Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/notesonliberstudOObroo NOTES ON THE LIBER STUDIORUM. NOTES ON THE LIBER STUDIORUM THE REV. STOPFORD BROOKE, M.A. WI TH IL L US TR ATIONS LONDON THE AUTOTYPE COMPANY, 74, NEW OXFORD STREET HY. SOTHERAN AND CO., 36, PICCADILLY 136, STRAND MANCHESTER : HY. SOTHERAN AND CO. 18S5 OF J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. BY 1 DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO A FRIEND. THE GETTY CENTER LIBRARY T is with much diffidence that I publish these Notes on the Liber Studiorum apart from the Autotypes they were at first written to illustrate; but some of those who possess the original plates have been good enough to express a wish to have the commentaries in the shape of a book; and I indulge a hope that a few among the public may be pleased to read something more about the most enduring record of Turner's mind. On reading over last Autumn what I had done, I was not satisfied with it. I have therefore re-written a great portion of the original matter, and thrown it, perhaps, into better form. Nevertheless, I must beg my readers to excuse a certain amount of repetition. Turner con- ceived a number of these plates — those especially in which the sun sets over ancient buildings — in a similar tone of sentiment, and the comment must take note of this repeated feeling ; but I trust that the expression of the same thought has been sufficiently varied not to be disagreeable. I have also been obliged to repeat — for the commentaries are' intended to be read along with the separate plates — certain statements with regard to the methods used by Turner in etching and in mezzotint- engraving. b vi The book has been a happy task during the winter months, and if it should give a little new pleasure to those who love Nature and reverence the great artist who interpreted her mystery so well, I shall gain all the reward I desire or deserve. Stopford A. Brooke. July, 1885. CONTENTS. NO. PAGE I. The Frontispiece ....... I Part I. II. The Bridge and Cows 5 III. The Woman and Tambourine .... 9 IV. Flint Castle . . 12 V. Basle . .16 VI. Jason 19 Part II. VII. The Straw Yard 24 VIII. Castle above the Meadows ; or, Oakhampton Castle 27 IX. Mount St. Gothard 30 X. Ships in a Breeze 36 XI. Holy Island Cathedral 39 Part III. XII. Pembury Mill, Kent 43 XIII. Bridge in Middle Distance ; or, the Sun between Trees . . 46 XIV. Dunstanborough Castle 49 XV. Lake of Thun 52 XVI. The Fifth Plague 56 Part IV. XVII. Farmyard with the Cock 58 XVIII. Drawing of the Clyde 60 XIX. Little Devil's Bridge over the Russ above Altdorft, Switzerland . . . . . .64 XX. The Leader Sea-piece ; or, the Guardship at the Nore . 69 XXI. Morpeth, Northumberland 72 viii CONTENTS. No. Part V. PAG r XXII. Juvenile Tricks 75 XXIII. The Hindoo Worshipper ; or, Hindoo Devo- tions 77 XXIV. Coast of Yorkshire, near Whitby ... 81 XXV. Hind Head Hill, on the Portsmouth Road . 84 XXVI. London, from Greenwich ..... 88 Part VI. XXVII. Windmill and Lock 90 XXVIII. Junction of Severn and Wye .... 93 XXIX. Marine Dabblers 96 XXX. Near Blair Athol, Scotland .... 98 XXXI. Lauffenbourg on the Rhine .... 102 Part VII. XXXII. Young Anglers 104 XXXIII. St. Catherine's Hill, near Guildford . . .106 XXXIV. Martello Towers, near Bexhill, Sussex . .110 XXXV. Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne : Morning . . 113 XXXVI. From Spenser's Faery Queen . . . .116 Part VIII. XXXVII. Water Mill 120 XXXVIII. Hindoo Ablutions ; or, Woman at a Tank . 124 XXXIX. Crypt of Kirkstall Abbey 127 XL. Sunset 130 XLI. Procris and Cephalus . . . . 133 Part IX. XLI I. Winchelsea, Sussex 137 XLIII. Bridge with Goats 140 XLIV. Calm . . 145 XLV. Peat Bog 149 XLVI. Rispah 155 Part X. XLVII. Hedging and Ditching 158 XLVIII. Chepstow Castle 161 XLIX. Chain of Alps from Grenoble to Chamberi . 164 L. Mer de Glace, Valley of Chamouni, Savoy . 166 LI. Rievaulx Abbey . . . . . .170 CONTENTS. ix No. Part XI. page LII. Sol way Moss 172 LHI. Solitude 177 LIV. Mill, near the Grand Chartreuse, Dauphiny . .179 LV. Entrance of Calais Harbour 185 LVI. Dumblain Abbey, Scotland 188 Part XII. LVII. Norham Castle, on the Tweed . . . .191 LVIII. Raglan Castle 195 LIX. Ville de Thun : Switzerland .... 200 LX. The Source of the Arveron, in the Valley of Chamouni, Savoy ..... 202 LXI. Tenth Plague of Egypt 206 Part XIII. LXII. Water-cress Gatherers . . . . . .210 LXIII. Twickenham — Pope's Villa . . . . .213 LXIV. Bonneville, Savoy 217 LXV. Inverary Castle and Town, Scotland . . .221 LXVI. CEsacus and Hesperie . . . . . .224 Part XIV. LXVI I. East Gate, Winchelsea, Sussex .... 230 LXVIII. Isis .234 LXIX. Ben Arthur .237 LXX. Interior of a Church ...... 242 LXXI. Christ and the Woman of Samaria . . . 245 Appendix . . . . . . . . . . 249 PREFACE TO THE COLLECTION OF AUTOTYPES. HE Liber Studiorum was begun by Turner in rivalry with the Liber Veritatis of Claude, but to compare the two books together would be unfair to Claude. Claude's draw- ings were slight records of his pictures, hurriedly flung off, and he had nothing to do with the mezzotints made of them which appeared long after his death. Turner's book was made up of original studies carefully drawn, and conceived for the purpose of engraving — etched on the copper by himself, their engraving carried on day by day under his own eye, and sometimes done by his own hand. The plates, therefore, in the two books cannot be justly set one against another. That which can be contrasted is the method and power of composition of the two men, their truth to nature, their imagination of their subject, their sentiment, their range, their dispo- sition of light and shade, their capacity of grasping the real and of idealizing it truthfully. Turner began his book by the plate of the Bridge and Goats, which every- one can see is done in rivalry with Claude. But he soon xii PREFACE. wearied of this half imitation, and though there are other " classical landscapes " in the Liber Studiorum, the majority of the plates are done out of his own heart, and bear his character upon them. They are always composed, that is, they are not absolute transcripts of any scene in Nature. He drew when he was at the place the impression it made upon him, and he arranged what he drew according to certain laws which have been followed by artists for centuries. But the methods of composition, from long habit of them, had become a part of himself, so that he practised them unconsciously, as a man walks without taking note of his movements. He drew also landscapes which 4 flashed upon his in- ward eye ' in solitude, such as the Hindoo Devotions and the Procris and Cephalus, and these also were composed into a beautiful harmony, so that they seem to be the product of Nature herself in those moments when she works like an artist — consciously, with as it were a human soul within her, striving after beauty. It is the fashion to call these composed landscapes ideal, but they are never ideal in the sense of being false to physical fact. On the contrary, they inform us concerning Nature, and concentrate into a short space a multitude of truths belonging to mountain, river, tree, sea, cloud, and plain ; each of which was won from long observation of Nature, by steady work done hour by hour for many years in the open air. Every drawing then is a record, first, of indi- vidual emotion, and, secondly, of natural fact ; and these, harmonized by imagination into a complete subject, are PREFACE. xiii wrought together in obedience to laws of composition which generation after generation of painters have elabo- rated in careful practice. The publication of the book began in 1807, and was carried on at intervals for twelve years until 181 9, at which year Turner was forty-four years old. Seventy-one plates were issued, and then, there being but small sale for the work, the publication was dropped. Of the re- maining thirty plates — for the original plan, excluding the Frontispiece, was to embrace a hundred — some were finished, others had only advanced as far as the etching, and some only existed in the drawing. A few proofs, etchings, and nearly all the drawings of these unpub- lished plates are in various collections. Turner classified those that were published under six heads — marked by letters above the plate. A., architectural; P., pastoral; E. P., elegant pastoral, or as Mr. Pye thinks, epic pastoral ; M., marine ; M., or M s ., mountainous ; H., historical, or perhaps heroic. Many engravers were employed : Charles Turner, William Say, Dunkarton, Clint, Easling, Lupton, Dawe, S. W. Reynolds, Hodgetts, and for the aquatint subject of the Bridge and Goats , F. C. Lewis ; and full information may be gained about their work, and about all matters relating to the Liber Studiorum, combined with admirable criticism, in the catalogue compiled and written by Mr. Rawlinson. 1 As to the method employed, the first thing Turner did was to make a drawing of the subject in sepia for the 1 Published by Macmillan and Co. xiv PREFACE. guidance of the engraver. These drawings are in the National Gallery. They are the ghosts of what they were, and are almost in every case, and naturally so, inferior to the prints. The copper was then sent to Turner, who, with a few exceptions, etched with the needle the essential lines of the subject, always with a reference in his own mind to the mezzotint which was to be added. When the plate was etched and bitten in, the engraver roughened the whole plate with a multitude of little projecting points of copper made by a special tool, and resembling the papillae of the tongue. This is the mezzotint, or more properly, the bur. ' All these points catch the ink in printing, and would yield an intense black were they not removed. They are accord- ingly partially removed with the scraper when lighter darks are required, and the lighter the passage the more the bur is cleared away, till finally in high lights it is removed altogether, and the plate in these places is bur- nished.' 1 It is plain then, that the mezzotint engraver can gradate the light and shade of his plate from abso- lute black to pure white, or rather from the deepest dark to the highest light — and no better vehicle could have been chosen for engraving his drawings by an artist who, like Turner, was a master of gradation, and especially careful in developing his whole subject from or towards a dominant light. The engravers were not then left to themselves. Turner had proofs of the plates at various stages of the rubbing down sent to him, and wrote on 1 Hamerton's "Etching and Etchers," ch. ii., p. 81. PREFACE. XV them his instructions and advice, following the engraving almost day by day, and sometimes working on the plate with his own hands. A few he mezzotinted and engraved himself, and I have drawn attention to some curious things in these plates. When finished, they were printed off, but owing, first, to the rapid wearing away of the less raised, that is the most rubbed-down bar, and, secondly, to the polished parts becoming roughened by the friction used in cleaning the plate, the relation of tints in these mezzotints was gravely affected and changed after about thirty or forty impressions were taken. Hence it is only those early impressions, called First States, which show us the subject as Turner originally conceived it in dark and light; and when retouching became necessary, the second state was arrived at, and when again necessary — the third. All the photographs here given have been taken, with one exception, from first states, and it is time now to give some details about them. Some time ago, the Autotype Company asked whether I should advise them to republish their first reproduction of the Liber Studiorum, and brought me the photographs to look at. I thought them worthless, and said so. They did not resemble, even at a distance, the originals, and the most of them were taken from inferior impres- sions. I then offered to lend them one of my prints to make a trial of, and said that trie first thing to be done was to photograph it full size, with the plate mark, and the second to engage the services of some person accus- xvi PREFACE. tomed to engraving to follow in the negative the deeper and more important lines of the etching. For the great difficulty of photographing any of the Liber Studiorum is that wherever the mezzotint is dark, the etched lines are scarcely seen in the-photograph. In the original these lines are the strength, the life, the story of the whole ; they support, enliven, reveal the mezzotint ; without them the plate is a body without bones, and this use of the etching is most valuable at those very places where the mezzotint is darkest, that is, where the photograph neces- sarily fails to clearly reproduce them. They are to be detected, however, by a close-looking eye, only they are flatted down to the surface of the photograph, not emergent and triumphant as they are in the engraving. " Is it not possible, then," I said, " since they are there, to follow them carefully with a needle, and get them clear in the photograph ? If you can do this, you may succeed better than at present seems possible." The attempt made with this single plate appeared to me sufficiently good to encourage the Company to undertake the whole work. This particular difficulty of the etched lines was partly overcome in the manner indicated, but only partly, because there were many places where the etched lines could not be seen upon the negative, and rather than put in what could not be followed accurately, I advised the photographers to leave the negative alone. The next great difficulty was gradation of tint. In a plate like Hind Head Hill, all the dark hills are varied from point to point of shade with exquisite skill of en- PREFACE. xvii graving. Not an inch of the plate is of the same depth. The photograph cannot reproduce this, and the result is uniformity of gloom ; therefore, in this plate as in some others, where there are great masses of gradated shadow, the only thing for the photographer to do is to recognize his limits, and leave alone and untouched what he cannot help. In these particular portions, therefore, the repro- duction fails, but it fails from the necessity of the case. Nothing more could be done. Another difficulty of the same kind can be met in some plates, as, for example, in the Dunstanborough, where the foreground is almost black, while the sky is of delicate purity of light. If the plate be exposed long enough to get the dark, the sky is ruined; if the lightness of the sky be kept, the fore- ground is not made dark enough. The only thing to be done in this case was to modify the printing power of different portions of the plate. Another difficulty arose from the different colours of the ink in which Turner caused the plates to be printed, and another from the different textures of the mezzotint. The chemical rays were more effective in catching some tints than others, and they also seized on some textures more successfully than on others. The difficulties, then, have been very serious, and when they are considered, I think that the success of the Auto- type Company has been far greater than could have been expected. Some of the plates are better than others, but none are without worth. They can never be said to approach the proofs, but they give a fair idea for three xviii PREFACE. shillings and sixpence of originals which are now to be obtained but rarely, and at a high price. The purchaser of one of these photographs may easily work it up from an original plate at the South Kensington or British Museum to a much closer image of the original, and such labour frequently repeated will be, though worthless as art, of great use to anyone who may care to understand. Turner's method of work. In many cases, the marking out of the etched lines from the original in ink of the right colour will illuminate the whole photograph and make it of greater value. As to what I have myself done in the way of notes, I was asked by the Autotype Company to write something on each plate, and I have done what I could. My object has solely been to tell the pleasurable thoughts and feel- ings these engravings have awakened in me, and the things I have seemed to see concerning their composition and sentiment during a companionship with them of many years. I have refrained from all critical blame, for criticism of that kind is useless, and Turner knew his difficulties and his failures better than anyone else ; but we can never go very far wrong in saying clearly what we enjoy. If others then find delight in the same forms of beauty or are led to see those which ought to give delight, or indeed are at all brought, by the expression of the writer's rejoicing, into the temper of reverence and joy, good is done — and even if the things in which he finds pleasure are more fancifully than truly enjoyable, the harm is transient. There is nothing which those who PREFACE. xix seek beauty, without vanity in their hearts, so easily dis- cover to be fantastic as fantastic enjoyment. One kind of criticism is altogether vile : it is that which strives to find out mistakes for the sake of pluming itself on its own cleverness ; and rather than fall into that, it is better not to get the habit of blame at all. I have preferred to look at what was beautiful when I was capable of seeing it, and to say how I saw it, and why I loved it. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. \ ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Fragment from 44 The Guardship at the Nore." . 69 Etching, by Frank Short. Frontispiece 1 Jason 19 Falls of the Clyde 61 Procris and Cephalus 133 cesacus and hesperie 225 Photo -engravings by The Autotype Company. No. I. THE FRONTISPIECE. Drawn, Etched, and the Centre engraved by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by J. C. Easling. Published May 23, 1812. ^^^ HE Frontispiece of the Liber Studiorum, presented by Turner to the subscribers when about a third of the book was finished, is composed of a central picture surrounded by a framework filled with various objects grouped fancifully together. The little picture in the midst was engraved by Turner himself. It represents the city of Tyre, standing high above the sea shore, and on the shore the maidens of Europa wail for her departure. She her- self, seated on the bull, waves her farewell to them from the sunny sea; The fantastic framework of the whole, wrought with decorative skill and composed with the extremest care, is suggestive of the subjects treated in the book. A scroll on which the names of the engravers are inscribed hangs near at hand from an upright mast. The spars and oars, set against a row of Norman arches, tell of the Marine and Architectural drawings. The water-lily, the B 2 LIBER STUDIORUM. wild grasses and mosses speak of the Pastoral ; the caduceus, the urn, the thyrsus of the Elegant Pastoral ; and the picture of Tyre with the distant hills of the Historical and the Mountainous subjects. The white peacock, standing on the fragment of a classic temple in the forefront of the engraving, is the eye of the whole composition, and may possibly symbolize the pride of Tyre. Our chief technical interest is in the engraving of the central picture, done by Turner's own hand. If his work was sensitive and delicate when he engraved on the large scale of a whole plate, it was much more so when he put this image of a great city, with the sunny sea and distant mountains, into this tiny space. So evanescent was the sky that a single printing altered it, and before long he was forced to re-mezzotint the whole. This he did again and again, and the engraving grew more and more sub- stantial, until at last Tyre, originally bathed in dazzling light, and seen through the light like a visionary city, appears under a gloomy sky pierced only by a few rays of sunshine. These changes were made with wonderful skill, but the centre of the plate is always unsatisfactory except in the earliest states in which Turner's dream is still a dream. This is the picture Turner placed at the beginning of his book, and I think with a deliberate meaning. He painted the passing away of Tyre, and symbolized it by the story of Europa ; and in it he expressed all his own sorrow, both grim and pitiful, for the decay and death of LIBER STUDIORUM. 3 human work and glory and beauty. He had a special attraction towards great sea- empires, gathered perhaps from his silent love of England, and he illustrated their rise and fall in the two pictures — for which he seems to have had most personal love — the Rise, and the Fall of Carthage. Therefore, if he wished to represent in the most striking manner his sense of the sadness of humanity, he would choose, to do it under the image of the fall of a Queen of the sea. Here he has chosen Tyre. The sun is not rising over her towers, but westering to its descent into the waves, and the hour of the afternoon is that hour when loveliness is greatest but is on the verge of decay. It is the same hour in the history of the great sea-city. The setting of her Empire is at hand, but her glory and her beauty seem as yet undiminished and superb. The whole scene laughs in light and joy. The clouds of the upper sky are disposed in oblique bars, and seem — so like painting is the laying of the mezzotint — to be tinged with Tyrian crimson. Low on the horizon they pass into vapour, penetrated with light; and the mountains underneath them, steeped in the radiance, look almost transparent. The sea glitters, and runs gaily into the bay the cliffs of which are wooded to their edge ; and over the shallow beach, whose wet sand takes all reflections into its apparent depth, the waves, edged with white, spread in softly sweeping curves. On the cliffs, and lifted into the light in pride, the temples and palaces of Tyre arise, overlooking and commanding the sea ; and her fortifications run down to the piers 4 LIBER STUDIORUM. where her merchant barks and battle-galleys lie at anchor. Turner has tossed their beaks into the air, and, as if he wished to bring pride and sorrow together, the uplifted arms of Europa and her companions repeat the tossing curves of the bows of the warships. There is no gloom at first sight in this sun-lighted scene, but there is the threat of gloom. The very ex- quisiteness of the beauty suggests that it will pass away. The sun departs from the sky, and Europa — daughter and princess of Tyre, Spirit of her splendour and of her loveliness — is like the sun departing, borne to another land by the God. Empire, with her, is changing place from Asia to Europe, and the wailing of her maidens is prophetic of the overthrow of the city of the Sea. When pride and beauty are at their height, they are doomed. This is the symbolism of the plate Turner placed at the beginning of his book, and it strikes that note of sadness for the sorrow of the earth and the fates of men, to which as the predominant note of the Liber Studiorum Mr. Ruskin long since drew attention. PART I. ISSUED JANUARY 20, 1807. No. II. THE BRIDGE AND COWS. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner., HIS drawing, treated with so much sim- plicity, is said to bear the traces of Gains- borough's influence. The natural landscape is certainly grouped in that painter's man- ner, but the human element is altogether Turner's own. Gainsborough often played with the peasant's life as a pretty subject, and his rustic children are always touched with sentiment and beauty. It was well to draw that side of the truth ; and that he should feel it proves his easy, charming temper. But Turner, whose imagination was greater than Gainsborough's and who therefore felt more deeply, saw the sterner and the truer side of English pea- sant life. In that he scarcely ever felt the other side, he missed completeness of view, and the Liber Studiorum, when it treats of the country labourer, is too uniformly 6 LIBER STUDIORUM. bitter and ugly. There is neither grace nor charm in the poverty recorded in this drawing, and the only pity is in the sternness of the record. The mill is poor, the water of its stream is scanty, and the wheel is not going. It grinds the corn only of those whose heavy toil struggles to keep life going from day to day, and who will decay and end like the dead willow beneath the bank. The boys are sickly, stunted, idle \ and without pleasure even in their play. It is the dull naked truth of country life in a district of heavy clay such as Turner drew again in the Hedging and Ditching of his book. But where men and children do not grow well, trees flourish; and Turner's pleasure in the making of this drawing was in the grove and in the willows by the water. The bridge — supported by the unshaped stems of trees, and floored by rude planks the curves of which the artist has etched with great care — seems as if it had grown of its own impulse out of the wood behind it ; and it may not be too fantastic to think that Turner wished us to feel that it was the work of Nature herself, and that the thick- foliaged grove to which it leads was a place where the old forest mystery could still be felt. This imaginative impression is deepened by the strong realism of the pollard willows that fringe the brook and are the outer wall and guard of the deep wood. They are nobly drawn. The vital switch and lissome leap of the branches of the living willow ought to be compared with the decaying trunk and the gnarled boughs of its dead companion. Both are contrasted with the most accurate truth to LIBER STUDIORUM. 7 nature, nor is their contrast without its pathetic analogy to vigorous manhood and sapless age. The etching of their leaves, as the etching of the whole plate, is done with the greatest affection, his hand dwelling on his work from point to point, as if he was delighted to tell the story of all he loved so much ; and the slow stream as it winds under the bank among the reeds and round the stone, shows, as many another example proves, that nowhere is Turner's hand more delicate, nor his grace of thought more tender, than when he is at work on a dark pool like this where many reflections gather together to mingle and to commune like friends with one another. Opposite to this woodland and water so full of imagina- tion, is the commonplace mass of trees on the rising hill by the roadside; but even these Turner pitied in their dulness, and therefore the cumulus above, in sympathy with them, repeats their outline. The rest of the sky is still and sleepy, the cloudy sky of an English afternoon in a damp country. There is no wind, nothing to stir the blood or lift the leaves. The composition of the plate is interesting. A line taken from the head of the standing boy and brought down to the feet of the boy who sits on the ground will repeat the curve of the left bank ; and another drawn along the backs of the cows will echo the line of the bridge, not exactly, but enough to illustrate one of Turner's constant habits in cpmposition. Then again, the nearest upright of the bridge has its repetition in the beam which holds up the waste-trough of the mill, and 8 LIBER STUDIORUM. these two clasp together the distance and the foreground. Lastly, all the long, soft sweeping lines of the bridge and the cows are opposed by the short curve of the road which wheels sharply to the left ; and every one of these curves is made more enjoyable, through contrast, by the vertical lines of the mill which is, though hidden away at the back of the drawing, the centre of the composition. No. III. THE WOMAN AND TAMBOURINE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HE WOMAN AND TAMBOURINE is one of the classical, or rather Claudesque landscapes, and a curious thing it is. The plate wins a great deal of charm from the finished engraving of Charles Turner, but though a pure and lovely piece of technical work, he reached a higher excellence afterwards when both he and Turner under- stood better the method of combining etching with mezzotint. The etching itself is, like that of the Bridge and Goats, too elaborate. A year later, and the fewest possible lines, only those needed to animate, enforce, and explain the mezzotint, would have been used ; and it is worth while, in order to realize the difference, to contrast the etching of this plate with that of the Inverary Pier. The landscape has not been seen as a whole before it was painted, but concocted — built up step by step out of IO LIBER STUDIORUM. materials partly supplied by Claude and partly by Nature. It lacks, therefore, both vitality and unity. But the openness of atmosphere, and the sunlight so characteristic of Claude belong to it, and there are many things in it which, if they are somewhat weak, are also pretty. The rocky banks of the river and the buildings and trees above them are such as are often seen in Italy, but the two highest arches on the top of the wall are inserted by Turner with the intention of carrying our imagination through their openings into the air and plain beyond — a frequent trick of his. The stone-pines, tossed into the sky like plumes, have great grace, and Claude never mingled his goats and brushwood with more artificial charm than they are here mingled in the foreground. Bridge, rocks, castle and hill, the broken ground beyond the river bank, are fairly invented, but it is invention in the chains of the Italian classicism. Moreover, the drawing, like others of the same type in this book, is not kept within one manner. The road on which the distant figures stand, and the brake on their right, and the trees, are all English, not Italian. They are not classic, and they strike an alien note. There is a dead calm in the pale sky, the calm of a warm southern day. The clouds are steeped in sunlight, the river glides along, the hills are dim in the haze of heat; the comfort of the sunshine falls like a blessing over all the land. Nature feels the welfare of the hour, and the goddesses beneath the trees are gay. This senti- ment of the joy and well-being of the world in light and LIBER STUDIORUM. II warmth is felt by Turner, and it is in this alone that we touch his imagination. He has deepened the calm by the common practice of doubling his objects. The goats are in pairs ; two men stand on the bank ; the foreground figures are echoed by the figures beyond. Many resting-places are also pro- vided for the eye ; and the sweeping slant of the great tree and of the road and the bank to the left is insisted on, even created to the eye, by the three sloping figures which are hauling at a rope under the pier of the bridge. I suppose that Turner had some meaning in the figures of the foreground, but nothing can be odder than the group. Venus and Minerva are seated together, and Minerva is making Cupid dance to the timbrel of a Bacchante. The segis of the goddess is flung against the bank ; her puissant spear is over-crossed by a thyrsus. It is like a solemn piece of satire, and if Turner had any meaning in it, I scarcely think he had more than a general grim sense that Wisdom may be made by Love to play the fool. No. IV. FLINT CASTLE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. LINT CASTLE is a delightful picture, as fresh and bright as the sunny, breezy day it represents. A light brisk wind is blowing on shore, and ruffles the waves, and sends gay ripples in over the shallow sand. The clouds are full of movement and change, and their masses, stratified on the horizon and the zenith, are rolled upwards in the middle sky into great sunlit cumuli, bright as the head of Zeus. Their heavier congregation on the right, in front of which the dark vertical mast of the fishing-boat rises in order to vary their uniformity and to make them retreat to the eye, is yet thin enough to permit the rays of the sun to shine through it at intervals. Higher in the sky, these rays have completely conquered the obstruction of the cloud, and slant across the whole drawing in a blaze, enlarging and dignifying the composition. Op- posed to these oblique lines, and leading us down to the LIBER STUDIORUM. 13 horizontal surface of the sea, are the straight, sunny bars of vapour over the horizon against which the walls and towers of the castle stand up proudly. The castle is lightly etched — nothing but the outline is given — and yet so admirably is it placed, and so forcibly is it relieved, that it dominates, and is the centre of the drawing. It seems to commune both with sea and sky, rooted in the one, rising into the other. On the left, two ranges of low hills come down to the beach, and their waving ridges are continued, but in change, by the curved lines of the boats which are drawn up on the sands below the castle. This binding together, through continuity of line, of natural features in a land- scape with objects of human labour is a common habit of Turner's, and the outcome of a constant principle in his mind. He felt silently that harmony of Nature and Man which Wordsworth put into verse. The boats are drawn with the knowledge gained by the long observation of his youth. He has built them with anxiety for their battle with the sea. See how their bows are tossed to meet the waves and to lift over them, how broad their beam, how mightily hewn their ribs, and with what mingled force and grace their sails and masts spring into the air. Turner loved these hardy facers of the tempest, and drew them with the same affection that a lover paints his mistress. Lower down, in the foreground, there is another of these boats, done from point to point with equal power and love ; and either to enhance our interest by more detail, or to 14 LIBER STUDIORUM. gain a greater mass of shadow, or because he loved that confusion of ropes and sails which is so pleasant to see, he places a smaller boat behind the larger one, and uses the darkness of its sharp projecting bow- sprit and its fluked anchor-head to intensify the light on the horizon. All this is wrought with his best skill. The two groups of men in the foreground are de- liberately composed into forms which are of value to the whole subject, and treated as if they were integral parts of the landscape. The group with the cart and horse, set underneath the castle, lifts the castle into the air, and gives it distance and dignity by repeating its lines. The group on the shore serves as a resting-place for the sight, and between both groups which are like the sides of a gateway, the lines of the seashore seem to open out to meet the breadth of the sea. The boat-hook and the block which crosses it are so arranged as to induce the eye to do this work. But the groups are not less full of that human interest so dear to Turner because they are thus treated. They fill the scene with life. There is as much activity upon the shore among the men as there is in the sky among the clouds. The smugglers discharge in haste their cargo ; far off, the fisher-folk are watching the scene. There is none of the sadness which prevails so much in the Liber Studiorum. Turner loses it by the seaside; the fresh wind, the ships, the sailors, seem to make him happy, and we feel his pleasure in these things as we look at this drawing. It is admirable for its unity of impression. LIBER STUDIORUM. *5 Atmosphere, joyous light and wind, the sentiment of the sea-coast and its life, of the sea and its rough playmates — both ships and men — are nowhere else, in this book, better expressed by the artist. No. V. BASLE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. GREAT deal of interest belongs to this plate as a record of Basle nearly seventy years ago. The " Hotel of the Three Kings " has replaced the houses on the right, and many a pitiful restoration has altered the appearance of the romantic and lofty houses which in the drawing rise like cliffs and climb the hill to the highest point where the terrace of the Minster overhangs the river. The Cathedral soars into the air to commerce with the skies, and Turner meant to emphasize its aspiration. But it has neither weight nor strength, and is so slurred over that it is difficult to identify it above the houses. It was not the religious history of the town that impressed Turner. But he was interested in Basle as the old mediaeval frontier town, one of the guards after 1501 of a small, poor, and free State. He has taken pains with the fortifications and gates; he has thought, as he drew, of its trade, and of the river as the defence and the LIBER STUDIORUM. 17 pathway of its trade. The chief objects in the drawing are the strong gate-tower, the custom-house opposite it, and the store-house where the boats drawn up in the side-canal are landing produce. Nearer at hand two huge granaries arise, and the river is alive with timber- rafts and barges. Yet much of the sentiment of the older time is also preserved, and the town has still the air of the place where Holbein and Erasmus lived. And the sky over it is in sympathy with a land where a severe life is ennobled by effort, and whose in-dwellers had, like this day with oppressive clouds, fought steadily for freedom. The sun, half hidden, shines out of banks of close vapour, and pours a warm and mellow light over the fields beyond the ^Escher Thor where the battle of St. Jacob was fought, that battle where 1,600 Swiss contended with 16,000 French ; and the wealth of rays shot from the under line of the clouds may be Turner's translation of his sympathy with the Thermopylae of Switzerland. The light is tender and clear, and steeps all the back- ground in a shimmer of radiance which is the most beautiful thing in the engraving, and through which the banks of the river and the hills of the Black Forest softly shine. I cannot admire the sky \ nor does Turner's Rhine even resemble the ' exulting and abounding 1 waters that rush with gladness through the town. Ordinarily Turner gives a great stream its full value ; but I imagine he was so interested in the old houses and the story they told him that he forgot the majesty of the river, and saw it only as a road for merchandise. Nor is it possible that c 18 LIBER STUDIORUM. at any time the bridge should have been so tumbledown a structure as Turner has made it. It looks as if it had but one railing which serves to do duty now for one side, now for another ; and the horses that cross it are no less carelessly drawn. On the whole I do not think that Turner ' had much pleasure in this drawing ; even the surface of the stream with its reflections, though skilfully studied, is wholly inferior to that of the other rivers in the Liber Studiorum. No. VI. JASON. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by picture. The composition is full of repetitions that, by insistance on a certain symmetry, knit it together. The broken trunk in the pool with its extended arms, and the curves of the iron reeds, repeat the lines of the two main tree stems and of Jason's figure, The riven bough, the end of which has fallen to the ground, is a repetition of the heavy tumbled branches on the left above the pool. These, with others easily discovered, are the powers which unite the several parts of the drawing into a whole ; that is, so far as the mere arrangement of lines is concerned. The real unity, the living whole of the composition, is made by the imaginative conception of the subject. Charles Turner. HE picture from which this plate of Jason is taken is in the National Gallery, but the print is more carefully composed, more imaginative, and more finished than the 20 LIBER STUDIORUM. The etching is carried further than usual, and every line is masterly. Its manner changes with the thing represented, and with the passion of the artist. The engraving is worthy of the etching, and Turner must have watched, and touched on it, day by day. There is not a quarter of an inch of the tree trunk on which Jason's hand is laid which is not full of interest. Lichen, and weather stains, and moss, and hollows where the fibres of the wood have decayed, are one and all wrought with close intention and affection. The rock-face of Yorkshire sandstone is done with equal care, and it is a wonder tb see how the shadows of the trees inform us, by the variations of their direction, of every breakage, cleavage, and change of the surface of the rock. There is nothing Greek in the conception of the sub- ject. Turner has conceived the old story with his usual naivete. He knew from Ovid that the monster was asleep, and Jason therefore approaches the dreadful pit without any precaution. He moves daintily : he has disposed his garment most beautifully on the fallen trunk, and he does not care at all that he is half en- tangled in the trees; but were the dragon suddenly to flash forth his fiery head and rattling rings, Jason could not defend himself for a moment. But though there is nothing Greek — save, perhaps, the childlike directness of the thought — in Turner's treatment of the legend, yet it is not made modern. The Teutonic element in Turner — unknown to himself — has moved in his mind. The drawing might be the representation LIBER STUDIORUM. 21 of a subject taken from a Norse Saga, and placed in the midst of English scenery. The cavern is such as we find described in the story of Sigurd or Beowulf; and the dragon is a great worm like Fafnir, guarding a trea- sure in this hollow of the earth. It is not a true serpent that Turner means to draw, but the Fire- Drake that, serpent in body, has the head, claws, and the teeth of the northern dragon. No serpent would leave the skeleton we see in the foreground, but this monster has torn all the flesh from the white bones of his victim. Nor is it apart from the sentiment of a Saga that the scenery is English. For it is England of the ancient settlement, when all beyond the village and the town was ' forest,' that Turner has here represented. Outside of the clearing, at that time, moor and wood and broken ground were always haunted by the fierce creatures of the imagination ; and there is the true terror of the peasant's superstition in the dragon jaws that Turner has given to the heads of the withered trees. Even Sigurd or Jason, as they drew near the den, might have seen a dragon in every twisted bough. There is no solitude deeper in the Liber Studiorum than that which we feel here. Only one touch shows that man has ever been in this place, and I am not sure that Turner inserted it with intention. The end of the trunk of the tree on which Jason kneels has been lopped smooth or sawn away. It may be that Turner only put in this sharp downward semicircle to contrast with the upward sweep of the dragon's coil, and to oppose a 22 LIBER STUDIORUM. clear-cut arc to the wild extravagance of the boughs and stems ; and it certainly makes all the natural forms more interesting, and standing alone among them gives them greater value. But Turner whose imagination is rarely careless, may have intended more by this than a mere fulfilment of the law of contrast. This piece of human work tells the questioning imagination how long the place has been dwelt in by the dragon. Since men hewed down the tree, the frost and rain of years have worn and split the smooth-sawn surface. Since then the broken tree trunks that have fallen into the pool have pushed forth a rough growth like a hedge all along their ridges. Its thick and tangled branches are full of life and boldness, and the way in which, coiled like knots of cord, they twist forth from the trunks, is a marvel of accurate representation. In this manner Turner has fixed the length of time ; but there is a point, unless the dragon be winged, where his imagination has been neglectful. One asks, — Where is the dragon's path when he comes forth from the cave? — where the crushed branches? — where the slot of Fafnir ? The deadly pool, with its fierce etching hewn as if with passion into the copper, increases the weird impression ; yet Turner, with his love of a little peace — of Nature's secret quiet in the midst of her most wicked desolation — drops into the pool one of the lilies that grow in the moat of Raglan unhaunted there by dragon and un- touched there by decay. Pale, quiet, undisturbed by all of earth, through the LIBER STUDIORUM. 23 break in the pretty copsewood which Turner loved to etch, the sky looks in upon the savage horror down below. Neither the wrath and woe of the dragon, nor the victory of the hero, win the sympathy of Nature. PART II. ISSUED FEBRUARY 20, 1808. NO. VII. THE STRAW YARD. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HIS plate was famous among the engravers for the effect produced within so short a scale of light and dark; the deepest dark, inside the doorway, being very light; and fine impressions of it from this point of view are of great value. The subject, of course, is not especially interesting to those who seek the heroic in the Liber Studiorum, or Nature represented in her beauty or power ; but it has its own charm, and there is more of the true Turner and of what he loved than there is in subjects which seem more interesting, like that for example of the Bridge and Goats. At least, this is English, and Turner loved his land though often his love was sorrow. And it is peasant life, and though he saw that life as it is, and LIBER STUDIORUM. 25 made it coarse and rude, yet he pitied the difficult labour of the poor, and his soft feeling always rises through his work upon it, and touches us with tenderness. The figure of the labourer on the ladder, bent with years of toil and sickness, and the two figures at the gate — addicti glebae — clenched to the soil — how close they are to the stern reality ! The horses are as sad and weary and rude as the men, wrought to skin and bone by bitter labour. Nothing is neglected to deepen the impression. The discarded plough and harrow and the milking stool, all reflected in the sulky pool, tell us, by their neglect, that it is autumn time. It is against winter that the men are stacking the straw, and the afternoon shows one of those bright October skies which are full of cold clear light. This sky is one of the most beautiful in the Liber Studiorum, more choicely engraved than that of Flint Castle, but of the same quality of light and air, and full of the fancy and change of nature — through all its intricate passages of change studied with the greatest care, and true through every difficulty. There is calm in the air at present; nothing can be quieter than the low cloud- barred horizon that opens on the left, but on the right, above the trees, wind is at hand. The clouds there are tossed and intertwined by the yet unborn spirit of the breeze within them. It is a rare moment for a painter to seize, and as difficult to represent. But with what ease, with what mastery the work is done ! The trees which rise into the sky above the barn are grouped with the beauty which Turner took care to give 26 LIBER STUDIORUM. to Nature whenever he had to represent poor and out- worn Humanity. Their outline is lovely, and they are etched with exquisite lightness and power. They over- shadow and ennoble the barn whose open door with its two edges of bright light would fill a boy's heart with longing to penetrate its darkness-. Nor are the pollard willows unworthy of Turner's hand. Their stems, their long switch-like branches, the upward toss of their graceful leaves, etched deeply, but preserving their sword-like lightness, are well contrasted with the two birches that hang their sere and pensive foliage over the rough labourers below whom they seem to compassionate but not to love. As studiously careful is the composition of the horses and the cart. This is a pyramidal composition bounded by three curving lines. The apex is the man upon the ladder; the hooves of the horse make the point at the left-hand angle, and the point on the right is the end of the shadow thrown by the white horse. The whole is bound together by the heap of straw in the midst, where one truss, like the ornament at the angle of the base of a column, is laid at right angles to two that cross it. Within this triangle, there is an involved composition of the horses, the hurdles, the cart, its wheel, the ladder, and the figure carrying the straw, which is full of interest and pleasure. On the whole, though many do not care for this print, it is as well worth careful study — within its range — as any in the book. We may well give it some trouble, for Turner has given to it a world of anxiety. No. VIII. CASTLE ABOVE THE MEADOWS; OR, OAKHAMPTON CASTLE. Drawn and Etched by]. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HE CASTLE ABOVE THE MEADOWS is a pretty plate, gracious and cheerful, and the herd-boy who pipes on the grass, so much for his own pleasure and absorbed in his music, gives the keynote to the warm and happy place, and tells us of what Turner felt. It is so rare to find him gay and good-humoured in the Liber Studio- rum, so rare to find him dwelling on the joy rather than on the sorrow of men, that the subject is more interesting from this point of view than it is in itself. For otherwise there is not much in it, nor is it so well conceived or drawn, or so penetrative of the heart of Nature as we should expect. It is chiefly but of the depths of his sympathy for man that Turner's imaginative treatment of Nature arises \ and he pierces most deeply into her 28 LIBER STUDIORUM. truth when his soul is full of the tragedy of mankind. At least, this is true of him after and during the years in which he wrought at this book. There are many drawings of his earlier years when he is lost in the joy of the quiet hills and water-dells ; and he is nearer then to the lonely passion of Wordsworth for the spiritual life of Nature than any other soul has ever been. But this exquisite time, when his was the silence and rapture of the lovely world, was brief ; and of that Joy " whose hand is ever on his lips, bidding adieu." When afterwards, as in this subject, his heart was light, there was but little depth in his work ; phantasy was there rather than imagination, prettiness rather than power ; and he seems to lose the certain instinct of his hand. The trees in this drawing appear to be pollarded elms and are, with the exception of the two graceful creations beyond the stile, ill drawn in comparison with his usual work, and they certainly want imagination. They are best done in those parts where they are ugliest, where the pollarding of past years has forced them into strange modes of growth. The prettiest thing in the drawing is the soft gliding of the hills and their woods into the water meadows, and the unfrequented road where the cows lie without fear of disturbance. All the winding of the road, the house, the line of wood beyond, are charmingly composed together; and the trees on the horizon that toss their heads like plumes give grace and lightness to the dis- tance, and suggest the evening wind. LIBER STUDIORUM. 29 The Castle is of course the central thought, but Turner has not, I think, loved it. He lifts it high, it is true, against the sky, but around it gathers no sentiment, save perhaps in the apparent sympathy of its towers with the rock on which they are built, itself wrought into forms — as if it were basalt — which resemble ruined towers. The sky however is beautiful, full of flaked cirri continuously yet variously disposed and lit underneath with the light of the sun which has dipped towards its setting behind the western hill. The shadow of the hill and trees has begun to slope towards the plain ; the cattle are half at rest ; the sun- light streams, like an evening traveller, through the stile which leads into the secret of the wood ; and the boy, whose face is lit with light as with pleasure, pipes the farewell of the warm evening to the happy earth. No. IX. MOUNT ST. GOTHARD. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HE sky of this impressive plate was spoilt by the rottenness of the copper. It will be seen from the remarks I quote in the Ap- pendix that Turner took a great deal of pains to get as good a result as he could out of the de- fective material. Nevertheless the sky remains lifeless, and it is difficult to tell from the engraving whether the white forms upon the distant peaks are snow or cloud. They seem to be clouds and have their character, but we know that he intended the mountains to be covered with snow. The fact is that the state of the copper forced him to replace what was originally snow by white shifting clouds which are blown away by the wind and pass into pale and paler vapour, till their whiteness is lost in the general colour of the sky. The power and majesty of the drawing is concentrated round the road. It is the difficult triumph of human energy over the terrible forces of Nature that Turner LIBER STUDIORUM. 31 paints, and with which he sympathizes while he paints. The most magnificent Swiss drawing of rock and gorge which I have ever seen — a drawing at Farnley of this very pass — where the road runs under overhanging rocks and is supported by arches over a stupendous precipice, is dedicated to this thought. In the drawing before us now, the treatment of the same sentiment is quieter and more dignified, and the portion of the pass chosen for illustration is not among its upper and fiercer ranges. But not less deep than in the Farnley St Gothard is the impression we here receive of slow, firm human labour overcoming the mute resistance of the mountains. Turner has wrought with his utmost strength the dark gallery driven through the precipice. With equal strength he has built up the side of the precipice which climbs from the hollow, until it seems to be a buttress made by human hands to support the mountain. He has laid down the road upon the solid rock with touches as solid as the rock ; and finally etched the low broad wall and parapet with lines deeper and more rigidly cut than any used upon the rocks, as if he would insist on the worth of the work of man ! The steady and patient march of the laden mule, bending to his work, is a symbol of the labour that built the road, and daily uses it. But Turner tells still 'more. He tells, to enhance the wonder of the road, the dangers to which it is subject. Down that rushing precipice above fall the winter ava- lanches, and where they pass over the slope of the rock, 32 LIBER STUDIORUM. not a lichen has grown. Water, lying in the crevices, has eaten into the stone, and freezing, has split it along the lines of cleavage. Lower down, it has riven away a great mass which has fallen beside the path. Nearer at hand, another form of water destruction is at work. A small stream, from a source above, has worn its way over and into the rock. We see the result of its labour below in the tumble of stones. Tiny as its cascade is now, in spring it desolates the path. The history then of the work of water, running and frozen, which this little corner of the drawing tells us is an abstract of Alpine disintegration. I wish I could adequately tell how it is that Turner makes the masses of rock and the faces of precipice in his mountain drawings seem so gigantic. No other artist approaches him in this matter. It is not that they succeed ill. They do not succeed at all. It is not that he succeeds well ; it is that he succeeds superbly. The M eye-baffling " precipice in the drawing at Farnley is not eye-baffling to Turner; he draws it as large as he saw it. The slope of cliff here, through whose body the gallery is hewn, seems as vast as the actual rock itself. Look at the great outlying mountain buttress on the right, opposite the parapet ! It looks enormous, and yet this impression is given within six inches of the drawing. " Insupportably advancing" — it is this word of Coleridge which describes it best as it seems to press forwards, with its head like an elephant, into the space above the valley, LIBER STUDIORUM. 33 The same things are true of his smaller masses of rock. His boulders look their size \ here above the path is one, detached, as huge as those in the Source of the Arveron and in the Ben Arthur. How is it done ? It is easy to say generally that it is the work of a hand trained to express, through years of exercise, the most subtle distinctions of form; that it is the result of an immense knowledge gained by years of observation and recording of the doings of nature, so that his pencil when it moved, moved as if he himself were Nature. But more particularly, he gains these massive effects, first, by the infinite change and variety in his outline of a precipice or the edge of a rock — the main curve or fall of the line altering at every tenth of an inch its sweep — so that the eye, unconsciously arrested at every point, never seems to come to the end. The vast rock outlines have this subtlety and variety, but it needs a hand almost as subtle and various as Nature's own to render them. Secondly, this change and subtlety must be expressed within the great lines of stratification, cleavage, or fracture which belong to each kind of rock, and the artist must feel these main lines and never be false to them, no not even in the stones which fall from the rocks on the roadside. And Turner saw and drew rightly these lines, though he knew nothing about them scientifically — in fact drew them all the better because he was not con- fused by any geological knowledge. And the lines by which he marked the character of the rocks were as few in broad drawings like this, as they were multitudinous D 34 LIBER STUDIORUM. and careful in an elaborate drawing like Loch Coriskin. It is then this absolute truth to the figure of the rocks as influenced by their atomic arrangement which makes our sight impute to them in his drawings their hugeness of height and breadth. Thirdly ; in Nature there is not an inch of the surface of a great fall of cliff, of a boulder, or a stone, which is at any point the same. The whole expanse is covered with crevices, rounded bosses, angles, and depressions, lichens and vegetation, water mouldings, and water channels — with the results of Nature's work, anger, and caprice for many years — and every variation produces a change of light or a gradation of shadow. So far as an artist renders this infinite variety of surface and tells its story accurately, detaining the eye a thousand times with new* matter as it wanders over the cliff or the stone — so far does he give the true impression of vastness or force which the eye receives from the actual surface of the rocks. And Turner is a pre-eminent master of this. The boulders in the Source of the Arveron are worked with gradations of tint changing within the one-hundredth part of an inch, and the sloping face of cliff in this plate is varied in the same way with infinite subtlety and knowledge. The looker-on feels its moulding as if with his hand, and if he knows rocks he can ask questions from the drawing as from the rock itself and answer them with the same pleasure. His attention is detained, and the result is, he sees the surface here, which is only a few inches across, as if it were as wide as the rock itself. LIBER STUDIORUM. 35 But the interest in this engraving does not end with the discussion of this question. The great cliff on the right is made to seem more huge by the meadowland that spreads over its end, and on the very edge of it Turner's eye has been caught by the strangeness of three or four blocs perches, and used them with an artist's intention to enliven the curved brow of the promontory. The bold setting of this promontory over against the cliff which descends from the gallery, and the bracing of the two together by the parapet, sends the eye downward to the profound depth of the valley ; and it is a proof of what a great artist can do by small means that Turner, with half- a-dozen etched lines, has made us understand the course of the river that runs down the valley, and the amount of its slope. Far away in the distance, the mists rise and fall, the heights are piled huger and huger, one over the other, till at last from their mighty shoulders the sharp-toothed peaks of the crystalline rocks leap up like flames of fire. But whatever the might and the multitudinousness of Nature may be — the last and the first thing which claims the mind is the slow- wrought path winding with pain and victory among the mountains. No. X. SHIPS IN A BREEZE. Drawn and Etched fry], M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. ^'HIS drawing, usually called the Egremont Sea Piece, is with its companion — the Leader Sea Piece — a study of shipping in windy weather. It is the kind of weather in which Turner reached all the gaiety of which his silent, steady nature was capable — a seaman's gaiety, like the rough fresh breeze which tosses here the waves and rolls the clouds along. It was a gaiety he did not show, but nature felt it for him, and on such a day the salt spray and the rushing wind and the bursts of sunshine and rain made him feel happy. The higher sky is clear and the half-gale continuously brings up across it dark and heavy clouds, each pour- ing forth their rain. As they pass away, the sun from above illuminates their upper folds. The moment chosen here is the interval between the retreat of one of these masses of vapour and the approach of another. Rain is falling to the right and left, but not in the centre. LIBER STUDIORUM. 37 In contrast with this swift movement and life, this variety of gloom and light, is the quiet space of lofty air upon the right, and the motionless cirrus clouds that float in its sunshine. The same opposition of movement and rest is made by the ships which whirl swiftly in curves around the steady, horizontal man of war at anchor. In order to animate the sky still more and to fill the mind with the impression of the breeze, Turner has put in the gulls which are tacking against the wind, and the pen- nant and flags which struggle with it to escape and are themselves like flying birds. The oblique lines of shadow which cross the sky at right angles to the masts of the sailing merchantmen make the curves of the clouds seem more beautiful, and seem to double the speed of the ships. To get distance, the sea is separated into three spaces on the left, the middle one of which is flooded with sun- light, and the same effect is produced on the right hand by the shadows which divide the sea into five spaces and force the eye to travel over them one by one. The ship anchored in the midst is riding head to the wind, the force of which is indicated by the way she sinks downward at the bow, pulling at the cable. The wind is strong, therefore, but it is blowing off shore. Hence the waves have no run in them and no massiveness, and are broken up into white water. They lift only against the pier with the general agitation of the whole sea, and the interest of their drawing consists in the representation of the clashing of this apparently double movement, the 38 LIBER STUDIORUM. movement towards, and the movement away from, the land. Three of the ships are sailing free with the wind on their quarter. The fourth has just luffed up head to wind in the process of tacking, and her sails are flattened against the masts. The life, the speed of these merchant barks, their ease and freedom on the sea, their mastery over the waters are all delightful. We feel the pleasure Turner had in the vigorous sea-life of England ; in the sturdy companionship with winds and waves of the old tars we see upon the pier ; in the stir of her commerce, using with joy the ocean for its work under the protec- tion of her navy. If the pennant tell true, the ship at anchor is an old man of war now on guard, and round it, as if claiming their right to its defence before they go on voyage, sweep the trading ships in salutation. No. XI. HOLY ISLAND CATHEDRAL. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HIS engraving is, as nearly as possible to an imaginative artist, a purely architectural treatment of the subject. Turner, in the "England and Wales," has painted Holy Island as seen from the sea. There, the cathedral is set on high above the basaltic rocks, and stands forth against the roar of the storm like a prophet against the armies of the Kingdom of Evil. Nor is it at all improbable that Turner had this thought in his mind. It belongs to the story of the Island. Cuthbert in his cell, praying through the tempest, heard at night the shrieks of the demons in the fierce gusts; and those who built this later temple did not lose the wild tradition. Nor was Turner less faithful to the natural spirit of the place. The northern coast, the tempestuous sea, the lonely rock, the sands, the stern life of the seamen, the wreckage of the coast, the rude play of women and children with waves and wind, the incessant fierceness of Nature and 4Q LIBER STUDIORUM. her wild work of years on the cathedral, are all expressed in the " England and Wales " drawing. In our engraving there is nothing of this. This is a study of arches and worn stone ; and it was difficult to make it ideally interesting. But Turner has done his best to give himself and us a fine pleasure by his accurate and imaginative etching of the stones. There is no sloven- liness, or trying to produce picturesque effect by mean- ingless dots and shadows and vegetation. Whatever pleasure is arrived at has its foundation in truth and in the charm that arises out of the clean clear drawing of things as they are. The axe-hewn massiveness of Norman work, and its close-fitting grasp of stone to stone, are here before our eyes. It seems as if the building was not made, but had grown like an oak by its own vitality. There are no ruled lines, no mere draughtsman's mechanical work. Every touch moves instinct with the artist's feeling of the life of the stone itself, of the way in which the mason hewed it, of the work which Nature has done upon it. Twice he has expressed — where the arches have sunk in the upper row — the tremendous strength of the resistance the noble masonry offers to decay. . And all over the walls, by the most skilful mezzotinting — watched as it was day by day by Turner — the surface structure of the stone is narrated to us ; and the story varies from point to point. The interest is made, then, by the telling of truth. Ad- ditional interest is supplied, first by the sky spaces seen beyond the upper windows ; then by the falling lights LIBER STUDIORUM. 41 and by the gradations of shadow which rise to the central light; then by the clever disposition of the pillars, varied like a grove of trees, but each in its place ; then by the wild curves and luxuriant vegetation of the foreground — its natural and unpremeditated growth being set in contrast to the studied and rigid lines of the architecture ; and, lastly, by the way — in strict ac- cordance probably with the actual impression it produces — in which the central pillar is made chief of the others, like the leader of a host. It is in reality on a line with the pillars on each side of it. But owing to its lower descent into the ground, to the broken arch above its capital which pushes forward like a horn and challenges the eye, to the disposition of light upon it and especially on its capital, and to its elaborate carving, it seems to come onward beyond the rest, and the others to recede from it at an angle. Moreover, being thus made the centre of the composition, Turner, to give it importance, has made a great foundation for it, setting it on a little mound of its own, and surrounding its base with wild grass and weeds the great leaves of which curving away on either side of it support and dignify it. By these things the plate is made delightful ; and it is worth while perhaps to say that Turner, not being able to amuse himself as usual with the sky, has taken special pleasure and pains with the broken ground and stones, and made every inch of them interesting, even to the smooth floor in the distance which in contrast with the rough foreground gives to the eye the pleasure of repose. 42 LIBER STUDIORUM. Lastly, Turner wished to tell something of what lay outside this narrow space, and we are made conscious of the tall unseen towers of the ruin by the shadow of one of them falling across the arches, and of the nearness of the sea and of the human life that belongs to it by the fisherman who passes across the aisles with his creel. PART III. ISSUED JUNE 10, 1808. No. XII. PEMBURY MILL, KENT. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HIS Pastoral at least, among many that record the squalid misery of the peasant, is not hideous or wretched. Storm does not brood or thunder over it; all around it flows the warm summer sunshine. The labourers are not starved and sickly, but sturdy English workers. The dog is the only ugly thing in the drawing, but the pigeons — midst of all the corn — are well fed and happy, and the great burdock leaves grow in the wash of the water-wheel as if they had the secret of perfect health. The white flour falls in a stream through the sunshine into the sack, and the vine twines lovingly its tendrils round the door and beneath the thatch. It is the idyll of the fruits of the earth — " With corn and wine have I sustained thee." And the giving of God is filled up by the labour of men. 44 LIBER STUDIORUM. Unlike the miserable picture of the Water Mill starving for want of work, this happy mill has wrought all day and is working still. The cart is half filled with its produce. Moreover, the place is old, and has its own long- developed character. All things we see have been wrought upon by time and by the elements, but they are in working order ; they have none of the feebleness, while they have all the charm of age. The large-leaved plant has been growing for many years ; the old window-frame now filled with bricks, the rude cross-beams nailed across the gaping wall, were there, and were old, before the dovecote with its gay in- habitants was fastened to them. The vine has been planted by the grandfather of the miller, and a hundred tales belong to it. The place is aware of itself and of the manifold human lives that have grown into it. There is, too, a special individuality which belongs to buildings which use water and wind for their work, and Turner has felt and seized that here. Therefore, with the old age there is quiet, and brightness, and distinction. And the indwellers of the place are at one with its sentiment. The dog, the doves, find life pleasant in this retired wood- land spot, lulled always with the rush and murmur and tinkling of water, with the rustling of the grove without, and the humming of the millstones. The human beings also are not apart from its soft quiet. For though their limbs are bent with toil, that is no over-sad or weary face which looks away over the sack's mouth and running meal into the warm afternoon ; and though not many 1 * LIBER STUDIORUM. 45 thoughts of sentiment may come to these honest labourers, for daily work fills the soul, yet the place thinks and feels for them, and their lives are formed by its quiet spirit. That is the meaning of Turner's sunlight. Whatever the stillness may be in their hearts — the stillness of feeling or only of monotony — over the whole scene pours the sun- shine, adorning all things, birds and plants, wheel and water, with its unpurchased gold, warming all things with its glowing life. In the universal brightness even the darkness of the place seems for the time only a deeply shadowed light. As to the drawing itself, it is not so full of technical interest, either in work or composition, as many others. The wheel and the large leaved plants, the pigeons and vine, are perhaps over-sparkled with lights. But the sentiment of the drawing is its charm. The overshadow- ing grove without folds the mill in its embrace, and shuts up in peace this little nest from the noise of the great world. It is always at home, and has its own sweet content with its own labours and its own pleasures. And the sunlight comes, softly winnowed through the foliage of the grove, and pours through the open door with tender warmth and blessing. The cloud of floating meal takes up its glimmer and bears it into every recess of the mill, touching wheel and wall and floor and the sacks all in a row, with its grace and praise. It shines upon the heart of the place where all the work is done ; and its brightest ray strikes full on the miller whose quiet toil from day to day has made this little kingdom into Home. No. XIII. BRIDGE IN MIDDLE DISTANCE; OR, THE SUN BETWEEN TREES. Drawn and Etched by], M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HE BRIDGE IN MIDDLE DISTANCE is one of those classical landscapes which Turner called Elegant Pastoral, Into it, as into all the other classical pastorals, his naturalism intrudes; and that unity of sentiment so necessary in an artificial composition is destroyed. When Turner is talking this double tongue he does not care so much as usual for truth to nature, and he draws things which are nondescript. Here for instance, it is impos- sible even to guess of what kind some of the trees are intended to be. Some of them seem Southern, others Northern. The landscape itself is half Italian and half English. The plain and the distant mountains look like a remembrance of the Campagna. The river is like an English river, like the winding of the Severn ; but the LIBER STUDIORUM. 47 bridge resembles one of those massive, broad-roaded, low-parapeted bridges — see how Turner has insisted on its breadth ! — which cross the valleys of the Riviera. The foreground on the right with its low walls and bushes has come from Italy, but the rise of the road to the left with its copsewood and trees is entirely English ; and in the midst of all this he throws down three Claudesque rather than classical figures, full of a quaint unreality which entertains rather than displeases. The whole thing is unsatisfactory. The sky however is nobly and quietly composed, though the sun, placed in the very midst blazing and overwhelm- ing, rendered it extraordinarily difficult to represent it with beauty and variety. The transparent horizontal lines of cloud below the sun repeat and carry on the horizontal lines of the plain, and increase the impression of its expanse ; while the faint lovely cirrus clouds above which are sloping away to the left give depth and atmosphere to the sky. They descend to meet the only cumulus in the heaven, far down above the trees on the left. By a common artifice of Turner's, this cumulus, repeating the outline of the trees, lifts them into the air, and assists the mind in its effort to give dignity to this part of the com- position. The beautiful outline of the larger trees in the midst, set on high in dark and light against this pale and glowing sky, is the finest and most daring piece of imagi- nation in the plate. The rest is somewhat commonplace, especially the support of the bridge at either end by massed foliage, but the whole is reposeful and fills the 48 LIBER- STUDIORUM. imagination with the rest and comfort of a warm summer afternoon. The sky is in aquatint, and exquisitely engraved by C. Turner, and the engraving of the river and of the sun- lighted foreground where the figures are sitting is full of delicacy and feeling. No. XIV. DUNSTANBOROUGH CASTLE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. UNSTANBOROUGH CASTLE, since its siege by Lord Hastings after the battle of Hexham when it was battered down in three days, has remained a ruin; and the ruin seems all the more desolate because of its savage and lonely site. The rocks of the promontory on which it stands are black and iron basalt, as grim as the nature of the north-east wind that continually beats upon them. The sea is as merciless as the wind, and its driven spray year by year consumes the masonry. Yet the Castle re- mains, pathetic in its patience, enduring the wild weather. Turner felt with it as with a living thing ; and in what ways he felt with it he has told us twice, once in the " England and Wales " series, and again in this Engrav- ing. In the first of these we stand upon the shore, south of the little creek into which the sea runs in the Liber Studiorum print ; and over an intervening ledge of rocks we see the roof only of the cottage of which here E LIBER STUDIORUM. we see the whole. Beyond, the ruined towers stand up against a disturbed sky clearing after heavy rain and storm. The castle does not occupy all our interest, for Turner has filled the foreground with a crowd of sailors and country folk, of boys and weeping women employed around the wreck of a fishing smack which the gale has broken and cast upon the shore. The sea is still rough, though the wind has fallen ; and the whole drawing is dedicated to the representation of the dangers of the wild coast and the labour of seamen and their wives, more than to the sorrow of the ruin. But here, Turner has made the castle the chief interest. He felt, as he saw it this day, that it had lain so long uninhabited by man that it had become at one with the being of the basaltic rocks on which it stands; solid stone like them ; a part of that Nature which lives for itself and not for man. Therefore he gives it no human sympathy ; it is not tenderly lit, as Norham and Raglan are, by the soft sunset lights. It receives what the rocks and sea receive, and no more ; and they and it are flooded with the morning light of a sky purified into calm after a night of storm. In all the Liber Studiorum there is not a more unconscious, pure, and quiet heaven. The wind has ceased its turmoil, the resting sheep add to the sense of morning peace and clearness, and the castle no more remembers its past wars than the rocks recollect the gale of yesterday. But Turner could rarely hold himself free from hu- manity, and though there is no human sentiment gathered LIBER STUDIORUM. round the ruins, we find his sorrowful witness to the battle of man with the winds and waves in the gaunt ribs of the ship, shattered like the castle ; and in the wretched cottage sheltering beneath the cliff, the gable of which, to mark his sympathy with its pathetic poverty, he has touched with the rays of the morning sun. The drawing tff the rocks is masterly, and it is worth while to observe how the lit corner of the cottage lifts the castle gateway into the air by leading the eye upwards, and how the three sheep standing on the rocks and the three above them on the slope are so disposed as to perform the same office, and to repeat the arrangement of the two towers and of the wall between. Were the sheep removed, half the majesty and height of the gate- way would be lost. Still as the sea seems without, it is so lifted by the tide and so broken among the rough spurs of basalt that it runs almost in waves into the long narrow gully under the cottage ; and it is with curious skill that Turner — when he has made this inwashing wave climb over the ledge of rock — draws the curving oval sweeps of the shallow and calmer water that spreads to the right and left. It is a piece of accurate truth to Nature. No. XV. LAKE OF THUN. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. B URNER rarely painted on the spot," says Mr. Ruskin; "he looked, gathered, con- sidered ; then painted the sum of what he had gained, up to the point necessary for due note of it, much more of the impression, since that would pass, than of the scene, which would remain. "The Niesen and Stockhorn might be completely drawn at any time ; but his vision of them amidst their thunder-clouds, and his impression of the stormy lake, with the busy people on its shore, careless of storm or calm, was to be kept. And kept it was, to his latest day, realized first completely in the Lake of Thun of the Liber Studiorum." The "vision of them amidst their thunder-clouds" exactly expresses the sentiment and the life of this draw- ing. The Niesen is lord of the Lake of Thun, and wher- ever the traveller wanders on its shores, he feels that mountain's monarchy. Turner has drawn with great LIBER STUDIORUM. S3 nobleness and majesty its massive slopes and upper precipices, and, to dignify it still more, has set its horn against the heart of the thunderbolt. The Stockhorn, too, has its own lightnings, but they fall upon it, — they are not at home with it. It is from behind the Niesen that the flood of fire pours forth which crosses the whole range of peaks. They have been in darkness and the moment in which they are suddenly revealed by the flash is the moment that Turner has chosen to paint. Nothing could be more difficult to render. For the mountains, being plunged in vapour, would only appear faintly, though sharply outlined, in the flash ; and it would be only owing to the extreme vividness of the light that their snows would be distinguished from their rocks. The delicate differences of mezzotint brought close to pure white by which this work was done lasted only through a few impressions ; and the lower sky and the distant mountain range had to be reorganized almost im- mediately. It is only in early states that the flash tra- verses the whole plate from side to side, or that the mountains are seen faint through a film of vapour. Then again, the middle range of cloud, which is illuminated by the lightning which strikes downwards in the midst of the drawing, was the moment before as dark as the highest range of cloud, and had to be most delicately gradated from the brightness of the flash to the darkness on its right and left, in order to express this momentary illumination. On the endurance then, of this delicate work the unity of the impression made by the sky de- 54 LIBER STUDIORUM. pended jj and it perished rapidly. It is no wonder that Turner was soon discontented. Only a few impressions exist which record satisfactorily his effort to represent the instantaneous lighting up of a dark sky by two flashes of fire of different intensity. It is the lightning, we must remember, by which we see the whole. It is the lightning which reveals that the clouds are not all of a uniform darkness. The birds, the edge of the sail, by whose gleams of light the aerial distance of the lake and hill is made, are struck forth by the lightning. It is by it also that the waves are flashed out into a light far more fierce and dramatic in its contrast with the darkness of the lake and shore than sunlight would produce. It is a sensa- tional effect of Nature, and the short and broken waves — illuminated in points and darts and in strange places by the two simultaneous flashes — are admirably true to those produced in a lake by a sudden squall of wind. But the tale of this storm is not yet completed. If I am right in my conjecture, Turner saw, at this moment which he chose to record, the rare phenomenon of " arborescent light- ning." At the head of the lake the lightning ascends from the ground, flashing upwards right and left, and illuminating the slope. In the tropics this effect of light- ning takes frequently the shape of a tree with naked branches, and hence derives its name. There it often spreads half way up the sky \ here Turner only saw it rise a short way, but he seized its appearance and drew it as he remembered it. LIBER STUDIORUM. 55 When all this has been said, there still remains, as the great pleasure of the plate, the imaginative conception of the towering Niesen, at home amongst the lightnings and the storm. 1 And Turner has emphasized this by rolling the lower clouds which have escaped from the cleaving sword of the lightning down its far side in whirling folds of vapour. For the clouds are its companions and its lovers, and out of them it speaks in thunder across the vale to its brother the Stockhorn. 1 The earliest drawing made by Turner of this scene is in the Farnley Hall collection, and it is curious that there is only one flash of lightning in it, and that it is not behind the Niesen. That burning heart of the drawing was added afterwards to this plate of the Liber Studiorum. No. XVI. THE FIFTH PLAGUE. Draivn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. N this engraving of the Fifth Plague, the effects of the storm upon the earth have no terror or magnificence. Turner had never seen the hail and lightning of the lands nearer the tropics, nor the desolation wrought by a tor- nado ; and the scattered fires which here represent the de- scription in Exodus— " the fire ran along upon the ground" — are more like ridges of burning furze than like flames lit by the wrath of God. But the thunder splendours of an angry sky had often been seen by Turner ; and the sky here is solemn, full of awe and judgment, wrath and plague ; and the banded lines of its fury, of equal cloud and fire, are driven over the earth as if they lusted for vengeance. The storm is at its height. Its forerunners of piled and convoluted vapours are passing onwards to the left. From its van, and breaking from its ragged edge ablaze with intolerable light, innumerable flashes, forked and ribboned, flare forth, and seem in LIBER STUDIORUM. 57 their madness of rage to be blown about and ravelled asunder by the fierce wind. Its central body has sunk down, black and crammed with deadly wrath, over the city on the right. It will not cease to pour forth doom till every house is made desolate. But Turner, whose mind had nothing Oriental about it, could not see Egypt nor conceive the Mosaic story. The pyramids and the city are without any majesty or imagination. Moses is naively enough imagined. He stands as if a child had pictured him, and because of this very childishness of conception there is a certain sim- plicity, a directness, in his figure which have some attrac- tion ; and Aaron, crouching behind in terror on the ground, is conceived with the same simplicity. Both are as nothing in comparison with the awfulness of the sky. But a greater artist would have made the prophet the centre of the scene, and concentrated in him its majesty. The dark pool and the shattered trees, and the man and horse hurled dead in a moment to the ground, are imaginative ; the black stagnant water — as in the Rizpah and the Jason — is an element introduced by Turner when he wishes to bring horror into a place ; and the tree torn in two and hurled over the dead man, approaches — though at a great distance — what Tintoret would have conceived. PART IV. ISSUED MARCH 29, 1809. No. XVII. FARMYARD WITH THE COCK. Drawn and Etched by], M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. HIS composition — the Farmyard and Cock — though it is one of the least attractive in the Liber Studiorum, has its own interest, with others of the same type, in the history of Turner's mind. The painter par excellence of imagi- native landscape has here endeavoured to represent the corner of a small farmyard. It is strange to look at it, and then to think of the ideal solemnity of the Procrisand Cephalus or of the soft mystery of the Hind Head Hill ; and the difference proves his range ; but it would have been wiser had he left this class of subjects to those who cared for them. He had no pleasure in this drawing, but if it was worth doing at all, it was worth doing well. And he might easily have done it better. He drew pigs well when he chose, and he had no disdain for a farmyard, LIBER STUDIORUM. 59 but he has here, through lassitude of temper, drawn his animals badly, nor has he proved his hand in the rest of the work. The composition of the piece is, as usual, careful. The horizontal lines of the cart are relieved of their monotony by the huge circle of its wheel and by the opposing lines of the second cart beyond it. The dis- position of the hens and pigs is in Turner's usual pyra- midal manner, with supports on either side to strengthen and ennoble the design. But the commonplace of the whole is too great to be redeemed. The lines of the quiet sky which holds its beauty still over this ugly piece of earth repeat the lines of the cart and seem to give it sympathy. And the summer trees in the evening — for it is the hour of rest — look in upon the farmyard and whisper over it in the wind, gossiping with one another of their own matters now that the day is done, as the two peasants gossip with each other by the paling, and are glad that work is over. No. XVIII. DRAWING OF THE CLYDE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. N the early proof from which the autotype is taken Turner has driven the rays of the sun at different angles through the foliage, and has reflected them at different angles from the varied slopes of the falling water. This was one of his experiments, but he did not consider it true to nature, and in a subsequent proof he has drawn three parallel diagonal lines in pencil to mark the true path of the rays — one across the foliage, two across the water- fall, and written underneath, "This will do." In that state the plate was published. All the pretty fancifulness of the rays in this impression is taken away. It is a good instance of his sacrifice of fantastic charm to truth. One of those quiet afternoon skies of which Turner is so fond lies over this unfrequented hollow, so hidden that women are bathing in the pool where the backwater of the cascade is shallow. But their presence does not disturb the impression we receive from the drawing and LIBER STUDIORUM. 6l which Turner felt as he drew — of a spirit of happiness in Nature apart from humanity. All things here are full of a glad enjoyment of their own life. " In themselves they all possess their own desire." But among them is one whose power and gladness are supreme. The water ^ fall is the spirit of the place. The passion, and the life of it, and the hurried race of its stream among the rocks in front are wild with lonely delight. The trees on both sides look over to see and share in the dancing of the water, and are drenched with its spray. The sun- light joins in the pleasure of the water and dances with it. In truth, everything belongs to the cataract. Only the castle among the trees is set apart, but even to it the waterfall is united by the mill which uses for the work of the castle the descending stream. The waste of the mill-force tumbles into the fall in a vertical and quiet line on the right which contrasts admirably with, and enforces, the sloping and tempestuous rush of the cas- cade. Above the waterfall, the horizontal lines of the walls of the castle and of the clouds, bind together the two sides of the subject, and rest the eye which would otherwise be somewhat overwhelmed by the multitude and the variety of the curving lines. One of them, however, does a great deal of work. It is that of the trunk of the tree on the right which rising boldly opens out the background of the drawing, and gives depth to the hollow of the cataract. Then the whole story of the river is told to us with all Turner's accuracy and insight. First, the smoothness of 62 LIBER STUDIORUM. the rush of the water before it dashes downwards is insisted on by the brightness of the sunlight that illumi- nates it. Then, we can tell from the surface of the upper fall in what manner the rocks below it are moulded, a matter which requires the most careful and tender draw- ing ; but Turner never paints waterfall or torrent without giving us this information. Then, half way down, the main body of the water,- dashing to the right into the pool below, throws up an ever-forming, ever-pulsating cloud of spray ; and the work of disintegration this has done during centuries is shown in the deep recess hol- lowed out of the cliff. Over this the trees are hanging, their branches drooping downwards. At first it seems strange that all the lowest branches are leafless. But rising spray destroys up to a certain point the foliage which just above that point it makes luxuriant. This subtle piece of truth is here observed and recorded. Again, on the left side, that portion of the, fall which is not included in the oblique rush to the right tumbles down vertically, and its spray, as well as the whirl of the backwater of the pool, have formed another recess. But as the main force of the fall is expended on the right, this left recess is not so deeply hollowed out as the other; and its rocks are not worn in the same way as their opposite companions. Once more, the water in the pool is in reality boiling upwards, but it seems calm — for the pool is deep, and the force of the descending water has pushed away the stones from below and piled them up in a ridge a little LIBER STUDIORUM. 63 lower down, and over this ridge the river breaks in foam. The channel now narrows, and the water rushing from both sides meets in turmoil in the midst, whirling fiercely and in curves — drawn with the utmost care for truth — around the projecting rock on the right, the surface of which Turner has carved and dug into holes that we may know how at a different level the swollen waters have done their work. The whole history of the waterfall and its labours is thus told. The figures are fantastic, and are so arranged as to illustrate and intensify the lines of the composition. No. XIX. LITTLE DEVIL'S BRIDGE OVER THE RUSS ABOVE ALTDORFT, SWITZERLAND. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. -K^j; HIS is the old bridge below Andermatt on the St. Gothard Pass, drawn when only a mule-path traced its thin line among the ghastly cliffs. We see it here, in the distance, crawling slowly along them like a serpent ; and Turner, in his deep sympathy with the struggle of man for victory over the difficulties of Nature, throws upon it the lightning-like rays of sunlight. Midst of the desola- tion and gloom, this, at least, he thinks, shall be illumi- nated. But a greater triumph than the path was the bridge, and though he cannot set it altogether into light, yet he fills the whole drawing with its presence. It is, in his feeling, greater here than the mountains ; and its front of masonry, sweeping from side to side of the scene, fills LIBER STUDIORUM. 65 the eye with a more majestic image than the walls of rock above it. He has made it also a part of Nature. It seems to be an upgrowth of the will of the rocks them- selves, and long companionship has bound it to them for ever. Nor does the sunlight neglect it. Brighter even than on the path is the radiance of the shining on its parapet and on the limb of its arch — an arch lightly wrought, and yet so strong that all the fierce storms that haunt this pass have not loosened its knitted stones or injured its grave serenity. Turner loved it as he drew it. It is with the greatest care that he has made the lines of the parapet and the footway of the bridge rise and fall in faint curves made by the settling of the masonry into absolute firmness, and he wished to make that impression on our mind. Mark too, how the parapet heaves above the arch in a faint and lovely curve, and with what a lift the bridge rushes upwards to meet the pathway. It is as if it were alive. It still stands fast below the modern road. Its parapet is broken but the mass is unshaken, and to this day, through the beautiful toss of its curve, bent like a spring and seemingly as elastic, we can look up the gorge and see flashing across the awful hollow where the Reuss boils and foams in never-ending torment the broken sunlights Turner saw. The weather of the piece fits Turner's conception of human intelligence conquering, but with difficulty, the savage forces of Nature. For the storm is passing away ; the wind still blows freely but the clouds are dissolving ; F 66 LIBER STUDIORUM. the sun is conquering, the mountain tops are set free, and behind the dark pines the fires of life are shining. And few aspects of cloud are more beautiful in the Liber Studiorum than this — when the thin and slanting lines of transparent vapour are transfused and alternated with the rays of sunlight, and both light as well as vapour seem to be spun into fine threads by the whirling wind. The mountains, great as they are, are not drawn with the same massiveness and descending power as Turner has drawn them in other representations of the St. Gothard ; but I think he instinctively subordinated them to his bridge. He had not the same reason for lowering the impression we receive of the rocks beneath the arch, because he wished them to be conceived of as at one with the bridge, and as its deep foundations. And there- fore he has hewn them into majesty, and preserved in many of their incurving lines the story of their having once had to do with the stream which now roars so many feet below. From either side they sink downwards to an angle which, inverted underneath the central stone of the arch, tends to lift it into the air and to give it stability. But this is not all. The descending ridges of the mountains in the distance serve to deepen the gorge and ennoble the bridge. The same downward fall of all lines to the hidden path of the torrent is insisted on by the slant upwards of the blasted pines, paralleled and carried higher by the slope of the mountain side behind them; and the whole series is bound together by the LIBER STUDIORUM. 6 7 triangular knob of rock exactly below the crown of the arch and the turn of the distant footpath. This lozenge of rock is the keystone of the composition. Turner's study of these pines and their rock founda- tions is in itself an abstract of the sentiment of the Alpine passes between the line of deciduous trees and the tree- less region. In the Chartreuse we are still among the chestnuts; and savage as the torrent is and awful the precipices, there is Turner's tenderness in the evening air, in the workman returning home over the bridge, in the stream-fed slope among the saplings and flowers, in the quiet and rosy sunset seen far away. But here, higher up, where solitary Desolation abides amid destruction, Turner marks the deathfulness of the Upper Alps by the skeleton of the mule set in the foreground with its skull couched like a dragon's, and its ribs struck upwards in sympathy with the dead ribs of the withered pines. Only two carrion crows, with their gray plumage exaggerated into white, animate the place. But yet there are things that hold fast to life — the iron pines. Wilder than the rocks themselves, they grow dark as the rocks and are rooted in their clefts. A few on the left are flourishing, but in how broken and torn a life ; half naked, black against the light. As to those two pines in the foreground, for which Turner made several studies, 1 they have lived their life, and they seem to cry out to heaven against their long misery. And yet they have done their best, and Turner in his fierce and pathetic 1 They may be seen in the National Gallery. 68 LIBER STUDIORUM. sympathy with them records it. Their roots have become part of the very rock itself. Few things in this book are finer than the drawing of the talons of the nearest pine which have struck themselves round the curving of the rock like an eagle's claws around his prey ; or than the drawing of its trunk, where the foldings of the wood are like the foldings of the schist of which the cliff is made — as solid and as strong — one would think almost as old. Nor have these ancient trees even yet surrendered life. They cling to it as the Swiss clung to the liberty of their mountains, as the mountain path clings to the mountain sides. No. XX. THE LEADER SEA-PIECE; OR, THE GUARDSHIP AT THE NORE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. ^HIS plate, commonly called the Leader Sea- Piece, is a companion to the Ships hi a Breeze, No. X., p. 36, taken from Lord Egre- mont's picture. The sentiment of No. X. gathers around the commerce of England, its freedom, mastery, and activity upon the sea, under the guard of her navy. The idea of the Leader Sea-Piece is different. It is England watched over by her warships. The line- of-battle ship at anchor is the guardship at the Nore. Another ship of war in the distance doubles the impres- sion of watchfulness and protection. Between them both the fishing-boats return safely to the land. The shore lies low, scarcely discerned ; the rest is England's surest guard — the sea. Britannia needs no bulwark, No towers along the steep. 70 LIBER STUDIORUM. It is not the sea at peace which defends her, but the wild, tormented waves that run so fiercely here, their edges torn off by the wind which has made the sky above as wild and tossed as the water. The great cumulus clouds have all their upper rack blown away like the wave-crests underneath ; and lower down they are trailed away, as if by a steady gale, into parallel lines of slanting stratus. The very rays of sunlight seem also to be driven into similar forms by the wind. Above, heavier clouds, charged with rain, are heaving forward, their folds full of a coming shower. The sea is divided into four stripes of alternate dark and light, the nearest and largest of which is blackened by the squall which sends the fishing-boat along so swiftly. These horizontal stripes emphasize the hori- zontal lines of the anchored ships, and double the impres- sion they are designed to make of firm and stately watch- fulness. The beautiful curve made by the two fishing- boats and by the sloping patch of light on the shore, — the sweep of which is determined by the etched strokes on the stern of the nearest boat — is a lovely contrast to the horizontal lines of the sea and the men-of-war, and the rushing speed of the boats is equally set over against the stern quiet of the guardships. The slanting masts of these boats, at right angles to the clouds, yet both — clouds and boats — moved by the wind, seem to enhance the power of the growing gale, and the strained cable of the ship tells of the force with which it blows. The run of the sea, and its sharp curves are struck forth clearly by the LIBER STUDIORUM. 71 three white touches on the bars of the buoy which turn in an opposite direction to the waves. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped, that so much of the masterly etching of the waves is lost in the photograph, but the splendid drawing of their eddying sweeps around the buoy, and of the hollow behind it where the surface is made smooth by the headlong dip of the sea beneath it, can still be seen. It is in the work of the waves around this buoy that Turner tells exactly how strong he means the wind and the tide to be. No. XXI. MORPETH, NORTHUMBERLAND. Dmivn and Etched by]. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. ORPETH is one of the most admirably composed drawings in the Liber Studiorum. Like all great art, our feeling when we look at it is — How easy it would be to do this ! as when we see bad work, we think — How difficult art is ! But were an amateur to try it, he would find that the ease was in the great artist's genius, and not in him. For this harmony that we feel in the work is the result of a knowledge won by long labour and observation of what to keep and of what to leave aside, until at last the painter's hand acts and creates unconsciously, chooses and rejects without asking why, and makes harmony without one pause of consideration. Had Turner been questioned for what reason he did this or that, he would have answered — "I do not know," though had he taken the trouble to think about it, he could have told. But that is just the trouble an artist does not take. His business is to create, not to explain. The plate is full of skilful repetitions and contrasts. LIBER STUDIORUM. 73 The kite leaning against the wall repeats the arch of the doorway above ; the signboard in bright light beyond the bridge repeats the large dark one that juts out against the sky, and the line of the bridge repeats the line of the moor that dips towards the doorway of the Tower. As to the management of the light and shade on the road, and the skilful disposition of the horse and woman, I will not dwell upon them. Those who have eyes will see much more than I can tell. The old Peel Tower is the central thought of the drawing of Morpeth, and Turner felt for it with his sad- dened love of the romance that had passed away. Dark and lonely he makes the moor around it, and sombre the cloudy sky of the north over its head. A little wildly- scattered light falls upon it, but the light is chiefly thrown upon the tall modern house below, where life is moving, and which, as it were in mockery, repeats its outline. From the gable of the tower no smoke ascends — only the vapour of the cloud hangs over its desolation — but the smoke of the vulgar house flares in the chill wind like a fire. And see how noble, in his sympathy, he has made the tower, and how he has insisted on its strength. It is small, but it is fixed in a hollow of the hill, so that the hill itself is its guard and foundation. Its foundations slope outwards to establish their grip upon the hill and to support the ponderous masonry of the upper story. The face of its gabled side is like a precipitous cliff. Its door, the battlements, are almost untouched by decay. But the plastered house below 74 LIBER STUDIORUM. already requires repair outside. The bridge also, and the wall of the house on the left belong to the elder time, and Turner took care to make them as grey and massive as he conceived the characters to be of those who built them. It is these things which filled his heart as he drew — and the piece of moor beyond the bridge, with its savage broken lights and wild trees growing as if they had something of the nature of the Border riders in them, is an example of how a great artist can put into a little space the character of a whole time and its in- dwellers. Sky and moor and tower and trees all speak with one voice. Nor indeed is the old town less impres- sive. Its short set houses — the walls of those on the right are those of a later time — tell of a hard life and a poor, lived in the incessant trouble of rough weather rarely changing into warm sunshine. The shadows Turner has cast on his drawing are deep and heavy ; the lights are dim with rain and angry. They symbolize the years of those that live in the town, whose rare pleasures are mixed with, and born out of pain. There is not one of the folk who are moving about who is not bitterly worked and worn and sad at heart. Even the one idler who leans over the bridge is sorrowful and weary. The drawing is then filled with the spirit of the gray North — the spirit, in the town itself, of the set sad struggle of life sternly endured through poverty and pain — the spirit, in the country beyond the town, of that rude romantic passion and battle which beats like a heart in the Border ballads. PART V. ISSUED JANUARY I, l8ll. No. XXII. JUVENILE TRICKS. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. ^HE hollow here represented may still be traced in the Green Park, the spring of water remains, but the grove of trees is changed. No stranger problem can be thought of than that which is presented so forcibly in this print — how it happened that one who could draw with elaborating love and with equal keenness of eye and heart the mystical beauty of Nature should represent humanity under forms so revolting. The chief figure among the boys is a sickly idiot, and the others are coarse beyond all words. Their very glee is base. They were, I suppose, the kind of boy Turner used to see about Maiden Lane when he was a youth, and he had no eye afterwards for others of a higher type, save perhaps when he drew the fisherlads of England. 7 6 LIBER STUDIORUM. Above them, with joy and care in every line, he dwells upon the work of nature, moulding in fibrous folding and in graceful rising the trunks of the trees — a study as careful and as delicate as any in the whole of this book. It is a strange problem, and I wonder if the painful horror he seems to have often had of man threw him all the more in utter loneliness on the breast of Nature, and isolated him with her into a love which enabled him to read her inmost secrets. But if this be so, and I think of it when I look at many drawings, he could not linger long in Nature's embrace alone. He was compelled by his heart to mingle humanity with Nature, and though he never drew men and women well, he filled his landscape with the sorrow and the thought, the joy and the passions of mankind. Of half his work it might well be said that the Nature he painted was a parable of which Man was the interpretation. No. XXIII. THE HINDOO WORSHIPPER; OR, HINDOO DEVOTIONS. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by R. DUNKARTON. F the first state of Hindoo Devotions, as this plate was called, very few impressions were taken before Turner saw reason to change the sky, owing, it is said, to failures in the copper. Before the alteration, it was free from clouds save for a few solemn bars of horizontal cirrostratus which, just touched with light on their under edges, hung high over the trees. Near the hills also there were a few drift- ing vapours, and the rest was the grave and level heaven of a misty afternoon. An entire change was wrought, and not, I think, for the better, in the second state. The sky was made a mackerel sky, less solemn than the first, but in its con- tinuous repetition and in its ordered arrangement of similar series of clouds, also dignified and calm, and 78 LIBER STUDIORUM. detaining the eye with pleasure from distance to distance. I conjecture that its lower range which, with its long horizontal lines of cloud one above another resembles a vast plain, is made so, to suggest and enlarge the expanse of the Roman Campagna, a portion of which we see below. It was indeed, as I think, this impressive surface that Turner saw in his mind when he made this drawing. It has nothing to do with the nonsense title of a Hindoo Devotions ; " it is an ideal reminiscence of Rome and its scenery. The temple might almost have been directly sketched from that of Minerva Medica. The half-withered and stunted trees are such as grow in \ the Campagna. The stone pines, two and two together and scattered on ridges of ruin, belong to many a view along the Tiber. The mingling of trees and ruin on the further bank above the stream and the slow sluggish stream itself recall the banks of the Anio. The low hill beyond-the plain has the outline and the sentiment of the hills seen from the platform of the Lateran. In truth, the whole sentiment of the scene is Roman. Deserted, melancholy, ghostly, yet keeping its solemn grandeur, the Roman scenery retains its inextinguishable and pathetic appeal to our sympathy for the ruin of so much glory, for the passing away of so much of human life. No one can look at this drawing and doubt that Turner felt the unique sentiment of the place. The very ground he draws is built up of the ruins of temples and baths, and he sets the wild weeds to grow among the remains of pride and luxury, among the mourning of the LIBER STUDIORUM. 79 Gods. He embodies all the sorrow of Rome, and all the strange and haunted feeling of the wanderer who at night outside the Aurelian walls hears the dead whisper, and sees them pass him by, white in the white mist. When we turn from the drawing as an ideal represen- tation of feeling, and ask how far it is an ideal representa- tion of natural truth, our satisfaction is not so great as it is in other and even less important subjects in the Liber Studiorum. The sky indeed is admirable, even without its distinct aim at sentiment. The hill and plain seem to dream in the velvet air of Rome, and the two pines on the ridge of ruin, which throw the plain and hill into distance, possess that lonely aerial look which makes those isolated trees in Italy enchant the imagination. The dip of the road, the broken ground and banks of ruin, and the brushwood beyond them which binds them together with so beautiful a curve ; the disposition of the tree trunks with the ground, and the mystery of the road itself, are all skilfully wrought, but none of these so much as usual with Turner tell us their natural truths in a beautiful way. I do not like to blame the trees on the left hand, but I do not understand them and cannot like them, though I suppose Turner wanted them to have this form in this place. The nearest stone pine is a careful study, and the branches in their balance and arrangement, in their combination of rigidity and spring, and their tale of the ceaseless effort of the tree to set right the original push it got out of the perpendicular (an effort one can follow all along the stem) are full of interest ; so is the intricacy of the 8o LIBER STUDIORUM. upper branches and the repose of the thick foliage, but I do not think that Turner can be said to have ever drawn a stone pine in a perfect manner, or with the sympathy and joy it needs; and this tree is no exception. As to its companion, it is a libel. But these criticisms matter little. This drawing is poetical in a way not many of the Liber Studiorum are, and in a way too much neglected. It is a piece in an old manner, and Turner seems — so versatile is he — to the manner born. No. XXIV. COAST OF YORKSHIRE, NEAR ^WHITBY. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. FTER many representations in the Liber Studiorum of the sea in calm, and in days of angry wind, we are placed at last in this engraving of the Coast of Yorkshire in the midst of a full and roaring gale, and before a terrible sea. The air is filled with the fine mist of the spray, and the cliffs loom dim through its driving veil. Still more dim, for its own foam-cloud accompanies it, is the mighty wave which at the back, lifting itself high in the air before it breaks, will in a moment, all thunder and snow, rush like a wild beast into the chasm under the great headland. Down this chasm the retreating mass of the preceding billow, the foam of which has climbed to the very top- most edge of the cliffs, is whirled outwards at full-speed, and, as it rejoins the main sea, its upper surface is caught by the wind and blown back again towards the shore. At the same time, the incoming has begun to clash with the retreating wave, and their fierce meeting has made a G 82 LIBER STUDIORUM. very hell of tormented waters. Nor does the record of these truths satisfy Turner. He marks two other facts only seen by those who have studied the storm-billows battling on a coast. One is that the under sweep of the down-dragging billow has so pressed upon the centre of its approaching companion that the water on its ridge, now curling to its burst, leaps upwards in pinnacles of foam ; the ottier is, that the surface of the same wave in retreat, being of churned foam, is light of weight, and is borne up the smooth and ponderous side of the in- coming wave as if it were oil. Above this tempest of water is the dark mist of spoon-drift, and as we look through it we seem to know that it is incessantly supplied from infinite sources of vapour far at sea, and incessantly hurried forward by the fierce tyranny of the gale. This is the story told to us in this one corner of the drawing, and whether its truth or its imagination is the greatest, I cannot tell. The best thing to say is that they are both one. The dark mass of the headland would press forward too much were it not for the disposition of the gulls by which sea and cliff are thrown backwards, and by the triangular arrangement of which the eye is led downwards to the base of the rocks, and from that to the mast of the shipwrecked fishing-boats. Curiously enough, this boat dashed on the rocks, and the sailors in wild atti- tudes upon them, are like a shipwreck in the Liber Veritatis which Mr. Ruskin has treated with savage humour ; nor does the scene seem more possible in Turner than in Claude, indeed less possible, for here the LIBER STUDIORUM. 83 sea is, as it is not in the sketch of Claude, tremendous. The figures closer in shore are also fishermen who are being saved, and one of them in the grasp of another seems to be for the moment mad with terror. It is Turner's way of enhancing the horror of the storm. Behind them, in magnificent realization, the billows run into another narrow cleft where they are compressed together into foam ; and the foam, borne inwards and upwards by the wind, rises in a flying cloud of rage almost to the height of the cliff. Below, another aspect is given of the shore. Two rocks form a narrow entrance, and within there is an open space in which the exhausted waves are whirling round and round in eddies, every one of which is studied from Nature with the greatest care. There, placed round it, in order to insist on the circular whirling, men are saving the flotsam and jetsam of the wrecks. The cliffs are lias, and drawn so well that it would be possible for a geologist to name them, and the highest of them, fronting the sea like a fortress, has the haughty air of a defier of the storm. On it, set a little inland, and in a space of clearer sky, where the gale is for a moment less violent — for Turner knew the gusty nature of a north-east tempest on that coast — stands the light- house : the one witness of the watchful struggle of Man with Nature, and of his monarchy over it. It dominates all the scene. But it could not save the fisher-folk from ruin, and we are left by Turner to muse upon the help- lessness of man and on the sorrow of his toil. No. XXV. HIND HEAD HILL, ON THE PORTS- MOUTH ROAD. Drawn and Etched by], M. W. Turner. Engraved by R. DlTNKARTON. IND HEAD HILL is one of the plates which it is extremely difficult to photograph. The mass of dark hill-sides becomes almost of an uniform tint and of uniform darkness in the photograph. All the gradations of shade, which are in the original subtly varied from point to point, are lost. The etched lines also which mark out the structure of the hills are drowned out of sight, and so are the lights which re- lieve the mass of shadow, especially those at the base of the round-topped hill, above the clustered sheep. Enough remains, however, to make the reproduction interesting, and the sky and the foreground come out well. The drawing of the foreground is worthy of close study. Nature has moulded this upland with rain and frost, and by the growing grass, for centuries ; men have made paths across it ; the feeding sheep have scored it with their fol- lowing steps. Turner has told the whole story of these LIBER STUDIORUM. 85 influences by the lines of his etching, and by the varied falling of the shadows. He has done more. He has so arranged the sheep along the edge of this shoulder of the down that we feel its rising curve and realize its height; and, still uncontent, has so disposed the other sheep and the attitude of the shepherd that they explain, even better than the etching, the modulations of the surface of the hill. The sky is also of the highest interest, the moment be- ing chosen when a great rain cloud has slowly drifted away to the right, while the afternoon sunlight, dividing the thinner folds of the retreating mass, breaks it up into separate clouds and sends the rays darting upwards and downwards from their broken edges. For subtle truth of dispersed light and shade, for imaginative arrangement, and for a solemn splendour of feeling and thought, so that it seems as if Nature herself had taken the pencil of Turner, this sky is not surpassed in the Liber Studiorum. The feeling of the whole subject is in harmony with the skies. It is the sentiment of a sorrow as gentle as the rain passing into the peace and sunshine and pleasure of life's afternoon, when the shepherd of life has leisure to read, and the labours of life, like the sheep, rest for a little time. The hour is given to quiet. The coach tra- vels in safety, the shepherd reads undisturbed. The days of highwaymen are gone by. The gallows is empty, and as if in forgiveness, the brightest sunlight falls on it and shines behind it. The rain has been warm and has fallen softly, without wind, and the vapour it has left nourishes 86 LIBER STUDIORUM. with tender dew the flowers on the hills. In a few minutes the landscape will be flooded with veiled and tender light, and the clouds illuminate themselves to receive their lord the Sun who comes forth from his pavilion. The hills on the left, and those on the right into whose re- cesses the mail coach leads our imagination — in gently flowing lines and soft enfoldings, strike the same spiritual note as the sky. The deep-sunk valley where the dark- ness is made alive by the white smoke of the burning furze; the lowly alders and the dwarf oaks that climb the hill and border the pool, their dark glades pierced by the brilliantly lit water; the resting sheep, the resting shepherd — are all in harmony, parts of the one sweet melody. Yet, though the hills are tenderly folded and faintly curved, their outlines are firmly and sharply drawn, so that we feel the rock under the short grass — nor are their flowing ridges left without the contrast that gives them value. The bright horizontal bar of the valley pool, and the vertical lines of the coach oppose these long sweeping curves, and waken a new pleasure : and the repetition of the outline of the nearest hill by that of the figure of the shepherd increases the peace of the drawing as much as the reverse of the angle of the hill-top by the two sheep exactly under it increases the majesty of the hill. But all these matters of composition, which Turner wrought out instinctively, are as nothing in comparison with the poetic sentiment of the whole. The artist loved the soft shining after rain, and all it imaged to him in the heart of man. And he loved it as it came to pass among LIBER STUDIORUM. 87 the moors and downs of England, and drew it a thousand times, oftener far than he .drew her storms. In all his work there is no record of it more beautiful and more temperate than Hind Head Hill No. XXVI. LONDON, FROM GREENWICH. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by Charles Turner. URNER'S heart was in this drawing. He liked all he had to do — London, his ' kindly nurse/ the distant spires, the antique towers, the mingling of smoke and cloud in the sky ; the river whose banks he haunted as a boy, the ships sailing up and down, the wharves, the architecture of the Hospital which it amused him to draw, the Hospital itself where the sailors he loved were housed, the rich park, the trees, and the stately deer. All pleased his soul, and the drawing came forth out of his inward pleasure into out- ward beauty. The Hospital seems to fill the whole space of the picture, and Turner has disposed the rising ground where the deer are lying, so as to enclose, as it were in a frame, the noble building and give it greater dignity. Then he placed in front of it, like a base to a pillar, the broad outspread meadow, and gave it, for foundation, the strength of the earth. The space of flat land on the left, with its broken lights, continues the line of the roof of LIBER STUDIORUM. 8 9 the Hospital, and this continuousness seems to increase its size to the eye and its importance in the imagination. Then comes the beautiful and curving sweep of the river, opposed to all the horizontal lines, but bringing them all into harmony. Boats, ships, are scattered all over it. Everywhere there are shipyards along its sides and a forest of masts beyond. " It is " — thought Turner — " a highway of the nations. It is London, and not Green- wich that I draw, and commerce and not war is the source of London. And there she lies along the horizon, filling it from end to end, the mysterious city, full of an impassionating attraction ; and rolling over it, the smoke which tells of home, and human labour, and incessant life below. So, I will make the smoke beautiful, and bathe St. Paul's in it and all the spires, and wreathe it into the loveliest lines I can draw, and make it the plaything of the wind, until, borne away to the right where the city ceases, it is swept upwards to lose itself in the heavens. But its lighter and fantastic curves are not quiet enough for thought, nor grave enough. So I will dispose above it the clouds of heaven, and their lines shall be various, but firm in ordered array and soft as wind-blown shadows ; and higher still there shall be a space of peaceful sky with floating clouds spun into delicate threads of gold, to tell of that which may sit afar in stillness above the smoke and stir of this dim spot." This was his voiceless thought as I imagine it to have been. At least, he was happy when he conceived this engraving, and the mood was not a common one. PART VI. ISSUED JUNE I, l8ll. No. XXVII. WINDMILL AND LOCK. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. HE sentiment of the Windmill, high on the hill against the sunset sky, has been set forth by Mr. Ruskin in a noble passage which I quote in the Appendix. But the same kind of feeling pervades the rest of the drawing. It is not an ideal sentiment as in the Hindoo Devotions^ but that which gathers round the hard-working life of the English poor; not sympathy with the wayside worshipper whom half in careless scorn Turner may have made into a Hindoo, but with the difficult drudgery of men who snatch their supper by the wayside, whose rest is taken among their tools and toils, and whose beasts of burden are the daily companions of their masters. The pity of the artist's heart fills the drawing he has made. All things are growing still with the sinking of LIBER STUDIORUM. 91 the sun. It is the hour of hard-won repose, and the slow sluggish life of the canal and its dreary labour are contrasted, in Turner's half pathetic half bitter way, with the swift rushing of the sun to its couch and with the splendour of its kingly canopies. But even in the sky, the ordered continuity of the clouds, as if they were presided over by one thought, impress the mind with peacefulness, and a number of repetitions of objects all along the course of the canal, to which it is needless to draw special attention, are used to create the same feeling. Nor is the mill itself, unmoved by the wind, and resting in the lofty sky, less the teller of repose than the heavy boat that sleeps far below in the dark water, or its companion whose firelight illuminates the gloomy depth of the lock. There is only one touch of active work in the whole drawing, where the two men heave round the lever of the lock-gates, and it is there to deepen by a single sharp contrast the quiet of the whole. The distant landscape of trees and bridge (the upward curve of the bridge being used to lift the ground to the eye) derives a charm from the golden mist in which it has gone to sleep ; and Turner has put on the left of the mill the tops of a few trees to inform us that behind the hill the landscape has the same still monotony. The lock-gate, swung back to the wall and rising steeply from the water, carries the eye upwards to the mill which it lifts into the air ; the door which hangs aside from the mill adds to that aerialness of it which is finally asserted by the sweep of its upper sail into the very 9 2 LIBER STUDIORUM. zenith. The two millstones resting on the ground, and in full light, seem to give a life to the mill ; their circles at once relieve and strengthen, by contrast, the vertical and horizontal lines of its pedestal. The slope of the cart and of the staircase still further modifies the rigidity of these lines, — a charitable office which the sloping sails perform for the upper part of the building. Look too at the force and boldness with which the pivot of the sails looks forth like a horn with eyes into the sunset. It also makes the mill alive. Out of it looks the spirit of the building. The sky is full of interest. The higher clouds are in oblique parallel lines, sloping down from the right-hand upper corner; and this series meets lower down, as in the Hindoo Devotions, another series of horizontal bars of cloud. The effect of the setting sun on such a sky is to throw the clouds, as we see them here, into apparent curves, the highest point of the curves being immediately above the sun, so that the king of day seems to go to his sleep under a triumphal arch. This appearance is caused, not by any actual change in the arrangement of the clouds, but by their being apparently destroyed in the path of the intensest light. And Turner has taken pains to indicate the actual lines of the clouds below the dazzle of the light, to tell us the truth that underlies the appearance. No. XXVIII. JUNCTION OF SEVERN AND WYE. Drawn, Etched, and Engraved by J. M. W. Turner. HE print from which this autotype is taken is a proof which has been washed over with colour by Turner. The foreground is, there- fore, unlike that in ordinary first states, dark, and much of the etched detail of leaves and broken ground is lost. But the effect of light and shade is broader than in the untouched first state, and I have preferred, in spite of the loss, to submit the touched proof to photography. The plate was etched and also engraved by Turner. The etching is full among the trees, but is more gene- ralized than it is in any other plate of the Liber Studiorum along the banks of the Wye and the distant country beyond the Severn. As to the engraving, the mezzotint is put on and rubbed off in Turner's unconventional fashion, and exactly as an engraver would not, and perhaps could not have done it. The sky is a curious study in engraving, and part of it seems to have been treated with acid. All the foreground has been dashed in with a broad-toothed 94 LIBER STUDIORUM. tool, — the roulette — over the etching, and then mezzo- tinted. The boldness of this work may be contrasted with the delicacy with which the lights are wrought upon the river, but even these are excelled by the subtle engraving of the misty light which on the left hand comes gleaming through the foliage of the grove. The drawing itself is more of a composition in the so- called classical style than generally prevails in the Liber Studiorum, but while the manner of the stylists is followed, the matter is closer to natural truth than it would be in the hands of Claude or Gaspar Poussin. The trees are conventional, but they are skilfully arranged so as to give distance to the Castle and the Severn. But the real inte- rest is in another part of the subject. It is worth while to follow downwards the banks of the stream ; to examine how Turner has varied the descending lines of the cliff, while he preserves the unity of its stratification ; to mark the way in which the sloping banks on the margin of the river are drawn, so that we have all the facts we need recorded concerning the disintegration of the rocks above, and the deposition of mud by a tidal stream below. This representation of the results of Nature's long labour is even more remarkable when we look at the flat meadow lands at the mouth of the Wye. We can tell from the drawing how they have been laid down, and also how, as the Wye deposited them, they have been further influenced and arranged by the tidal flowing of the greater river. By careful artifice of light and dark, of fall and turn of cliff, the windings of the river and its LIBER STUDIORUM. course are drawn out into length before the eye. And it is by the faintest touches, by almost imperceptible curves in the etched lines as they approach the river, that we are told how the height of the banks lessens as the Wye draws near its junction with the Severn. One of the most difficult things Turner had to do was to make us conceive that the river ran in a deep gorge below the height. He has done this by the insertion of the inverted angle of pure white seen in the very midst of the drawing against the dark brushwood. This is repeated and drawn attention to by the angle which the broken ground makes below it, and by the triangle of light beyond it where the river turns for the second time. Again, as in Chepstow, the majesty of the Castle is impressed upon us. Its keep climbs into the air, its tower at the angle commands the stream and descends into it like a wall of cliff. The sky is very pure, flowing almost like a river, and its upper clouds resemble and are made to resemble the softly drawn-out banks of the level fields at the junction of the waters. It is kept throughout in harmony with the broad smooth streaming of the Severn, and the calm sunlit spaces of the Wye. Breadth, openness, and the sense of a great river with its great tributary passing onwards into the greater vastness of the sea — these make the charm and the dignity of this drawing. No. XXIX. MARINE DABBLERS. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. N the Marine Dabblers, heavy clouds are driven by wind over the sky, but between their battalions fields of clear or clearer sky are interspaced, where sunlight and vapour are mingled together. This is a common aspect of the weather in the sea-side skies of the Liber Studiorum, and it seems at times monotonous. But though monotonous, it is manifold in effects, and therefore likely to be chosen by an artist. In this plate one vast rain cloud is passing away to the right, and behind it, following in a more open heaven, are layers of cloud of less volume the edges of which are touched with radiance. Out of the midst of these the sunlight breaks and Turner uses it with a purpose. He makes it strike upon the boy who is the centre and central thought of the drawing. The labourers with whom Turner had most sympathy, towards whom indeed he felt tenderly, were those who toiled upon the sea. He takes pains with the drawing of all fisher-folk; the two men in this print are well drawn. LIBER STUDIORUM. 97 And all the elements which, developed in the man, make up the character of the grave, religious, quick-couraged, and gentle Cornish fisherman — to speak of a class I have known — men capable of silent sacrifice, as honest as they are brave, and having a special note in their nature caused by living always in the changing war and peace of the elements, are as far as Turner could do it embodied in this boy. He looks as if the winds had all his life been his companions ; and though the boys beside him are coarse and ugly, yet they are not vulgar. They are wholly occupied in their amusement, — playing at the business they will afterwards pursue, and Turners grim sense of the danger and trouble of their kind of life, and of what may be the fate of the boats quietly drawn up on the shore, is shown in the shipwreck of the toy boat. He could not help dwelling on the trouble of humanity. Nor has he omitted to mark in the massive strength of the fishing-smack, and in the ponderous weight of its sails, how fierce its battle is with the wind and the sea. Lastly, see how the sand has been washed and piled up below the bank, and with what truth the waves come round it. Mark also the beautiful and delicate drawing of the rapidly receding wave, broken into rough water over sand and shingle where in the background the two fishermen are standing ; and the curving lines of the slowly ebbing and smooth water in the foreground, not running down over shingle, but moving shallow, over sand. The dark stones in the right-hand corner, put in as an apex to a triangle, knit the composition into unity. H No. XXX. NEAR BLAIR ATHOL, SCOTLAND. Drawn and Etched by]. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. LAIR ATHOL is one of those drawings of Turner which is dedicated to the secret life that is in Nature. The greater number of the Liber Studiorum are pervaded with a human interest. Even in subjects where the sky and earth are treated with the greatest care and elaboration, as in Solway Moss or in the Peat Bog, the weary labour and striving of men are chief in Turner's thoughts. But here the fisherman is more a natural part of the landscape than the centre of it. He awakens its solitude, but the solitude is greater than he, and does pot tell him of its marvels. This then is more than a fishing-stream in a glen, it is one of those lonely places that Wordsworth thought pos- sessed a soul. Alas ! all the mysterious secrecy of the low ravine dark with bending foliage, among the rocks of which the stream cries, and where the kelpie might find deep pools to dwell in, is lost in the autotype. LIBER STUDIORUM. 99 Every gradation, even the branches of the trees and all the brushwood, are merged in one uniform shadow. The same thing has happened on the right above the fisher- man. The hollowed bank, made by the disintegrating shale, is in the engraving covered with deep-etched undergrowth, full of changing tints. Nothing is left of it : nothing, I fear, could be left of it. But the river has been fairly developed, and the sky and the lighter foliage of the plate are successful To that inner secret place, down which the stream, its life, is falling, Turner has given a portal, as if to a temple. On either side two rocks extend into the stream. One is clothed with trees, and the other, which lies half athwart the water, seems like a great boulder. It is in reality the end of a spur of living rock. Both are being worn away by the rushing river, but the seeming boulder, the curved hollow under which has been scooped out long ago, is at present spared much suffering. The wearing force of the water is now spent on its opposite companion. When the stream has passed beyond the low waterfall it is whirled into the recess behind the boulder; and forced out of that, is dashed against the left-hand bank of rock round which Turner has marked its swirling with a few keen-etched lines. It then continues to the left, breaking into foam over the shallow, and finding rooms wings again to the right and covers all its surface with curving ripples and transverse waves, the forms of which are caused by the hidden ridges of its bed. Under the boulder the water is smooth and full of reflections. The rush of the 100 LIBER STUDIORUM. stream in the middle of the channel has made a back- water in this place; but the water here detained must escape somewhere; and Turner marks the place where it escapes by those curving lines which start from the dark shadow and twist downwards across the horizontal ripples — like the figure 3 turned the opposite way — till at last they are caught and carried away into the general course of the stream. Every fisher will know that this is a glorious place for a rise. And the fisherman here, who has not much care for this nest of Nature, serves unconsciously the artist's use, and his uplifted arm and rod, continued by the broken stem above, lift the whole bank into the air, and set back the woody hollow behind him into deeper shadow. Out of the hollow rise the birches, Scotland's tree. They are disposed in two masses, one thrown back to the right, the other, over the boulder, to the left. Like two arms cast upwards, they serve thus to open out the landscape above the hidden dell ; and, by this contrast, to make greater the secret of its solitude. The two stems, springing in the form of a V above the point of the boulder, repeat, in miniature, this arrangement. A separate character belongs to both these groups, and we may, though the thought is too fanciful, see in them the two types of Highland character that Scott painted in Rob Roy Macgregor, and in Allan M'Aulay. In the midst, between these two massed groups of foliage, rises the youngest and lightest tree, the girl of the place, tossing her feathery crown, the image of the gay and brave the young and LIBER STUDIORUM. IOI high romance that Scott put into the soul of Flora Macdonald and of Catherine Seyton. This tree divides the low range of hills with its stem, and forms for the composition of the foliage above what the boulder jut- ting into the stream does for the composition below — the central light between two masses of shadow. Opposite, on the left bank, birch trees grow out of the frost-hewn rents of the rock ; and then, to give the mass weight and variety, the heavy-leaved chestnut is introduced, not, I think, very happily, but Turner knows best. And here he thinks again of the heart of his drawing — the secret recess where the lonely stream descends ; for he sets on the edge of the rock two stems, in bright light, that we may deepen for ourselves the mysterious gloom beyond. That mystery is part of the wild beauty of the earth that beckons to us out of its solitary places, but the face of which we seek in vain to look upon. Often in a silent glen like this we seem to hear its Presence call on us by name, but whether in mockery or love we cannot tell. Its voice has a different note in different lands, and the emotion the cry awakens is of one kind in England, of another in Italy, of another in Scotland. The great artist feels the difference, and Turner has painted here, not the soul of the water dells of England, but that of all the Highland glens. No. XXXI. LAUFFENBOURG ON THE RHINE. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by T. HODGETTS. URNER was unfortunate in the engraver of the Ville de Thun and of this plate. I can- not believe that he meant the gloom of the town to be so uniform, or its houses to possess so little interest. The rocks are heavily handled, and the river under the bridge ought to have more force and grandeur in its flow. It is more like a Yorkshire stream than the Rhine. Nevertheless, when it comes to the narrow cleft, its furious rush, half darkness and half flame, is the finest thing in the drawing. The other point of interest is the pale and sober sky with its sunlit bars of cloud. Its massiveness would be too great were it not relieved by the two trees high on the right hand which set it back into distance. But its brooding quietude is not too deep. It is this which gives dignity to the subject. The day was gray when Turner made his sketch, LIBER STUDIORUM. 103 and his thought became grave and still. A severe, vigilant, enduring temper of soul should belong to those who live in such a place, always listening to the roaring of the river among the rocks through which it has ground its way, and looking forward like the river to rest, after the solemn and weary strife of life — and this seems to be the sentiment which Turner felt as he drew the Teutonic town. The dark streets, touched with cold light, belong to the hard-working folk we see upon the rocks below ; but they are not all unhappy, nor yet untouched by love. It is not, perhaps, without meaning that the brightest light in the drawing is on the young girl whose hat is gar- landed with flowers ; and love is sometimes fairest and most constant in a life which is gray, whose weather is stormy, and whose toil is difficult. Nor are the two extremes of the battle of life and of the peace after battle unrepresented. The agony of the river is looked down upon by the quiet heaven. The stern castle and its towers are set in a gloomy sky, but the belfry on the right, like a beacon that guides into the harbour of God, rises into the light of the evening where it grows tender above the west. PART VII. ISSUED JUNE I, 1 8 1 1 . No. XXXII. YOUNG ANGLERS. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by R. DUNKARTON. HIS print and others in the Liber Studiorum have been called commonplace, and I can- not dispute it. The figures in them are more than commonplace, they are ugly • and they represent low types of humanity. But they are not vulgar, save in one — the Juvenile Tricks ; and there I sup- pose that Turner meant to draw the baser type of London boys. But the lads in the Marine Dabblers and in this plate are not vulgar, for they are enjoying what they are doing, and what they do is not base. They are coarse, and coarsely drawn \ but they are true to their type, and Turner never gilded the poor. Unlike some of his other peasants, these youths are not sickly with starvation : they are the rough, working breed of the suburbs of a country town the bold and staring houses of which we see beyond LIBER STUDIORUM. I05 the stream. Nothing can be more disagreeable than the broken water-can, the clothes, the hoop, the hat, and the bottle in the foreground. All these things, however, are in character. The one graceful figure is that of the working man fishing near the tree ; and he is grace- ful because he knows his work. It is the true attitude of the fisherman. But when we look at Turner's representation of Nature, we find his poetry. It is rustic poetry, a commonplace nook of pollard willows and bulrushes and still water, and Turner did not care much for the plants or the dirty stream, but gave — as if he were wearied with commonplace — his whole force to the drawing of the willows and the misty space of osier plantation behind them. The sinewy folding of the stem of the large pollard, its ragged and knotted ends, the spring outward and upwards of its branches and their insertion into the trunk, are truth itself, and ought to be carefully compared with the equally fine drawing of the younger trees on either side of the standing boy. In these there is a fresher life, a more vigorous leap of branch, a fuller foliage. It is crabbed age and lissome youth met together. The intricate interlacing of branches, their curving backwards and upwards, their mingled litheness and rigidity, the exquisite etching of the light foliage, are worthy of all praise. But Turner was sad enough, even when he had done this fine work. The place was too ugly for him. And he ended his drawing by placing over it the dullest and dreariest sky in the whole of the Liber Studiorum. No. XXXIII. ST. CATHERINE'S HILL, NEAR GUILDFORD. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by J. C. Easling. HE foundation of this Chapel to St. Catherine dates back to the time of Henry III. : and later in its history a Richard de Wauncey obtained a charter to hold a fair beneath it on the eve and the morrow of S. Matthew's day. It is this fair, with all its tents climbing the hill, and the street filled with booths and holiday games that Turner has drawn in the "England and Wales." Above it stands the Chapel on the ridge, and a heavy shower, dark and driven by the wind, approaches from the right. The road is deep under the precipitous hill-side, and the Guildford coach comes down it through the rain. At every point the representation of the subject differs from that given in the Liber Studiorum. This draw- ing is taken from the other side of the hill. It is as quiet as the other is turbulent ; instead of storm, the sky is full of pleasant air and light, and instead of mirth LIBER STUDIORUM. 107 and merchandise of men, we see the quiet farming life of England. The little Chapel is scarcely thought of in the noise of the fair, but here it is the spiritual power of the scene. It stands broken and sorrowful, the witness to a bygone faith, roofless, windowless, but at peace ; and Turner sets behind it the sky of a late afternoon, pale, but lit by the dazzling of a white cloud filled with sun- shine. The blessing its sorrow needs Nature bestows upon it. It has done its work for man and God, and Turner paints it in its ruined rest. As in the Dunstanborough, he has here also laid the sheep about the hill to increase the impression of quiet ; not forgetting, in the midst of sentiment, so to dispose them that their grouping may minister to the composition and draw attention to the way in which the sides of the hill have been weathered by the toil of Nature. But though the house of God is in ruins, and with it the form of religion it enshrined, there is one thing which remains always the same — the doings of man with the land, the work of the farmer. And to this — in contrast with the Chapel whose life is over — the lower part of the plate is dedicated. It is no picturesque place. Turner painted English life as it was ; and the struggle of the poor is uppermost in his mind in all these rustic subjects. This is a common farm, and rude are the labourers that tend it. But pathetic feeling is given to them by Turner's anxious kindness. He paints them at the hour of rest, and the sense of its consola- tion broods over this little world. The barn stands io8 LIBER STUDIOKUM. among its trees like a homestead, roofed and warm. The horses unyoked, and wearied out, are going to the stall, and the labourer passes forth to fetch them water. The cattle are coming home with the milkmaid, and the bullocks from the plough, — and there is not a leaf astir in all the trees in the windless evening. The composition of the drawing is a triumph of quiet power — not one exaggerated or rude line, but soft and flowing curves of road and walls and hill, met and enforced by the upright figures of the labourer and of the milkmaid which repeat and oppose each other, and by the prominent and advancing front of the barn. The rounded outlines of the cloud and of the tree tops — both of which in their descending curves deepen the hollow to which the road rises and on the ridge of which the woman stands — are set over against each other, and unite the heaven and the earth. The great trunk in the left fore- ground, leaning back, and the tree stems beyond open out a vista which carries us away from the enclosed hollow in which, on first looking at the plate, we feel we are too much imprisoned. The still spaces of sky seen on either side between the trees and the hill refresh the eye, and tell us that beyond the hill we shall escape into a wide and distant country. Even in quiet subjects of this kind Turner supplies food to the imagination. Many persons have made it a grave objection that the gate if closed would only protect half the open space, and Turner, they say, is here asleep. But that is exactly what he meant. The other portion of the gate is behind LIBER STUDIORUM. I09 the lower wall, and has been opened and pushed back. One sees from the upright on which the labourer's hand is resting that it will meet another of the same kind, and be bound to it by a loop. It is always wisest to believe that a great artist knows what he is doing. No. XXXIV. MARTELLO TOWERS, NEAR BEXHILL, SUSSEX. Dratvn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. HIS is one of the plates which do not much interest the general public, nor is it one of the greater or of the ideal subjects. But it has its own character, and Turner has not sought to sensationalize it. He has been content with its limitations. When the landscape of the earth was not striking, Turner employed his imagination upon the clouds and on their doings with the wind and sun. This stretch of Sussex shore with the towers is made interesting by the sky. But the world above is not so remarkable as to overwhelm the quiet world below. The sky has weight and power, but it is simple. The weather is such as he often loved to paint — squalls of wind and rain, with great heads of storm-swept cloud, and through the rifts of cloud broken sunshine. In the first region of the air, close to the earth, the masses of vapour are driven like a river before the wind. In the middle region, the force of the LIBER STUDIORUM. Ill gale is less, and the clouds seem, by their weight, to press with their lower volumes against the wind, while their upper and thinner folds are curled over and blown forward. A few lines of stratus, higher up, show that it is calmer still in the uppermost regions of the sky whence comes the sunlight. The vapour below lifts, or seems to lift, on the horizon, whence the squall of rain and wind is coming, — a common aspect of storm, but used here not only for its truth, but to enable us to see the far headlands and the towers that guard England. It is in this guardianship of England that the sentiment of the subject lies, and the central tower, all in light, fixes our feeling on this thought. But the storm above defends England also, nor is the great chalk cliff without its aspect of defiance. But beyond this sentiment, Turner wished to embody the main characteristics of the South-Eastern coasts of England. And he has almost given them all. The distant headland is typical of the Kent and Sussex shores, and so is the curved sweep inward of the bay. The chalk cliff, which heaves itself like Behemoth out of the earth, though low, fills the air : the dip down- wards of the meadows at its edge, the form of the winding path across it, the short grass, and the low trees which, blown landward by the prevailing wind, nest themselves, but rarely, . in the crannies of the chalk ; the slope of debris which has fallen from above, the hollow place between this slope and the ridge of the beach, within which the sea-road is naturally made ; the 1 12 LIBER STUDIORUM. great beach itself, piled up by the incessant rush of the Channel tidal wave, are all characteristic of this coast. Of the curves of the uplifted beach, of its manner of rise and fall, Turner has made an accurate study. Just as true to nature is the pool under the cliff near at hand, with those plants on its margin which flourish near the sea, where the salt of the spray is lightly sprinkled on them by the wind. The broken surface of its water is due not only to the wind that is blowing, but to the impulse of the spring which forms the pool. It is the telling of all these physical truths which makes this plate so interesting. But Turner does not only mean to tell physical truth. He suggests the human life and work and sorrow of the sea-shore. The shattered boat, embedded in the shingle, speaks of shipwreck and storm and the mastery of the ocean over human lives : higher up the seamen are mending their boats ; near at hand, the fisher's family are returning home, and Turner, with his usual tenderness for the do- mestic life of sailors, draws with some beauty the mother and the child together. Nor does he neglect — and this is frequent in his sea-pieces — the element of romance, rude as it is, that the revenue officers made on the coast dur- ing his time. The two swift-riding men enliven the road, and serve to insist on the dip of the ground, and to lengthen out the road to the eye. Lastly, the group of the boy, woman, and child dimly repeat, and certainly lift into the air the centre of the composition, the Martello Tower and its companion. No. XXXV. INVERARY PIER, LOCH FYNE : MORNING. Drawn, Etched, and Engraved by J. M. W. Turner. N VERARY PIER is one of the plates Turner engraved as well as etched, and I wish a skilled mezzotint engraver would take the trouble of studying it, and give to us a better account than I can give of the way in which Turner used his tools. What was etched was very little ; the hill on the left, the woods, the pier, the boats, and the sharp fluke of the anchor. The bird and post were afterwards introduced to give distance to the reach of water, as also were two of the distant fishing boats. The rest — sky, water, mountains, with the exception of a few faint out- lines, — were left to be wrought out in mezzotint. And the whole of the engraving is a strange study. The sky has a multitude of scratches running hither and thither across it in a seemingly meaningless fashion. It is only after a time, and when we consider the sentiment of the sky, that we conjecture they are intentional and do their work. The curves on the upper left hand are not mezzotint left i H4 LIBER STUDIORUM. behind by the engraver, but worked in at once — Turner using the engraving-tool like a pencil — a frequent practice in this plate. It is probably owing to this practice — a new experiment, as it were, in an art which a painter partly resented as mechanical — that the centre cloud is so disagreeably harsh in outline. It is plain, however, that Turner was fond of it and meant to draw attention to it as a chief part of his composition by pointing towards it the mast of the fishing boat below. It will be seen that there are many pure white spaces in the sky, bordered by the faintest film of mezzotint. After a few impressions — as usual with these experimental engravings of Turner — this faint film vanished and the place where it had been appeared white. Immediately the whole plate was thrown into disorder. All the relations of tone, light, and shade' were made inhar- monious ; and the same thing took place with the extra- ordinarily delicate engraving of the mountains and of the misty bar at their base. Hence, to re-establish these relations, the plate had again and again to be touched over with fresh mezzotint, and scarcely two impressions are alike. I do not understand how the surface of the furthest mountain at the entrance of the Loch has been worked, nor the little strip of hill behind the woody point on the left. The little strip seems as if it were done in aquatint, and the surface of the hill looks as if he had roughened the plate with sand, and then — in order to get a different texture — let the acid work upon that place. Another experiment ! LIBER STUDIORUM. The photograph ought to keep its ground white, in order, as much as possible, to retain the cold pure light of morning which fills the drawing. It does not glow, but it grows momently more radiant. It steals, like a visitor that is sure of welcome, round the edges of the hills, and whitens the waters of the bay. It is cold, but it sets all the fishermen to work. The air that comes with it is a " nipping and an eager air," but there is no wind. The folk are just awake, and no more. The calm is deep on the water and in the sky. The stones, the woods are as yet half asleep; only the mountains are fully aroused. There is scarcely a ripple even close in shore. The thin mist of the morning lies along the bases of the hills, and the fishing boats gleam pale through it, and shadowy. It is rising too among the mountain hollows and will float upwards invisible when the hot day comes, until in the highest region of the air it will chill into cirri like those already afloat in the upper sky. This is the sentiment of the piece, and Turner felt and enjoyed it greatly. As to the composition and work of the plate, those who do not feel its beauty, simplicity, power, and skill, will not feel it the more for words of mine. Here is the Northern morning, it seems to say, do you like it ? And here are the men who belong to the Northern sea — do you feel with their life? No. XXXVI. FROM SPENSER'S FAERY QUEEN. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by T. HODGETTS. HE " Faery Queen," they say, has been searched in vain to find the source of this subject. There is certainly no passage in that poem which describes a knight sitting on the ground and leaning his head in miserable thought upon his shield, while before him lie the abandoned shield and arms of another knight who has carefully piled them up like a monument before he has said his farewell to life. But I have always thought that Turner had in his mind, when he drew this place, the scenery around the cave of Despair described in the first book of the " Faery Queen." The abandoned armour has then belonged to a knight who has done himself to death, and the living knight, whose attitude is that of hopelessness, is one of those who, tempted by Despair, is now on the brink of suicide. The corpses that Spenser tells us lay round the cave are not in the drawing, nor is the cave itself seen, but Turner would seek, not to reproduce the poet's LIBER STUDIORUM. 117 description, but to paint the impression which the poet's story had made upon him. And the landscape we have here is, I think, conceived from the stanzas which follow : — Ere long they come, where that same wicked wight His dwelling has, low in an hollow cave, Far underneath a craggy cliff ypight, Darke, doleful, dreary, like a greedy grave, That still for carrion carcases doth crave : On top whereof aye dwelt the ghastly owle, Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave Far from that haunt all other chearefull fowle ; And all about it wandring ghostes did waile and howle. And all about old stockes and stubs of trees, Whereon nor fruit nor leafe was ever seene, Did hang upon the ragged rocky knees ; On which had many wretches hanged beene, Whose carcases were scattered on the greene, And throwne about the cliffs. Arrived there, That bare-head knight, for dread and dolefull teene, Would faine have fled, ne durst approachen neare ; But th' other forst him stay, and comforted in feare. That darkesome cave they enter, where they find That cursed man, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullein mind : His griesie locks, long growen and unbound, Disordred hong about his shoulders round s And hid his face ; through which his hollow eyne Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound ; His raw -bone cheekes, through penurie and pine, Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dine. Here, then, before us, in the drawing are the " old stockes and stubs of trees," and, in the foreground and u8 LIBER STUDIORUM. through the strange-formed mountains, the ragged rocky knees; the craggy clifts ; the leafless and fruitless stems on which many wretches had hanged been ; the ghastly owl, and the birds of prey. This is, I imagine, what Turner saw after he had read Spenser's description. It is a new episode, invented by the painter, in the history of the cave of Despair. The mountains are conventionalized — if I may use that term — by the imagination to fit an allegorical land. They are outlined with grim severity ; their sides — as smooth and precipitous as if they had been sliced downwards by an adze — made pitiless to fit the haunt of Despair; of grassless, treeless, blank, rigid rock, where even the lichen could scarcely find a crevice ; and pushing forth at their promontories rounded bosses or ragged squared edges like " knees," a word of Spenser's which may have lingered in Turner's imagination when he drew these ghastly hills. Below, in the dark ravine, we are to imagine that there lies the corpse of the knight who stripped off his armour before he flung himself down the precipice ; and the vultures are coming up the wind to banquet on him, while the carrion crow sits, already gorged, on the top of the withered pine. The fierce storms that sweep down the valley have torn away the upper part of the rock-rooted pine on the right, and stripped away the bark and foliage of the other tree at whose roots the knight is sitting ; nor have they less tormented the third pine, whose sinuous strength is wrought out inch by inch by the artist, and whose top, LIBER STUDIORUM. 119 iii symbol of the horror and crying of Despair, ends like the open mouth of a dragon. A single branch is all this veteran that has outlasted the gales of Hopelessness can show of life and faith. The sycamore between, if it be a sycamore, has lived despite of storm, but rather serves the purpose of a mass of shade in the right place than any symbolic end ; and the great burdock leaves in the corner are only inserted to serve the needs of the composition. The descending branch of the broken pine on the right, sweeping downwards, and the headlong curve of the great rock behind the heap of armour, aid the imagination to create and deepen the ravine ; while the faint mist seen rising on either side of this rock from the depths below serves the same purpose. The two naked pine stems, opening out like a U, put back into distance the encircling mountain range, the iron peaks of which are set against a horizontal strip of sullen light, grey as the locks of Despair. Above this ashen bar, the flat and heavy clouds, stretching out like prison walls and hem- ming in the valley, brood with a menace of hopeless misery. I speak of them in symbols, for they are symbolic. And over all the drawing, as in the soul of the anguished knight, there is dead silence. PART VIII. ISSUED FEBRUARY I, l8l2. No. XXXVII. WATER MILL. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by R. DUNKARTON. HE ideal English peasant was unknown to Turner. He saw and always painted the real peasant : the poor, coarse, ghastly life ; foul, disease-stricken, hopeless, yet enduring ; unromantic, unless in the pathetic thought of those who look on him and know that he can rarely possess, from childhood till he enter the poor-house in his decay, one touch of romance or joy or pleasant ease. The pathetic sorrow for this sorrow was voiceless in Turner, but he ex- pressed it by telling the rough and naked truth in the " pastoral " subjects of the Liber Studiorum. This is one of them, not " elegant pastoral " at all ! This is our Arcadia, and here is an English Daphnis and Chloe, and their gay and happy dwelling. LIBER STUDIORUM. 121 For the place is inhabited, and those who live in it are as well sheltered as the wretched cow, the boards of whose shed have been torn away for firing. The mill was born old, and in decay ; built half of clay and half of wood, and began at once to fall. The beams are now worm- eaten, the plaster has dropped away, the windows are blocked with planks, the shed and the gable are propped up with ragged poles, and the old millstone lies against the wall, sunken in the wet mud, so wet, that it partly reflects the stone. The steps are broken that lead to and from the mill ; the vegetation of the foreground is rank and wild, the dog is miserable, the horses gaunt and starved. The peasant who rides them to the watering is in rags, the woman who carries the sheaf — all she has gleaned with pain, and all the work the mill has to do this day — is worn with her bitter life ; the children of the mill, who look at her with the indifference of their common misery, are idle and sickly, and the coat of one is made out of an old corn-sack. There is not one happy or redeeming element in the whole drawing, unless it be the smooth lawn and lake in the distance, and this element does not redeem, but enhances the misery. Nature has no sympathy with man's sorrow, yet a cer- tain sympathy arising out of Turner's mind has here stolen into her work. When he placed the thistles near the steps, he may have thought of the ancient curse, " Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee^" and it is these that chiefly grow in the life of the English peasant \ and 122 LIBER STUDIORUM. the quantity of the herb of the field they eat is represented by the scanty bundle of corn the woman carries be- neath her arm. In sympathy too, the trees on the bank are dwarfed, and the sky is sad and lowering. Of course, the sky is as inventive as it is full of knowledge. Light is pouring into it from the left, the light of a low and watery sun, and the trees behind the shed are fringed with its radiant vapour. The cumulus masses which are growing into form above pass downwards into long clouds full of heavy weather, while the slant lines of the shower already begun repeat in their sympathy the sloping roof of the miserable mill. Night is coming and thick rain, but these cannot make the place more wretched than it is. The only pretty things in the drawing are the wood and water behind the mill, but they belong to another world where the gay children come down to the willows to feed the swans. The sole thing in order, and therefore plea- sant to see, is the water-wheel. It has been tended, for it is the very life of the dwellers in the mill. Turner paints it carefully blade by blade. But the threaded water that falls from it is small ; the mill has no work to do. That, however, did not prevent Turner from drawing the tiny falling of the stream with reverence for truth ; and the only things he seems to enjoy, so delicately wrought are they, are the ripples and the reflections made in the pool by the descending water. But first and foremost is the mill ; we are isolated with its pathetic face. The very repetitions of the bank by the LIBER STUDIORUM. 123 broken steps, of the chimney of the mill by the head of the sluice, of its wall by the line of the pond, shut us in with its life, and conquer our thought. We must think of it alone, and of its misery. No. XXXVIII. HINDOO ABLUTIONS; OR, WOMAN AT A TANK. Drawn and Etched by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved by W. Say. N this classical composition, to which Turner gave no title, he was thinking of the country around Rome, and it is full of the special sentiment, of the many unspoken thoughts he felt as he wandered among her ruins. 1 It is in the " grand style " of landscape, and in that style it can scarcely be bettered. The solemn sky, so full of dignified sadness, and spread above the distant hills, is kept pure throughout. No fancifulness intrudes into its quiet, nor is it disturbed by a single drift of cloud. Dark above, it is like a requiem over the ruin of a nation ; but far below over the horizon it passes into gentle and soft shimmer- 1 If anyone should wish to know how many and how grave his thoughts were at Rome, let him look at the engravings in Rogers' 44 Italy ? ' an