TURNER BY WALTER ARMSTRONG ADONIS DEPARTING FOR THE CHASE. From the Oil Painting by J, M. W. TURiSER, R.A. (59 4?) Ill tile Collection ot Sir WM. CUTHBERl QUILTEIJ, Ban., M.P. J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. From tlie Sketcli in Water-Colours by J. LINNELL (Same size as Oritrinal.l In the ColleLtioii of JAMES OBROCK, Esq. TURNER SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG DIRF.CTOR OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OE IRELAND i I go2 THOS. AGNEW & SONS LONDON, MANCHESTER, AND LIVERPOOL CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK This Edition on Japanese Paper is limited to 350 Copies in all, of -whicii this is No. ? ■■ 7 The Text of this f'olume is from tin Press of Brurihury^ Jgnew & Ct., Ltd., London. Tlu: Plates have been prepared by Air. J. Bii/iop Pralt, Htnpenden., and have all been printed in Lonilm. THE GETTY CENTER UBRAfiV COCKERMOUTH CASTLE. From tlie Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (2Ji X 351 In the Collection of LORD LECONKIEl.D, PETWORl H. PREFACE. IN the following chapters an attempt has been made to present Turner to the reader with as mucli completeness as the con- ditions would allow. An exhaustive biography is no longer has, perliaps, never been — possible. During the painter's own lifetime his most intimate friends found it difficult to satisfy their legitimate curiosity ; while too many of those with whom his more retired hours were spent belonged to the classes which disappear and leave no trace. But although we cannot know Turner as we do Johnson, we can at least build up an image of him, both as man and artist, which shall be consistent with the undoubted facts, as well as with the memories of those few people yet living who knew PREFACE him in the flesh. An image, too, which shall be consistent with itself; for, if I may be pardoned for saying so, too many of the pictures which have been made of Turner since his death, have no such congruity. They too often make use of superlatives which war both with circumstance and with each other, and leave us to struggle with a consequently blurred impression. Turner's character was com- plex, but not, I think, obscure, and although it is difficult to follow his thoughts into their byeways and impossible to chronicle more than a very small percentage of his doings, it should be comparatively easy, with the help of his letters, of his less discreet acquaintance, of his art, and of his own poetical confessions, to make a portrait in words which his painted portraits will corroborate. This I have tried to do. Whether any degree of success has been reached or not, the reader must decide. W. A. The warmest thanks of both the author and the publisher are due to the owners of Turner's pictures for the facilities of examination and reproduction they have afforded. In no case have these been denied, with the result that the plates here given illustrate the great artist with unprecedented completeness. In the production of these plates, and, indeed, of the whole book, the knowledge and experience of Mr. D. Croal Thomson has been of the greatest value. ETON COLLEGE. From the Oil Painting by J. (W. W. TURNISR, R.A. I23i » 35i) In tile Collection of LORD LECONFIELD, PETWORTH. CONTENTS. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER n. Turner's Birth — His Parentage — His Father and Mother — His Education — The Com- mencement of his Artistic Career — Early Works ........ CHAPTER III. Commencement of Turner's Real Career — Drawings of Norham and Pembroke Castles Influence of Wilson and the Dutchmen — " Calais Pier " — " Vintage of Macon " — " The Shipwreck " — Quality of his Imagination — His Domestic Arrangements — Pictures of English ' Great Houses ' — Tours on the Rhine and in Italy CHAPTER IV. Liber Studiorum .......... vii CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. Turner's life from 1805 to 1820 — Elected Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy — The Happiest Years of his life — Friendship with Walter Fawkes — Visits to Farnley — Exhibition of his Drawings in Grosvenor Place— Death of Fawkes — Friendship with Lord Egremont and Visits to Petworth- — William Frederick Wells and his Daughter, Mrs. Wheeler — The Trimmers of Heston — Alleged Courtship of " Miss " by Turner — Cyrus Redding : with Turner in Devon — Eastlake's Recollections of Turner- Robert James Graves: travels in Turner's company — Dealings with Cooke over the " Southern Coast" — Light they throw upon Turner's character . , . . ,81 CHAPTER VI. Turner's central, experimental Period—'' Sun rising in a Mist " — " Venus and Adonis " "Crossing the Brook" — "Hannibal crossing the Alps"— "Field of Waterloo" — "A Frosty Morning " — " Hulks on the Tamar " — " Dordrecht " — " Apollo killing Python " — " Dido building Carthage" — " Bay of Baias " — Culmination of his Second Manner in the "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus "—Momentary return to it in 1835 with the three " Burnings of the Houses of Parliament," and again in the "Fighting Temeraire " of 1838 — Early Symptoms of his last Manner . . . . . . . . - 103 CHAPTER VII. Turner as a Water-colour Painter . , . . . . . . , . .123 CHAPTER VIII. Turner's last Period— Pictures painted between 1838 and 1850 — Their enhanced reputation — " Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus "—" Slave Ship" — "Peace" — " War " — " Snowstorm " — " Opening of the Walhalla" — " The Deluge" — " Rain, Steam, and Speed" — His last Works — The "Visit to the Tomb 143 CHAPTER IX. Turner's life after the death of Walter Fawkes — Visit to the South of France- — Stay in Rome in the Winter of 1828-9— Death of Turner Senior — Death of Lawrence- — Making of Turner's first Will — Visit to Holland — First Visit to Venice — Gradual withdrawal from intercourse with his Friends — Journey with Munro of Novar — His last Continental Tours — His last Letters — His last appearance in Public — The private enquiry of John Pye — Sophia Caroline Booth — Turner's Death and Burial — His Will ..... 163 CHAPTER X. Turner's Achievement ............. 187 INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE LISTS OF TURNER'S WORKS . .215 LIST OF OIL PICTURES BY TURNER 217 LIST OF WATER-COLOUR DRAWINGS BY TURNER 238 INDEX 291 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 1. Adonis departing for the Chase , . . j Oil. z. J. M. W. Turner, R.A 'Water-Colour. 3. Cockermouth Castle ..... Oil, 4. Eton College Oil. 5. Lichfield Water-Colour. 6. Four Portraits of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. The Thames : near Windsor . The Garreteer's Petition Corfe Castle .... Chamonix (two Drawings) Worcester Cathedral Christchurch, Oxford The Tom Tower, Oxford . Salisbury Cathedral from the Cloisters Edinburgh from the Water of Leith Norham Castle .... Mont Blanc .... Kilgarran Castle Malmesbury Abbey Linlithgow Palace Clapham Common Bonneville, Savoy Pembroke Castle .... Fishermen on a Lee Shore: Squally Weather Conway Castle .... Sheerness ..... Cassiobury ..... Meeting of Thames and Medway Boats carrying out Cables, Sec. The rictori returning from Trafalgar The Trout Stream Walton Bridges Mercury and Herse Somcrhill .... High Street, Edinburgh Bolton Abbey .... Spithead : Boat's Crew recovering Anchor Fishmarket on the Sands : Sun rising in The Norc Ivy Bridge ..... On the Moselle .... Tours ...... Scarborough .... Tivoli : a Composition The Meuse : Orange Merchantman going to pieces on the Bar Rome: Churchand Convent ofSS. Giovani e Paolo ..... Water-Colour. Oil. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Oil. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Oil. Water-Colour, Water-Colour, Oil, Oil. Oil. Water-Colour. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil, Oil. Oil. Oil. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oih Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Oih Water-Colour, Sir William Cuthbert Quilter, Bart M.P, , . . . [ames Orrock, Esq. Lord Leconfield, Petworth . Lord Leconfield, Petworth C. Fairfax Murray, Esq, . I. Wm. Ward, Esq. . . . \ z. The National Gallery. . ' 3, Wm, Ward, Esq. . . . i 4, W. G. Rawliiison, Esq. . ' George Salting, Esq. . The National Gallery The Victoria and Albert Museum Herbert Horne, Esq, The British Museum . The British Museum The Nation.il Gallery. The Victoria and Albert Museum T. F. Blackwell, Esq. . Laundy Walters, Esq. The National Gallery , H. L. Bischoffsheim, Esq. Herbert A. Day, Esq. . Thomas Brocklebank, Esq. The National Gallery . The Rev. Stopford A. Brooke Ralph Brocklebank, Esq. The Lord Iveagh The Duke of Westminster , The Lady Wantage C. Morland Agncw, Esq, . P. A. B. Widener, Esq, . Geo. Donaldson, Esq. . Sir Don.ild Currie, G.C.M.G. Abel Buckley, Esq, . The Lady Wantage Sir Samuel Montagu, Bart. . Ralph Brocklebank, Esq, , Thomas Brocklebank, Esq. . George Salting, Esq. The National Gallery Edward Chapman, M.P. . The Lord Leconfield George J. Gould, Esq. Pandeli Ralli, Esq. . W, G. Rawlinson, Esq. University Galleries, Oxford C. Morland Agnew, Esq. Sir James Joicey, Bart., M.P. The National Gallery . The National Gallery IX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Folkestone : Twilight . Riv.iulx Abbe)- Windsor Castle A Snowdrift on an Alpine Pnss Yarmouth : Vessel in Distress Grassmnrket, Edinburgh Colchester . Shoreham. Ashby-dc-la-Zouche Van Gojen at Antwerp Crossing the Brook A Frosty Morning . Ulysses deriding Polj'phcmus The Fighting Tcmeraire Mortlake Terrace : Early Summer Morning Mortlake Terrace : Summer Evening. Also known as Barnes Terrace The Day after the Storm The Piazzetta, Venice Venice : The Academy Oberwcscl . Chrjses . The Lake of Lucerne . Zurich Lucerne Lucerne from the Walls Lausanne from Le Signal Monte Rosa from opposite Aosta The Rigi at Sunrise (Blue Rigi) The Rigi at Sunset (Red Rigi) . Constance ...... Land's End : The Longships Lighthouse Tete Noire ...... Lake of Zug ..... The Bridge of Narni .... Mercury and Argus .... Ehrcnbreitstein ..... St. Mark's Place, Venice . The Grand Canal, with Shylock ; also know as the Marriage of the Adriatic Venice from the Canale di Fusina . Peace: Burial of Sir D. Wilkie . Venice: the Giudecca . Rockets and Blue Lights Off the Nore (Wind and Water) . Edinburgh Castle Rosenau ..... The State Procession of Bellini's Pictures The Campo Santo, Venice Venice: Dogana and Salute Church Italy lOZ. 103. The Wreck Buoy The Deluge Edinburgh, from the Calton Hil Malnicsburv Abbey The Storm . . . . Dunstanborough Castle Original Letter by Turner . 1 Water-Colour. i Water-Colour. Watcr-Colour. Water-Col our. Oil. Watcr-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour, Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Watcr-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Watcr-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Water-Colour. Watcr-Colour. Water-Colour. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Water-Colour. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. Oil. oil. oil. Watcr-Colour. Water-Colour. Oil. Oil. Collection. Edward Nettlefold, Esq. Sir Donald Currie, G.C.M.G. R, E. Tatham, Esq. , S, G. Holland, Esq. The Victoria and Albert Museum Thomas Brocklebank, Esq. W, Lockett Agnew, Esq. Irvine Smith, Esq. . W. Lockett Agncw, Esq. H. C. Frick, Esq. . The National Gallery. The National Gallery The National Gallery. The National G.illery . S. G. Holl.ind, ~ Mrs. Ashton S. G. Holland, Esq. The National Gallerj- of Ireland . University Gallery, Oxford Edward Stcinkopff, Esq. Mrs. Ashton . Irvine Smith, Esq. Irvine Smith, Esq. , Irvine Smith, Esq. Edward Nettlefold, Esq. . W. G. Rawllnson, Esq. W. G. Rawlinson, Esq. J. E. Taylor, Esq. 3. E. Taylor, Esq. . Irvine Smith, Esq. J. E. Taylor, Esq. . The National Gallery of Ireland . Sir Donald Currie, G.C.M.G. . George W. Agnew, Esq. Lord Strathcona and Mount Roya G.C.M.G. Thomas Brocklebank, Esq. . Colonel Payne Ralph Brocklebank, Esq. . Sir Donald Currie, G.C.M.G. . The National Gallery . The Victoria and Albert Museum Charles T. Yerkes, Esq. Messrs, Thos. Agnew £ The British Museum Mrs. George Holt J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq. Mrs. Kcilier James Ross, Esq. J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq. Mrs. George Holt . H. Darell Brown, Esq. Thomas Brocklebank, Esq. R. E. Tatham, Esq. . S. G. Holland, Esq. E. F. Milliken, Esq. C. Fairfax Murray, Esq. . Facing p. 90. 92- 9+- „ 96. „ 9S. Page 101. 103- Facing p. IO+. „ 106. 108. ,, I 10. ,, 112. 1 1 11 1 20. ;gC 121. .ge 123. : Iz6. 130. 132. 136. : Sons „ i+o. Page 141. Facing p. 142. Page 143- Facing p. 144. ,, 146. 1+8. ■5+- ■56. Page 161. ,, 163. Facing p. 164. 166. 168. M 170- 176. Page I Page 115. Facing p. 236. X LICHFIELD. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M, W, TURNER, R.A. (Si , loll In the Coileiltion of C. FAIRFAX MURRAY, Esq. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. EVERY human being is a battle-ground for two opposing forces — one arising from accidental conditions, the other developed from within. In the case of an artist the dividing-line may be drawn with some assurance, for it is not difficult to trace the ajsthetic thread among the other strands which compose the individual. More especially does this appear to be true of those artists who, like Turner, are absorbent, descriptive, and explanatory rather than creative. In later chapters I shall have to attempt an analysis of Turner's purely artistic gifts. Meanwhile it may be useful to devote some introductory pages to a consideration of certain external influences — external at I B TURNER least to the jEsthetic part of his individuality — which never ceased to modify his work down to the end. The first, if not the greatest, of these influences was the scene upon which his eyes first opened in this world. London, the Eternal City of the English-speaking races, has seldom received its due share of admiration. Its own citizens, no less than the strangers tor whom it has now at last begun to bestir itself, have been alive to the frequent meanness of its units and to the absence of signs that its people as a whole attach importance to the look of things. And yet from two points ot view it has scarcely a rival. It is intensely human and inexhaustibly picturesque. Putting aside a few unmeaning districts where speculation has been more insolent than usual, it is alive with human passion to a degree unapproached by any other great European city. Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Madrid— all these seem built to order. London, like the little Italian capitals, is obviously the handiwork of the men who live in it. Its qualities and defects are those ot the people who swarm in its streets, and we feel that to trace the reasons for its being what it is, is to analyse the national character. In many of its most conspicuous features the French capital runs counter to the French grain. In matters of ordinary life, for instance, the French are only less conservative than the Chinese. They cling to a good thing when they have it, and are not apt to be taken by novelty for novelty's sake.* And yet Paris of the second Empire and third Republic is essentially experimental, and represents the substitution of a central, detached • We are so accustomed to tar the whole French character out of the political tarpot that the unchangeableness of French life in its practical aspects too often escapes our notice. Paris may fairly be called the centre of French vacillation ; and yet who cm remember any real change in Paris ? Electricity has put new ways of doing old things into the hands of its people, but it is still the old things that are done. There is none of that passion for variety, novelty^ and what we call originality with wliich purveyors for the English people have to reckon! Continuity is no less characteristic of French life as the people live it than its opposite is of Parliamentary politics as understood in the Palais Bourbon. INTRODUCTORY authority for the individual, with his own wants and predilections. Similar but always very partial substitutions have taken place now and then in London, and at present there appears to be some danger ot their spread- ing beyond their usual limits, but on the whole the desires ot individual Londoners have found expression, century after century, in the con- stitution of their home. This of course has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It makes for ugliness and a good deal of practical inconvenience. On the other hand, it leads to some sporadic sublimity, and it makes a town intensely human. It fills its veins with warm blood, and renders possible a sympathy between itself and the fortunes of those it shelters which is out of the question with a city built and provided. London is an ant-hill ; Paris and its Continental rivals are patent bee-hives. To walk, on a fine May morning, from the Arc de I'Etoile, down the Champs Elysecs, over the site of the Tuileries, through the quadrangle of the Louvre, and arrive in front of St. Germain I'Auxerrois in time to hear noon booming from its historic bourdon, is to receive, perhaps, the most vivid impression the art of arrangement has yet prepared in this world. So far as we can tell, the concentration of power has never before wedded beauty to unity over so wide a space. By the time we reach the end of such a pilgrimage we feel intoxicated with the completeness of our physical enjoyment ; and yet we have to make a conscious, nay, an irksome effort to realise the connection between all this splendour and the human life which swarms about it. The scheme followed is too external, too mathematical, too objective, too clean-swept of those inevitable accidents which attend free expression, to strike one as the genuine outcome ot human nature. Before we can realise that this is indeed the Paris of history, that from a tower of the beautiful church behind us the " tocsin de Paris" cried "Now!" to the butchers of the St. Bartholomew; that in the corner over there stood the house of Coligny ; that TURNER Irom a window beyond Perrault's too famous colonnade a King oi France shot Huguenots like bolted rabbits ; that over kennels now covered by the wide asphalte of the Rue du Louvre lurched the royal coach as Ravaillac made his tiger-spring on its wheel and drove his knife between the ribs of Henri Quatre ; that in the neighbouring Rue de I'Echelle, now so blatant in its clean-swept width, Fersen hid away the herline which was to carry Louis XVI. to Varennes ; that from those few tall, stooping houses which are still left the people watched the most tragic figure of history pass to her waiting grave; that into the narrow, swarming streets which used to cluster round this same Louvre the guns of the little Corsican artilleryman crushed back the Sections on the birthday ot his career before we can realise such scenes as these we have not only to reconstitute a city; we have either to imagine one born on different lines altogether, or to suppose that the French capital has always been a mask rather than a figure-head for French history. It is different with London. London and Londoner connote the same ideas. Each pursues its own way, and trusts to the give- and-take of life, to the shaking-down of one thing with another, like stones in a cart, for eventual solidarity. The city breathes the same spirit as its people. It seems alive with the English genius, with English energy and self-confidence, with English humour and toleration, with that peculiar English perversity which combines knowledge of the right way with a determination to make the wrong one lead to the goal. The range of its effects, from the brilliancy of Piccadilly on a May morning to the apocalyptic gloom of a winter sunset over the wharves and bridges of the Thames ; from the rush of the great thoroughfares to the sleepy repose of the by-ways which lie beside them, like drowsy fields beside a tumultuous mountain stream ; from the intensely human dulness of its mean streets to the imperial grandeur of its apex at St. Paul's, make it everlastingly new, unexpected, and expressive, 4 INTRODUCTORY like a clever woman. Even its unreasonable contrasts of wealth and poverty, of daintiness and dirt, of power and servility, help to make it an epitome, or rather an encyclopaedia, of the propensities and potentialities of the race to which it owes its being. The most characteristic walk we can take in modern Paris is that from I'Etoile to the Place du Louvre. A corresponding voyage in London would be from Whitehall to Bow Church. In the first case we learn little of any side but one of the French character. In the second, between King Charles's statue and the Duke of Wellington's — the one " looking up the Poultry " — the observant man would gather almost as much of the British idiosyncrasy as if he read the history of all the years which intervened between the setting up of those two figures. The trace of the street itself would tell him much, and what it told would be confirmed by the shapes, substances, and sizes of the buildings ranked along it. Here he would divine a sacrifice, too often abortive, to beauty ; there, another, perhaps brutal, to use. Of beauty itself he would find no lack. Indeed there are few places where, within a mile, more good architecture can be seen than between Wellington Street and the eastern end of Cheapside. Somerset House, St. Mary le Strand, the tower of St. Clement Danes, the memory — not the memorial ! — of Temple Bar, the spire of St. Bride's, the silhouette of St Martin's against the unrivalled front of St. Paul's, and the great steeple of Bow Church, all threaded on this one highway, make up a series of stone poems not easily to be rivalled. But in spite ot these fine surprises his feelings would not be chiefly moved by the architecture. The master impression would be left by the essential humanity of the pageant as a whole, by the witness borne at every turn to that energetic and yet reasonably just prosecution of individual aims and desires which is the birth-mark of the Anglo-Saxon. The very grime and sweat of the city seem a mortar to hold its stones and people together. The defects and virtues of the one are those ot the other. TURNER and from the union of the two rises a flame of human passion at which the dullest fancy may kindle. The picturesqueness of London, its aptitude to the painter's use, depends upon this congruity between its external features and the lives lived among them. Where individuality rules the units, possibilities of infinite variation are offered by the whole. If modern painters were like seventeenth-century Dutchmen, and were content to pass their lives in exploiting some one narrow field, the Strand, Fleet Street, and Ludgate Hill would supply themes for a whole career, and that with less repetition than we find in the work of a Cuyp or a De Hooch. The draughtsman, the colourist, or the chiaroscurist would exhaust his powers long before he reached the end of his material. Even Venice is comparatively poor, for it has neither the wealth of contrast in mass and line nor the never-ending opportunities which lie in the waywardness of the English climate. And yet London is still awaiting her Canaletto. It is strange that no painter has accepted her for his fate, for his single spouse, and set himself to weld her moods into that painted epic of a great city which the fancy can so easily foresee. The few who have done something of the kind have been too narrow in their sympathies, too lacking in the catholicity which makes for epic grandeur. They have seen little in London but fog and steeples. And yet where in the world can you find a scene more superbly pictorial, more essentially picturesque, than one of the great centres of London activity on a blazing day in summer ? Take the famous view up Ludgate Hill, when the sunlight pouring in from the south plays over the artificial valley and turns the roaring traffic into a torrent of scintillating colour, as if the great church at the top were a magic fountain, transforming men, women, and gaudy vehicles, and pouring them down the hillside in a never-ending stream of living gems. Everything here is picturesque, even the vulgar bridge INTRODUCTORY with its semaphores and steaming locomotives ; and the painter who paints because he hkes to paint could ask for no finer subject. London, in short, is as fit a school for the imaginative artist as any spot on earth. It ofi'ers an immense variety of images in a stimulating form. Nothing is too final, too complete as it stands. Everything is open to a new use, to the expression of individual ways ot thinking and seeing. The painter is never met by the non possum of the balanced and finished work oi art. He is not curbed to simple admiration, but is allowed, or rather compelled, to select and combine for himself ; the necessary — oscillation, shall I call it ? — between his own personality and the object is made easy and the channel to a new creation left generously open. In short, if there be any essential connection between an artist's achievement and the impressions of his childhood, a future painter could not choose a better place to be born in than the City on the Thames. The greatest artists of all, those who cannot think without creating, and only live to pour out their own abundance for the benefit of less gifted souls, are, no doubt, independent of impressions. They use such material as they find at hand ; but it remains strictly material, and its artistic value lies entirely in the bits of a great personality tor which it afl^ords a vehicle. We do not admire Michelangelo for his way of seeing things, but for what he creates out ot what he does see. The non-essential features of his art — its data — were no doubt mainly determined by the fact that he was born in Tuscany in the latter half of the fifteenth century. But if he had been born in London a week ago, and were to enjoy here the encouragement he received from Julius II., our children would find him working in the. same creative spirit for an English Ministry as he did for a Roman Pope. At least that is my belief ; and the same thing may be said of some half-a-dozen more of the most resounding names in art. But 7 TURNER immediately below these men, who were essentially creators, come a certain number of others who were more dependent on conditions ex- ternal to themselves. The word "illustrator" has been so inconveniently specialised that one feels a certain diffidence in applying it to a great artist at all. As now used, it seems to mean one who explains or supple- ments the work of other men. But why should we not extend its scope, and make it include those who explain Nature and interpret her beauties to people less clear-sighted than themselves ? With this extension the terms " illustrator " and " illustration " might fairly be applied to many men and to many kinds of art to which in their narrower significance they would scarcely be appropriate. The dividing-line between the illustrator and the creator is, no doubt, difficult to draw. It is not enough to say that the one explains nature while the other uses nature to explain himself The distinction lies rather in quantity than in kind, for just as the creator cannot help explaining the natural forms he uses, so the illustrator cannot avoid putting himself into his explanations. And yet the difficulty is more apparent than real. All those who understand works of art can see whether an artist is working with his eye and mind on the object, like Kipling, or with his eye feeding a mind preoccupied with the quality of its own output, like Stevenson. The dilTerence is one of preponderance ; but, assuming good will, it is easy to see which side of the scale outweighs the other. The most creative creators in the plastic arts have, I suppose, been Michelangelo and Rembrandt. In their cases milieu did not lead expression, although it determined the materials of which expression made use. Rembrandt was a consummate chiaroscurist, not because he was born in a mill with many shadows and a microscopic window, but because the direction of his a;sthetic impulse was towards concentration, towards that final artistic unity which is to man what FOUR PORTRAITS OF J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. In the Collection of 1. WM. WARD, Esq. 2. THE NATIONAL GALI,ERY. 3. WM. WARD, Esq. 4. W. Q. RAWLINSON, Esq. INTRODUCTORY organic unity is to nature* It is by their force in unity that his pictures live, and we may be sure that, no matter where he was born, his art would have developed on the lines it actually followed. And so with Michelangelo. His creative energy found an outlet through its combination with an unrivalled sense of how to express power — physical, spiritual, and intellectual. In writing thus I am alive to the fact that I lay myself open to misconstruction, and that unless a more logical definition of the term "art" than most of us are satisfied with be accepted, the distinction I am pointing to will not be perceived. It is, as I have said, one of preponderance, or rather of priority. The one class of workers has subjective visions and then seeks objective means for their realisation ; the other and, as I think, the lower class reverses the process ; it receives objective impressions and then proceeds to clothe those impressions in a subjective envelope. If the two methods led to similar results it would be waste ot time to argue about them ; but they do not. In the sequel this question will have to be examined at some length, for it has a direct bearing on the future of Turner's reputation. At present it is enough to point out that early experiences are more important to those painters whom I have ventured to call illustrators — associating the term with a redeeming definition — than to those who use external facts primarily as vehicles for the distribution of subjective ideas. Turner has often been pitied for his birth in Maiden Lane and his boyhood on the pavements of the Strand. And yet we may doubt whether he could have had a better preparation for the work which lay before him. Looking back over his career, it is impossible to deny that the large humanity of London and its mysterious envelope gave a tint to his imagination which suited it exactly and which it never lost. • Just as the production of man himself seems to be the supreme feat of our earth, so does the production of final and organic unity in a work of art seem the supreme feat of man — that is, it affords the best proof both of the individual efficiency of his faculties and ot their co-ordination. 9 c TURNER After the early years of drudgery were over, years in which he slowly grew to understand his metier and passed from the dull stage of saying what he could to the glorious one of saying what he would, he settled down to clothing his ever-expanding world in the particular form ot beauty to which his native city had given him the key. Now and then, for special purposes, he put aside mystery for pattern, and was content to set things in an absolutely transparent ether. But when he worked without an after-thought he made atmospheric mystery the chief ingredient of his art, and veiled the most crystalline sites in Europe in a gauze for which the warp came from his own birthplace on the Thames. As an artist, in short, as a selector of ajsthetic justifications for reproducing facts, he remained all his life a child of London. He lingered before Titian, Claude, the two Poussins, Wilson, Cuyp, and many more, and grudged fame to each in turn. But when he entered the lists against them, it was with a weapon they did not know. It was with that sense of nature's infinity, of life's mystery, of the transforming power of many mixed sincerities, which our abnormal cosmopolis was so well able to inspire. Turner's originality was never radical. All through his youth and his early maturity he was producing things which would scarcely have been what they were had someone else not lived and worked before him. Many comparatively unimportant artists have shown more power to invent, to build upon a foundation of their own. He began by producing enriched echoes of the English draughtsmen. He went on to treat the famous masters of landscape in the same way, showing a curious want of perspective as he did it, and being apparently as well pleased with a victory over Salvator or Loutherbourg as with one over Claude or Wilson. From first to last he required a text, a motive gathered more or less outside himself It will be part of my task to show how this peculiarity af?ected his work, and now does something to modify his fame. At present I only wish to note the support it gives lO INTRODUCTORY to my theory of the influence ot London. The town itself he painted curiously seldom, but its soul, the strange, formless, half-human, wholly living force exerted by the monstrous city, coloured his life, and became at the end, when he had put aside and forgotten his pathetic anch'io sono pittore forms of rivalry, the ideal vision by the light of which he worked. The second condition which had a profound efTect on Turner's art was his family history. For some unknown reason he betrayed extreme irritation when any one approached this thorny question. Gossiping traditions have professed to account for his touchiness, but no cause lor it is really known beyond his mother's occasional insanity and the fact that, even in her lucid intervals, she seems to have been kept more or less en cachette. However this may have been, the painter was as a matter of fact intensely secretive in all that concerned his domestic affairs. After his mother's death, when he had houses ot his own and his father had become his factotum, he seldom alluded to his childish experiences. Turner senior was more garrulous ; but when his professional loquacity was upon him he talked with one eye on the door, in fear of his formidable son. The result of all this withdrawal was a want of proportion in the painter's beliefs. He acquired false ideas of the necessity for self-assertion and of the relative positions of other painters, both dead and living, to himself. The notions of petty commerce among which he had sprung were enabled to keep their hold and to persuade him that one man's success meant another's ruin. " If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved! " he once exclaimed; and the exclamation was significant. He thought that a painter's market was as sharply circumscribed as a barber's, and that just as the chins to be shaved within a certain radius of Maiden Lane could be counted, so could the commissions awaiting an artist. The notion ot creating his own market, of appealing to new and unjaded admirations, was barricaded out by those youthful 1 1 c* TURNER experiences to which he so carefully refrained from providing an anti- dote. The notion ot putting forth his powers in single-hearted obedience to his own predilections, and with no intention but the service of his own sincerity, had to wait until he was middle-aged before it look its proper place as his guide. Turner's hiding instinct had another and perhaps even more serious consequence. It left him without the best of all trainings in technique. His own industry and ingenuity more than supplied this want so far as water-colours were concerned. In that branch of art he was a pioneer, and had nothing more to learn from his contemporaries while he was still a lad. As a painter in oil he was in a very different position. He had learnt in a bad school, for he had worked in Sir Joshua's studio, where the example set was unsuited to youth, and little was taught by precept. At the Academy he scarcely seems to have studied colour. The best teachers of technique are fellow-students, who hand on good traditions and enforce them at an age when the temptation to sacrifice soundness for a seductive brilliance is not so dangerous as it afterwards becomes. The average of technical proficiency is highest in the most gregarious schools, where experiments have to run the gauntlet between rows of experts, and the tiro's difficulties can be smoothed out for him by his neighbour. At the best of times our English painters are not well placed in this respect. The seclusion in which a British artist works after his student days are over restricts the spread ot knowledge, both of good and evil, and leaves his neighbour to puzzle out for himself many things from which a more unselfish system would remove all difBculty. And Turner carried secrecy to such an extreme that he might as well have worked in prison. Few ever saw him paint. He used, indeed, to go down to the Academy on varnishing days and play queer pranks on his pictures, but as often as not his object seems rather to have been to astonish INTRODUCTORY his colleagues than to do anything serious. So iar as we can discover by examining his work, his methods in oil were arrived at partly by looking at the old masters, and partly by deductions from his experience in water-colour. He never understood, or at least seldom took into account, the action of vehicles on pigments, or ot one pigment on another. It is fair to suppose that a man of his ambition, and one who showed so much solicitude for his own fame after death, was not indifferent to what time might do with his creations. In old age no doubt he did become careless and allowed his pictures to deteriorate in his own house. But age deadens the ambitions of us all. It is in youth and in what we call our prime that we dream dreams of self- projection into the future, and take thought for the handing down to posterity of our name and the memory of what little we may do. But even in youth and middle age Turner did things he would surely have avoided had he known their consequences. We may, then, put down such proceedings to ignorance, and that ignorance to the determined seclusion in which he chose to pass his working life. But Turner's aloofness had another cause than pride. And this brings me to the third condition external to his special gift which afTected the quality of his art. In a letter partly printed by Walter Thornbury, seven main features of Turner's character are set out by John Ruskin. One of these is sensuality; and of this, I imagine, Ruskin was chiefly thinking when, a line or two farther on, he adds the advice, " Don't try to mask the dark side."' In England we persevere, with more courage perhaps than wisdom, in the pretence that the feelings which man shares with the beasts are submissive to the will, and need not be taken into account in inquiring into the motives of any one outside the criminal classes. Even when applied to people of average passions such a theory is a pathetic delusion. If we relied upon it in the case of a man like Turner it would leave us 13 TURNER without any key — except, indeed, lunacy — to much of his conduct. We have plenty of evidence that with him the animal ptopensities were abnormally strong. His biographers tell strange tales of how he spent his week-ends. He had various mistresses ; and the piles of sketches left behind him bear occasional witness to dark bye-ways in his habits and character. In short, unless we accept the curious but not uncommon assumption that a man with strong sexual proclivities is worthless in all other ways, we must acknowledge that much that seemed eccentric and mysterious in Turner's conduct to his friends had a simple if not entirely agreeable explanation. These embarrassing obsessions were probably inherited from the ill-balanced, not to say insane, mother. They account for much, not only in his social behaviour, but in his art also, that seems strange and occasionally grotesque. A heated imagination is apt to forget its cause, and to drive its owner into extravagances which have little enough to do with the first incentive. It is quite possible that, if psychology were a better informed and more exact science than it is, we should find that the colour violences into which Turner fell in his last years had a great deal more to do with aberrations of his fancy than with any change in the constitution of his eyes. I have now described what seem to me the chief external influences by which Turner's special a:sthetic gilt was biassed. These were his birth in London, his sensitive pride, and his sensuality. To these modifying causes some would add a fourth, in his defective education. But there, I think, a mistake has been made. The evidence of his own writings exists to show that, wherever he obtained it, his knowledge of such matters as a painter was expected to know in the days of George III- was above rather than below the average. As life progressed, Turner seems to have shed his education. His method of expressing himself in words became more and more involved as he 14 THE THAMES: NEAR WINDSOR. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (9J > >3)) In the Collection of GEORGE SALTING, Esq. INTRODUCTORY grew older, until it arrived at the climax of incomprehensibility in the later codicils to his will. But in his earlier years he could write clearly enough, and could maintain a standard of orthography which was more than respectable for his time and class. To this question, which appears to me both important and interesting, I shall have to return presently. Meanwhile it is enough to say that the difficulties which beset Turner in his later years when he tried to express himself in words, should be reckoned among the results of his secret mode of life, rather than among its causes. In early manhood he possessed quite enough command of his native language and quite enough general education to make the belief that deficiency in those particulars drove him to avoidance of his friends inadmissible. He began, in fact, with an educational equipment which would have been quite sufficient for his needs had he lived in such a way as to keep it in good order, and added to it, by making the most of the social opportunities ensured to him by his genius. THE GARRETEER'S PETITION. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNBR, R.A. (21 ■ JO} THE i^iATIONAL GALLERY. CHAPTER II. Turner's Birth — His Parentage— His Father and Mother — His Education — The Commence- ment of his Artistic Career — Early Works. JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER was baptized in London, in the Church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, on the 14th of May, 1775. In the parish register the second name is written " Mallad."* His other Christian names seem to have been derived from his maternal uncles. As to the date of his birth, .the most direct if not the most trustworthy evidence we can point to, is the note * The entry runs:— "May 14— Joseph Mallad William, son of William Turner by Mary his Wife." 17 D TURNER in one of the numerous codicils to his will, that he was born on St. George's Day — the 23rd of April. He made so many different assertions about his own origin that even this plain statement cannot be taken as final ; but we liave no reason to doubt that he was baptized shortly after his birth in the little house in Maiden Lane, which was pulled down eighty years ago.* This house consisted of a basement, less completely sunk into the earth than usual, for it was lighted by a window rising above the level of the pavement, and not by a grated well ; of a shop opening from an arched entry at the side which led to buildings in the rear; and of two upper storeys, plus a small attic at the top. Maiden Lane was less smoke-bound a century ago than it is now, and the house must have had at least eight rooms of a sort For a married tradesman with one child it was a commodious home enough, and seems by no means to have justified much that has been written of the squalor of Turner's early surroundings. As to his family, that was and remains a little mysterious. The solid fects on which his biographers agree are scanty. His father, William Turner, was a native of South Molton, in Devonshire, where the painter's paternal grandparents are said to have spent the whole of their lives. Their son William came to London at some unknown date, and there, on the 2gth of August, 1773, in the Church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, he was married to one Mary Marshall. Twenty-one months later a son of the couple was baptized in the same church. According to the statement already referred to, the boy's birth had taken place on the previous St. George's Day. Unfortunately even these naked looking facts are open to a certain amount of doubt. * In 1821. In a small way Maiden Lane is classic ground. Theatrical memories especially cluster round the neighbourhood ; but in the Lane itself once lived Sancroft ; so did Andrew Marvcll, who here repulsed Lord Danby and the King's guineas ; here too, and that not so very long before William Turner put out his barber's pole, Fran(;ois Marie Arouet de Voltaire spent his two years in London. 18 CORFE CASTLE. From the Water-Colniir Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (Si . iH) THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM. HIS PARENTS Walter Thornbury calls old William Turner's wife " Mary Marshall (or Mallord)," and in after years Turner is said to have lost his temper more than once when allusions were made to some asserted connection with the Marshalls of Shelford Manor in the County of Nottingham. Of his mother's personality scarcely anything is known, but Walter Thornbury prints the following description *: — " She was a native of Islington, but at Turner's decease they had not succeeded in finding an entry of her baptism. There is an unfinished portrait of her by her son, one oi his first attempts. . . . There is a strong likeness to Turner about the nose and eyes. Her eyes are blue, lighter than his, her nose aquiline, and she has a slight fall in the nether lip. Her hair is well frizzed — for which she might have been indebted to her husband's professional skill — and is surmounted by a cap with large flappers. She stands erect, and looks masculine, not to say fierce ; report proclaims her to have been a person of ungovernable temper, and to have led her husband a sad life. In stature, like her son, she was below the average height. In the latter part of her life she was insane and in confinement. Turner might have inherited from her his melancholy turn of mind. I never saw her, never heard him mention her, nor ever heard of anyone who had seen her." The bulk of this description is fourth-hand. t It had to filter through old William Turner, Hannah Danby, Turner's housekeeper, and the two Trimmers, fiithcr and son, before it readied Thornbury 's * " Kindly furnished to me by the Rev. IMr. Trimmer, the eldest son of Turner's old friend and executor, the Rector of Heston, Mr. Trimmer obtained his facts from an authority no less unquestionable than Hannah Danby, Turner's old housekeeper, who had them from the Painter's father." — 'thornbury, vol. i., p. 5. f Thornbury prints his quotation in such a fashion that it is not easy to know exactly who is speaking. So far as his page shows, the individual who says " I never heard of anyone who had seen her," and " I knew him [William Turner] well," are one and the same person. It is a case, perhaps, of confusion between the two Trimmers, but even then these assertions are scarcely to be reconciled. 19 d' TURNER pages. The assertion about Mary Turner's madness has been confirmed, however, by Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse. He found entries in the books of Bethlehem Hospital showing that one Mary Turner was received there fi-om St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in 1800, and discharged, uncured, the following year, one of her sureties being a wig-maker.* Other items of information about Mrs, Turner are that she was the sister of one Marshall, a butcher at Brentford, that she was first cousin to the grandmother of Dr. Shaw, author of " Gallops in the Antipodes," and the younger sister of Mrs. Harpur, wife to the curate of Islington and grandmother of Mr. Henry Harpur, one of Turner's executors. Mr. Monkhouse adds that Harpur fell in love with his wife while he was at Oxford, and that the marriage of the pair brought the lady's sister to London. It is now, I fear, too late to add much to this confused information, and we must be content to know that the patronymic of the painter's mother was either " Marsliall " or " Mallord," that in blood at least she may have been better born than her husband, and that from her the painter inherited the temperament in which his genius, as well as certain embarrassing strains in his character, was rooted. We know a great deal more about William Turner ; but here again Thornbury leaves us in doubt as to whether an often-quoted description is at first or second hand. He prints the two following paragraphs, which I quote exactly as he gives them : — " ' There is a portrait of Turner, senior, by his son, much later than that of his mother. This, Mr. Trimmer says, he shewed my father years ago as one of his attempts at portrait. It is full face, the eyes and general expression are most correct, though I do not recognise the nose. A few years before his death, Mr. Turner the engraver made a drawing of him, which is a fair likeness. Turner, the son, hearing of the circumstance, said it must be destroyed, and " Turner " (Great Artists Series), p. 9. CHAMONIX (TWO DRAWINGS). Original Water-Coloiir Drawing by COZENS. Copy by J. .W. 10 i4ll In tlie Collection of HERBERT HORNE, Esq. HIS PARENTS the engraver, to pacify him, made a copy of it, which he gave up, and Turner destroyed it. At this time old Turner was decrepit. " ' As I knew him well,' Mr. Trimmer says, ' I will try and describe him. He was about the height of his son, a head below the average standard,* spare and muscular, with small blue eyes, parrot nose, projecting chin, fresh complexion, an index of health, which he apparently enjoyed to the full. He was a chatty old fellow, and talked fast ; but from speaking through his nose his words had a peculiar transatlantic twang. He was more cheerful than his son, and had always a smile on his face. When at Sandicomb Lodge, he was to be seen daily at work in his garden, like another Laertes, except on the Tuesday, which was Brentford market-day, when he was often to be seen trudging home with his weekly provisions in a blue handkerchief, where I have often met him, and, asking him after Turner, had answer, " Painting a picture of the Battle of Trafalgar," ' &c., &c." It is difficult to say for how much of these two paragraphs Trimmer, senior, is responsible ; but wherever they come from, they leave a vivid impression of the little Punch-like barber whose character differed so strangely in most ways from that of his son. Apart from his dreary marital experiences, the old man seems to have enjoyed a happy life. This, indeed, he deserved, for there can be no doubt that he did his duty as a father. I am not grounding this assertion upon the confused accounts which have come down to us of the boy's schooling. Thornbury says that he was taught to read by his Either, but not to write ; that in 1785 he went to his first school, at New Brentford ; that in the following year he migrated to an academy in Soho, kept by one Palice ; that in • Monkhouse prints this sentence " with a head below the average standard," and so fails to understand it. Mr. Trimmer meant to convey that William Turner was a " head " shorter than a man of middle height, which would probably mean that he was about 5 Icct 3 inches. 21 TURNER 1788 he went to a school at Margate, kept by one Coleman; that in or about 1788 he worked in the office of Thomas Malton the architect in Long Acre, also in Hardwick's office, also in the Royal Academy Schools, and yet again in Paul Sandby's drawing-school in St. Martin's Lane.* The impression conveyed is that Thornbury put down all he was told, and made no attempt to sift his information. Such a shuttle- cock education as he describes would be enough, as Mr. Monkhouse says, to spoil the intellectual digestion of any boy. It is now too late to find out where and how Turner really was taught the rudiments of learning ; but the proofs are abundant that his schooling was thorough enough, so far as it went. We have been told by most of the painter's biographers that he was a dunce, that he could neither write nor speak his own language, that, in short, he was uneducated. And yet plenty of evidence exists to prove that, judged by the standard of his own class, whether we take the class in which he was born or that into which he rose, he was exceptionally well taught for the time. Thornbury says his father was his only teacher until the age of ten, and that writing was not included in the curriculum. And yet, when he was twelve, the boy could sign his name in a good hand. Again, it is certain that after he was well launched on his career he had no time for schooling, and yet his sketch-books arc filled with memoranda — drafts of letters, descriptions of social and other experiences, as well as poems — written in the handwriting of a gentleman, and almost invariably well spelt. Hamerton saysf — " Turner never was able to spell." The statement is much too strong. I have read dozens of Turner's letters, and enough manuscript notes of one kind and another to make a substantial volume ; and yet, even in memoranda * Monkhouse adds to all these pupilages one under Humphry Repton, the landscape gardener, at Romford. (" Dictionary of National Biography." See also " Notes and Queries," 3rd Series, I., 484.) t "Life," p. 16. WORCESTER CATHEDRAL. From the Water-Colmir Drawing "by J. M. W. TURN 1121 1611 THE BRITISH MUSEUM II HIS EDUCATION intended only for his own eye, mistakes are rare, and the few which occur are such as even well-educated people were prone to in his day. Such blunders as the often-quoted one of writing "harmonuous" for "harmonious" were quite beneath Turner, and must be put down to the accidents of printing. In one instance he describes a party to which he went in Rome, and names many of the guests. These were of various nationalities, English, Italian, German, and yet he gives their names with an accuracy worthy of the Almanack de Gotha. It is quite true that he misused words, and wrote sometimes, especially towards the end of his life, in such a style that no human being could be sure of what he meant ; but even then the impression conveyed is not so much that he had never been educated, as that his imagination had developed while his power over words had grown rusty with disuse. His verbal confusion increased with age, so it can hardly have been due to want of school. In youth, especially when dealing with facts, he was clear enough. Thinking in images is much commoner than one is apt to suppose. One writer on Turner plumply declares it impossible to think without words ! An amazing assertion, seeing how often most of us have to hunt round for a word to express some image which is standing, visible, measurable, and complete, in our minds. If one may be allowed to give oneself as an instance, I myself habitually think without words, and turn to them chiefly when I want to convey a thought to someone else. In the light of this habit I find no difficulty in understanding how Turner, in his later years, so often found himself embogged in his native language. His embarrassments arose, not so much from an initially defective education, as from the lopsided mental development caused by his peculiar mode of life. His solitary broodings filled him with vague but ambitious imagery, while they did nothing to increase his power over the machinery of verbal expression. In his poetry we continually encounter fine images, which miss their eflret because they have been entirely thought out as images, and no attempt TURNER has been made to clothe them in words while their form was yet soft and pliable. Worth, the famous couturier, used to say that the whole secret of successful dressmaking lay in founding your design upon your materials, and not vice versa. It is just the same with writing. The means of expression must be kept in view while the imagination works, or you will find yourself landed, as Turner was so often, with an idea on your hands to which you can give no satisfactory form. In support of what I have said as to Turner's early education I will here quote some examples of his use of English and dealings with orthography. The following letter was written on the 4.th of November, 1815, from Queen Anne Street: — Dear Johns, I am glad to hear of your success, and of C. Eastlake's particularly fortunate and, I may say I believe, unprecedented good luck. Appianici, a Milanese who painted the same subject, viz., Buonaparte \was not so lucky], tho' report stated the picture [was bought for] 1,500 ; yet report only was its friend, and it still remains, I fancy, in the city unsold. Your letter arrived the day after the case left London, containing, not what you expect or perhaps will like — as you seem to have thought only of Dido, whose unwieldy frame-work might even of itself produce a miscarriage in so long a journey, the first piece I ever thought of as being generally wrong — you will find, alas, every- thing contrary to your wishes, which I am, believe me, sorry for. But even had I been less quick in dispatching the two I have sent, viz., the picture exhibited last year, Bligh Sands, and Jason, an old favourite with some, still I could not have sent any 30 or 40 guinea pictures, for I have none by me or [in a condition to finish] upon so short a notice, and the neglect of sending my letters after me to Yorkshire had placed me, as usual, in the rear, as well as prevented me getting anything forward in that ratio of price. However, you may do exactly as you please about them, only have the goodness to consider the pictures sent as under your care, and if they contribute one shilling more to the treasury of the exhibition at Plymouth I shall feel happy and proud of being an adjunct with the intentions of my worthy friends in Plymouth towards establishing or promoting the Arts. I have the honour to be Yours most truly and obliged, J. M. TURNER.* * The original of this letter is in the possession of Mr. C. Fairfax Murray. 2+ CHRISTCHURCH, OXFORD. From the Water-Coloiir Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (12) ■ iSjl THE BRITISH MUSEUM. HIS EDUCATION The second example is a letter written on the 4.th of September, 1816, from Farnley * : — Dear Holworthy, Having just returned from part of my Yorkshire slietching trip, I am more at liberty than when I wrote to you last, mind I say wrote you, because I have received an accusatory message " that you expected to hear from me." I must admit (tho' I requested you would suit yourself as to time at Mr. Knight's, you to let me know when) I did not say precisely that Mr. Fawkes lived at Farnley Hall, near the market town of Otley, in the West Riding of the County of York, and for which omission you have thought proper to punish me by your silence when, how or where you are, was, or will be ; so I beg leave to say that having finished nearly what I proposed doing this season in Yorkshire, [/] think I can do myself the pleasure of waiting upon Mr. Knight at Langold within a fortnight. If I were to meet you there [the pleasure] would be much enhanced to me, and only do not say the time is too long or too short, that I never wrote or am not yours truly J. M. W. TURNER. P.S. — And I want your advice about my calling or not at Belvoir. I have introduced a few words here and there, in italics and between brackets, which are required to complete the sense. They, or others to the same effect, had obviously been in Turner's mind, but had eluded materialisation in ink, as words are apt to do when a writer is thinking rather of the substance than the form of what he has to say. These examples are not cunningly selected ; they are fair specimens of his composition at the time, and even if they were not so, they would confirm my view, for, after all, a single fairly well expressed letter is better evidence of education than many ill-expressed ones are of the reverse. Turner fell over his words. His thoughts travelled a great deal faster than his pen. Consequently his sentences are full of involuntary ellipses and of disconnected rather than ignorant grammar. Even when the obscurity seems most profound the sense can, in most cases, be made clear by restoring some dropped- out word or comma. In the letter to Holworthy the only real • Communicated to me by Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse. 25 E TURNER blunder is the use of "was" after "you," and that, we must remember, had been in Turner's boyhood an accepted idiom, as well as a very pretty and convenient one.* It seems, then, more than probable that old William Turner was more successful with his son's education than has been supposed. The catalogue of schools quoted above amounts to an overdraft on our credulity ; but that, somewhere and in some fashion, the boy was well grounded in " the three R's " his own writings prove. The story of his education, like other matters relating to his early years, appears to have been deliberately obscured both by himself and his father — why, we can only conjecture. In any case, it seems certain that Turner obtained a far better training in the elements of knowledge than most boys of his station. As to whether Brentford or Margate should be credited with his introduction to letters it is now too late to determine ; personally I incline to the latter, for it is known that when he was nine years old he made a drawing of Margate Church. Between the two, at any rate, he learnt enough syntax and orthography to leave him without any serious obstacle to his ambitions but those of his own making. In other ways William Turner was an excellent parent. He was industrious, economical, good-tempered, and long-suffering, and must have supplied some corrective in the boy's constitution to the unruly propensities inherited from his mother. And we find him doing his duty when the next question arose, that of a trade for his son. Maiden Lane was on the outskirts of what was then the artists' quarter, and old Turner's customers, we are told, included not a few painters, architects, and other followers of the great profession. The barber is said to have begun by wishing to put the boy to his own * I may refer those who would hke to go more deeply into this question, to the sketch books in the National Gallery. They are full of notes, draughts of letters, draughts of verses, &c., &c., which seem to me quite inconsisteitt with much that has been written upon Turner's want of education. 26 THE TOM TOWER, OXFORD. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. [loi y H) THE NATIONAL GALLERY. HIS TRAINING IN ART trade, but he must have changed his mind betimes. The child's bent had declared itself very early indeed. His first recorded attempt at anything in the nature of art was the copying of the arms engraved on some pieces of plate belonging to a jeweller in the neighbouring Southampton Street. Then came the drawing of Margate Church, followed by various exercises of the time-honoured sort on the walls and copy-books of his Brentford school, and by the colouring of a large number of engravings in a copy of Boswell's " Antiquities of England and Wales" (published in 1785). These were done for one John Lees, of Brentford, who paid the boy at the rate of fourpcnce a plate. At about the same time he was making drawings, coloured copies of engravings, and so on, which were exposed in the Maiden Lane shop-window, and sold for a shilling or two a-piece. It may fiiirly be conjectured that the barber was led to revise his views by the earning power thus suggested rather than by any real comprehension of his son's gift. In any case he did revise them, and promptly. Among the artists who periodically submitted their chins to his razor was Thomas Stothard, then a man of about thirty; and tradition hints that his advice had something to do with the final decision. However that may have been, young Turner was at most eleven years of age when his training in art began. His father vacillated, of course, at first. Between 1786 and 1790 the boy seems to have studied under or worked for some seven or eight different masters. The more serious of these were Thomas Malton, the architectural draughtsman, of whom Turner used afterwards to speak with gratitude ; Thomas Hardwick the architect, who seems to have been the first to perceive his scholar's true line of advance ; and Sir Joshua Reynolds. A pleasant story has come down to us in connection with the boy's apprenticeship to Hardwick. It is said that William Porden, impressed by the cleverness with which young Turner had washed in backgrounds to certain architectural perspectives, offered to give him indentures without a premium. Old 27 TURNER Turner, however, was not seduced by the offer. He had lately received a legacy— we are not told the amount— and believing that his son would do better in an office of higher standing than Porden's, he determined to devote the whole sum to paying Hardwick's con- siderable fee. Turner used to say in after life, " Dad never praised me for anything but saving a halfpenny ; " but, niggardly or not in spoken praise, the old man showed a practical belief in his son's abilities, and did all his limited knowledge could suggest to ensure their fruition. After a short experience of young Turner's powers, Hardwick advised him to devote himself to landscape painting, and to enter the schools of the Royal Academy. This he did in 1790,* and at about the same tune received permission to work under the roof of Sir Joshua Reynolds. By this time Reynolds had practically abandoned painting, and Turner, like other so-called pupils of the great President, spent his time, no doubt, in copying his master's pictures. One must, however, include Sir Joshua's name among those by whom the young artist was chiefly influenced because, as a matter of fact. Turner's early practice was very strongly affected by what he saw in Leicester Field His knowledge of Sir Joshua's methods must have come througl copying and the talk of fellow-scholars ; but however it came, th can be no doubt of its effect. His own earlier productions, especially the portrait, painted in or about 1792, which belonged to Mr. Ruskin, and the considerably later portrait in the National Gallery, are technically * The date usually given for Turner's entry at Somerset House is 1789, but his name first occurs in the Academy registers on the 21st of July, 1790. Between that date and the 2nd of December, 1791, he put in 96 appearances, or rather more than 50 per cent, of the possible total. All these entries relate to the " Plaister Academy." On the 14th of November, 1792, he began to work in the "Life Academy," wlicre he was fairly constant (48 attendances out of a possible 75), until the 26th of February, 1793, when his name appears on the registers for the last time. His signatures in the R.A. book are always " W. Turner " " Wm. Turner," or " William Turner." I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. C. Pairfa.x Murray for the opportunity of consulting these registers. 28 S. 1 ere SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE CLOISTERS. From the Wiitei-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (26J « 19SI THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM. HIS TRAINING IN ART very like the last works of Reynolds, between whose example and that of Wilson in landscape must be shared the credit of forming Turner's iirst style as an oil painter. In the Royal Academy Schools Turner was a more successful student than is commonly supposed. The sketch-books in the National Gallery contain a few life studies which are up to the highest level of students' work. One of these, indeed, a recumbent female figure, sharply foreshortened, is more searching and better understood than any other life study by an English painter of those days I ever saw. As time went on. Turner seems to have forgotten, or lost interest in, the literal facts of human structure, just as he forgot the structure of his native language. That he once had it all at his fingers' ends is proved by these scanty but decisive remains of his student days. With Turner's exit from the Academy Schools in 1793, at the age of eighteen, his subjection to parental authority no doubt came to an end. It is probable that he had long been independent of his father in the matter of money, even if their relative positions had not already been reversed. In 1790 he had exhibited his first drawing at the Academy, a view of Lambeth Palace.* In each of the years 1791, 1792 and 1793 he had been represented by two contributions, one of which, a Bristol view, may possibly have been in oil. In this year — 1793 — he is supposed to have set up a studio for himself, for the catalogue gives his address no longer at 26, Maiden Lane, but in the adjoining alley, Hand Court. Early in the same year, or perhaps in the autumn of 1792, he had made the first of his sketching tours, starting from Bristol from the house of his friend Narraway, a fell- monger, on a borrowed pony. It is pretty certain that from this time onwards Turner was able to keep himself, to help his parents, and to lay the nest-egg of the fortune which was afterwards to become so considerable. It is a good moment, then, to pause and picture to * It was in the Winter Exhibition at Burlington House in 1887, lent by Mrs. Courtauld. TURNER ourselves the remarkable person with whom converging forces had enriched the Anglo-Saxon race. In outward appearance he was short, muscular, large-headed, rather Jewish in feature, with small and keen blue eyes, hooked and fleshy nose, and sensuous lips. In character he was impulsive, irritable, sensitive and tender-hearted as a girl, ardent in all his desires, and full of a strange pride, as if the soul of an e.xiled king had wandered into his bourgeois body. Intellectually he had a remarkable faculty of observation, a prodigious memory for what he had seen, a voracious appetite for things to be grasped and digested by the eye, and the difi^use, formless imagination of a Celtic bard. As to his acquirements, good and evil, he had the habit of industry, the instinctive distrust, the conviction that life is a battle, and the mania for petty gains, of the small and struggling tradesman. Among all these the ruling characteristics, those which determined his artistic career and moulded his social life, were his passionate temperament, his farouche pride, his instinct of competition, the memory in his eye, and the vague, half-articulate but unresting energy of his imagination. If we stripped him of any one of these, we should find him difficult to explain. Without pride, he would have mixed frankly with his kind, and avoided many things in his art which arose from pure ignorance ; without his trade jealousy — as a man he was not jealous — he would never have wasted his powers in crushing fancied rivals ; without his miraculous memory his art would have been simpler, less encyclopjedic, and more closely knit ; without his industry and desire of gain, he would have failed to provide himself with that secure financial basis which enabled him to follow his own inclinations from adolescence to old age. An enforced aloofness seems to have been one of his traits from very early years. We hear of his friendship with various young men of his own age and calling, such as Robert Ker Porter, Henry Aston Barker, Thomas Girtin, and others ; but it is always intermittent, and never ends in the frank intimacy one likes to 30 1 EDINBURGH FROM THE WATER OF LEITH. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W, TURNER. R.A. n the Collection ot '. F. BLACKWEL1_. Esq. HIS FIRST PICTURES associate with life in studios. Plenty of evidence exists to suggest that with nothing to hide, he would have been a sociable creature, for on the comparatively rare occasions when he came among his friends he thoroughly enjoyed himself. The two skeletons in his cupboard — his knowledge of his mother's semi-insanity, and his own inheritance, partial though it was, of her temperament — cut him off in early manhood from the delights of free companionship, and turned him in later years into a kind of social lighthouse, blazing out now and then to dazzle his acquaintance between long periods of occultation. This is not the character of a happy man, and Turner can seldom have known happiness when not absorbed in his work. He was full of ambitions inconsistent with his state, and must have spent much of his time in dreaming dreams from which the awakenings were merciless. The notion that he was soured and disappointed by the neglect of his art is hardly borne out by facts, but in the contrast between himself as he was — the son of William and Mary Turner, and the sultan of various illiterate domestics — and the imaginings of his restless brain, the elements existed of a tragic discontent. Turner's independent career may, as I have already said, be taken to have begun in 1793, after he had left the Academy Schools. From that time onwards he managed his own affairs, living mainly by the commissions, which were then so plentiful, for topographical drawings, portraits of country houses and such-like, but also by the sale of drawings made to sell and by occasional teaching,* The iirst oil picture he is known to have exhibited at the Royal Academy was there in 1797. It is now in the National Gallery. t » He gave lessons at five shillings an hour, to begin with— a fee afterwards raised to a guinea. That he disliked teaching, the reader will scarcely need to be told. t The Catalogue calls it "Moonlight, a Study at Millbank," and then goes on to describe the site as a little east of the cottage near Cremorne Pier in which Turner died. As a fact, Millbank is nearly three miles east of Cremorne Pier and the little house in which Turner's surreptitious death took place. 31 TURNER At this time landscape painting, as we now understand it, afforded a very precarious means of livelihood, whether in England or elsewhere. Wilson, a generation earlier, had starved at it. Gainsborough had looked upon it rather as a pastime than as a serious way of supple- menting, to say nothing of making, an income. Such admiration as it excited was given to the Old Masters, and not to many of them. The few moderns who prospered with its help were either topographers, like Joseph Vernet, or advertising charlatans, like Loutherbourg, who drew attention to themselves by extraneous devices. The idea of buying a modern landscape for its beauty alone had occurred to few, and so, with his keen eye to the main chance, it is not surprising that for some years Turner was content to travel the old well-worn groove. Any drawing which reproduced a recognisable scene and was within what he would have called a low " ratio of price " was sure of a purchaser. His first care, then, after leaving the Schools was to gather material. He began those tours through England which were to occupy so much of his time and to give him a knowledge of his native country which no one, perhaps, has rivalled. Between 1790 and the end of the century he produced an enormous number of drawings of English churches, cathedrals, castles, and other buildings. If these had all been done from the actual objects, they would have enabled us, with time and patience, to tabulate his tours. Unfortunately a great number are modified versions of other men's works. Occasionally we come upon curious indications that some drawing which has all the air, superficially, of having been done on the spot, is really a report at second hand. Turner's intelligence was so keen that he is not often caught tripping, but now and then he " gives himself away " by misapprehending structure, or forgetting the position of the sun, or slurring over some passage which is only difficult because it has not been seen. His explorations, however, were constant. We are told that during his most active years, between 1793 and 1800, he would 32 TURNER AND GIRTIN walk twenty-five miles at a time, with his luggage at the end of a stick. As a rule he seems to have been alone ; but Girtin is believed to have sometimes gone with him, and on a few rare occasions they appear to have attacked the same subjects at the same time. The young man who made the early drawings here reproduced could scarcely have had a better monitor at his elbow than the author of the " View on the Wharfe " and " Street in Paris," in the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the " Durham," at Manchester. Where Turner was diiTuse, delicate, and episodic, Girtin was broad, masculine, and selective. The acquaintance between the two* is said to have begun when they were both in the employment of John Raphael Smith, the engraver, for whom they used to colour prints. This must have been pretty early in Turner's life, certainly before he left the Academy Schools, for after 1793 his time was otherwise employed. It is asserted that in the latter year Dr. Monro engaged both lads to spend their evenings at liis house in the Adclphi Terracc,f and enhance the effect of his own drawings by putting in washes of ink and colour. The Monro tradition has no doubt suffered in the handing down. The various gossipers about it have dwelt probably on the more piquant accounts of how the fatnous and kindly doctor and his next-door neighbour, John Henderson, dealt with the clever boys they collected round their tables. It is difficult to believe that, at the age of eighteen and upwards, Turner and Girtin would spend many evenings in putting colour washes over another man's outlines for half- a-crown each and their supper. But Dr. Monro had a large collection of drawings and pictures by such artists as Rembrandt, Claude, Wilson, Morland, Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, Thomas Hearne, John Cozens, and others. Of these Turner made copies, with and without variations, • Turner and Girtin were of nearly the same age: they were both born in 1775. t The Doctor also had a house at Bushey, and there occasionally the symposia took place, Turner and Girtin sometimes walking all the way out and back. (Watts, "Biographical Sketch," in Liber Fluvioruni, p. xi.) TURNER exercising his own taste and getting at the heart of his model at the same time. One of our plates shows an original Cozens side by side with Turner's version of it. Compare them, and you will see how all the younger man's modifications tend towards a less decoupe effect.* Here, I conjecture, we have one of the signs of Girtin's influence, for this peculiar sense of effect was not characteristic of Turner in his youth. Historians of English water-colour paintingt have always been ready to confess the abilities of Girtin, and to allow that he affected the practice of his contemporaries to a considerable extent. I think we may go farther, and recognise in his example the true foundation of English water-colour painting. He was the first great leader of the School, the generalissimo, as it were, who gave the army behind him the first real glimpse of the fat plains awaiting a master. Cozens, before him, had shown a profound genius, but his gift was too personal, too exclusively subjective, to be of much use as an example. Little in the way of principle could be distilled from his productions. Girtin, on the other hand, displayed exactly that union of subjective with objective qualities, of deference to conditions with frank sincerity of individual expression, which makes the leader in art. The history of English painting contains no more fascinating figure than that of Thomas Girtin. Dimly seen as it is through the gathering mists of time and the occasionally malevolent shadows cast upon it by jealous bystanders, it stirs our sympathies as that of one in whom the gift of art was combined with those warm and self-regardless feelings which art is supposed to foster. Born in the same year, nearly in the same month, as Turner, and dying before he was twenty-eight, he left behind him a tradition of frankness, of generosity to his fellow-artists, of a natural refinement increased by continual selection of the best, and * In his " Early English Water Colour Painters," Monkhouse gives an opportunity for a similar collation, with the same result. Especially Mr. Roget, in his " History ot the Old Water Colour Society." 34 NORHAM CASTLE. From the Water-Colour Drawing b>' J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (19^ ^ 27:;) In the Collection of LAUNDY WALTERS. Esq. TURNER AND GIRTIN of an unerring eye for the true path of art among the temptations of nature, which compels us to mourn his early death as, possibly, one of the greatest blows our English School has ever received. " Poor Tom Girtin " he was called by those to whom his open nature, his confidence in fate, his reliance upon a universal goodwill, were mere foolishness. " If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved," said distrustflil Turner; and the saying is at once the best tribute to Girtin and the deepest glimpse into the gulf which separated his character from that of his greatest rival. Before Girtin appeared, the notion of attempting to create with water-colour, of setting it up as a competitor with oil, had scarcely dawned upon its users. To them the very phrase " water-colour painting " would have seemed audacious. They bore themselves humbly, and looked upon their in'etier as a means of adding a shy grace to things meant for the satisfaction, not of the artistic instinct, but of the desire for documents. Such a demand obviously had its limits. A finite number of Norman castles, Gothic abbeys, great houses, and other self-assertive scenes existed, and of these only a small percentage would put in their claims each year. From this point of view it was obvious that if the places were to be taken as the only motives for the drawings, every order received by A. was one lost to B. So thought Turner ; but Girtin was more sanguine. He apparently understood that art creates its own demand. He believed that if the form of it he practised boldly widened its field of operations, accepted no arbitrary limits to its methods or aims, and freely com- municated its discoveries, it would rise from its parasitical condition and flourish as it had never flourished before. Some of the comparisons between Turner and Girtin appear to run on mistaken lines. If we wish to get at a real idea of how the two young men stood to one another, and of their respective potentialities, we must confine our survey to the less than twenty-eight years they spent in this world together, and must examine the harvest of those 35 TURNER years in the light of general experience. It is, I think, impossible to deny that in pure art Girtin's work beats anything done by Turner before 1802. But this in itself need not prevent us from seeing more promise in Turner than in Girtin. As a matter of fact, great artists have more often begun in the tentative, experimental style of the former than in the masterful fashion of his rival. It seems almost a law that the longer an artist remains in the exploring and acquiring stage the richer will be his production when he begins to express. In painting, precocity seldom foretells a fruitful and commanding genius, and Girtin was precocious. He seems never to have hung in the doubts of youth at all. " While Turner was still plodding on in his endless study, Girtin," says Monkhouse, " had already completed his education. The grand style of Piranesi, the large manner of Canaletto, taught him all he needed ... He soon saw his way to express what he wished to express. He had an extraordinary gift of hand, a wonderful comprehension of any subject he wished to draw. At once he seems to have fixed in his mind an idea of what he wanted to represent — composition, colour, feeling, and all — and he went straight to work and realised it without doubt or difficulty. Few artists can be said to have known so clearly what they wanted to do, and been able to do it with so little check."* There is no exaggeration in this description, and yet to how very few young artists who have afterwards become great could such language be applied ! Great painters nearly all begin slowly. Few among them show real power until they have passed the age at which Girtin died. For this reason then, if for no other, it seems not improbable that if Girtin had lived he would have failed to rival the extraordinary development of Turner. But that makes it all the more desirable that he should not lose the credit of his actual performance. In the volume I have just quoted, Mr. Monkhouse makes a comparison between the two painters which * "The Early English Water Colour Painters," p. 45. 36 CHARACTERISTICS OF GIRTIN is, I think, unfair to Girtin. " His temper," he says, " was always calm and restful, careless for the most part as to choice of subject, but accepting it, whatever it was, as a thing whose nature and beauty were to be revealed, not, like Turner, as a thing to be treated, altered, and twisted till it assumed a beauty in accordance with his taste, and a shape which conveyed an extrinsic idea. He always surrendered himself to his subject, whether it was a landscape or a building. The quality of his poetry was expressive, not creative — he left creation to nature, and assumed the more humble role of interpreter. ... If Girtin's imagination was, on the one hand, passive, receptive, expressive, Turner's was, on the other, active, restless, creative. . . . Girtin liad turned topography into art, but his art was only nature at her best ; whereas Turner's was a different thing from nature altogether, not only prose turned into poetry, but translated into another language." * Here, I submit, we have a comparison based on such a false foundation that it leads to a conclusion diametrically opposed to the truth. Girtin accepted the facts of any scene before which he planted his easel because his aim was art, and not topography. He understood how, by treatment often so unobtrusive that only the artist would recognise its presence, he could be at once faithful and creative. He could take the simplest scene — a few yards of river bank, with trees against the sky above it, as in the South Kensington "View on the Wharfe," for example — and make it a creation, in the true artistic sense, by pure unity of vision. Turner, in his early years, had Httle or no perception of this. He could not have made this " Wharfe " drawing, had it been to save his life. He did not trust art, because he was not yet an artist. His way of making a scene more interesting than he found it was to exaggerate the objective beauties he saw there and to bring in others from outside. The notion that the required charm could be given by design, by chiaroscuro, by the music of touch, was not realized by him until a • " The Early English Water Colour Painters," p. 55. TURNER comparatively late period of his career, and never in his whole life did he grasp it with the vigorous faith of Girtin. Turner was very far indeed from being topographically faithful. It has been demon- strated often enough how ready he was to disregard the facts he had before him, and to paint scenes as he thought they ought to be rather than as they were. But his changes were inspired, not by Girtin's desire to justify his work by art, but by the wish to increase the objective beauty of his subjects. From any given scene Girtin selected such elements as made for congruity of impression, neglecting the rest, and so controlling the marcli of liis brush that the unity thus won by selection should be enhanced by sympathetic handling — by a handling in which the size, form, and direction of every touch should contribute its quota towards the final harmony. Turner proceeded differently. His idea was not to reduce a scene to esthetic unity, but to inflate it into objective sublimity. He aimed, not at a new creation justified by art alone, but at the glorification of the fact existing. One consequence of this difference in aim is that Girtin never forces his material, never attempts to make it do more than it can do well, never causes us to lose our interest in it and our wonder at its capacities ; while Turner continually does all these things. The fibre, as it were, of a Girtin is in harmony with the art it carries, while that of a Turner is too often strained and tortured, not to be looked too closely into. Here, before I go any fiirther, it may be as well to explain what I understand by the term " creation " as applied to a work of art. Such an explanation is by no means superfluous, seeing how the word has been used by more than one writer on Turner. But before we can define " creation," we must define " art " itself, or at least hint at a definition. Ruskin's teaching, so far as I understand it, comes to this : that art lies in the comprehension, reproduction, and illustration of pre- existing beauty, and that the greatest artist is therefore he who studies Nature with the profoundest humility, who reproduces her with the 3S MONT BLANC. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A, THE NATIONAL GALLERY. CREATION IN ART most unerring fidelity, who illustrates her with the greatest resource. That educated people may be induced to accept such a description by a great writer the career of John Ruskin proves. And yet it is obviously no description of art at all, but merely a theory as to the ultimate, external purpose to which painters, sculptors, and perhaps architects, should devote their art. A definition of art itself must be founded on some quality, some element, running through all works of art, and through nothing else. Is there such an element ? That question may be best answered by another — Has beauty a cause ? Is it a mere question of association, or is there some deep principle underlying all those combinations of phenomena which seem to us beautiful ? I have made my confession in detail elsewhere,* so that here I need only say that beauty seems to me to be fitness and purpose expressed with the help of an intrinsic relation between our senses and the phenomena perceptible by them. In the case of the one art into which extraneous matters do not import confusion — I mean, of course, the art of Music — we all accept the existence of this intrinsic relation and allow that upon it rests our capacity for being moved. In some arts, and especially in tliat of Painting, the intrinsic element is so complicated with the accidental and too readily com- prehensible feature of imitation, that most of us never get beyond the ideas connected with the latter, but fasten upon some part of them as containing the whole secret of art. So far has this gone that even great artists have been found to assert that art is imitation, and the best work of art the one which comes nearest to producing illusion, and this in spite of the fact that the great majority of the arts have nothing even incidentally to do with the production of illusion at all. To return to my definition : Art of all kinds depends on the creation, not on the reproduction, of beauty. The artist's business is to understand, or at least to perceive, the laws upon which Nature works, * Introduction to " Gainsborough, and his Place in English Art." TURNER and to put those laws into action on his own account, so that he may add to and not merely duplicate the world's stock of beauty. He must imitate the conduct of Nature, not her products. His imitation of the latter is not an end, but a means ; and even as a means it occupies but a small place in the sum-total of artistic activities. The revelation of beauty has been sometimes suggested as a sufficient description of art. In a certain sense, no doubt, a Beethoven sonata, or the interior of Westminster Abbey, may be described as revelations of the beauty latent in a piano, or in Portland stone ; but unless we abolish the word create altogether — or restrict it to things made out of nothing, which comes to the same thing — it is reasonable to apply it to works of the human imagination. To reveal beauty is an ambiguous phrase. You may do that by drawing back a curtain. To create beauty, to combine elements into a new whole, intimately fused and only to be judged by itself, describes, if it does not logically define, the aim of all true art. By creation, then, I mean the use of the intrinsic power over our senses which lies in the final elements of art — in Painting, these elements are line, colour, tone, and handling — to give coherence, unity, and, as it were, organic existence to a picture, statue, or other work of art ; to make it impossible to suppose that any part of it came by accident ; or that, as a whole, it was anything whatever but a declaration of passions and desires really and truly felt by its maker. Artistic creation is quite distinct, then, from objective invention. It need not imply invention in the ordinary sense of the word at all, but may consist entirely in that work of selection, control, and accent which is enough by itself to give inevitableness and unity to any product of the human mind. I may illustrate what I mean by referring to a fine Holbein, such as the " Sieur de Morctte " — if that be its right name — at Dresden. Here we have an artistic creation entirely depending for its unity on control, on the unerring way in which part answers to 40 KILGARRAN CASTLE. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (36 4S) In the Collection of H. L. BISCHOFFSHEIM HIS ACQUISITIVENESS part, and one detail of treatment is implied by another, so that we are left with the conviction that the picture was seen, as a whole, by a single effort of the painter's mind before a touch was put upon the panel. Incidentally, no doubt, the portrait bears witness to the inventiveness of Holbein, for he surely designed the beautiful dagger slung at Morette's waist. But that fact, which wc only know through external evidence, does not affect the artistic merit of the work or make it more creative from the pictorial standpoint than if the dagger had been copied. It only enables us to say that Holbein was a good designer of metal-work as well as a fine painter. As a creator, then, as the presenter of a concrete idea, as a painter trusting entirely to the intrinsic powers of his art, Girtin deserves a place above the Turner of his own time. Turner saw this clearly enough and trembled for what the future might have in store. He profited by Girtin's example, but many years had to pass before his own work reached the unity and breadth of his early rival. To put it thus, however, is not quite fair to Turner ; for it would be absurd to pretend that he entirely adopted Girtin's ideals or aimed at identical results. His mind in youth was essentially acquisitive. He admired Girtin's coherence, breadth, and repose ; he aimed in turn at the golden atmosphere of Cuyp, at the sonorous colour and sensuous shapes of Titian, at the gradation of Claude — in fact, he was governed till late in youth by the spirit which made him, one varnishing day, carry off a knife-load of some brilliant pigment from a brother artist's palette. The fifteen years which elapsed between his first definite indication of the purpose for which nature had made him, and the real inauguration of his career, were spent in a more industrious exploration of the terrain than any painter had undertaken since the days of Leonardo. He tried all kinds of ideas, and measured himself against all the artists whose fame he found in the mouths of those about him. Had he been as determined to master the technique of the oil medium as he TURNER was to prove himself the intellectual superior of the famous artists who had brought it to perfection, his own ambitions might have been more completely fulfilled. How differently he behaved towards the technique of water- colour ! One of the strangest things in his career is the contrast between his determination to explore the capabilities and extend the field of the one material, and his readiness to take the other for granted and use it in a sort of blind trust. If Turner had been the first man to employ water-colour, he could scarcely have been more careful to make good every step in his progress. From those primitive drawings, in which one or two simple pigments are used merely to hint, as it were, that nature is not all black and white, down to the gorgeous dreams in which his development closed, his invention never sleeps. Turner's stages are continuous. He makes no adventurous bounds, but, like an Alpine climber, he cuts secure steps before committing himself to a further advance. It is at least arguable that every secret, every trick and contrivance known to the water-colour painter, was discovered by Turner. Some, of course, were known before his time, but these he re-discovered and used with a skill fir beyond that of their first inventors. His dexterity was equal to his ingenuity. We cannot say of him, as we can of so many pioneers, that he pointed to the goal but could not reach it himself He not only devised methods, he used them so consum- mately that in some cases we are disputing still as to whether he used them at all ! * He could lay a wash and paint into it in such a fishion that a good eye may be deceived into thinking it not a wash, but tinted paper. t He could use the rag and the knife with similar Ji)iesse, and I have heard proficient water-colour * In this connection the reader may be referred to a strange story told by the late W. J. Stillman in his "Autobiography of a Journalist," vol. i., p. 162. I Those Rhine drawings once at Farnley are an instance ot this. It (jften used to be asserted that they were on grey paper. 4.2 MALMESBURY ABBEY. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNKK, K.A. In tile Cullection of HERBERT A. DAY, Esq. HIS MASTERY OF WATER COLOUR painters contradict each other flatly on the question whether certain eficcts of his were obtained with body-colour or the sponge. Now and then, no doubt, especially in the Rivers-of- France drawings, he forced his effects and showed a characteristic want of tenderness for his material. But on the whole he makes it clear that he loved water-colour for its own sake as he never loved oil. He nursed it, dexterously behandled it, watched its symptoms and corrected its weaknesses, like a mother with her child, until at last he moulded it into the finest possible instrument for the use to which he put it, an instrument having, indeed, no defect but that curse of mortality which it shares with us all. LINLITHGOW PALACE. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER R.A, m , loi In the Collection of THOMAS BROCKLEBANK, ISsq. CHAPTER III. Commencement ot Turner's Real Career — Drawings of Norham and Pembroke Castles — Influence of Wilson and the Dutchmen — " Calais Pier " — " Vintage of Macon" — "The Shipwreck" — Quality of his Imagination — His Domestic Arrangements — Pictures of English 'Great Houses' — Tours on the Rhine and in Italy. THE beginning of Turner's real career is usually put down to 1800, but the way of seeing things and the method of work which were to be his down to the end of his eclectic period, seldom found stronger expression than in the pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy two years earlier. In 1797, moved, perhaps, to a new spurt of emulation by Girtin's superb drawings of Yorkshire scenery, he had started on his first visit to the North. During this tour he had wandered through the Lake district, through Cumberland, +5 TURNER Northumberland, Durham, and part of Yorkshire ; he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Whitaker, for whom he was afterwards to do so much, and had, perhaps, paid his lirst visit to that " Farnley Hall, near the market-town of Otley, in the West Riding of the county of York," which was to fill so large a place in his life. A few months later he sent to the Academy ot 1798 several pictures and drawings which more than foreshadowed the style of his first maturity. Among these were the famous " Norham Castle, on the Tweed — Summer's Morn,"* " Morning among the Coniston Fells, Cumberland, "f " Dunstanborough Castle — Sunrise after a squally Night, "| " Holy Island Cathedral," " The Refectory of Kirkstall Abbey, Yorkshire," " Winesdale [sic), Yorkshire — an Autumnal Morning," and four other subjects from north ot the Humber. The story has been told by all Turner's biographers how, during his visit to Scotland in 181 8, he one day found hiinself walking with Cadell, the publisher, on the Tweed, opposite Norham, and how, when a turn in the path brought them face to face witli the majestic ruin. Turner bowed and doiTed his hat, explaining that Norham had made his fortune, through the drawing he sent to the Exhibition of 1798. All these productions of 1798 are intensely characteristic, and may, in my opinion, be accepted as marking the birth of Turner's imagination no less clearly than his work of two years later. The " Norham " especially is a most ingenious essay in balance. The influence of Girtin is still to be traced in the breadth of the four alternating planes into which the tone scheme is arranged; but Turner's own idiosyncrasy is responsible for the elaborate way in which the details echo and corroborate each other, for the subtly masked curves which lead the eye into the centre without stirring it to rebellion, and, of course, for that insistence on history and hope as well as on present fact, • Now in the possession of Laundy Walters, Esq. (See Plate). Mrs. Thwaites has a similar drawing, "t" In the National Gallery. J Given by the Duke of Westminster to the Melbourne Gallery. 46 CLAPHAM COMMON. From the Oil Painting l^y J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (12 - 17) THE NATIONAL GALLERY. I EARLY PICTURES which seems to have been one of his most unfailing pre-occupations. The drawing is without the simplicity of concentration, the masterful command to see what the painter saw and nothing else, which it would have had at the hands of Girtin. Turner accepts accident and does his best to digest it, failing a little here and there, with the ugly contour of the river bank on our right, for instance; as yet he does not sweep it aside and replace it, as he will do twenty years later, with details scarcely more relevant but vastly more amusing of his own invention. The pressure of Girtin is again shown in the "Dunstan- borough." Here we have concentration of the deliberate and contrast of the slightly melodramatic kind, carried almost to violence in tlie search for breadth, force, and perhaps a moral. Down to 1802, the year of Girtin's death, the main influences which shared with him the work of forming Turner were those of Reynolds and Wilson. Sir Joshua had so much in common with the Welsh landscape-painter that a young artist could found himself on both without any risk of embracing discordant elements. Both were enamoured of fat textures, of a rich, crumby impasto, of low tones and of the shadow that seems to tempt exploration with the outstretched hand. In the " Kilgarran Castle" of 1799 (see Plate), the combination of Turner's various exemplars is carried to the farthest point. Colour, texture, and even handling all betray an eye ted on Wilson, while the vigour of the chiaroscuro, the determination to win unity at no matter what cost to light, rests lightly on Girtin. In this much discussed picture Turner shows a command of his material upon which he seldom improved. Later in life he was to use the other end of his palette with equal skill and more audacity, but he seldom contrived to sink tone so low without loss of atmosphere. Imagine what the " Calais Pier " would be, for instance, if the storm sky against which the sail of the incoming packet is relieved were as transparent in its gloom as 47 TURNER the shadows of the " Kilgarran Castle," and you will have to confess that in some ways Turner made better use of English than of Dutch examples. In a picture painted a year or two later than the " Kilgarran " — I mean the " Dolbadern," which he gave to the Academy on his election as an R.A. in 1802 — much the same kind of effect is aimed at, but with less success. The glazes are there managed with interior skill, with the result that the shadows are at once more inscrutable and less mysterious. To the Academy of 1799, Turner sent a " Harlech Castle," the fine drawing of " Warkworth," now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the " Battle of the Nile," his first naval picture. These things, added to what he had previously done, earned him his election as an A.R.A.* In 1800 he exhibited the "Dolbadern," already mentioned, a "Carnarvon," and three views of Fonthill, in water colours, and his "Fifth Plague of Egypt," the Plague ot Fire, which he was afterwards to make use of for one of the least successful of his Liber Plates. It is a strange o combination of fiaivete in the imaginative parts, with vigour in those which depend on memory and experience. The thunder-storm — for so, in appearance, it is — is well, the Egypt, with its Pyramids and an unautho- rized pylon, extremely ill, done. The Pyramids look like tents. Another Old Testament subject followed in 1801, and a third in 1802. These were "The Army of the Medes destroyed by a Whirlwind," and the " Tenth Plague of Egypt," the latter also used for the Liber. Mr. Ruskin seems to have had these three pictures in his eye when he declared that during Turner's "first period" (i 800-1 810) his mind was fixed on the Law ot the Old Testament. Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse, naturally enough, calls this an astonishing statement, and declares that there is no proof that he ever in his life gave a thought to the Law of Turner marked his promotion by moving westwards from the humble neighljourhood of Maiden Lane. He took a studio, at least, at 64, Harley Street. In 1801, 1802, and 1803 his address in the Academy catalogues is 75, Norton Street, Portland Road. In 1 804 he returned to 64, Harley Street. 48 EARLY PICTURES the Old Testament. That he founded pictures on some of the more dramatic events of Jewish history is a very different matter, and is probably to be explained by the simple fact that in the rotation ot his rivalries he, at about this time, found himself confronted by the works of Nicolas Poussin and his disciple Caspar. It is certainly a significant fact that, early in this very year, 1802, Buchanan, the picture importer, had exhibited in London Nicolas Poussin's " Plague at Ashdod," between which and Turner's plague pictures the affinities are striking.* A most interesting and excellent production of about this time is here reproduced, in " Clapham Common." It is small, little more than a pochade, and looks as if it had been done off-hand. And yet in some ways it is curiously elaborate. The pattern made by the trees has been most carefully established, while the shape of the piece of sky, bounded above by the leafige of the near clump and below by the sky-line of the distant wood, has been arrived at by much revision. The scheme as a whole points to thought of Hobbema ; the colour and handling to study of Wilson, Morland, or Hoppner.t It is a brilliant little sketch, and is notable, moreover, as an instance of what so many writers on Turner have pointed out, namely the care with which he preserved an idea for future use. Mutatis mutandis, the pattern here elaborated is practically the same as that in the Liber plate known as " Hindoo Devotions." The date of this little canvas is given in the National Gallery Catalogue as 1802. At this time Turner's evolution was anything but continuous. His " Norliam " was * Irvine, Buchanan's agent, had extracted the Poussin from the Colonna Gallery in Rome, the previous autumn. The picture was afterwards sold to the Duke of Northumberland, who presented it to the National Gallery in 1838. Another and finer example of the same composition is in the Louvre. -f If Hoppner had devoted himself more to landscape, he would probably have taken his place with Wilson and Gainsborough at the head of the landscape-painters of the eighteenth century. His drawings rival those of Gainsborough, while his backgrounds to portraits often show more of the true spirit of landscape than those of Reynolds. 49 H TURNER in the Exhibition in 1798, his "Pembroke Castle, South Wales — Thunder-storm approaching" (see Plate), in that of 1801. And yet, judging from the technical evidence, which is usually the safest in such a question, this " Pembroke " might be put before the " Norham." The truth seems to be that, in the continual veerings about due to his eclectic methods, the later drawing represents a moment when he was thinking of the Dutchmen, the various " Van-somethings and Back-somethings who have libelled the sea," rather than of the more imaginative qualities of Wilson and Girtin. Compared with the "Norham," the "Pembroke" is hard, over-definite, and airless. As a design, however, it shows Turner's early manner at its best, especially in the sky, which is a masterpiece of pictorial arrangement as well as of fidelity to natural fact. Turner had possibly first set foot in Scotland in 1797, when he made his drawing of Norham ; but his serious dealings with that country began only in 1801. In the autumn of that year he made one of those wide casts of his net which are so characteristic, embracing points then so far apart as Edinburgh and Loch Awe. He seems to have prepared himself for the journey by dipping into ' Ossian,' with whose poetry his own has often such an amusing affinity. " Ben Lomond Mountain, Scotland : The Traveller — vide Ossian's ' War of Caros,' " is one of the titles in the 1802 catalogue. The other Scottish scenes are the " Falls of Clyde, Lanarkshire: Noon — vide Akenside's 'Hymn to the Naiads'"; " Kilchern Castle, with the Cruchan Ben Mountains, Scotland : Noon " ; and " Edinburgh New Town, Castle, etc., from the Water of Leith." One of the most curious instances of Turner's explorations of other artists' styles is given by the drawing of Edinburgh. We can under- stand his inquiries into the methods of Wilson or Claude ; but why should his pugnacity be stirred by such a painter as Alexander Nasmyth ? And yet before this " Edinburgh, from the Water of Leith," we cannot doubt that Turner's intention was to show that he could beat Nasmyth PEMBROKE CASTLE. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. (a? • 41) In the Collection ot RALPH BROCKLEBANK, Esq. L FIRST CONTINENTAL JOURNEY at his own game. The variations from the normal Turner of the time are all in Nasmyth's direction. Composition, colour, handling, and effect — all these have a leaven of the Scottish master, as if Turner's very thoughts were aflected by the attraction of proximity. In 1802 Turner followed up his visit to the North by one to the South. Taking advantage, like so many others, of the Peace of Amiens, he crossed the Channel and penetrated as far into the Alps as what he — or the Academy printer — calls the " Valley of d'Aoust." He was fiiscinated by the scenery about Bonneville and Chamonix, and the drawings he brought back seem to me the most purely artistic things he had yet produced. He forgot for the time those impertinent recollections of other men which had so long beset him, and allowed the emotions stirred by a new aspect of nature to have their own way with his brush. In such things as the " Bonneville " which belonged to Mr. Ruskin, or the closer and more spontaneous sketch in the collection of Mr. Stopford Brooke (see Plate), wc find a more undiluted Turner than we have yet encountered. If he had never again countermarched or stepped aside, we should have been able to say that he had found himself during his visit to the Continent in 1802. Unfortunately things passed otherwise, and many years were yet to elapse before he finally settled down to his own line in the race for fame. In the same Exhibition with his " Bonneville, Savoy, with Mont Blanc," his "Chateau de St. Michel," and his " Source of the Arveron," appeared two of his frankest and, it must be confessed, most successful experiments with stolen thunder. These were " Calais Pier " and the " Festival on the Opening of the Vintage of Macon." The appearance of these two pictures in the same Exhi- bition with a " Holy Family " and the landscapes from the foot of Mont Blanc showed extraordinary versatility; but they also proved that Turner did not then really and fully appreciate the art against which he was pitting himself 51 TURNER The " Vintage of Macon " is conceived on the lines of Claude ; the " Calais Pier " on those followed by the whole group of Dutch sea- painters of the seventeenth century, Jakob Ruisdael, Willem van de Velde, Bakhuisen, and the rest. Unfortunately Turner neglects, or rather ignores, one of the main pictorial qualities on which Claude, Ruisdael, and Van de Velde depended for their charm. The " Vintage of Macon " is finer in design than an average Claude ; the winding river, the groups of trees, the bridge, the crowds of figures, the roll of the distant land- scape, are better understood and employed to better effect than was usual with the Franco-Italian. So also with the " Calais Pier." No Dutchman ever painted anything which could live beside it, so far as vigour of design, movement, and knowledge of the sea go. When we look, however, into the actual constitution of the pictures, into the quality of the crust of which they are composed, it is another matter. The Frenchman and the Dutchman took it as part ot their business to make paint a beautiful thing, to lose it as paint and regain it as air and light. The best Van de Velde — such a thing as the " Calm " in the Wynn Ellis collection in the National Gallery — is a small afliair beside a great Turner, but it shows a respect for material, a comprehension of the rights, if I may put it so, of the little heaps of pigment on the palette, unreached by the Englishman in 1803. Two years later Turner painted the " Shipwreck," which now hangs as a pendant to the " Calais Pier " in the National Gallery. Splendid in design and unprecedented as a page from the drama of the sea, it has the same defect as its companion in the indiflirence, the want of tenderness, solicitude, and comprehension, with which the material is handled. Turner has failed to keep his shadows transparent and his sky luminous ; his thunder-clouds are solid, a ship could break her topmast against them ; while the surface of his sea looks capable of sustaining those iron manacles which he was in due time to set afloat upon it. And this applies to all the sea-pictures painted within a year 52 CONWAY CASTLE. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. In tile Coliection ul THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTEH. SHEERNESS. From the Oil Painting iiy J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (40i ■ 5741 In ttie Collection ot LADY WANTAGE. RUSKIN ON ARTIFICIAL LANDSCAPE or two of 1803 ; "Fishermen on a lee Shore in squally Weather,"* painted about 1802; "Boats carrying out Anchors and Cables to Dutch Men-of-war," exhibited at the R.A. in 1804 ;t the " Sea-piece," of which there is a small sketch or replica in the Oxford University Galleries (see Plate); I the Duke of Westminster's "Conway Castle" (see Plate); and even to some extent to Lady Wantage's " Sheerness " (see Plate), painted as late as 1805. In all these Turner's attention is concentrated on the maritime drama. He thinks too little of his paint and canvas. This Mr. Ruskin counts to him as a mcrit,§ thereby deciding olT- hand the whole question of the artist's v. the layman's view of art. In his comparison of the old masters with the moderns as landscape painters, he says that " this infant school differed inherently from that ancienter one, in that its motive was love. However feeble its efforts might be, they were /or the sake of nature^ not of the picture, and therefore, having this germ of life, it grew and throve. Robson did not paint purple hills because he wanted to show how he could lay on purple ; but because he truly loved their dark peaks. Fielding did not paint downs to show how dexterously he could sponge out mists ; but because he loved downs. " The modern school, therefore, became the only true school of landscape which has yet existed ; the artificial Claude and Caspar work may be cast aside out of our way .... and from the last landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life, we must pass at once to the first of Turner. "II Now, the implication here is that a picture consists of objective truth and technical skill, with no third element between the two. It • See Plate. t I" '''S possession of Mr. George Donaldson (see Plate). \ The large picture is in America (Widener Collection). The version bequeathed to the National Gallery by Mr. J. M. Parsons seems to me a copy, perhaps by the same hand as that " Kilgarran Castle " which was the subject of so much discussion at the Guildhall Exhibition in 1899. § ■' Modern Painters," Vol. III. p. 332 (Ed. 1888). II Id., lac. cit. 53 TURNER ignores subjective esthetic expression altogether, and gives not the slightest hint that its author was alive to the fact that a painter talks with paint, as a musician does with sound, and might paint purple hills neither because he loved them nor because he wished to show off his skill in laying purple washes, but because they gave him notes, both of form and colour, essential to the new creation he had in view. To the Ruskni of 1856, who thought there was no middle way between painting a thing for the love of it and painting it for the sake of exhibiting technical dexterity, the vogue of Ruisdacl, and Cuyp, and Hobbema, must indeed have seemed perverse. Twenty years after the passage I have quoted was irrevocably in the hands of his disciples, Ruskin might have read the following description of what should he, in a picture, between imitation and dexterity, to justify both. " Ruysdael peint comme il pense, sainement, fortement, largement. La qualite exterieure de son travail indiquc assez bicn Failure ordinaire de son esprit. II y a dans cettc peinture sobre, soucieuse, un peu fiere, je nc sais quelle hauteur attristee qui s'annonce de loin, ct de pres vous captive par un charme de simplicite naturclle et de noble fimiliarite tout a fait a lui. Une toile de Ruysdael est un tout ou Ton sent une ordonnance, une vue d'ensemblc, une intention niaitresse, la volonte de peindre une fois pour toutes un des traits de son pays, peut- etre bien aussi le desir de fixer le souvenir d'un moment de sa vie. Un fonds solide, un besoin de construire et d'organiscr, de subordonner le detail a des ensembles, la couleur a des effets, I'interet des choses an plan qu'elles occupent ; une parfaite connaissance des lois naturelles et des lois techniques, avec cela un certain dcdain pour I'inutile, le trop agreable ou le superflu, un grand goiit avec un grand sens, une main fort calme avec le cceur qui bat, tel est a peu pres ce qu'on decouvre a I'analyse dans un tableau de Ruysdael."* In short, the contents of a * Fronientin, " Les Maitres d'Autrcfois," pp. '24.8-9. 5+ CASSIOBURY. From the Water-Coloiir Drawing by J. IM. W. TURNER, R. (iS . 28) In the Collection of C. IVIORLAND AGNEW, tsq. It MEETING OF THAMES AND MEDWAY. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. I42 ■ 56i) !n tlie Collection of P. A. B. WIDENER, Esq. FROMENTIN ON RUISDAEL Ruisdael landscape are there for reasons beyond — and above — either objective truth or technical display, and it is by the profound insight with which these reasons are grasped and the inexorable unity to which they consequently lead that the Dutch master has earned his feme. We have to bear in mind, too, that, acute as it is, even Fromentin's analysis has to indicate the point by working round it. Art can only be explained in terms of art. To no accounter for lesthetic emotion can it be said " rem acu tetigisti." There is an element beyond analysis, like the life in the cell. Harmony perhaps, harmony pure and simple, may be brought within our tests, but the organic unity which makes the supreme work of art, whether we have to do with a thing as complex as a picture or as simple as a Pisano medal, refuses to be translated into any language but its own. The artist can only say to the student : " Look, look long enough and with sufficient goodwill, and in time — perhaps — you will see what it is you have to aim at ! " The development of an artist depends mainly upon his gradual perception of the intrinsic limits and capacities of the material he is using. The painter who is a painter first and a preacher, poet, botanist — whatever you like — afterwards, turns to " the grace of Nature or her gloom, her tender and sacred seclusions or her reach of power and wrath," not so much to recall impressive phenomena, as to select those which can be painted finally and masterfully, so that his picture, when complete, may ring upon the human senses with a unity, clearness, and freedom from sign oi pain and effort similar to Nature's own. Turner had no sooner finished the group of pictures 1 have just been discussing than he seems himself to have been struck by their heaviness and want of inner light. He had been treating oil paint as if it were water-colour, laying broad swathes of opaque pigment as he had been accustomed to lay transparent washes, and providing no substitute for the action of the white paper. How he was turned TURNER to a better practice we can only guess, but judging from the change in his methods after 1805, it seems likely that he had been taking hints from Willem Van de Velde. In i8o6 he painted the famous little picture of the " Victory beating up the Channel with the Body of Nelson on board." * Here all the heaviness and opacity of the earlier sea-pieces have disappeared. The general effect is as light and airy as a water-colour. The shadowed hollows of the waves suggest the depths below, and behind the autumn clouds sweeping up from the south-west we can feel the illimitable spaces of the sky. A year after the " Victory " was painted, Turner had the " Sun rising in a Mist" at the Academy. That was in 1807; in 1808 he showed the " Trafalgar," now in the National Gallery ; and twelve months later still the " Spithead . Boat's Crew recovering an Anchor " (see Plate), in the same collection. To my mind, the " Spithead " is the completest thing Turner ever did on the basis of the Dutch tradition. In conception it carries the ideas of Ruisdael, Van de Velde, de Vlieger, Van de Capelle, etc., to a pitch of dignity and grandeur far beyond their reach, while in such purely technical matters as the opposition of reflecting to absorbent surfaces, the clearness of the shadows and the gradation of the impasto, it shows that at the time it was painted Turner had thoroughly learnt his lesson. + How docile he could be as a scholar is shown even more convincingly by a certain picture, painted about this time, for which he took the scafTolding from Rembrandt. This is the " Wind- mill and Lock," in the collection of the late Sir Francis Cook. It rests so frankly upon Lord Lansdowne's famous " Mill " that to criticise it as an independent picture would be beside the mark. Practically the * In the possession of Sir Donald Currie, G.C.M.G. {see Plate). \ The silver tonality of this picture is now somewhat affected by a darkened glaze over what — on the analogy of seascape — should, 1 suppose, be called the forewater I The crests and long hollows of the nearer waves are covered with a skin of brownish yellow, suggestive of an experiment with some material which never came off a palette. Mr. Buttery suggests beer. What- ever it may be, it lias changed with time, and modified the general harmony. Traces of the same glaze arc to be found in the "Shipwreck," and in other pictures of this time. S6 BOATS CARRYING OUT CABLES, &C. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R,A. (40 51) In the Collectiod of GEO. DONALDSON, Esq, THE VICTORY RETURNING FROM TRAFALGAR. From the Oil Painting by J. fA. W. TURNER, R.A. (26 X 39) In the Collection of SIR DONALD CURRIE, G.C.M.G. 1 HIS IMAGINATION one specially Turneresque thing about it is the production downwards of the vertical lines of the mill by those of the lock gates, a contrivance of which Turner was fond. It gives an eifective contrast between the horizontal and vertical elements of the arabesque. Another but somewhat later pasticcio upon the great Dutchman is the picture known as " Rembrandt's Daughter," at Farnley. Here the general arrangement, the colour scheme, and even some of the minor elements of the design, are adopted frankly from the " Potiphar's Wife," which passed some years ago from Grittleton House to the Berlin Museum. Let us return for a moment to our narrative. It has sometimes been asserted that Turner paid a second visit to the Continent in 1804. The statement is improbable, for at that time the war with Napoleon was again in full swing. No confirmation of it, moreover, is to be found beyond the appearance of a " SchafFhausen " in the Academy of 1806, and the existence of some Swiss drawings dated in that year in the Fawkes collection. But these must either have been based on his notes and memories of 1802 or on someone else's drawings. His second experience of the South was pretty certainly deferred until 181 g, when he made the tour on the Rhine which resulted in those fine drawings on grey grounds which were so long at Farnley. Crossing the Channel a second time in the same year, lie added the glories of Italy to his stock of impressions. During the interval between his first Continental journey and the second, his energies had been mainly governed by his strange desire to meet and vanquish all the champions of his own art in turn. It is difficult to say whether in so proceeding he said to himself, like Napoleon, '■^'Je vais me mesurer avec — so and so," or whether he simply took the line of least resistance. Many strong imaginations cannot act when they have nothing but a blank sheet before them. I think Turner's imagination was one of these. Before it could work at all it had 57 ' TURNER actually to see something to work upon. In spite of its extraordinary vigour, wealth, and grandeur, it required a lead, at least during the first thirty years of his career. It is remarkable that among the thousands of sketches he left behind him, scarcely any invented schemes of pictures, or abstract compositions, such as most painters make in scores, are to be found. His sketches are all notes from Nature. The processes ot his imagination were those of development, expansion, and addition, rather than of initial invention. Most of his oil pictures dated earlier than about 1830 suggest something we have seen else- where. Even before the "Ulysses and Polyphemus" of 1829 (see Plate), which may be fairly considered the finest combination of art and nature he ever achieved, memories arise like ghosts, and we find ourselves won- dering whether he ever saw the famous Titian which has lately migrated from Cobham Hall to Boston.* From first to last Turner was rather an improver on a splendid scale, an expander and enhancer of the objects which attracted him, than a man driven by the desire to make. We cannot imagine him whittling a stick into an amusing shape or playing with a bit of clay until he had thumbed it into art. He was always projecting his imagination outwards and setting it objective tasks. He cried to Nature as well as to other artists, " I can improve on what you do." In spirit he was a challenger, and we know that choice of weapons lies with the challenged. He competed with Nature, just as he competed with the Poussins, with Claude and Wilson. He modified and exaggerated her features, not to make a new thing — depending, indeed, on external facts for its scaffolding, but on its own intrinsic balance, coherence, and repose for artistic finality — but to make old, eternal things more gorgeous, more self-assertive and yet more mysteriously human than they arc already. * He must have seen it. It was brought to England with the Orleans Gallery, and publicly exhibited in London from the end of December, 1798, to the end of June, 1799, with the rest of those Orleans pictures which had failed to take the fancy of either the Duke of Bridgewater, or Lord Carlisle, or Lord Stafford; it was also at the British Listitution, in 18 19. 58 THE TROUT STREAM, From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNKR, R.A. 136 4SI In the Collection ot ABEL BUCKLEY. Esq. WALTON BRIDGES. From the Oil PaintiriK by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (35 ' 48) In the Collection of LADY WANTAGE. PICTURES BETWEEN 1806 AND 1820 The years between 1806 and 1820 are curiously portioned out between his two forms of rivalry. In 1806 he capped Poussin with his " Garden of the Hesperides," and did homage to Rembrandt with his "Windmill and Lock"; in 1811, 1814, and 1815, he wrestled with Claude in "Mercury and Herse," * in " Apuleia in search of Apuleius,"t and in "Crossing the Brook" (see Plate) ; while in 18 19 he gave the coup de grace to W. Van de Velde with " The Meuse — Orange Merchantman going to pieces on the Bar " (see Plate). In all these pictures the various models are kept apart with ease. There is no attempt at Carraccian combinations. Elements from Claude are not allowed to intrude upon Caspar, nor those from Rembrandt upon Van de Velde. And yet all through these same years Turner is producing things in a more personal style, which may be traced, like an underground river cropping up here and there, from about 1797 to its bolder emergence in or about 1820. During the thirteen years which elapsed between the " Hesperides " and the " Meuse " — i.e. between 1806 and 18 19 — his more individualistic productions were, "Bligh Sand "(before 1809), the " Trout Stream " (i 807),: the "Wreck of the Minotaur,"" % and "Abingdon, Berkshire" (1810), "Apollo and the Python" (1811), "Snowstorm — Hannibal crossing the Alps" (1812), "A Frosty Morning" (1813) (see Plate), and "Walton Bridges" (i8i5).|| All these are marked by the individual preferences which were afterwards to mark his great period, more especially by that love of a visible atmosphere and the pregnant mysteriousness to which it leads, which I venture to trace to the effect of London upon his childish mind. * In the possession of Sir Samuel Montagu, Bart., M.P. (See Plate.) f Several explanations of this title have been given. Probably it has no explanation beyond the painter's fancy. Mr. Monkhouse suggests that Turner had a vague recollection of Apuleius's connection with Apulia, and thought the latter was a woman ! I have already given my reasons for believing that Turner was a much less ignorant person than such a theory implies. J In the possession of Abel Buckley, Esq. (See Plate.) § In the collection of Lord Yarborough. 11 In the collection of Lady Wantage, (See Plate.) 59 *i TURNER Of Turner's private life during the years between 1800 and 1820 no very connected account can be given. Between the Exhibitions of 1799 and 1800 he moved from Hand Court to 64, Harlcy Street. This latter house he may have actually bought ; for at his death, fifty years later, it and the one next door, as well as the house round the corner in Queen Anne Street which is so intimately connected with his name, all belonged to him and communicated with each other at the back. From 1801 to 1803 his address in the Academy catalogue is 75, Norton Street, Portland Road, where he probably had a studio. In 1804 it is again 64, Harley Street, to which, from 1808 to i 811, is added "West End, Upper Mall, Hammersmith." After 1811, Queen Anne Street West appears, and remains to the end, being supplemented, fi'om 1814 to 1826, by his Twickenham address, called "Solus Lodge" in the former year, and " Sandycombe Lodge" from 1815 to 1826. There is evidence that in these various houses Turner lived with some reasonable degree of comfort, and that the squalor and neglect which depressed visitors to his gallery did not at lirst extend to the more private rooms. Between 1802 and i8ig the war, as I believe, prevented him from renewing his acquaintance with the Continent. During these years, indeed, he travelled much, but in his own country. He visited many great houses, and made pictures ot them for their owners. Two " Tableys," * one in a calm, the other in a wind, were in the 1809 Academy; two "Lowther Castles"f and a " Petworth " :[; in that ot i8io. " Somerhill " § was painted in 181 i, and " Raby Castle " |1 in 181 7. During these same years he was a constant visitor at Farnley. Between 181 1 and 1 8 14 (the exact date is doubtful) he paid his first and, so far as is known, his only visit to Devonshire and to those relations of his own who were settled at Barnstaple and Exeter. During this journey he made many of the drawings afterwards engraved by George * One now at Pctwurth. | At Lowther. ij: At Petworth. § In the possession ot Ralph Brocklebank, Esq, (See Plate.) 11 Belongs to Mr. H. Walters, Baltimore. 60 MERCURY AND HERSE. From the Oil Painting by J. IVl. W. TURNtR, R.A. 175 < 63) In tlie Collection of Sir SAMUEL l«ONTAGU, Bart, X SOMERHILL. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNKR, R.A. 13s - 471) In tile Collection nf RALPH BROCKLEBANK, Esq. HIGH STREET, EDINBURGH. From tlie Wnter^Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. 168 9il In the Collection ot THOMAS BROCKLEBANK, Esq. EARLY TOURS ABROAD Cooke in the "Southern Coast." In 1816 he spent several weeks in Yorkshire, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Richmond, collecting the materials, no doubt, if not actually making the drawings, for the plates to Whitaker's " Richmondshire." In 1818 he crossed the Border for the third time, to make drawings for Scott's " Provincial Antiquities " ; and in 1 8 1 9 he made the two foreign tours already mentioned — one of a fortnight on the Rhine, the other in Italy. It remains to be said that during the last twelve of these years — from 1807 to 181 9 — much of his attention was given to what is likely to be the most durable monument to his fame ; J mean to the preparation and production of his Liber Studiorum. But this is a matter so important to a proper understanding of his art that it must have a chapter to itself. 61 I BOLTON ABBEY. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (II ~ 1541 In the Collection of GEORGE SALTING. Esq. CHAPTER IV. LIBER SrUDIORUM. OF all the quaint rivalries of Turner the quaintest, perhaps, was that with Claude's Liber Veritatis. Here he deliberately set himself to outdo a series of memoranda by a full-dress display of learning. The fame of the Chatsworth drawings had been extended, indeed, if not enhanced, by the publication of Earlom's reproductions ; but even then its reputation was of a kind which would have stirred 63 TURNER the rivalry of no great artist who ever lived but Turner. That it should have suggested the notion ot publishing a sort ot cyclopaedia of landscape was not surprising, but that Turner should have so named his publication and arranged its details as to draw attention at every point to the other Liber, to insist on the fact of his emulation, and to make it impossible to ignore the naivete of his impulse, is only to be accounted for by the sort of intellectual moat he had excavated between himself and the outer world. The Liber Veritatis is a collection of some two hundred drawings, ot various degrees of elaboration, made by Claude after his own pictures, no doubt to serve as reminders for his private use. Many among them bear on their backs the dates and buyers' names of the original pictures. In manner and in what commerce calls " importance," they may be compared to the drawings contributed by modern French landscape painters to the earlier illustrated catalogues of the Salon.* They were never meant to be taken as works ot art on their own account, although Claude, being, after all, an artist, could not help inspiring them with modest little souls of their own. Such things were dragged into a false position when they were reproduced by Earlom, still more when Turner turned on his searchlight and confronted them with the elaborate productions of his own genius. That he did so, however, is a good thing for us, for Liber Studiorum, putting colour aside, not only shows his gift at its best, it is the only part ot his ceuvre which has nothing to fear from the passage of time.f The attack on Claude's monopoly must have been projected in the very first years of the nineteenth century, for Turner's opening shot was fired in 1807. The first part of Liber published on the 20th of January in that year, and its preparation must have taken a * The allusion is to the drawings, not to their reproductions in the citalogues. \ The most valuable books on the Liber are Turner's Liber Studiorum, by W. G. Rawlinson ; Notes on the Liber Studiorum, by the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke ; and Notes and Memoranda respecting the Liber Stiidiorum, by John Pye and J. L. Roget. 64 LIBER STUDIORUM considerable time. The scheme was to make drawings in brown for each plate, to etch these in outline on copper, and then to employ the professional engraver to finish them in some method adapted to the reproduction of broad washes of colour. For the most part the drawings* are identical in size with the plates, but in a few cases they are slightly smaller. The pigment mainly used is sepia ; but the tint is so often modified by the introduction ot other browns that the collection, as a whole, shows a great variety of tones. These drawings, beautiful as they often are, are essentially stepping- stones to something beyond. No man had a finer sense ot economy in means than Turner. In working for the engraver he would set on paper exactly what was wanted, and nothing more. He felt no temptation to lavish his gift of delicacy on a scaffolding. Now and then he even makes alterations in a drawing without troubhng himself to match its original colour. Apart, then, from the loss of brilliancy, caused by the half-century of daylight to which the fifty-one drawings which originally came to the National Gallery have been exposed, these monochromes do not stand towards the finished mezzotints as Charles Keene's drawings, for instance, do towards the woodcuts in Punch. To find Turner's thoughts in their full development we must turn to a fine set of the plates. f * Eighty-four drawings, classed as designs for the Lihn Sludiorum, are in the National Gallery, fifty-one being part of the original inheritance from Turner, and twenty-seven of the Henry Vaughan bequest. The British Museum has three, and a few others are distributed in two or three private collections, making about a hundred altogether. This total is only reached, however, by including many things which have no known connection with the authentic Liber designs beyond similarity of size and method. ■f Replying to some critic, Ruskin says, in the Literary Gazelle for November 13, 1858; " You object that the drawings for the Liber Studiorum are not included in my catalogue. They are not so, because I did not consider them as, in a true sense, drawings at all. They are merely washes of colour, laid roughly to guide the mezzotint engraver in his first process ; the drawing, properly so-called, was all put in by Turner when he etched the plates, or super- added by repeated touchings on the proofs. These brown guides, for they are nothing more, are entirely unlike the painter's usual work, and in every way inferior to it; so that students wishing to understand tlie composition of the Liber, must always work from the plates, and not 65 K TURNER The troubles of Liber began with the selection of a tone process and of engravers to carry it out. As Turner proposed to etch his own outline,* what he had to determine was the best method of introducing chiaroscuro. In the hands of F. C. Lewis and others, aquatmt had been giving satisfactory results ; moreover, Lewis had already engraved a small plate of " Coalbrookdale " for Turner in that method. So his lirst choice fell upon it. He etched a subject, "Bridge and Goats," afterwards issued as No. 43, and bargained witli Lewis to complete it in aquatint for five guineas. This turned out to be the only plate finished solely in aquatint t of the series ; for during its progress Turner sent a second drawing — a " Chepstow Castle," afterwards re-named " River Wye " — to Lewis, demanding that he should either etch it himself or dispense with an etching altogether. Lewis agreed, but wished to raise his terms to eight guineas. The result was that Turner accepted the first plate, paid five guineas for it, withdrew the " Chepstow," and closed his account with Lewis. He wished, in short, to vary the contract on his own side, while denying a similar freedom to the other party to the bargain. In a rough-and-ready fishion Turner, no doubt, believed himself honest. In those various dealings with his Liber prints which look so like sharp practice, he seems always to have preserved a certain balance between what he gave and what he took. He sophisticated his from these first indications of purpose." This seems to me greatly overstated, especially the opinion I have put in italics. It would give an entirely wrong impression to anyone who had never seen the drawings. A few of them, such as the "Holy Island Cathedral," the "Morpeth," the " Kirkstall Crypt," the " Dunstanborough," the " Mill near the Grande Chartreuse," and the " Egremont Sctpiece," are delightful little works on their own account, showing both great spontaneity and an immediate solicitude. They arc, in short, better than the corresponding plates. But there can be no doubt that, as a rule. Turner was thinking chiefly of the final purpose as he made the drawings. In this respect they may be compared to his designs for things like the vignettes to Rogers and Scott. • Following, no doubt, the precedent of Girtin, in the " Views of Paris." t This statement must not, however, be taken too literally. Both roulette and rocker have been used in tiie lower part uf the plate. 66 SPITHEAD: BOAT'S CREW RECOVERING ANCHOR. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (67 « 92) THE NATIONAL GALLERY. !, I LIBER STUDIORUM proofs, but only after he had put new work on the plates. It must be confessed, however, that the fine jleur of honesty was beyond his comprehension,* and when we think over his treatment of Lewis wc cannot help suspecting it to have been caused, partly at least, by a desire to get rid of aquatint, and substitute the nobler method of that tnaniere anglaise into the secrets of which he had lately been initiated. Before 1807, the year at which we have arrived, mezzotint had been mainly confined to the reproduction of figure pictures ; but a few scrapers, especially Richard Earlom (who was still alive when Turner was searching for a process), had shown its capacity to render not only the most delicate gradation, but even a reasonably fine line. Earlom, the engraver of Claude's Liber, whose experience had lain more closely than that of anyone else to the course marked out by Turner,t was an old man in 1807; but there was no dearth of successors. Among these was the painter's namesake, Charles Turner. Tradition says tliat, attracted by the name. Turner the painter called upon Turner the engraver, and was by him initiated into the process of scraping a plate. Charles Turner was not only the most prolific, + he was also one of the most artistic of mezzo- tinters. Some of his plates have a breadth and unity scarcely surpassed even in the greatest days of the art. His relations with the painter seem to have been exceptionally smooth for a time. He was so successful as a teacher that J. M. W. Turner was afterwards enabled to scrape with his own hands one of the finest of the Ltber plates, the " Junction of the Severn and the Wye," as well as some in which his success was less complete. Tlie process finally determined on and used tliroughout the * His dealings with Cooke, the pubhsher of the "Southern Coast," to be presently mentioned, are another instance of the same thing. j" He had, for instance, translated Hobbema into mezzotmt with curious success. J During his life of eighty-three years, he scraped no fewer than 685 plates (Alfred Whit- man, Catalogue in the "Masters of Mezzotint," 1898). 67 TURNER production of Liher, after the experiment with Lewis, was as follows : Turner made the initial drawing, carrying it only so far and putting only so much labour into it as the immediate purpose required. He then received from the engraver a copper on which an etching ground had been duly laid. To this he transferred his outline, using the point with masterly freedom and assurance after his initial attempts. The copper, with the drawing, was then returned to the engraver, who bit in the painter's outline, supplied proofs of the completed etching, then rocked the plate, and finished it to the best of his ability in mezzotint. Proofs were then again submitted to Turner, who criticised them minutely, occasionally working on the plate himself, and always showing extreme solicitude on such points as the value of a tone, and the colour and variations of the ink.* Thus, speaking generally, was Liber produced, although a few plates were differently treated. In some cases, happily not many, the etched outline was left to the engraver ; in others — eleven plates in all — the painter did the scraping himselft Turner's first intention, after getting rid of aquatint, was that Charles Turner should engrave the whole series. Unfortunately a difficulty arose, similar in principle to that with Lewis. The painter seems to have agreed to pay his namesake eight guineas a plate, and then, after a considerable number had been done, to have foisted the publication and sale of the parts on the engraver as well. In this Charles appears to have acquiesced at first, but after a short experience * Direct evidence is wanting for some of these statements, but probability, as well as a critical examination of tlie results, leaves little doubt of their truth. t " Two things are noticeable about Turner's own mezzotinting — one the rapidity with which it wore, as compared with the work of the professional engravers; and the other (arising doubtless out of this) the extraordinary way in which he changed the effects from time to time " (W. G Rawlinson, to whose admirable catalogue raisonne I must refer the reader for a more detailed discussion of Turner's division of labour with his engravers). 68 LIBER STUDIORUM he demanded an advance to ten guineas a plate. Turner refused, and took his work elsewhere. After a time the breach was patched up, and Charles Turner resumed work on the Liber. The total number of plates contributed by him was twenty-three — twenty before the quarrel, and three afterwards Meanwhile the painter employed William Say, who scraped eleven plates ; Dunkarton, who did five ; Dawe, four ; Hodgetts, three ; S. W. Reynolds and Clint, two each ; Annis, one by himself and two more conjointly with Easling ; and Lupton, the youngest of them all, who did four of the published plates and a few of the unpublished. These figures amount to a total of sixty plates out of the seventy-one published ; the remaining eleven are those mezzotinted by the painter. As to the printing, it was carried out by Lahee, of Castle Street, Leicester Square. " The paper chiefly employed was a fine-ribbed, hand-made description, which he habitually obtained from France expressly for his copper-plates. It contained a certain amount of iron, which accounts for the stains one sometimes sees in Liber plates. Occasionally Whatman paper was used for the prints, as it was almost invariably for the etchings. The very late and worthless impressions, which appeared chiefly at the Turner sale in 1873, were taken on a smoother and stouter English paper. " Turner was in the habit of constantly visiting Lahee's printing office, to watch the results of his alterations and the effects of new plates. Standing by the press, he would examine each impression as it came ofl^, and with burin (? dry point) or scraper make such changes or retouches on the copper as he thought desirable ; sometimes getting the plates into such a muddle that they had to be sent home to him to be seriously treated." * From all this it will be seen that Turner spared no pains to secure * Rawlinson, op. cit., p. xxviii. 69 TURNER victory in his attack on Claude* It is disappointing to find a great painter driven to the production of a work ot art by any desire but that of creation, and the whole business becomes a little grotesque when we remember the disparity of the forces brought into the field. On the one side a half-playful artist, with a sheet of paper, a pen, and brush ; on the other, an artist doing all he knew, a bevy of engravers, pens, brushes, copperplates, etching points, rollers, scrapers, burnishers, printers, proofs, trial states, and what not. Turner's sense of humour should have saved him from giving such an opportunity to the scoffer. But, after all, it is ungrateful to question his motive, for its result has been to enrich us with a unique work of art. The inspiration, perhaps, was vicious, but the result brought justification. A great deal has been written on the moral aims of Like?- — on its system of sub-division into "Pastoral;" "Elegant, or Epic, Pastoral ; " " Historical," etc. ; and on the details of its production, publication, and subsequent career. These matters are for the most part outside my purpose, and so for their more detailed discussion I must again refer the reader to the volumes of Mr. W. G. Rawlinson, Mr. J. L. Roget, Mr. Stopford Brooke, and others. I must confess that to me the discussions which have taken place over such matters as the classification of the Liber plates seem a mistaken use ot time and energy. The whole business of H. and P., and E. P. and M. was childish, and could only occur to such a puzzle-headed man as Turner was apt to be outside his art. The sub-divisions served no purpose at all, except to embarrass the artist and make it difficult for him to keep the promises he had made to himself The object of art is not " to delineate everything that is visible beneath the * Attempts have been made to deny that competition with the Liber Veritatis was seriously in Turner's mind when he started his own enterprise. This idea seems to me quite untenable in view of the painter's general conduct in the first and second periods of his art, to say nothing of that letter to Robinson the publisher, in which he proposes a similar attack on Wilson and Woollett. 70 FISHMAHKET ON THE SANDS: SUN RISING IN A VAPOUR. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNHR, R A. (34 ^ 44) In the Collection of EDWARD CHAPMAN, M.P. LIBER STUDIORUM sun," but to create beauty. We do not examine a Liber plate in order to grasp the diiTerence between a " pastoral," an " elegant pastoral," and a " historical " subject, but to learn how emotion can be translated into terms of line and tone. For the same reason it appears to me a matter of very little importance whether Turner meant to moralise or not when he contrasted the beauty oi a London park with the lumpish ugliness of the boys and girls who make it their playground. No doubt he was fond of ulterior meanings ; he loved to suggest that his mind was teeming with deep thoughts, to which he might give expression an he would. So far, however, as he does let us catch glimpses of them his moral ideas are commonplace enough. They never amount to more than a perception of obvious contrasts — between strength and weakness, between things that are and things that have been, between human ambition and human destiny — to which most of us are equal. It is scarcely worth while to dwell upon such moralisings as these, especially as they have been treated, once for all, with an amount of tenderness, acuteness, and ingenuity to which the present writer can lay no sort of claim. Mr. Stopford Brooke has squeezed Libei- dry, so far as its possibilities of an esoteric meaning go. It cannot be denied that he has by doing so enormously increased the pleasure the literary man may derive from these seventy-one plates ; but I suspect that if Turner could read his volume it would touch him with all the charm of novelty ! For me, the Liber is a confession of aesthetic faith, a declaration by Turner of what he believed to be the aim and scope of land- scape painting, a guide-post directing us into the recesses of his artistic soul, and enabling us to explore both its weakness and its amazing strength. We can, for instance, learn from it that he was a colourist. The peculiar quality of its gradations, the way in which its chiaroscuro suggests and even demands colour — as, for instance, 71 TURNER in that passage in " The Lake of Thun " where he sets the peak of the Niescn against a coronet of electric fire — could only be con- ceived by an imagination at home with colour. Bearing in mind that the Liber was begun in 1806 and abandoned in i8ig, we can nearly divine the whole Turner from its pages, and, as I think, explain to ourselves with some confidence why his art appears supreme to one class of artists and the mass of amateurs, while to those who prefer the more Latin view of art — the view which has had to put up with so much contumely through a characteristically English misappre- hension of the phrase " art for art's sake " — it seems deficient in a quality by which many humble artists and modest works of art have a firm hold on immortality. This defect lies on the threshold. It has to do with the initial conception of the Liber, and must be accepted as a continuing modifier of its internal completeness. Put shortly, it is the want of intrinsic meaning in its substance. Turner's etching has been praised, I will not say extravagantly, but at least unreservedly, by a high authority, the late Philip Gilbert Hamerton ; but line has a delight of its own which the painter did not fully explore. As representations his etchings for Liber are superb. They suggest the growth and forms of trees, the structure of rocks, the conduct of water under the stress of wind or invitation of gravity, with perfect knowledge as well as with that sense of Nature's infinity in loveliness in which he stands alone. But the tense vibration of the etched line, the quick, electric sympathy with which it answers to the etcher's emotion, welding it in one creative act with the truth he has to tell, is not so evident. Compare one of the best of the etchings — the " Holy Island Cathedral," the " Cephalus and Procris," the " Woman at a Tank,"* or the " St. Catherine's Hill," a favourite of mine — with any Rembrandt landscape, say " Six's Bridge," or even with such a fine Seymour Haden as " Erith Marshes," and you will have to confess that, * Commonly called " Hindoo Ablutions " ; but is she not rather using the tank as a mirror ? 72 LIBER STUDIORUM in spite of the natural beauty suggested by the point as Turner wields it, his line is without the peculiar and particular soul with which it is imbued by the born etcher. This, of course, would not be a fair comparison if we could point to some other production of Turner's in which the essential qualities of line were better understood. In Liber, etching is not there for its own sake : it was used as a scaffolding for a tone process, and so, you may say, to compare its results with those obtained under freer conditions is absurd. That, of course, is true; but, fortunately, opportunities are plentiful enough for the study of Turner's feeling about line, and the more use we make of those opportunities the more convinced do we become that its essential qualities appealed to him but slightly, and that his interest was roused mainly, if not exclusively, by its power to represent and illustrate. It is the same with his chiaroscuro. His intention is not, like that of Rembrandt, to talk with light and shade, but to play with lights and shadows as he finds them ; he does not use chiaroscuro for the direct expression of spontaneous emotion, but tor the reflex expression of feelings excited by external phenomena. I have no doubt that many — if there should be many — who read these lines will think that all this is mere splitting ot hairs, and that any attempt to distinguish between created and represented beauty is waste of time. To me, however, it seems important that one should have a clear idea of why it is that an unalloyed satisfaction, so far as it goes, can be felt in such a thing as a print from a few square inches of copper on which Rembrandt has scratched a dying tree and the top of a hat,* while not a few of those who have spent their lives on art are left with a sense of want before the most beautiful of Turner's plates. In genius at large the Englishman was the Dutchman's equal ; why, then, is his work less poignant The explanation lies in * No. 154 in Middleton's Catalogue; 349 in Cilarles Blanc's; 360 in Dutuit's. 73 L TURNER this, that Turner imposed an office on line, while Rembrandt developed its essential powers. Rembrandt felt an emotional sympathy with his material — an emotion expressed in the quahty of every line he drew ; Turner's sympathy was not with his means, but with his visions, which explains not only the lukewarm interest felt in him by those trained in the Latin tradition, but also that indifference to the physical constitution of his own productions which has led to the death of so many among them. The real glory of the Liber Studiorum lies in its description of Nature. Turner does not analyse her beauty ; he does not explain why she is beautiful ; but he does tell us how, with a completeness and a grasp on the detail of phenomena which no one else has approached. His treatment of all objects is equally convincing, unless, indeed, it be the human figure. We know from other evidence that he could draw the figure well enough when he liked, so it is curious that the one thing he slurs over, and presents, as it were, in symbol, in these seventy-one plates, is their population. He felt, perhaps, that figures which could be looked at for their own sake would divide the interest too much. And, after all, perhaps it is a mistake to say he slurred them over. They appear symbolic at first sight, because our eye is so much keener to note deficiencies in our own direction than in any other. If rocks and trees could see and speak, they would probably complain that the painter had shown an unfair preference in the opposite way, and rendered his own kind with a completeness denied to theirs. My own favourites in Liber are those plates in which Turner's extraordinary skill in suggesting the beauty of trees has the best chance of showing itself His skill in combining the beauty of individual trees with that of tree companies and regiments was unrivalled. His interest, in short, never flagged. Look, for example, at the wood overhanging the water on the left of the " Raglan." You may count the separate 7+ HULKS ON THE TAMAR. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. (36 ^ 48) In Ilie Collection of LORD LECONFIELD. LIBER STUDIORUM trees and admire the form of each, and yet the clump as a whole has its character, it delineates the shape and rise of the ground on which it stands, it does its work in the general pattern, and carries on the space note struck by the opposite and less encumbered bank. So well do they fit the ground, you feci that if the trees were away the composition would still be good, the evening sun would still pour through the mediaeval skeleton upon happy surfaces beyond. And the central clump, the outpost at the bridge, how beautiful it is 1 And yet the " Raglan " was not etched by Turner. Mr. Stopford Brooke even calls the etching " so commonplace and monotonous that — I almost seem to hear Turner say, ' I must save the subject from failure and mezzotint it myself!'" This judgment is a little too hard, perhaps, on Dawe, to whom the etching is generally ascribed. Finer than the " Raglan," more intense in its passion, and closer in its unity, is the somewhat similar " Procris and Cephalus." To me this seems the most consummate of all the L,iber designs. Here again we have a company of trees, as individual and yet as eager in collaboration as ladies in a minuet. The pattern made by their stems is perfect in its rhythm, while they bend round and over the tragic focus with exactly the right amount of elemental sympathy. Nothing is forced, but no chance of expression is missed, and the longer we look the more profound does the painter's insight into the mood of Nature appear. The subtlety of art, too, the slightness of the barrier between success and comparative failure, is curiously illustrated. Take away the few strokes of the scraper which represent Aurora, and half the charm* would vanish. The " St. Catherine's Hill " is not usually classed among the great successes of Liber, and yet I think it does what it sets out to do with a completeness rivalled by very few of its companions. In spite of the * I wonder whether Turner had Wilson's " Niobe " in his mind when he conceived the design. The fable seems to me to be rightly interpreted in the letter from iMr. Webster Thomson, printed by IVIr. Stopford Brooke (Notes, etc., p. 136). TURNER ruined chapel on the hill the melancholy note is nowhere struck. The passion is that of evening peace, of work done and rest at hand, of drawing in from the dispersed labours of the day to the common shelter and common repose of the night. The etching is among the best of the series. It is carried through with more foresight, with a more continuing comprehension of where the mezzotint will need support, than some of the others. In most of the plates some passage is left to the scraper which clearly asks for line ; here the only thing of the sort is a little bit of the main group of trees, where some ambiguity between cloud and foliage might have been avoided by a few strokes of the point. Turner is said to have hated trees and the trouble they gave him. The success with which he used them in Liber was due, no doubt, mainly to the process employed. Trees with tlieir intimate commingling of tone and contour, of silhouette and mass, call for the alliance of broad tones with line. Skies, mountains, sweeps of foreground or water, might be rendered with mezzotint alone. Line indeed is an embarrassment to all these, and is introduced by Turner more for the sake of keeping a print under one skin than because it was locally required. His apparent principle was to etch when one object had to stand in silhouette against another, but elsewhere to restrain his point to what liarmony and balance demanded. Hence it is not difficult to see why, speaking broadly, the plates in which trees play a large part are best. Reticent with the point as Turner was in most of the treeless subjects, he was hardly reticent enough, and not a few of them wcjuld have been im- proved by a franker trust in the scraper. I would even go further, and say that most of the plates in which no trees or other things with cutting silhouettes occur, would have been finer had there been no etching at all. The " Peat Bog, Scotland," and " Martcllo Towers near Bexhill " are good instances. In both of these line was demanded by the figures and other detached objects in the foreground, but all the landscape parts might have been left entirely to mezzotint. The mountains, and even 76 THE NORE. From the Oil Painting by J. M. W. TURNKR, R.A. (35 • 48) In the Collection of GEORGE J. GOULD, Esq. LIBER STUDIORUM the morass, in the former, the white clifF in the latter, seem too essentially matters of tone for the intrusion of ink ridges, which are almost as much out of place as they would have been in the sky. I have included the " Holy Island Cathedral " among the best etchings in the Liber. Simple as it is, and comparatively bare of those signs of thought and intention in which most of the plates are so rich, it appeals to me, at least, by its unity — by the harmony in which its two ingredients work together to a common conclusion. Each fulfils exactly its own function, and neither encroaches in the slightest degree on the other. Both engraver and etcher have done their best, and their best, for its purpose, is very good. In this plate Turner's line has the robustness of Prout and something of the nerve of Meryon, while the conception as a whole has an Egyptian dignity. The closeness with which failure in art treads on the heels of success may again be seen by comparing this plate with No. 39, "The Crypt of Kirkstall Abbey." This is one of the plates entirely due to the painter's own hand. Even the biting, I suspect, is his, for the tendency of the professional etcher would be the reverse of what we see here. The bitings have been too few, consequently the lines, from the nearest parts of the vault to the farthest, are too equal in value. Turner's heart was not in this plate. It contains several pentimenti, or rather mistakes, which he was not at the pains to erase, and we can see that he shirked the trouble of working out the complex chiaroscuro problem he had set himself It is a pity, for with more careful execution it would have been one of the best of the series. Even as it is, it is much better than the third abbey, the " Rivaulx," in which a forced and melodramatic scheme of light and shadow is draped on a clumsy and, in parts, incomprehensible skeleton of etching. I have discussed Ltber chiefly from the a;sthetic standpoint — 77 TURNER from the standpoint of one who asks whether Hne and chiaroscuro are used in it for their proper and peculiar purposes, and whether they are so employed that in each case a real unity has been reached. It is easier to answer the second question in the affirmative than the first. A few of the plates, no doubt — " Pembury Mill," " Juvenile Tricks," " Young Anglers," for example — have no particular meaning in their arrangement, while a few others — " Farmyard with Cock," " Lauftenburg," " Rivaulx " — are forced, mechanical, and drawing-mastery in their division of light and shade. These, however, are exceptions, and on the whole an extraordinary grip on the constituents of natural beauty marks the series. As our eyes move from one plate to another wc feel our emotions focussed as they are by perfect scenes in nature. Looking into them for the poetry of execution, for the evidence of the virtuoso's intense sympathy with his materials, our satisfaction becomes less. In pictures there are two poetries — the poetry of Art and the poetry of Nature; and the poetry of Art is the higher of the two, for it is distilled from the masterpiece of Nature, the brain of man at its best. Now Turner's poetry is the poetry of Nature, transferred and re-arranged, but still recognizable as Nature's own property and creation. Compare the most moving of his Liber compositions, say the " Procris and Cephalus," with the design by Cotman known as " Breaking the Clod."* Before the latter we feel no impulse to analyse, to trace the origin of any detail, to refer to Nature and collate. We accept the whole as it is, and feel it touching our spirits with its creator's mood in a tense directness. Over a Turner, disquisition is never impertinent. We can always busy ourselves with its relation to the external fact, which remains to the end its raison d'etre. No better proof need be sought that Turner was essentially an illustrator than the temptation to signalise » A reproduction has been published by the Autotype Company. The original black-and-white drawing is in the collection of Mr. Reeve, of Norwich. 78 ON THE MOSELLE. Frnni the Wnter-Coloiir Drawiiii: by I. W. TIlRNKR, R.A, is4 741 In the Collection of W. G, RAWLINSON. Esq. LIBER STUDIORUM the points of contact between his art and the nature from which it springs, which everyone feels who thinks about him at all. Before the Cotman we are pricked by no such desire. Like a Rembrandt or a Titian, it presents its own title to existence ; it demands no labour of reminiscence or comparison, before its full meaning and value can be realised. Whether Liber declares Turner's own conclusions about man in nature with the frankness insisted on by Ruskin in a lamous passage,* we may, ot course, doubt. Art rather than despair makes a painter prefer broken-down mills to flourishing factories; riven and blasted trees to smug saplings, prosperous and cabbagy; gnarled old hcdgers and ditchers to straight young farmers. But although we need not accept these threescore and ten plates as Turner's fall confession, they do contain a view of life, and their unity depends on the wakefulness with which its details are watched and steeped in a prevailing sentiment. * "Modern Painters," Vol. V., pp. 336 et seq. (ed. 1888). 79 TOURS. From tlie Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. 151 » 7i) UNIVERSITY GALLERIES, OXFORD. J CHAPTER V. r's lite trom 1805 to 1820 — Elected Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy — The happiest years of his life — Friendship with Walter Fawkes — Visits to Farnley — Exhibition of his Drawings in Grosvenor Place — Death of Fawkes — Friendship with Lord Egremont and Visits to Petworth — William Frederick Wells and his Daughter, Mrs. Wheeler — The Trimmers of Heston — Alleged courtship of " Miss " by Turner — Cyrus Redding ; with Turner in Devon — Eastlake's Recollections of Turner — Robert James Graves : travels in Turner's company — Dealings with Cooke over the " Southern Coast " — Light they throw upon Turner's character. EFORE going on to discuss Turner's art during what I shall venture to call his experimental period, it will be con- venient to complete what little has to be told of his private 81 M TURNER life during those years. I can only speak in generalities, for it has long been impossible — perhaps, indeed, it has never been possible since Turner died — to gather authentic details of how he passed the hours not actually spent in the studio. All the doings of his we really know would fill but a very little part of his seventy-six years. His life was probably more, rather than less, full of little cares and worries than usual ; and I think the instinctive picture we all form of a man's pre-occupations would in his case be exceptionally inaccurate. More than most artists, no doubt, Turner lived in his art. The wrenching of his mind from matters connected with paint was even more of a waking from dreams, of a turning away from pleasant Spanish castles to squalid realities, than with others into whose brains a vivid imagination has been mixed. Picture him turning his eyes from the growing glory of the " Polyphemus " to listen to the woes of Hannah Danby, or from the patriotic fervour of the " Temeraire " to concoct excuses for slipping away to Mrs. Booth, at Margate, and you will shudder at the contrasts involved in his scheme of life. In such a see-saw the mental pleasures must surely have been at the sunny end of the beam, and the gorgeous life of the imagination, self-sufficing, and revolving in a splendid cycle of observation, conception, and realization, must have stood up as the better part before the painter's eyes. Enough has now been said of the dessous of Turner's career to ensure that its elTect on his art and visible personality shall not be ignored. What we have to remember is that the painter who, above all others, watched, investigated, and reproduced the phenomena of external nature, did not confine his curiosity to mountains, skies, and seas, but followed it through such byeways as only a Rops and a Maupassant have publicly ventured into. At page 313 of his 1877 edition, Thornbury gives an account of how Turner spent his week-ends, to which I may refer as completing the indications 82 SCARBOROUGH. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. I" < isll In the Collection of C. MORLAND AGNEW. Esq. PROFESSOR OF PERSPECTIVE afforded by his notions of domestic comfort. A biography is nothing if not real, says Monkhouse in referring to this very question, and it would be absurd to ignore, or even to slur over, one oi the most masterful strains in any individuality into which it intrudes. Having referred to it, however, and insisted sufficiently on its presence, we may henceforth leave the reader to picture for himself the elTect of an irregular household and still more irregular connections outside it on a passionate, generous, and distrustful soul like that of Turner. In 1808 Turner was elected Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy, an honour he accepted with gravity, and the duties of which he made serious attempts to fulfil, if not to create ! His inexact habit of mind would have made him a bad teacher of such a science even if he had mastered it himself. But a very short examination of any picture or drawing of his in which architecture is an important feature is enough to show that his real knowledge of perspective was confined to a few of its more easily mastered principles. Trace, for example, the edge of a cast shadow over a Gothic front, and you will have to confess that he was quite unable to lay out its course over the hills and hollows.* And yet he attempted to lecture on the more advanced and mathematical branches of the subject. It is possible that he may have had clearer ideas in his mind than those he managed to convey, whether in words or with his pencil, and that his practical mistakes sprang rather from indifference than from ignorance. But on the whole it seems more probable that he had been poring over some treatise on perspective as he did over Ovid, and that both his election to the professorship and his attempts to fulfil its duties, were suggested by a characteristic pleasure in a half-comprehension of * Instances may be found in most of Turner's more elaborate drawings, such as the "Salisbury Spire, from the South," in the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the " Worcester" in the British Museum. Among the scores of pocket-books in the tin boxes of the National Gallery, there is one of curious interest, in which the pages are divided between incomprehensible exercises in perspective and erotic verse ! 83 M* TURNER what he had read. He took a childish pride in his office, and was accustomed for years to append the letters P.P. to his name, and to set out his title in full in the Academy Catalogue. The early years of the nineteenth century were probably the happiest in Turner's hfe. It was during those years that he made nearly all the friends who were neither official, on the one hand, like his colleagues of the Academy, nor, on the other, of a class to be kept as much as possible out of sight. The fimily of Dr. Whitaker ; the Fawkeses, of Farnley ; William Frederick Wells, the President of the Old Water-Colour Society, and, we are told, the " onlie begetter " of the Liber Studiorum ; Mrs. Wheeler, Wells' daughter ; the Trimmers, of Heston ; and Lord Egremont ; — among people like these he spent the hours which were not given to his families, his painting, or his foreign tours. As time went on his peculiar domestic arrangements must have become more and more embarrassing — for his amours were by no means childless — and must have reduced his facilities of intercourse with his friends. Down to about 1825, the glimpses we catch of the man himself are mostly reassuring, and seem to point to an individual happy on the whole and full of interest in life, although set apart to some extent from his fellow creatures by a want of constitutional balance, by an absence of that correlation of faculties which enables a man to walk serenely along the high road, and even in the bye-paths of life. In 1825 died Walter Fawkes, and a change in Turner can be traced, or rather divined, from that year. We have less direct evidence as to the relations between the two men than we should like, but we know that so great was Turner's affection for Fawkes, and so deep his regret for his loss, that he would never return to Farnley after 1825, in spite of many pressing invitations from his friend's children. During the first quarter of the century his visits were constant, and were often so long as to outgrow all right to the title. Nearly the 84 TIVOLI : A COMPOSITION. From tlie Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. In the Collection of Sir JAMES JOICEY, Bart,, IH,P, i i THE MEUSE: ORANGE MERCHANTMAN GOING TO PIECES i ON THE BAR. I ^ From the Oil Painting liy J. M. W. TURNER. R.A, (67 . 944) THE NATIONAL GALL1£RY. FARNLEY whole summer of 1 8 1 6 was spent there. He was invariably a guest at all family functions, and a pathetic illustration of the love between himself and Fawkes is afforded by the fact, that during the last few weeks of the Squire's life, when Fawkes came to London to consult the doctors in the early months of 1825, Turner dined twelve times with him in Grosvenor Place. Farnley Hall has been called Turner's shrine. The figure, perhaps, is not very exact, but it expresses what the visitor feels when he first makes acquaintance with the place. It is a picturesque house, lying well above the Wharfe, about seven miles from Harrogate, and between the extremities of two long spurs reaching down to the Wharfe from the moors. In architecture it is Jacobean impaled — as a herald might say — with eighteenth-century renaissance. You go in through low-browed picturesque rooms, panelled and carved, into the light loftiness of the Adam tradition at least, if nothing more. Two of these modern rooms are consecrated to Turner. One is hung round with drawings, in the other three great oil pictures, " Dordrecht," " Rembrandt's Daughter," and an unnamed " Sea Piece," decorate the walls, while the tables groan under albums and solander cases filled with smaller things, and those studies of birds which so moved the soul of Ruskin. Standing in the window of the saloon, the room with the framed water colours, you may look across the valley, in which the Wharfe meanders round many Turners, to the long hill on which those clouds gathered that gave the painter his first hint for " Hannibal crossing the Alps." The whole scene is at once intensely English and intensely Turner. The only thing which does something to lessen our pleasure is the prosperity of Otley, two miles away, which sends smoke and waftures of some mysterious aroma to filter through the oaks and beeches of the Wharfe. Before i8go the Farnley collection was completer than it is now, for in that year many of the Rhine drawings on grey grounds were sold, as well as other things. TURNER If Walter Fawkes, or either of his two wives, had been inoculated with a drop of Boswellian ichor, we might have really known Turner. They had opportunities denied to everyone else, for they united practical intimacy with that essential difference of origin which makes observation detached and keen. The second Mrs. Fawkes did keep a diary, but it merely records the comings and goings of the painter among those of other people, and conveys little information beyond enabling us to see that he was almost a member of the family. An entry in 1816 records, however, that Mr. and Mrs. Fawkes and Turner visited Craven together, and that from Skipton the painter went on a sketching tour. Two years later we find the Fawkeses at Eton on the Fourth of June, " to see the boat race ; little Turner went with us." No mention of the painter occurs after the death of Walter Fawkes, although the diary goes on to 1838. On the 13th of April, 18 19, Fawkes opened an exhibition in his Grosvenor Place house of all the water-colour drawings he possessed. A posthumous catalogue — if I may call it so — was compiled as a memorial. The copy at Farnley has a sort of Frontispiece by Turner, composed on much the same lines as that of the Liber Studiorum, and also views of the exhibition rooms, one by Turner, the other, I think, by another hand. The catalogue included a dedication to Turner as well as "extracts from the observations on Mr. Fawkes' collection of water-colour drawings made in the daily papers and other publications during the months of May and June, 18 19." These extracts now make strange reading, but they show, at least, that the painter was recognized as a great artistic force even by the daily critic of eighty years ago. The dedication is affectionate and graceful : — To J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R.A., P.P. My dear Sir, The unbought and spontaneous expression of the public opinion respecting my collection of water-colour drawings, decidedly points out to whom this little catalogue should be inscribed. 86 ROME: CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SS. GIOVANNI E PAULO. From the Water-Colour Drawing by J. M. W. TURNKR, R.A. ,s« ■ 14)) THE NATIONAL GALLERY WALTER FAWKES To yoUj therefore, I dedicate it, first as an act of duty ; and, secondly, as an offering of Friendship ; for, be assured, I never can look at it without intensely feehng the delight I have experienced, during the greater part of my life, from the exercise of your talent and the pleasure of your society. That you may year after year reap an accession of fame and fortune is the anxious wish of Your sincere friend, ,