a time all seems well, perhaps more than well, for the gain in all the lower elements of his art is very striking. During the next twenty years his works gain constantly in the sensuous attractiveness of colour and in the formal beauties of rhythm and design. The loss of beauty is compensated by deep draughts of pleasantness. Yet amid the feverish intoxication of sensuous beauty a wild unrest and despair make themselves increasingly felt. The man has sacrificed himself to his art, and the starved human soul turns in bitterness from the ardently desired rewards of the most brilliantly triumphant artistic career that modern times have witnessed.

It is usual in treating mainly of Turner’s oil paintings to fix upon the year 1815 as the great turning-point in his career. After

1815 there is a marked change in the aims and character of Turner’s art, and it is convenient to date this change from the year that saw the end of the Napoleonic wars, and inaugurated a new era in the social and political condition of this country. From this date, too, the conditions of artistic production changed. The rapid development of industrial concerns brought a new class of patrons upon the scene. Before 1815, Turner’s patrons had been mainly the landed aristocracy; after 1815, his chief patrons were the successful merchants of the great towns. From that time the men of commerce and the manufacturers ousted the aristocracy from the leading position which they had held in the councils of the country. With the change of men a change took place in the ideals, manners and taste of the country; and Turner, with his extraordinary sensibility, his ready powers of intuition and rapid assimilation, seemed bound to reflect the change in his work.

Yet if we look closer into Turner’s career, we find that 1815 was rather the year that saw the brilliant public inauguration of the new era, than the actual beginning of the change. The ‘Crossing the Brook,’ exhibited in 1815, is often regarded as the impressive close of Turner’s early manner, yet this beautiful picture already bears the impress of that folie des grandeurs to which we owe most of the excesses of the new manner. The ‘Frosty Morning’ of 1813 is really the last work in which the inspiration rings true throughout, in which the form and content are absolutely indissoluble. ‘Dido and Æneas,’ the only picture exhibited in 1814, is a frigid pseudo-classical pomposity, the due development of the strain of baser metal in Turner’s genius, which had already betrayed itself in the ‘Macon’ of 1803, the ‘Narcissus and Echo’ of 1804, and the ‘Schaffhausen’ of 1806. In glancing rapidly over Turner’s career we have been able to ignore these works; in the rush and splendour of his general development such pictures fall into insignificance, as casual indications that a busy professional man’s industry may outrun his inspiration.

After 1813 it is impossible to ignore this side of Turner’s production. It was just this regrettable side of his work that appealed most strongly to the middle-class public for whom he had now to cater. ‘Dido Building Carthage’ (1815) is a picture exactly to the taste of the admirers of the first instalment of Childe Harold, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara. It has the historical remoteness, the vague and empty grandeur, the mysterious dreaminess, the warm, voluptuous atmosphere and intoxicating lyrical movement of the contemporary phase of Romantic poetry. In ‘The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire’ (1817), ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1818), ‘Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday’ (1819) and ‘Rome from the Vatican’ (1820), we recognise the contemporary and fellow-worker of Byron, Moore, Southey, Chateaubriand and Lamartine. In 1822 Turner’s only picture at the Royal Academy was entitled ‘What you Will’!—an ominous but significant title. It seems to put into words the ruling motive of this new phase of his art; to show that Turner is fully conscious that he is trimming his barque to catch the breath of popular applause. ‘The Bay of Baiae’ (1823), the two ‘Mortlakes’ (1826-27), ‘Dido directing the Equipment of the Fleet’ (1828) and ‘Ulysses’ (1829) indicate clearly the predominant bent of the artist’s mind towards the grosser pleasures of his art.

These works brought and kept Turner prominently before the public eye. They made him the pride and glory of the Royal Academy, and put him on a level of celebrity with Sir Thomas Lawrence. They made him, in short, in Sir Walter Scott’s words, ‘the fashion,’ yet it is these works that Turner’s admirers of the present day regard with only moderate enthusiasm.

Compared with the work of the previous decade, such pictures cannot but strike us as unworthy of the artist’s genius. Yet we have a tendency nowadays, I think, to overrate the independence of the artist. The modern artist, in so far as he is dependent upon the support of the society in which he works, is not an entirely free agent. The society that applauded them and for whose pleasure they were produced must therefore accept perhaps the main responsibility for the middle-class ideals stamped upon these pictures. In tracing the reaction of society upon art and art upon society, it is an extremely difficult matter to decide which factor is the more powerful, but I am inclined to think it is not art. But however this may be, it is certainly the duty of the individual to fortify himself as best he can against the contagion to which he is exposed. And it must be confessed that Turner was but ill-provided within himself with the means to resist the deadening influences of the atmosphere of bad taste into which he was now launched. It is true that Turner was not exactly what is called a ‘society-man,’ and he might therefore have more easily escaped the contagion of those drawing-room ideals to which men like Tom Moore succumbed. But Turner was a member of the Royal Academy. It was the recognised organisation of his profession, and he valued highly the honours it had to confer. His lack of general education made him an easy victim to the pretensions of officialism; like all uneducated people, he had a ridiculous reverence for the trappings and mummery of the learned world, for degrees, diplomas, titles. He was inordinately proud of the right to write ‘R.A.,’ ‘P.P.,’ after his name, and to alter these letters to P.R.A. was the height of his ambition. Under these circumstances he could not but identify himself with the immediate practical aims of the Royal Academy. Now this ill-starred institution is so unwisely and so unfortunately constituted, that its very existence, and all its powers of activity as a professional benevolent society, are made to depend almost entirely upon its popularity as an exhibition society. The Academy throve then as it thrives now, in proportion as it succeeds in catering for the taste of the fashionable and moneyed public; it could only lose ground if it made the slightest attempts to guide or educate the public sense of beauty. In this way it had become in Turner’s time nothing more nor less than an organisation for stamping the ideals of the drawing-room upon English art.

In 1819 Turner made his first visit to Italy, the material for the pseudo-classical pictures painted before this having been derived from other artists’ pictures and engravings. It is curious that he should have waited till his forty-fifth year before making this journey. The Continent, it is true, had to a great extent been closed to English travellers since the outbreak of the French Revolution; but in spite of political and other difficulties Turner had managed to see a good deal of France, Belgium, Savoy and Switzerland, and he had been down the Rhine. If he had been equally keen to see Italy he could certainly have gone there also, especially as Italy was more generally accessible to an Englishman than any of the other countries he had visited. This curious shrinking from Italy may very likely have been due to the promptings of his own nature. When we examine his art as a whole we clearly see that he found more delight in the wildness, irregularity and caprice of Switzerland and the Rhine valleys than in the more regular scenery of Italy. Even Mr. Ruskin admits that Turner got no good from Italian scenery; Naples, Rome and Florence only put him out and bewildered him; Venice is the only Italian city that lent itself at all gracefully to his genius, and Venice is the most northern in character of all the Italian cities.

But the requirements of his patrons and the peculiar Academic misunderstanding of the principles of landscape art conspired to send Turner to Italy. There the scenery is more beautiful in itself and richer in historical associations than elsewhere in Europe, therefore it is the duty of the ambitious landscape painter who happens to have had the misfortune to be born somewhere out of Italy to stop painting the mere scenes of his own country as soon as possible, and to set out at once for such spots as Tivoli, Narni and Lago Maggiore, the spots approved, stamped and consecrated by generations of the prosperous travellers of all the chief countries of Europe. The theoretical error at the root of this dangerous prejudice is the confusion of the materially pretty, agreeable, and pleasant, with artistic beauty, which is something essentially different from any of these things. But this confusion of the pleasant and the beautiful was a doctrine which the Academy of Turner’s time was bent on inculcating by its teaching and exemplifying in its practice.

It happened that Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the most brilliant exponents of the gospel of the pretty and pleasant, was spending the summer of 1819 in Rome. In the intervals of his labours and relaxations with the great and beautiful of society, he found time to notice the grandeur and beauties of the scenery around him. During this time ‘his letters to England were full of entreaties addressed to their common friends to urge upon Turner the importance of visiting Rome while “his genius was in the flower.” “It is injustice to his fame and his country,” he writes on another occasion, “to let the finest period of his genius pass away ... without visiting these scenes.”’[21] Whether these

appeals had any special weight with Turner we do not know, but he set out for Italy within a month or two of the writing of these letters.

He went from Calais to Paris, followed the usual coach-route to Turin, explored the Lakes of Como, Lugano and Maggiore, and reached Venice by way of Milan, Brescia and Desenzano. He must have spent some time at Venice to judge from the number of drawings made there, then went to Bologna, Cesena and Rimini, and continued along the coast of the Adriatic to Ancona. At Ancona he turned inland to Loreto and, following the high post road through Recanati and Macerata, entered the Via Flaminia at Foligno, and passing through Narni and Orticoli entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo, probably sometime in October. From Rome he explored Frascati, Tivoli and Albano, and made a tour to Naples, Baiae, Pozzuoli, Pompeii, Amalfi, Sorrento and Herculaneum. He was back in Rome by the 2nd December, then visited Florence, and, recrossing the Alps on the 24th January 1820, returned through Piedmont and France. On the 12th February we find him dining at Grosvenor Place, London, with his friends the Fawkeses.

To judge from the number of sketch-books filled on this journey Turner must have had the pencil in his hands practically the whole time he was away. Before starting he had ‘got up’ the subject carefully from books and engravings, and he knew exactly what buildings, antiquities and views he ought to look for at each place he went to. In this way he lost no time mooning about, like a modern artist, looking for unexpected beauties. He just went straight from one guide-book point of interest to another, sketched each methodically from every possible point of view and hurried on to the next. The sketch-books he used were generally about 7½ by 4½ inches in size, composed of ordinary white paper. His favourite medium was a hard-pointed pencil. His sketches are always made with a view to information, never for effect. In this way about a dozen books were filled, each of about a hundred pages, and most are drawn on on both sides of the pages. Our reproductions of the sketches of the Grand Canal, the Piazzetta at Venice, and Trajan’s Column (Plates XLVIII., L., and LIII.) may stand as examples of the main body of work done by Turner during this visit.

In addition to these small sketch-books he also used some of larger size, with the paper prepared with a wash of grey. He used one of these books at Tivoli, and another at Rome and Naples. The grey tint was of such a nature that it lifted quite easily when rubbed with bread or india-rubber. In this way he was able to indicate the chiaroscuro of his sketches with ease and celerity. The more elaborate drawings of Rome were made in this way, among them those exquisite views from Monte Mario, which have long been among the most admired of the drawings exhibited in the Turner Water-Colour Rooms at the National Gallery. Where the subject was an interesting one he occasionally worked over it, or over parts of it, with water-colour, as in the ‘View of Rome from Monte Mario’ (No. 592) here reproduced (Plate LI.), and ‘The Colosseum’ (No. 596) among the exhibited drawings. But the number of drawings in which Turner had recourse to colour is extremely limited, quite nineteen-twentieths of them being simply in pencil.

The drawings made during this visit are, in Mr. Ruskin’s opinion, the best Turner ever made from nature. ‘All the artist’s powers,’ he wrote, ‘were at this period in perfection; none of his faults had developed themselves; and his energies were taxed to the utmost to seize, both in immediate admiration, and for future service, the loveliest features of some of the most historically interesting scenery in the world.’[22] And again, ‘They are, in all respects, the most true and the most beautiful ever made by the painter.’[23] And assuredly it would be difficult to praise these superb drawings too highly or too enthusiastically; for sheer grace of pencilling, for skilful composition, for loving, unwearied rendering of architecture and natural scenery they are absolutely unrivalled.

But it is only as drawings, as works that contain their end within themselves, that they can be praised so highly. They are probably the most beautiful topographical drawings that have ever been made, but Turner did not regard himself as a topographical draughtsman, and from his point of view the results of this journey cannot have been completely satisfactory. If he had valued himself at all on his capacity for making beautiful topographical

drawings, he would surely have taken some steps to bring these achievements to the notice of the public.[24] He did nothing of the kind. We have seen that it was his settled habit to regard his sketches and drawings from nature as merely the preliminary stages of his pictures. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, Turner, after his few years of apprenticeship, never drew from nature without altering and arranging what he saw. He never accepted the given momentary facts in a passive spirit. It is on record that once he said to the companion of one of his sketching tours who had got into a muddle with the drawing he was making, ‘What are you in search of?’ And this active spirit had been one of the chief characteristics of all the drawing from nature he had done before his visit to Italy: he had always been in search of something, he had always had a very clear and exact idea of what he wanted, and he had almost invariably managed to grasp just what he wanted, while encumbering himself with very little else.

This clearness of intention is absent from the Italian drawings. The scenery, the buildings, the people, the shipping and the effects of light are all new to him, and delightfully interesting. The novelty of his surroundings carries him out of himself. He becomes for a time a mere common tourist with a kind of accidental knack of making rapid and wonderfully beautiful pictorial memoranda. It is as though the creative artist had said to his familiar daemon, ‘We are now in fair Italy. Sleep thou, and take a well-earned rest. The business of note-taking will go on automatically without thee; and when we are once more back in dreary London thou shalt awake as a giant refreshed with slumber, and shalt knead with renewed vigour the material that has been accumulated.’ But the results achieved were not as satisfactory as Turner might have expected. The best that could be made of these wonderful sketches was two or three charming water-colours for Mr. Fawkes, a weak and empty ‘Forum Romanum’ for Mr. Soane’s Museum, and a large ‘Bay of Baiae,’ which, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, ‘is encumbered with material; it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good picture, and yet is so crude in colour as to look unfinished.’[25]

It therefore depends very much upon what we are in search of, what conclusions we shall come to about these Italian drawings. If we are evangelists with a mission to preach the Gospel of Naturalism, we may accept them as the finest works of art Turner ever produced, in spite of the fact that he found them useless and worse than useless for his artistic purposes. From such a point of view it would be Turner’s fault if these beautiful things threw him out and led him astray; or, as Mr. Ruskin puts it, ‘the effect of Italy upon his [Turner’s] mind is very puzzling ... he seems never to have entered thoroughly into the spirit of Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but awkwardly introduced into his large compositions.’[26]

But if the processes of artistic creation are worth studying, we shall go on to ask ourselves how it is that the most elaborate, painstaking and thoroughly delightful drawings Turner ever made from nature were actually the least useful to him as a maker of pictures; and how it is that exquisitely deliberate and dainty drawings like those in the Roman and Neapolitan sketch-books lead actually to the production of frigid, hybrid, pseudo-classical pictures, while hurried and scarcely intelligible scribbles like those reproduced in Plates XXVII. and XXV. had been the means of bringing into existence such noble and impressive pictures as the ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and designs like the ‘Hedging and Ditching’?

The answer to these questions is not far to seek. The state of mind necessary for the production of the two kinds of drawings is essentially different, and the one, which produces the exhaustive and accurate drawing, is antagonistic to the state of mind in which a strongly imaginative work of art is conceived, while the other, which produces a less immediately satisfying record, is actually the state of mind in which a passionately felt work of art comes to birth. In the drawing which we admire so much the emotional element is in abeyance, the cognitive or sense-perceptive is predominant; in the other the emotional element is predominant. But in the first case, while the immediate result, considered simply in itself, is more delightful, there has been

no real quickening of the artist’s spirit; in the second case, while the immediate result is deplorable for us, it is eloquent and glorious for the artist himself as the first stirring of his newborn spiritual progeny.

The object of these remarks is not to attempt to convince us that these charming Italian drawings are at all less charming than they seem; it is rather to combat the false deductions which Naturalism has succeeded in drawing from the fact that they are so genuinely delightful and so self-satisfying. It is inevitable that an artist shall constantly be making studies from nature, sharpening and exercising his powers of observation, and storing his note-books and memory with facts of natural appearances. But it does not follow that this business of observing and recording visual facts is the essential or even most important part of the artist’s function. Naturalism assumes that it is. It therefore treats the power to copy natural objects faithfully and without alteration as the exact equivalent of the power of pictorial expression.[27] And so far as the system of art education pursued in this country has any rational foundation, it is based upon this doctrine of Naturalism. Hence the only kind of training that is provided for English art students is training in this capacity of reproducing objects of sight accurately. This has come to be the beginning and the end of modern art education, with what results we have only to walk into any summer exhibition of the Royal Academy to see. Under these circumstances, I think it is important that we should give its due weight to any evidence that tends to invalidate these generally received opinions. Of course the evidence of the practice and line of development of one artist, even an artist as great as Turner, is not by itself sufficient to settle such a question; but still, I submit, this evidence has a distinct bearing on the subject and should receive its due attention.

If the doctrine of Naturalism possessed the universal validity it is assumed to possess, the pictures based upon the truest and most elaborate drawings Turner ever made from nature—and that too of the most beautiful and the most historically interesting scenery in the world—should have been the best he had so far produced. They are admittedly among the worst. If the training acquired by making such drawings is essential to the development of the artist’s powers of pictorial expression, how comes it that in Turner’s case this training came after the production of his most perfect pictures,—these Italian drawings being made in 1819, the ‘Sheerness,’ ‘Windsor,’ ‘Abingdon,’ and ‘Frosty Morning’ having been painted between 1809 and 1813, and he had never worked from nature like this before? This is the evidence. I can only beg the candid reader to give it the earnest consideration it seems to me to deserve.

Turner’s oil paintings produced between 1815 and 1830 cannot but strike us as disappointing, especially when we compare them with the output of the years immediately preceding this period. It is only as a sea-painter that Turner reminds us of his former mastery, and with the exception of the ‘Dort’ (1818) ‘Entrance of the Meuse’ (1819), the Greenwich ‘Battle of Trafalgar’ (1823) and ‘Now for the Painter’ (1827), it would do Turner’s reputation little harm if all his oil pictures produced during these years were destroyed. His real greatness is only shown in this period by the water-colours produced mainly for the engravers. In the work done for the Southern Coast, Scott’s Provincial Antiquities, the Rivers and Ports of England, and the England and Wales series, Turner displayed all the genuine nobleness and sweetness of his nature. I propose therefore to occupy the remainder of this chapter with a rapid survey of these undertakings, singling out from each one or two representative designs for closer examination.

We have now seen what was the character of Turner’s pictures which gained him most applause and favour in Academic circles and with the public of the Academy. It is no doubt regrettable that a man of his talents should have to waste his time—as it seems to us—in the manufacture of puerile and pretentious specimens of Academic ‘high art,’ but we can easily make too much of the matter. There is something altogether incommensurable about such a man; he is like some great natural force, copious, abundant and unwearying. He must have drawn and painted with as little effort as ordinary mortals exert when they play cards or write letters to their friends. I have no doubt that

the ‘high art’ concoctions bothered him much more than his better works, for it was all ratiocinative, conscious, all spun out of the understanding without any deep-struck roots in the unconscious life of his affections. But no doubt he felt prouder of the results, simply because he was more conscious of the efforts. We have no grounds for supposing that he did not enjoy the work, and in return it certainly gave him comparative independence, and encouraged him to produce. Printsellers and publishers were anxious to get the celebrated Academician to work for them, and the big middle-class public were eager to possess themselves of engravings from the great man’s designs. It was certainly a clear gain that the designer of the Southern Coast, the Richmondshire drawings, Scott’s Provincial Antiquities, the Rivers and Ports of England, and the England and Wales series could afford to keep publishers and editors at arm’s length, that he was so strong in public favour that his work was influenced by none but artistic considerations.

It hardly comes within the scope of the present essay to study the drawings in detail which form the originals of Turner’s engraved work, important as these drawings are as examples of the artist’s genius. Each drawing is a perfect work of art in itself, the fact that an engraving was to be made from it counting practically as nothing with the artist. If the subject did not lend itself quite satisfactorily to the engraver’s requirements, Turner introduced various modifications into the engraver’s proofs, but he did not alter the drawings. In this way the original drawings were kept as independent creations. Into them the artist was free to pour all that spontaneous native side of his talent which could find no outlet in his ambitious ‘high art’ productions. As water-colours the originals of the engravings that were issued between 1814 and 1830 are among the most remarkable and consummate achievements of the medium. With hardly an exception they are worked entirely in transparent colour, and for sheer range of invention, variety of effect, and loveliness of colour they have no equals. But their place is among the artist’s completed works, and as our immediate business is with the sketches and studies, we can only touch upon these exquisitely beautiful water-colours incidentally; i.e. only in so far as they help us to grasp the significance of the sketches and preliminary drawings which went to their production.

It is a curious sign how little conscious Turner was of the nature and limitations of his own capacities, that the plan of the Southern Coast series of engravings, as it first took form in his mind, included a long narrative poem from his own hand describing the history and local peculiarities of the places he proposed to illustrate. It is hardly probable that an individual with less capacity for verbal expression ever sat down to write a long poem. Yet it is easy to see how it was that Turner came to think himself competent to undertake such a task. The stamp of his mind was genuinely poetic. He had, and knew that he had, in a high measure ‘the vision and the faculty divine.’ The inspiration of his best works had been drawn from the poets, from Thomson, Akenside, and Milton. His pictures, so far as it is possible to distinguish content from form, are real poems. And the technical accomplishment of pictorial art had come to him so easily and naturally that it may well have seemed to flow inevitably from the innate strength of his emotions and the vivid hue of his imagination. He probably thought that he had only to take a pen in his hand to find the accomplishment of verse following with the same ease and inevitability.

The verses Turner did succeed in writing are pathetic failures; the mind so intimately versed in the subtleties of visible melody and harmony was dead to the witchery of verbal sound. It is true that his failure is not quite so abject as the extracts Thornbury has printed from the attempted Southern Coast epic would lead one to expect, but, when all due allowance is made for Thornbury’s blunders of transcription, the result is still quite hopeless. But it is otherwise when we turn to the designs made from the same subject-matter, and, in spite of Lessing and a host of modern theorists, I must insist that in their heart and essence they are indeed poems.

The first number of the Southern Coast was published in January 1814, and the last number was not issued till May 1826, but with only one or two exceptions the whole of the Dorsetshire, Devon, Cornwall and Somersetshire subjects (and these form about three-quarters of the whole work) were made from sketches taken during a single journey in the summer of 1811. These sketches are the kind of notes that a poet would take; from the point of view of the historian or topographer they are singularly incomplete. Occasionally we come across a tolerably elaborate drawing of a ruined castle or stretch of rocky coast, but even these are summary and hurried in comparison with the Italian drawings, and Turner seldom chose such sketches as the bases of his finished pictures. He certainly found them useful as the means of making a methodical analysis of the pictorial constituents of what he saw, and as storing his memory and giving matter and fulness to his own conceptions of natural phenomena. But there their usefulness ended. The actual embryo of the pictures he painted is generally a hurried scrawl about two square inches in size, made with a blunt pencil.

Among the Southern Coast sketch-books is a fat little volume bound in brown calf, having a brass clasp and lettered on the back, British Itenary (sic). The title page runs as follows:—The British Itinerary | or | Travellers Pocket Companion | throughout | Great Britain | Exhibiting | the Direct Route to Every | Borough and Commercial Town | in the Kingdom | with the principal Cross Roads | Compiled from Actual Measurement | and the best Surveys and Authorities | By | Nathanl. Coltman; | Surveyor. | Employed by the Post Office in Measuring the Roads of | Great Britain | London. | Printed and Published, by Wm. Dickie, No. 120 Strand; and N. Coltman, Green Walk; Black Friars Road. | Price 3s. Sewed.’ It contains two hundred and fifty leaves, the printed matter only occupying about a third of the total number, the remainder having been left blank for notes. These are now filled with Turner’s notes of expenses incurred, the draft of the poem he attempted to write, and a number of minute sketches. Among these it is possible to recognise the originals of several of the Southern Coast designs, including those of Combe Martin, Watchet, Boscastle and Clovelly, the ‘Dartmouth’ and ‘Dartmouth Castle’ of the Rivers of England series, and the sketch upon which the superb ‘Stonehenge at Daybreak’ (R. 81), in the unpublished ‘Liber,’ was probably founded. Two of these sketches have been reproduced on Plates LV. and LVI., together with the engravings of the completed designs. That the finished drawings could have been made from such slender material can hardly appear less than astonishing to those familiar with the methods of artists of the present day; but to the best of my belief, Turner had no other sketches or drawings of these places to assist him in his work, and it can only add to our amazement when we notice that in all probability the finished drawings were made, one nearly eight years, and the other nearly fourteen years, after the sketches were taken; the ‘Watchet’ plate having been published in April 1820, and the ‘Boscastle’ in March 1825.

When we examine carefully the sketch of Watchet we find that it gives us very little more than the general idea of a small fishing village, with a curved breakwater and a stretch of rocky coast running off into the distance. This general idea must have been all that the artist retained of his experiences of the place, i.e., he cannot possibly have retained any bare unattached visual sensations of any of the particular objects comprised in the scene. The details of the construction of the breakwater in the engraving may, for all I know (I have never visited the place), be exactly like those of the actual one which Turner saw there, but what little I know of his ordinary methods of work inclines me to doubt it. It is probably true enough to the general facts of the case, but all those little local accidents of form which the conscientious realist of to-day would linger over so lovingly are certainly ignored. No doubt when Turner was on the spot he looked at the breakwater, as at everything, with keen and vigilant eyes, and his impression of the structure would have contributed to the building up in his mind of a definite and concrete idea of the laws and customs of breakwaters in general. And when he set to work to elaborate his sketch it was doubtless this general idea which came into play, and which turned those half-dozen rudely scratched lines in the sketch into a sharply defined mental picture, as vivid to Turner’s imagination as a real scene, and infinitely more useful for his immediate purpose, for the task of selection and rejection was already done. In this way the whole subject came to life; the sketch, a fixed point in present perception, beckoning forth the stored essential riches of the artist’s mind. Those three upright lines inside the breakwater turn into