»l»^'^-:-

JULES DAVID PROWN

Yale Center for British Art
Gift of
JULES DAVID PROWN

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

TURNER'S SKETCHES
AND DRAWINGS By
A. I. FIN BERG
^ 111

WITH loo ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & GO. LTD
36 ESSEX STREET W. C.
LONDON

First published in 1910

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES,

PAGE ix

INTRODUCTORY, .....
The nature of our subject-matter, ....
The raw material of art, .....
The character of our subject-matter, as embryonic forms of artistic
expression, prescribes our method of study.
Our difficulties of description and analysis, .
The separation of Art-criticism from Aesthetic,
Eight aspects of Turner's genius,

1
22 33
4

CHAPTER I. SEVEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP-
Tumer's first dra-wings,
'St. Vincent's To-wer,'
Copies and imitations.
His debt to art.
Work with Mr. Hardwick,
Oxford sketches,
' Radley Hall,'
Working from the Antique,
The Bristol sketch-book.
End of the apprenticeship,

-1787-1793,

S 6 8
10
10 1112 14.
1416

II. THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN— 1793-1796,
Welsh tour of 1793, . . . ¦ •
' St. Anselm's Chapel,'
Turner's topographical rivals.
Midland tour of 1794,
Limitations of topographical and antiquarian art,
' Interior of a Cottage,' . . . •
Light and Shade as a means of expression, .
The sketch-books of 1795 and their contents,
' High Force of Tees ' or ' Fall of Melincourt ' }

17 1718 18
20 2223 24 25 27

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

CHAPTER
III. THE SUBLIME-

-1797-1802,

Change from pure outline to light and shade,
' Ewenny Priory,' ....
Contrast between 'Ewenny' (1797) and'Llandaff Cathedral' (1796)
Transition from Objectivity to Subjectivity,
Growth of taste for the Sublime, ....
There are no sublime objects, but only objects of sublime feeling.
Therefore no guidance but from Art,
The Wilson tradition, .....
The two currents in Turner's work at this period —
(a) Study of Nature ;
(6) Study of the Wilson tradition, .
In the 1 797 sketches these two currents are kept distinct.
The North of England tour (1797) and its record, .
' Studies for Pictures : Copies of Wilson,'
The two currents begin to coalesce,
The origin of ' Jason,'
Scotch tour (1801), .
Swiss tour (1802), .

29
29 30
3031
3132323S

S3 3434
36
37 38
38 S9

IV. THE SEA PAINTER— 1802-1809, .
Contrast between Marine painting and the Sublime,
Turner's first sea-pieces.
The ' Bridgewater Sea-piece,'
' Meeting of the Thames and Medway,'
' Our landing at Calais — nearly swampt,'
'Fishermen upon a Lee Shore,'
The Dunbar and Guisborough Shore sketch-book,
' The Shipwreck/ .
The mouth of the Thames,
' Sheerness ' and the ' Death of Nelson,'

41 41424246 4848484951 53

V. 'SIMPLE NATURE'— 1808-1813, ..... 55
The works of this period an important yet generally neglected
aspect of Turner's art, ...... 55
Turner's classification of ' Pastoral ' as distinguished from ' Elegant
Pastoral,' ....... 56
The Arcadian idyll of the mid-eighteenth century, . 57
The first ' Pastoral ' subjects in ' Liber,' . . .57
The ' Windmill and Lock,' ...... 57
vi

CONTENTS
"*"¦=" PAGE
Events connected with the development of Turner's deeper and
more solemn conception of the poetry of rural life, . . 58
An attempt to define the mood of pictures like the 'Frosty
Morning,' . .... 64
The work of art is nothing less than its full significance, . . 67
Distinction between mood and character, . . .68
VI. THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM,'  72
Object of this chapter, .... . . 72
The first ' Liber ' drawings were made at W. F. Wells's cottage
at Knockholt, Kent, . . ... 73
' Bridge and Cows,' ... .73
Development of the so-called ' Flint Castle,' . 75
'Basle,' ...... 78
' Little Devil's Bridge,' . . 80
' London from Greenwich,' ... 80
' Kirkstall Crypt,' . . .... 81
Etchings of the so-called ' Raglan Castle ' and ' Source of the
Arveron,' ....... 82
Suggestion for the better exhibition of the 'Liber Studiorum'
drawings, . ..... 83
VII. THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS, OR 'WHAT YOU WILL'—
1813-1830, . ..... 84
Survey of the ground we have covered, ... 84
The training of Turner's sympathies by the Poets, . 85
The limits of artistic beauty, . . . .86
The predominantly sensuous bent of Turner's genius, 86
The parting of the ways, ..... 87
The influence of the Academy and society . . .88
Turner's first visit to Italy, .... 89
The Naturalistic fallacy, . . . . . gs
Turner's work for the engraver, ... .97
VIII. MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY, AND THE ORIGIN OF
IMPRESSIONISM— 1830-1845, .116
Mental Characteristics of the 1815-1830 period, . Il6
Their influence on form and colour, . . .117
Colour enrichment a general characteristic of Romantic art, . 118
What further development is required to give the transition to
Impressionism ? . .118
Turner's first Impressionistic work, . .119
Vagueness as a means of expression, . . .lip
vii

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

Two ways of painting one's impressions. Turner's earlier way
contrasted with the modern Impressionistic way, . ¦
The change after 1830 is it a change in terms of sight or of
thought — visual or mental ? .
The content of Turner's later work, .
Relation of Turner's later work to Impressionism defined.
The historical development of Turner's later manner.
The Petworth sketches, ....
Discovery of the artistic value of the Indeterminate,
' Rivers of France,' .....
Venetian sketches, .....
Swiss and Rhine sketches, ....
The end, ... . .

119 120 120121126126128129131134
135

IX. CONCLUSION, .

The distinction between Art-criticism and Aesthetic,
The aim of this chapter, .....
Art and physical fact, .....
The ' common-sense ' conception of landscape art as evidence of fact
Mr. Ruskin's treatment of the relation of Art and Nature, .
His confusion of Nature and Mind, ....
Art as a form of communication implies that the dualism of Nature
and Mind is overcome, .....
What does Art represent ? . .
An individualised psychical content present to the mind of the artist.
Classification of Turner's sketches and studies from the point of
view of their logical content, .....
The assertions in a work of art do not directly qualify the
ordinaiy real world, but an imaginary world specially con
structed for the artist's purpose,
The ideal of complete definition, .....
Yet the content must determine the form,
Plea for a dynamic study of Artistic form, ....

136 136137137
137138140143 144145 146

150151 151153

INDEX,

155

Vlll

LIST OF PLATES

AU the Drawings are in the National Gallery, unless otherwise specified.
(The numbers, etc., in brackets refer to the position of the Drawings in the Official Inventory.)

The Pass of Faido, St. Gothard,
Water Colour. 1844. (occlxiv. 209.)

I. St. Vincent's Tower, Naples,
Water-Colour. About 1787.

Frontispiece PAGBS
Between 6-7

(l.B.)

n. Central Portion of an Aquatint by Paul Sandby, after Fabris,
entitled 'Part of Naples, with the Ruin'd Tower of
St. Vincent; Published 1st Jan. 1778, . . Between 6-7
III. Radley Hall : South Front, ..... Facing 11
Water-Colour. About 1789. (iii. d).
IV. View on the Avon, from Cook's Folly, .... Facing 14
Water-Colour and Ink. About 1791. (vi. 24).
V. Lincoln Cathedral, ..... Between 20-21
Water Colour, exhibited at Royal Academy, 179S.
In Print Room, British Museum.
VI. Lincoln Cathedral, from the South-west, . . Between 20-21
Pencil. 1794. (xxi. 0).
vii. Pony and Wheelbarrow, ..... Facing 23
Pencil. 1794. (xxi. 27a).
VIII. Melincourt Fall, Vale of Neath, .... Facmg 26
Pencil, part in Water-Colour. 1795. (xxvi. 8).
IX. Interior of Ripon Cathedral : North Transept, . . Facing 28
Pencil. 1797. (xxxv. 6).
X. Conway Falls, near Bettws-y-Coed, .... Facing 30
Water-Colour. About 1798. (xxxviii. 71.)
XI, Conway Castle, ...... Facing 32
Pencil. About 1798. (xxxviii. 50a).
XII. Ruined Castle on Hill, ..... Facing 34
Water-Colour. About 1798. (l. k). ix

PLATE XIII.

XIV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXVI,

XXVII.

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
PAGES
Study of Fallen Trees, ..... Facing 36
Water-Colour. About 1798. (xwi. 18-19.)
Caernarvon Castle, ..... Facing 37
Pencil. 1799. (xlvi. 61.)
Cassiobury : North-west View, .... Facing 38
Pencil. About 1800. (xtvii. 41.)
Blair's Hut on the Montanvert and Mer de Glace.
Sketch for the Water-Colour in the Farnley Collection, Facing 39
Water-Colour. 1802. (lxxv. 22.)
Study for the ' Bridgewater Sea-piece,' . . . Facing 42
Pen and ink, wash, and white chalk on blue paper. About 1801.
(LXXXI. 122-123.)
Study of a Barge with Sails Set, . ... Facing 43
Pen and ink, wash, and white chalk on blue paper. About 1802.
(lxxxi. 138-139.)
Fishermen launching Boat in a rough Sea, . . Facing 44
Pen and ink and wash. About 1802. (lxviii. 3.)
Study for ' Sun rising through Vapour,' . . . Facing 45
Black and white chalk on blue paper. About 1804. (lxxxi. 40.)
Study for ' The Shipwreck,' .... Facing 47
Pen and ink and wash. About 1805. (lxxxvii. 16.)
Men-of- War's Boats fetching Provisions (1), . . Facing 49
Pencil. About 1808. (xcix. 18.)
Men-of- War's Boats fetching Provisions (2), . . Facing 50
PencU. About 1808. (xcix. 22.)
' The Inscrutable,' ...... Facing 52
Pencil. About 1808. (ci. 18.)
Sketch for ' Hedging and Ditching,' . . Between 56-57
Pencil. About 1807. (c. 47.)
' Hedging and Ditching,' .... Between 56-57
Wash drawing in Sepia for 'Liber Studiorum.' About
1808. (cxvii. w.)
(a) Mill on the Grand Junction Canal, near Hanwell,
Pencil. About 1809. (cxiv. 72a-73).
(b) " Windmill and Lock,'
Engraving published in ' Liber Studiorum,' 1st June, 1811
(R. 27).
X

Facing 61

PLATE XXVIII,

XXIX.

xxx.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

xxxrv.

XXXV.

xxxvi.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

LIST OF PLATES
PAGES
Whalley Bridge and Village, .... Facing 62
Pencil. About 1808. (cm. 8).
Whalley Bridge. Sketch for the Picture exhibited at the
Royal Academy. 1811. (Now in Lady Wantage's
Collection), ...... Facing 63
Pencil. About 1808. (cm. 6.)
London, from Greenwich Park, .... Facing 64
Pencil, About 1809. (cxx. h.)
Petworth House, from the Lake, .... Facing 65
Pencil. About 1809. (cix. 4.)
Petworth House, from the Park, . . Facing 66
Pencil. About 1809. (cix. 5.)
Cockermouth Castle, ..... Facing 67
Pencil. About 1809. (cix. 15.)
Landscape near Plymouth, .... Facing 68
Pencil. About 1812. (cxxxi. 96.)
(a) Sandycombe Lodge and Grounds.
Pen and Ink. About 1811. (cxiv. 73a-74.) r Facing 69
(6) Plan of Garden : Sandycombe Lodge,
Pen and Ink. About 1812. (cxxvii. 21a.) ¦'
Scene on the French Coast, . . . Between 74-75
Sepia. About 1806. (cxvi. c.)
Scene on the French Coast. Generally known as 'Flint
Castle : Smugglers,' . . . Between 74-75
Print of etching, washed with Sepia. About 1807. (cxvi. n.)

XLII.

Juvenile Tricks,
Sepia. About 1808.
Berry Pomeroy Castle.
Castle,' Sepia. About 1813.
The Alcove, Isleworth.
ham — Pope's Villa,' etc.,
Sepia. About 1816. (cxviii. i.)
Sheep- Washing, Windsor,
Sepia. About 1818. (cxviii. q.)
View of a River, from a Terrace,
'Macon,' Sepia. About 1818. (cxviii. y.)

(cxvi. z.)
Generally known as 'Raglan
(cxvm. B.)
Generally known as 'Twicken-

Sometimes called

Facing 78
Facing 79
Facing 80
Facing 81
Facing 82
xi

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
PLATE XLiii. Crowhurst, Sussex, ..... Facing^
Sepia. About 1818. (cxvm. r.)
XLIV. Kirkby Lonsdale Bridge, ..... Facing 84
Pencil. About 1816. (oxlviii. 4c-5.)
XLV. Raby Castle, ...... Facing 85
Pencil. About 1817. (clvi. 16a-17.)
XLVI. Raby Castle, ...... Facing 86
Pencil. About 1817. (clvi. 19a-20.)
xLvii. Raby Castle, ...... Facing 87
Pencil. About 1817. (clvi. 18a-19.)
XLVIII. Looking up the Grand Canal, Venice, from near the
Accademia di Belle Arti, .... Facing 90
Pencil. 1819. (olxxv. 70a-7l.)
XLIX. St. Mark's, Venice, with part of the Ducal Palace, . Facing 91
Pencil. 1819. (olxxv. 45.)
L. The Piazzetta, Venice, looking towards Isola di S. Giorgio
Maggiore, ...... Facing 92
Pencil. 1819. (olxxv. 46a.)
LI. Rome, from Monte Mario, .... Facing 93
Pencil and Water-Colour. 1819. (clxxxix. 33.)
LII. Rome, from the Vatican, ..... Facing 94
Pen and ink and Chinese white on grey. 1819. (clxxxix. 41.)
Liii. Trajan's Column, in the Forum of Trajan, . . Facing 95
Pencil. 1819. (olxxxviii. 48.)
LIV. Study of Plants, Weeds, etc., .... Facing 96
Pencil. About 1823. (ccv. la.)
LV. (a) Watchet, Somersetshire,
Pencil. About 1811. (cxxin. 170a.)
(J) Watchet, Somersetshire, . . . \Facing\W)
Engraving published in 'The Southern Coast,', 1st April,
1820.
LVI. (a) Boscastle, Cornwall, ....
Pencil. About 1811. (cxxm. 182.)
(b) Boscastle, Cornwall, .... FacinglOX
Engraving published in ' The Southern Coast,' 10th March,
1825. -'
Lvii. Hornby Castle, from Tatham Church, . . Between 102-103
Pencil. About 1816. (cxlvii. 41a-42.)
xii

Facing 1041

LIST OF PLATES
PLATE PAGES
Lviii. Hornby Castle, from Tatham Church, . . Between 102-108
Engraving, from the Water-Colour in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, published in Whitaker's ' Richmondshire,'
June, 1822.
ux. (a) Heysham, with Black Combe, Coniston Old Man,'
Helvellyn, etc., in the distance, .
Pencil. About 1816. (cxlvii. 40a^41).
(ft) Heysham and Cumberland Mountains,
Engraving published in Whitaker's 'Richmondshire,' 22nd
August, 1822.
LX. (a) Edinburgh, from Calton Hill,
Pencil. 1818. (clxvii. 39a.)
(b) Edinburgh, from the Calton Hill, .
Engraving published in Scott's 'Provincial Antiquities
of Scotland,' 1st November, 1820.
(c) Edinburgh, from Calton Hill,
Pencil. 1818. (clxvii. 40.)
(d) Figures on Calton Hill,
Pencil. 1818. (clxvil 40a.)
LXI. (a) Borthwick Castle, ....
Pencil. 1818. (clxvii. 76.)

Between
ri06-107

(b) Borthwick Castle, .....
Engraving published in Scott's ' Provincial Antiquities of
Scotland,' 2nd April, 1819.

Lxii. (a) Rochester, ....
Pencil. About 1821. (oxcix. 18.)
(&) Rochester, ....
Pencil. About 1821. (cxcix. 21.)
LXiii. Rochester on the River Medway,
Water-Colour. About 1822. (ccviii. w.)
Lxiv. Bolton Abbey, ....
Pencil. About 1815. (cxxxiv. 81-82.)

LXV. Bolton Abbey, .....
Engraving published in ' Picturesque Views in England and
Wales,' 1827.
LXVI. (a) Colchester, ....
Pencil. About 1824. (ccix. 6a.)

Facing 107

Between 108-109

Between 108-109
Between 110-111
Between 110-111

(6) Colchester, Pencil. About 1824. (ccix. 7a.)

Between 110-111xiii

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
PLATE PAGBS
Lxvii. Colchester, Essex, .... Between 110-111
Engraving, published in ' Picturesque Views in England and
Wales,' 1827.
Lxviii. Stamford, Lincolnshire, .... Between 112-113
Pencil. 1797. (xxxiv. 86.)
LXIX. Stamford, Lincolnshire, .... Between 112-113
Engraving published in ' Picturesque Views in England and
Wales,' 1830.
LXX. (a) Tynemouth Priory, ....
Pencil, with part in Water-Colour, 1797. (xxxiv. 35.)

(6) Tynemouth, Northumberland,
Engra-ving, published in ' Picturesque Views in Eng
land and Wales,' 1831.

Facing 113

LXXI. Bemerside Tower, . .... Between \\S-\\9
Pencil. About 1831. (cclxvii. 82a.)
LXXII. Bemerside Tower, . .... Between \\\-\\S
Engraving published in Scott's ' Poetical Works ' (Cadell),
1834.
LXXIII. Men chatting round Fireplace : Petworth House, Facing 122
Water-Colour. About 1830. (ccxliv. 82.)
Lxxiv. Teasing the Donkey : Petworth, . . . Facing 123
Water-Colour. About 1830. (ccxliv. 97.)
LXXV. Honfleur, ..... Facing 126
Water-Colour. About 1830. (oclix. 16.)
LXXVI. Country Town on Stream, . . . Facing 127
Water-Colour. About 1830. (cclix. 16.)
LXXVII. Sheep in the Trench, .... Facing 128
Water-Colour. About 1830. (cclix. 17.)
LXX VIII. Shipping on the Riva degli Schiavone, . Facing 129
Water-Colour. About 1839. (cccxvi. 20.)
LXXIX. The Approach to Venice : Sunset, . Facing 132
Water-Colour. About 1839. (ccexvi. 16.)
LXXX. Riva degli Schiavone, from near the Public Gardens, Facing 133
Water-Colour, About 1839. (cccxvi. 21.)
LXXXI. Freiburg : The Descent from the Hotel de Ville, . Facing 134
Water-Colour. About 1841. (cocxxxv. 14.)
xiv

LIST OF PLATES
PLATE
LXXXII. Ruined Castle on Rock, .
Water-Colour. About 1841. (cccxxxix. 5.)
LXXXIII. Village and Castle on the Rhine, .
Water-Colour. About 1844. (cccxlix. 22.)
LXXXIV. The Via Mala, ....
Water-Colour. About 1844. (ccclxiv. 362.)
LXXXV. On the Rhine, ....
Water-Colour. 1844. (cccxlix. 20.)
LXXXVI. Baden, looking North,
Water-Colour. 1844. (cccxlix. 14.)
LXXXVII. Lucerne : Evening,
Water-Colour. 1844. (cccxliv. 324.)

Facing 135
Facing 140
Facing 141
Facing 148
Facing 149
Facing 152

XV

TURNEH'S SKETCHES AND
DRAWINGS
INTRODUCTORY
The nature of our subject-matter — The difference between sketches and
finished works — The character of our subject-matter, as embryonic forms
of artistic expression, prescribes the method of study we must adopt —
Our method is broadly chronological — But to follow Turner's work year
by year in detail would carry us beyond the limits of our present under
taking — I have, therefore, broken up Turner's career into eight stages or
phases of development.
THE object of the following pages is to re-study the
character of Turner's art in the light of his sketch
books and drawings from nature.
During Turner's lifetime his rooted objection to part with any
of his sketches, studies, or notes often formed the subject of ill-
natured comment. Yet we owe it to this peculiarity that the
drawings and sketches included in the Turner Bequest at the
National Gallery comprise practically the whole of the great
landscape painter's work done direct from nature. The collection
is, therefore, of very great psychological interest. It shows
clearly upon what basis of immediately presentative elements the
airy splendour of Turner's richly imaginative art was built : and
amongst the twenty odd thousand sheets of drawings in all stages
of elaboration, the embryonic forms of most of the painter's
masterpieces can be easily traced.
A careful examination of the drawings shows that Turnejr's
objection to part with his sketches and notes was not the outcome
of a blind and deeply ingrained passion for accumulation, but
T. S.— 1 1

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
that it was the necessary result of the painter's clearly defined
conception of the radical difference between the raw material of
the painter's art, and its fully articulated products — the difference
between mere sketches and studies and fugitive memoranda, and
the fully elaborated works of art to which such preliminaries are
subservient, but with which they should never be confused. From
Turner's point of view the properly finished pictures were all that
the public had a right to see or possess ; the notes and studies were
meant only for his own eye. Even in his later years, when he
consented to exhibit what he expressly called a ' record ' of a scene
he had witnessed, he grumbled when it was admired and treated
as a picture, although in this case the ' record ' was not a hurried
memorandum, but a fully elaborated attempt ' to show what such
a scene was like.' ^
The method of our study must be determined by the general
character of our subject - matter. Our main business is with
fragmentary records, hurried memoranda, half-formed thoughts,
and tentative designs. We must not and cannot treat these
dependent and embryonic fragments as independent entities ; we
cannot pick and choose amongst them, or love or dislike them
entirely for their own sakes, as we can with complete works of
art which contain within themselves the grounds of their own
justification or insufficiency. To grasp the significance of our
sketches and studies we must study the goal towards which they
are striving. We must not be content to admire even the most
beautiful of these sketches entirely for its own sake, but must
study them for the sake of their connection with the works which
they were instrumental in producing.
These considerations have also weighed with me in the
selection of the numerous illustrations with which the publishers
have generously enriched this volume. On the whole I have
chosen the illustrations rather for the light they throw on
Turner's conception of art and methods of work than for their
own individual attractiveness ; but the glamour of execution is
so invariably present in all that came from Turner's hand, that
few of these drawings will be found which do not possess a very
powerful aesthetic appeal of their own.
1 See Modem Painters, vol. v. p. 342 note.
2

INTRODUCTORY
In dealing with Turner's work from the point of view I have
indicated, we are forced to touch upon problems which the
prudent art critic is apt to avoid. In studying the relation
between the preliminary sketches and studies and the finished
works into which they were developed, we find ourselves plunged
into the midst of some of the most baffling difficulties of
psychology and aesthetic. In attempting even to describe the
relation between the more rudimentary and the more fully
articulated processes of artistic expression, we are forced, whether
we like it or not, to face the problems of the relation between
form and content, between treatment and subject, between
portrayal and portrayed ; and we cannot go far without finding
ourselves obliged to reconsider the common-sense ideas of Truth,
Nature, and Art. We cannot avoid such problems if we would.
If I face them, therefore, instead of emulating the discretion of
my elders, it is, I am sure, from no ingrained love of abstractions,
but rather from an overpowering interest in all the concrete forms
of pictorial art.
The separation of aesthetic from art-criticism which is so much
favoured at present, though it eases the labour of thought both
to the art- critic and to his readers, seems to me otherwise inex
cusable and fraught with serious artistic and intellectual dangers.
Art-criticism cut adrift from general principles cannot help
degenerating into a blatant form of self-assertion or an immoral
form of practical casuistry — a finding of good reasons for any
thing you have a mind to ; and aesthetic, divorced from all living
contact with the concrete phenomena of art, is one of the dullest
as well as the most useless of studies. But this is not the place to
set forth in detail or defend my conception of the function and
methods of art-criticism. I will merely say that I regard it as a
form of rational investigation of the phenomena of pictorial art ;
it has no immediate practical aim; and it does not propose to
prolong or intensify the enjoyment which works of art provide.
We find then that we cannot study Turner's sketches in isola
tion from his finished works. But to follow his completed work
year by year in detail would obviously carry us beyond the limits
of our present undertaking, I have, therefore, broken up Turner's
career into eight facets or aspects. In the first chapter I deal
3

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
with his seven years' apprenticeship, from 1787 to 1793, using his
sketches to throw light on his youthful aims and methods. The
second chapter, covering the years 1793 to 1797, deals with the
work of the topographical draughtsman, I then study the
gloomy and romantic side of Turner's art, when he was mainly
under the influence of Richard Wilson and of the churchyard
and charnel-house sentiment of Edward Young and Joseph
Warton. The fourth chapter is devoted to Turner's early sea-
pieces, and the next to his work as a painter of what his contem
poraries called ' Simple Nature.' This phase of Turner's art is
difficult to describe in a few words. One way would be to call
it a phase of Wordsworthian naturalism, but it must be remem
bered that it was not an echo or a by-product of Wordsworth's
poetry, but an independent and simultaneous embodiment in
another form of art of sentiments common both to Wordsworth
and to Turner. Pictures like Turner's ' Frosty Morning ' and
' Windsor ' were as new, as unprecedented, as Wordsworth's most
characteristic poems. This side of Turner's art shows him as the
founder of a genuinely national school of homely realism, as the
head of the Norwich school and the master of David Cox, De
Wint, Callcott, and the rest.
The sixth chapter deals with the designs engraved in the
Liber Studiorum, and the sketches on which they were based.
The seventh is devoted mainly to the work engraved in the
Southern Coast, Richmondshire, Scott's Antiquities, the Rivers
and Ports, and the England and Wales series, the work
by which the artist is perhaps best known. My eighth
chapter treats of the period when signs of mental decay began to
be apparent. These years saw the production of what have been
called the first Impressionistic pictures. Then, by way of bring
ing to a head some of the observations on the nature of artistic
expression which our investigations have forced upon our notice,
I have added a final chapter dealing mainly with the relation
between Art and Nature. The subject-matter of this chapter
is not so attractive as that of the others, but I do not think it
right to omit it.
This selection of the facets of Turner's dazzling and complex
genius is necessarily arbitrary and incomplete. The aspects I have

INTRODUCTORY
chosen to throw into relief can make no pretence to be exhaus
tive. They must be taken as a poor but necessary device for the
introduction of a kind of superficial order into our present task
— as a concession to the weakness and limitations of the powers of
the student, rather than as a successful summary of the multi
farious forms into which one of the most prolific and many-sided
creative activities of modern art has poured itself. And the
threads of this living activity which I have sought to isolate, never
existed in isolation. Turner was not at one period of his life a
romantic and at another a pseudo-classic or Academic painter,
a sea-painter at one time, and a painter of ' simple Nature ' at
another. Turner was always a sea-painter and a topographer, a
romantic, a pseudo-classic, and an impressionist, as well as a master
of homely realism. While he was painting ' Hannibal Crossing
the Alps ' he had the ' View of High Street, Oxford ' on his easel ;
the ' Abingdon ' and the ' Apollo ' were painted at the same time
as were the ' Frosty Morning ' and the 'Dido and Aeneas.' He
could paint a huge dull empty canvas like ' Thomson's Lyre '
whenThis muse was putting forth its lustiest and most vigorous
shoots ; he could give us ' The Fighting T^m^raire ' when his
powers seemed stifled amid the fumes of early Victorian senti
mentality. His genius is hot and cold like Love itself, a fine and
subtle spirit that eludes the snares of our plodding faculties. But
unless we desire merely to bedazzle and intoxicate our senses, we
cannot afford to dispense with the poor crutches upon which our
pedestrian intellect must stumble.

CHAPTER I
SEVEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP— 1787-1793
Turner's first drawings — ' St. Vincent's Tower ' — Turner's copies and
imitations — His debt to Art — Work with Mr. Hardwick — Oxford sketches
— ' Radley Hall ' — Drawings from the Antique — The Bristol sketch-book
— End of the apprenticeship.
THE legend runs that Turner's first drawings were exhibited
in his father's shop-window, ticketed for sale at prices
ranging from one to three shillings.
There is nothing improbable in this story, though the drawings
referred to by Thornbury,^ as having been bought by a Mr.
Crowle under these conditions, do not happen to have been made
by Turner. I have not, indeed, been able to discover any draw
ing which can confidently be said to have been purchased from the
barber's shop in Maiden Lane, but there are some in the National
Gallery which show us exactly what kind of work Turner was
capable of producing at the time when he might have resorted to
this rough and ready method of attracting patronage.
A typical drawing of this kind is the brightly-coloured view
of St. Vincent's Tower, Naples, reproduced on Plate i. of the
present volume. It is oval in shape, measuring about 8 x 10
inches, and has evidently been cut out without mechanical assist
ance, as the curves of the oval are somewhat erratic. As the
youthful artist had not visited Italy at this period, I thought it
probable that this drawing was based upon the work of some
other artist, and I was fortunate enough to be able to trace it to
• The Life of Turner, by Walter Thornbury, 1897 edition, p. 27. The drawings referred
to are now in the Print Room, British Museum.
6

PLATE I

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.NTRAL PORTION OF AN AQUATINT BY PAUL SANDBY, AFTER FABRIS
PUBLISHED I JAN., 1778

SEYEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP
its source. It is copied and adapted from an aquatint by Paul
Sandby, after Fabris, published on 1st January 1778, entitled
' Part of Naples, with the Ruin'd Tower of St. Vincent.' Sandby 's
engraving is a large one (about 13;^ x 20 inches), and comprises
an extensive view of the harbour and bay of Naples, with the
Castel deir Uovo in the middle distance, and St. JElmo crowning
the buildings on the right. Turner has picked out as it were
the pictorial plum of this mass of topographical information. He
has set the ruined tower boldly in the centre of his design, and
has used only just so much of the surrounding buildings and
scenery as was necessary to make an appropriate background or
setting for it. He has reduced the Castle of the Egg to insignifi
cance, and closed up his distance with appropriate but imaginary
mountains. In the engraving a passing boat with figures divides
our interest with the tower. Turner has suppressed it. He has
also reduced the .size of the quay upon which the tower stands,
thus increasing the apparent height of the tower. The few
meagre weeds clinging to the battlements in the engraving have
developed luxuriantly in Turner's drawing, thus adding consider
ably to its picturesqueness. The foreground figures seem to have
been adapted from those in the engraving.
It is probable that these slight differences between the
engraving and the water-colour were made involuntarily, for it is
evident that Turner did not have the engraving under his eyes
while he was making the drawing. He had probably seen the
engraving in some shop-window, and had made a hasty pencil
sketch of the part that interested him. That he was working
from a somewhat perfunctory sketch and not direct from the
original is proved by the fact that he has introduced three arches
into the building on the quay immediately at the foot of the tower,
instead of the two in Sandby 's engraving. But in the engraving
there is a small rounded turret on the battlements of the quay
which comes just in front of the place where Turner has intro
duced his third arch. It is clear that he mistook the indication
of this turret in his rough sketch for a third arch in the building
beyond. It would, of course, be imprudent to suppose that Turner
chose to work in this way partly from memory, with the deliberate 7

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
intention of giving his imagination freer play ; he was probably
forced to do so by the material exigencies of his position. But
certainly this way of working was admirably calculated to
strengthen his memory and call into play his innate powers of
arrangement and adaptation.
The colour scheme, which is probably the artist's own inven
tion, is light and pleasing. The golden rays of the setting
(? rising) sun are painted with evident enjoyment. The warm
yellow light of the sun is transfused over the whole of the sky,
turning the distant clouds into crimson. The keynote of the
colour is thus orange yellow, passing through pink to burnt sienna.
In spite of the lightness of the colour the drawing was worked
over a black and white foundation, light washes of Indian ink
having been used to establish the broad divisions of light and
shade in the design. These washes afterwards formed the ground
work of the greys and cooler colours, being warmed in parts (as
in the tower) with washes or touches of pink and burnt sienna, or
worked up into more positive hues by subsequent washes of blue
and yellow.
The handling of the drawing — the sharp decided touches, the
neatness and dexterity of its washes, and the rapid march of the
whole work — shows what a hold the idea of a unified work of art
had already obtained over Turner's mind. The clear, determined
workmanship shows that he must have been thinking of the whole
from the beginning, and not of the representation of a number of
separate natural objects.
This childish effort seems to me of great interest as marking
with extraordinary clearness the point of departure of Turner's
art. From the beginning he sees things pictorially, as elements
in a conceptual whole, not as isolated and independent objects.
His sense of design — both as the faculty of expression as well as
of formal arrangement — is thus developed, while the merely repre
sentative qualities of art are ignored or at least subordinated.
This early grasp of the idea of pictorial unity is obviously the
result of Turner's study of works of art, and not of his study of
nature. Since Mr. Ruskin's labours it will not be possible for
any student to overlook the enormous profit which Turner derived
in his subsequent work from his unwearied observation of the
8

SEYEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP
phenomena of nature; it is well, therefore, to be careful not to
overlook the prior debt which Turner had contracted to art, and
the extraordinary advantage his early grasp of pictorial unity gave
him in appropriating the multifarious variety of natural shapes
and colours.
The other drawings of this period in the National Gallery
only serve to emphasise Turner's indebtedness to art. Some of
these are plain straightforward copies. The most elaborate of
these is the copy of * Folly Bridge and Bacon's Tower ' which has
long been exhibited in the Turner Water Colour rooms (No. 613,
N.G.). This is copied from an engraving by J. Basire published
in the Oxford Almanack for the year 1780. The colouring, how
ever, is original. This copy is signed and dated, ' W. Turner,
1787.' Among the other copies is a pencil outline of the Old
Kitchen, Stanton Harcourt, from the engraving in Grose's
Antiquities. There is also a coloured drawing, somewhat similar
in size and shape to that of St. Vincent's Tower, of Dacre Castle,
Cumberland. I am unable to say from what engraving this is
copied or adapted.^ It may have been a slightly earlier effort than
the Neapolitan subject, as the Indian ink underpainting is less skil
fully done and the general effect is heavier and more monotonous.
These drawings, made, I believe, between Turner's twelfth and
fourteenth years, show the youthful artist in the act of acquiring
the rudiments of that pictorial language which he was to use in
after years with such mastery and ease. We see him acquiring
this language by intercourse with his fellows who use it, not, as is
the modern way, through the course of a random study of nature.
He is learning from tradition, and the thought of the artistic
community as expressed in the current pictorial language
is gradually forming and moulding his ideas. He is imitating
those around him, as a child imitates the words of its nurse
and mother.
On the present occasion, I need do no more than call attention
in passing to the immense advantage Turner enjoyed in being
initiated thus early and in this easy and natural way into the
' Since these lines were written I have been lucky enough to discover its source. It is
based on an engraving in Gilpin's Northern Tour, vol. ii., facing p. 85. Turner has followed
the engraving fairly carefully, but has introduced two figures of his own in the foreground. 9

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
sphere of art. He was thus saved from those years of futile and
heart-breaking experiment to which the modern system of nature
study dooms all those students whose native powers are not
entirely deadened by its influence. The habit thus early forced
upon him of regarding himself as an actual producer, i.e. as a
maker of articles with a definite market value, must also have been
beneficial to him. The existence of a class of real patrons, whose
tastes had to be consulted and whose pockets contained actually
exchangeable coin of the realm, must have placed some insistence
upon the social aspect of art, and have helped to prevent the boy
from making the mistake which so many subsequent artists have
made, of considering their work merely as a means of self-expres
sion, instead of as a means of super-individual or universal
communication. Another important result of these early employ
ments was the facility and mastery in the use of his material
which they gave him. Between the water-colours of different
periods of Turner's career there are the most astonishing contrasts
of subject-matter and sentiment, but in all of them one finds
the same inimitable grace, strength, and dexterity of workman
ship, the same unequalled technical mastery over the medium ;
and this purely executive address — this * genius of mechanical
excellence,' to use Reynolds's expression — could have been attained
only as the result of an early familiarity with this particular form
of artistic expression.
About his fourteenth year (1789) Turner was placed with an
architect, Mr. P. Hardwick. It seems to me doubtful whether he
was regularly apprenticed, or was intended to take up the study of
architecture from a practical point of view. The evidence upon
this point is extremely limited, but what little there is points to
his employment upon purely pictorial tasks, such as the dressing
out of projects or views of buildings with a plausible arrangement
of light and shade and a pleasing setting of landscape background.
We know that Mr. Hardwick built the New Church at Wanstead,^
and that Turner made for his master a water-colour drawing both
of the old church which was pulled down and the new one that
took its place. I have not been fortunate enough to trace the
1 It was finished in 1790 and consecrated on the 24th June. See Lysons's Environs of
London, vol. ii. p. 237.
10

PLATE 111

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SEYEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP
present owner of these drawings, but the water-colour of the old
church was exhibited at the Old Masters (R.A.) in 1887. There
is, however, in the National Gallery a pencil outline of the new
church, squared for enlargement, which shows no signs of training
in the practical work of the architect's profession.
The earliest of Turner's sketch-books now in the National
Gallery was in use during the period of this connection with Mr.
Hardwick. A pencil sketch of a church by the river, easily
recognisable as Isleworth Old Church, with barges moored beside
the bank, is probably the note from which the water-colour was
made which Mr, Hardwick's grandson lent to the Old Masters in
1887. Most of the other drawings, however, appear to have been
made during a stay near Oxford, There are sketches of Clifton
Nuneham (then Nuneham Courtenay), near Abingdon ; of Radley
Hall, between Abingdon and Oxford ; of a distant view of Oxford ;
a sketch of a ruined tower which may represent Pope's Tower in
the ruins of the Harcourts' house at Stanton Harcourt, and two
drawings of Sunningwell Church, a village about two miles from
Radley and three from Abingdon. As Turner's uncle, Joseph
Mallord William Marshall, his mother's elder brother, after whom
he was named, was then living at Sunningwell, it is probable that
these drawings were the result of a summer holiday spent with his
relative. These drawings represent Turner's first attempts to draw from
nature. They are characterised by an absence of blundering and
a sense of pictorial logic and requirements which could only
belong to a beginner whose eye and hand had already been
disciplined in the production of works of art. One cannot but
feel that the mould into which the immediate experiences of the
artist were to be cast had already been firmly set before his pencil
was placed upon the paper, nay, before the particular sights in
question were actually seen. In other words, the pictorial
formula into which the material gathered from nature was to be
worked up had been clearly determined before the artist set out
to gather such material for himself Turner's confidence in the
unbounded felicity of immediate contact with nature was not
commensurate with that of modern artistic theorists. He does
indeed entrust himself to the open fields, but it is not until he
11

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
has armed himself with a stout though flexible panoply of artistic
convention. But though the draughtsmanship is conventional, I do not
think it can fairly be called mannered. The actual statements
made are made with the utmost simplicity and directness. In the
drawings of Sunningwell Church (on p. 12 of the sketch-book), of
Radley Hall (pp. 9 and 14), and of Isleworth Old Church (p, 22),
the general proportions and main facts of the buildings are noted
with deliberate and methodical care. The artist knows what facts
he will want when he comes to make his finished water-colours,
and he takes those facts and calmly ignores all the particular
effects of light and shade, colour and accident which his experi
ence of other artists' work had shown him would not be useful to
him. Thus there is a strongly marked selective activity at work,
which gives what I think can be more correctly described as style
than as manner. Yet I should not be surprised to find the term
mannerism applied to the curiously monotonous calligraphic
scribbles which stand for trees and clouds in these drawings.
That they are conventional and singularly indefinite I readily
admit, yet they are not deliberately learnt ' ways of doing trees '
like those, for instance, which a student of J. D. Harding's
teaching might adopt. They are as they are because their
immediate function is clearly determined by their ultimate
purpose. In making his finished water-colour drawing at home
the trees and clouds, as well as the whole system of light and
shade, were merely the docile instruments of pictorial effective
ness. The exact shape of each tree and cloud in his drawing, and
even their exact positions, were determined as the work pro
gressed by purely pictorial requirements. A detailed statement
of the exact shape of any particular tree or cloud in the actual
scene from which the sketch was made would therefore have
been not only of no use to the artist, but a positive hindrance, as
it would have complicated the problem of formal arrangement
before the artist, even if it did not actively hinder its solution.
In these sketches from nature Turner therefore takes his skies
and foliage for granted as much as possible, merely hinting at
their general existence in a loose and tentative way.
But if the charge of mannerism cannot be fairly brought
12

SEYEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP
against the sketches made face to face with nature, it is otherwise
with the water-colours which were afterwards elaborated from
them. Drawings like the view of ' Radley Hall,' reproduced on
Plate III., and the ' View of the City of Oxford ' might almost be
said to consist of little else than mannerisms. The manner of
doing trees and skies and of arranging the planes of the scene is
taken over directly from Paul Sandby, as are also the method of
working in transparent washes and the gamut of colours used.
The ' View of Oxford ' is indeed nothing but a feeble echo of some
of Sandby 's fine drawings ; it tells us little of Turner himself,
beyond an indication of a certain liking for scenes of this kind.
Perhaps the most noteworthy point in the drawing is the demon
stration it affords of the superior development of his sense of tone
to his sense of form ; the buildings sway to and fro in the wind,
the foliage is childish and ridiculous, but the difference between
the broad expanses of ground and sky is clearly marked, and the
limpid sky gives an undeniable charm to it all.
There is perhaps a little more of himself in the view of
' Radley Hall.' The way the tree-trunks seem to blow themselves
out, and toss themselves this way and that, while their branches
explode in the wildest and most fantastic contortions, — all this is
given with such keen and frank enjoyment, that it points to
something more than a mere passive reproduction of a purely
technical recipe. The trees in those drawings of Sandby which
Turner had studied do indeed behave in this way, but Turner
identifies himself so closely with the inner meaning of these forms
that they become his own legitimate property. The sense of
exuberant freedom in the trees is intensified by contrast with the
rigid restraint of the building in the middle distance. It is as
though the boy's imagination was glad to get away from the
realm of necessity and disport itself in aimless gambols through
space, free from the encumbrance of inert matter and of the laws
of gravitation. It is this habit of getting at the inner emotional
content of the pictorial conventions he adopts, that stamps
Turner's whole career of imitation and appropriation with its
peculiar character, making him invariably richer for all his
borrowings, and more original for all his imitations.
These two drawings were made in 1789, during the artist's
13

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
fourteenth year. About the beginning of 1790 he joined the
schools of the Royal Academy, acting, it is said, upon the advice
of Mr. Hardwick. During part of 1790 and for the next two or
three years he worked in what was then called the 'Plaister
Academy,' i.e. from casts taken from the antique. Laborious
chalk and stump drawings of the Apollo and Antinoiis of the
Belvedere, the Venus de' Medici, and the Vatican Meleager, as
well as of the more robust forms of the Diskobolos and Dying
Gaul, are still in existence to demonstrate the diligence with
which he pursued these uncongenial studies. Such work must
have given his masters a singularly poor and misleading opinion of
his talents. In June, 1792, he was admitted to the Life Class,
while still continuing to attend the Antique. This academic
training, however, must have been useful as an antidote, or at
least as a supplement, to the topographical work to which all his
spare time was devoted.
He seems to have spent his holidays in 1791 partly with his
uncle at Sunningwell and partly with some friends of the family,
the Narraways, at Bristol. The sketch-book in use at this time
is now in the National Gallery. The volume was never a
handsome one, — it was probably stitched and bound by the artist
himself — but its present appearance is deplorable ; the cardboard
covers are broken, the rough and ready backing is almost undone,
a number of the leaves have been cut or torn out, and the
remainder are in a generally dirty and dilapidated condition. In
spite of these disadvantages it gives us a valuable glimpse of
Turner's interests and acquirements at the age of sixteen.
Our first impression is that his year's work drawing from the
cast has produced hardly any perceptible effect. The drawings of
buildings are in some cases even more perfunctory than those in
the ' Oxford ' Sketch-Book. The sketch of Bath Abbey Church
(on page 14 of the book), for example, is not a very creditable
performance for an ambitious Royal Academy student. Its
carelessness, however, may have been due to limited oppor
tunities, but we must remember that this hasty scrawl, with
the assistance of a few written notes and diagrams, was sufficient
to enable the artist to produce afterwards an elaborate water-
colour of the subject. A still more elaborately wrought and
14

PLATE IV

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SEYEN YEARS' APPRENTICESHIP
carefully considered water-colour was the result of another sketch
(on the reverse of page 16) in this book, a view of ' Stoke, near
Bristol, the seat of Sir H. Lippencote,' now in the possession of
Mrs. Thomas. This pencil sketch is quite as perfunctory as that
of Bath Abbey. It is evident that nature ' put him out ' or that
the artist's youthful impatience induced him to hurry over the
first stages of his work. These sketches from nature were merely
means to an end, and so long as they contained sufficient hints
to set his subsequent work going he was perfectly satisfied.
However, in some of the drawings where the first sketch from
nature has been worked over subsequently (as in the water-colour
of Captain Fowler's seat on Durdham Downs [on pp. 17a and 18]),
we can trace an increased delicacy of hand, an added capacity for
dealing with complex and irregular forms, and greater knowledge
of the natural forms of trees.
But it is evident that the wild and romantic scenery of the
Avon gorge made a deeper impression on the young artist's
imagination than the spick and span seats of the gentry. The
ruins of Malmesbury Abbey are sketched from every available
point of view, and there are hurried and clumsy sketches of ' The
Ruins of a Chapel standing on an Island in the Severn,' ' A View
of the Welsh Coast from Cook's Folly,' and others of 'Blaze
Castle and the Deney and Welsh Coast,' ^ and the 'Old Passage.'
The drawing described as a ' View from Cook's Folley (sic), looking
up the River Avon with Wallis Wall and the Hot Wells ' (repro
duced on Plate iv,), shows clearly the bent of Turner's mind
towards the wildness and freedom of nature, as well as his strong
love of ships.
If it were our intention to follow Turner's work year by year,
we should have to study in detail the drawings of Oxford,
Windsor, Hereford and Worcester, and especially the Welsh
and Monmouthshire sketches which belong to the years 1792
and 1793. As it is, it is sufficient for our purpose to notice that
the work of these two years shows a gradual increase of power
in making sketches from nature. The young artist slowly gathers
confidence in himself. Nature ceases to ' put him out,' to fluster
' These titles are written on the backs of the drawings by the artist himself^an excellent
practice which he very soon abandoned. 15

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
him with her multitudinous details and ever-varying effects. He
begins to treat nature as a conquered enemy, and there is just a
suspicion of youthful impertinence in the cool and methodical
way in which he gathers up the kind of facts he wants, and
ignores everything that does not come within the scope of his
pictorial formulas. But by this time it is evident that his period
of apprenticeship is at an end, and that we must turn our attention
to the work of the brilliant young topographical draughtsman.

16

CHAPTER II
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN— 1793-1796
Welsh tour of 1793 — 'St. Anselm's Chapel' — Turner's topographical
rivals — Midland tour of 1794 — Topographical and antiquarian draughts
manship — Its main interest is not embodied in the work — The marvel
lous petit-maitre — The ' Cottage Interior ' — Light and shade as a means of
expression — The sketch-books of 1795 and their contents — ' High Force
of Tees ' or ' Fall of Melincourt ' ?
^MONG the five drawings by which Turner was represented
/-\ in the exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1794, one
"*- -^ was a view of the Devil's Bridge, Cardiganshire. This
was doubtless one of the first results of the sketching tour in
Wales made in 1793. We can readily believe that Turner's
imagination was powerfully impressed by the wild and
gloomy scenery of the country and its romantic ruins, but his
efforts to embody his impressions were not at first very successful.
For the moment his powers as an architectural draughtsman
were more in evidence than his powers of expressing grand and
gloomy ideas. The romantic turn of his mind had to be more
fully developed before it could command public support, and for
the time being this phase of his art seemed swamped in the flood
of topographical employment which the immediate success of his
less ambitious drawings in the 1794 exhibition brought him.
In a contemporary press notice, preserved among the Ander-
don collection of catalogues in the Print Room of the British
Museum, Turner's drawings of ' Christchurch Gate, Canterbury,'
and the 'Porch of Great Malvern Abbey, Worcestershire,' are
said to be ' amongst the best in the present exhibition. They are
the productions,' the writer continues, ' of a very young artist, and
give strong indications of first-rate ability ; the character of Gothic
T.8.-2 17

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
architecture is most happily preserved, and its profusion of minute
parts massed with judgment and tinctured with truth and fidelity.
This young artist should beware of contemporary imitations. His
present effort evinces an eye for nature, which should scorn to
look to any other source.'
The first of the drawings which called forth this praise is now
in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Ruskin Bequest), the
other is probably the 'Malvern' now in the Manchester Whit-
worth Institute (No. 73). The critic's remark about the danger of
' contemporary imitations,' which I take to mean the danger of
Turner imitating the works of contemporary artists, may probably
account for his neglect to mention another drawing exhibited at
the same time, which strikes the present-day observer as a more
accomplished and remarkable effort than either the ' Malvern ' or
' Christchurch Gate.' I allude to the drawing described in the
R. A. catalogue as ' St. Anselm's Chapel with part of Thomas a
Becket's Crown — Canterbury Cathedral,' which I take to be the
drawing now in the Manchester Whitworth Institute (No. 272).
This is a work of infinite patience and wary skill, a remarkable
combination of far-sighted knowledge of ultimate effects united
with the utmost delicacy, firmness, and patience of execution.
These qualities do not seem to me so clearly marked either in the
Christchurch Gate or Malvern drawings, but very likely to the
contemporary observer, especially to one avid of originality, the
drawing of ' St. Anselm's Chapel ' may have appeared more
ordinary or conventional.^
The success of these drawings estabhshed Turner's position as
one of the foremost architectural and topographical draughtsmen
of the day. But we must not make the mistake of supposing that
Turner's success was the result of an absence of serious rivals. De
Loutherbourg, Dayes, Hearne, Wheatley, Sandby and Rooker
were by no means unworthy rivals. Nor must we jump to the
conclusion that Turner, at the age of nineteen, had outstripped
such competitors in any but the purely topographical branches of
their profession. The best of the older men were artists of wide
' The fourth architectural subject in the exhibition is described as a view of the 'Inside
of Tintern Abbey.' If this was the drawing now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as the
evidence seems to indicate, the critic's preferences seem even more incomprehensible. On
the whole this is, I think, a finer work even than the 'St. Anselm's Chapel.'
18

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN
sympathies and ambitions, who could not rest satisfied within
the narrow limits of purely topographical work. They looked
upon such work as a kind of necessary drudgery, useful from a
pecuniary point of view, but not calling for the whole-hearted
exercise of all their talents and enthusiasm. Dayes, to whom
Girtin was apprenticed, and from whom Turner had learnt a great
deal, seems to have detested topographical work, in spite of the
skill and delicate charm with which he treated it. All his
enthusiasm was reserved for figure subjects in the grand manner,
for which there was no market. In this 1794 exhibition he had
four illustrations for Dr. Aitken's Environs of Manchester,
which have the perfunctory look of work done against the grain,
and a ' View of Keswick Lake,' which may possibly have been the
slight and charming drawing of this subject now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum, too small and fragile a thing to attract much
attention. The versatile and brilliant De Loutherbourg did not
exhibit this year ; Hearne also was absent. Rooker had five of
his delicately-accomplished but rather prosaic drawings. Paul
Sandby had two views of Rochester Castle, and ' A View of
Vintners at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman's Turkey Paper
Mills,' where the excellent paper upon which almost all Turner's
drawings were made was manufactured. Wheatley sent no land
scapes this year, and Girtin, Turner's senior and rival, had a single
exhibit, a 'View of Ely Minster,' the first drawing he had had
accepted by the Academy. The result of this state of things was
that Turner's architectural and topographical work was pitted
against only the perfunctory or tired work of his older rivals. For
the moment all his indefatigable patience and amazing energy and
skill were concentrated on this one point of attack, with imme
diately decisive results.
Turner had now achieved an honourable footing in his pro
fession. Dr. Monro bought his ' Anselm's Chapel ' and gave him
commissions for many other drawings. Booksellers found his
name an attraction. With publishers ready to buy his drawings,
though at prices that would merely excite the derision of a
modern artist, and with patrons like Dr. Monro ready to encourage
his more ambitious efforts, his opportunities of travel were greatly
enlarged. 19

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Turner spent the summer of 1794 making a tour of the
midland counties of England. Northampton, Birmingham, Lich
field, Shrewsbury, Wrexham, Chester, Matlock, Derby, Notting
ham, Lincoln, Peterborough, Cambridge and Waltham were
among the places he visited. The views published in the Copper
Plate Magazine during the next three years of Nottingham,
Bridgenorth, Matlock, Birmingham, Chester, Peterborough and
Flint were made from sketches taken on this journey, as were also
those of King's College, Cambridge, Flint, and Northampton,
published in the Pocket Magazine during 1795. But these were
the least important results of the tour. The work into which
Turner threw all his enthusiasm and ambition was sent to the
exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1795, which contained no
less than eight of his important and highly-finished drawings.
The best known of these are the 'Peterborough Cathedral;
West Entrance,' which was included in Messrs. Agnews' 1908
annual exhibition of water-colours — it had suffered somewhat
from the light and had been restored, but was still an impressive
work; the 'Welsh Bridge, Shrewsbury,' now No. 276 in the
Manchester Whitworth Institute, a carefully wrought and ex
quisitely accomplished drawing ; and the ' Cathedral Church at
Lincoln' (Plate v.) now in the Print Room. This elaborately
finished drawing, I am inclined to think, played an important
part in Turner's development. It is almost the only drawing I
know from his hand which has a papery and unconvincing general
effect, which is monotonous and insensitive in its textures, and
hard and metallic in its details. For once in a way Turner seems
to have deferred to the ideals of elaboration of the ordinary con
noisseur, who likes to see every detail in every part of a work
pushed to its highest point of finish. For these reasons the draw
ing must have been very generally admired when it was first
exhibited, but Turner could not have been satisfied at all with his
own work, for he promptly abandoned the style. This is the
most ' mappy ' of all Turner's drawings, and we know that for the
rest of his life he had the greatest horror of this quality.
When we examine the pencil drawings made from nature on
this tour we find them all severely governed by the ends they
were intended to serve. The sketches for the publishers' work
20

PLATE r

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL
WATEIi COLOUR E>:HIBn'ED AT KO\'AL ACADEMY, 1795
(Print Room, Briiis/c MnseuinJ

PLATE VI

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LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, FRO.M THE SOUTH-WI-.ST
PENCIL. 1794

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN
are generally made in a small note-book (about 4| x 6| inches
in size). They are invariably in pure outline, without the slightest
suggestion of light and shade— nothing but the scaffolding of the
more important shapes upon which the final designs were to be
elaborated. On such a small scale the ease and grace of Turner's
touch are not much in evidence. The sketches are severely business
like, and done as quickly and with as little effort as possible. There
is more effort and feeling in the casual studies with which the leaves
of this sketch-book are interspersed. The accompanying sketch
(Plate VII.) of a pony standing ready saddled gives a good idea of
the mature wisdom of Turner's style of sketching at this period, its
determination to grasp the larger truths of form and structure,
as well as the quickness, readiness, and versatility of his powers
of perception. The drawings for the more ambitious subjects are generally
made on larger and separate pieces of paper about 8 x 10^
inches in size. On this scale the delicate play of the artist's
wrist becomes appreciable. The dominant impression left by
a glance through these drawings is one of excessive orderliness
and methodical neatness. There is no hurry, no scamped or
perfunctory work, still less are there any signs of dilatoriness or
even slowness. The artist's respect for relevant fact is equalled by
his appreciation of the value of time. His calm objective out
look, his steady, unwavering grasp of general principles enable
him at every point to economise his labours, to store up the
record of the greatest possible amount of material facts (i.e. of
facts material to his purpose) with the utmost celerity, clearness,
and the least possible expenditure of manual effort. This is
particularly noticeable in the treatment of the towers in the
Lincoln Cathedral drawing (Plate vi.), where every advantage
has been taken of the repetition of forms. A possible, though
not a very satisfactory, way of doing justice to the predominance
of conceptual over purely visual elements in this work, would be
to say that the artist has here drawn with his head rather than his
eye, that he puts down not so much what he sees as what he
understands. I am tempted to Hnger for a moment over the placid and self-
contained air of this phase of Turner's work, because we shall so
21

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
soon get into an altogether different atmosphere, and because we
shall understand Turner's after work all the better the more
clearly we grasp the character of the work we are now examining.
The self-contained air to which I allude is connected in my mind
with the character and limitations of topographical work. Now
the essential character of topographical and purely antiquarian
work is that it does not aim primarily at expressing the imagina
tive or emotional effects of the objects it represents. It takes
these imaginative or emotional interests for granted, relying
indeed on them for the ultimate justification of its work ; but the
work, as topographical and antiquarian, aims directly only at an
adequate representation of the particular scenes or buildings with
which it is concerned. There is, as it were, a tacit division of
labour ; the artist being called upon to record accurately and
vividly a certain scene or building, merely as a scene or building,
while the spectator is expected to supply the requisite mental
associations and emotional colouring. The artist draws a castle,
we will say, as a mere object of sight, while the spectator is
supposed to remember that the castle was built by such and such
a king, and that certain moving events took place in it or near it.
This division of labour simplifies the work of the topographical
artist, reducing his business to a clear-cut affair of definite visual
facts. Hence the Oriental stolidity of Turner's topographical
work, its Oriental patience, neatness, and precision. In a draw
ing like the ' Lincoln Cathedral ' Turner is as wholly immersed in
the succession of particular material facts as a Japanese or
Chinese artist. As with the Japanese and Chinese artists the
material facts are not there entirely for their own sakes ; in
Turner's case they imply an antiquarian interest, as the Eastern
artists' work implies an added religious or poetical significance.
But the point to which I desire to draw attention is, that this
added significance is not embodied in the work itself. It is some
thing extraneous and fortuitous, and the work itself falls apart
into something dependent. It is in fact an accessory, a work of
mere illustration, not an independent work of art.
We shall have to return to this subject in our next chapter,
when we find Turner wrenching himself free from the trammels
of topography and antiquarianism to soar into the regions of
22

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PONY AND WHEELBARROW
FENcrL. 1794
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN
artistic freedom. In the meantime we will turn our attention to
the topographical drawings which Turner sent to the exhibition
of 1796. Of the eleven drawings by which Turner was represented at
the Royal Academy this year, nine were apparently of a topo
graphical character. I have only been able to examine two of
these recently — the ' Transept and Choir of Ely Minster,' in the
late Mr. R. F. Holt's collection, and the ' Llandaff Cathedral,' in
the National Gallery (Exhibited Drawings No. 795). If we may
judge from the rather cold impression these two drawings make
upon us, it is probable that they owe their existence rather to the
artist's professional diligence than to any overmastering impulse
towards artistic expression. But the work, if not particularly
enthusiastic, is distinguished by its thoroughness and workman
like spirit. Every mechanical difficulty is fairly faced and
mastered with imperturbable coolness, patience, and dexterity.
So palpably is the artist's attention fixed upon the executive side
of his art, especially in the ' Llandaff Cathedral,' that a contem
porary prophet might well have been excused if he had seen in it
only the promise of the making of a marvellous petit-maitre, and
had declared that its author could not be possessed of a spark of
native genius.
Perhaps if we could see either of the two other drawings
which, to judge from their titles, were neither topographical nor
antiquarian in subject, we might find evidence which would induce
us to modify this dominant impression of intellectual coldness
and unruffled placidity. In particular, the title ' Fishermen at
Sea ' seems to suggest possibilities of romantic expressiveness,
especially when we know that the subject was treated by the
same hand that was to give us in a few years' time the 'Calais Pier,'
Lord Iveagh's ' Fishermen on a Lee- Shore,' and the ' Shipwreck.'
But this drawing has not been traced, and the second drawing,
the ' Internal (or interior) of a Cottage,' has apparently shared
the same fate.
There is, however, a slight possibility that the latter subject
may be correctly identified with the small drawing in the National
Gallery, exhibited under the title of 'Cottage Interior' (406
N.G.). This drawing has been, somewhat rashly, Supposed to
23

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
represent the underground kitchen beneath the barbers shop
in Maiden Lane. There are absolutely no grounds for such an
assumption, and a moderately careful examination of the drawing
shows that it does not represent an underground kitchen or room
of any kind. It is clearly a room on the ground-floor, but the
lower part of the window has been curtained off", with the object
of getting a picturesque arrangement of light and shade, and
this fact may have lent some plausibility to the suggestion that
the light was falling through a grating above. If I am right in
identifying this drawing with the 1796 exhibit the study was made
at Ely, as the catalogue informs us.
But whether this drawing was exhibited at the Academy or
not, it clearly belongs from internal evidence to the latter part of
1795 or the beginning of 1796. It therefore offers us an interest
ing connecting link in the development of Turner's art, showing
the line of study which turned the youthful topographer into the
romantic artist.
Yet there is little of the romantic spirit on the face of this
drawing. A poor interior bathed in gloom, with a narrow stream
of light falling on an old woman sitting beside a copper and
surrounded by an array of pots and pans. But it is significant,
because it bears witness to the direction of Turner's mind to the
study of light and shade as a separate vehicle of expression. In
the topographical drawings proper, light and shade is not used for
its emotional effect, but simply as a means of representation, that
is to say, to bring out the shapes and details. In the ' Interior '
we see Turner beginning to isolate the system of light and shade,
to study and grasp its possibilities as a separate factor of artistic
expressiveness. But if we turn to the sketch-books containing the record of
Turner's summer wanderings in 1795, we find no lack of evidence
of the essentially artistic cast of his mind, and of his wide sym
pathies with nature. His journeys this year were mainly confined
to portions of the coast-line, to the Isle of Wight, and the south
coast of Wales from Chepstow to Pembroke Bay. It was not by
any means the first time he had seen the sea, but he was then able
to study it more closely than before, and under its wilder aspects
and conditions. 24

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN
The outward appearance of the two principal sketch-books
used this year bears clear indication of bright professional
prospects. These handsome calf-bound volumes, each with four
brass clasps, put forward solid claims to respect — claims which a
young artist standing alone without a backing of influential
patrons would shrink from advancing. Opening the book devoted
to the Isle of Wight subjects, we find the first page headed in ink
with the words ' Order'd Drawings,' and underneath a record of
subjects and sizes of drawings to be made for Sir Richard Colt
Hoare and Mr. Charles Landseer, the engraver. In the South
Wales book we find the record of further commissions from these
two patrons, and others from Viscount Maiden, Dr. Mathews,
Mr. Laurie, Mr. Lambert, Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Kershaw.
These indications suggest that the drawings in these volumes
were not made entirely for the artist's own use and enjoyment.
They are certainly for use, as their neat and careful array of details
proves, but they were also destined to bear the scrutiny of possible
patrons, and excite, if possible, a desire in their breasts to see
them carried out in a more elaborate medium. This may account
for a certain smugness or primness in much of the work itself, for
its faint suggestion of youthful conceit and a priggish air of
conscious rectitude.
The sketching tour opens at Winchester, and we can follow
the artist to Salisbury and Southampton. We then find him
suddenly at Newport, in the Isle of Wight. The remainder of
the book is devoted to this island. At Newport Turner was
chiefly interested in Carisbrook Castle. We can then trace his
footsteps southward to Ventnor and along the South- West coast
to the Needles ; thence back to Newport, with a visit to Brading,
where he made a delightful draAving, partly finished in water-
colour, of Bembridge Mill.
The workmanship throughout is admirably deft, graceful and
accompHshed. It is not, however, till the artist gets to the open
sea round the Needles that his imagination seems stirred at all.
In the centre of the drawing on page 39 stands the blunt face
of the chalk cliffs ; on the left, the incoming waves play round a
few broken stumps of rock. Between the chflfs and the spectator
there is a small bay in which some fishermen's boats ride on the
25

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
rising tide. The waves play prettily with the boats, but these are
carefully tethered fore and aft, thus showing that their owners
have learnt to mistrust the gracefully advancing waters. In the
distance the cold dark volume of sea seems to justify these
suspicions. Gradually a sense of the sternness of the eternal
conflict between the sea and the dry land impresses itself on our
minds. The whole coast seems in the clutch of a ruthless and
never-resting foe. In some scenes the high cliffs seem to stand
proudly and defiantly in the water ; here they are in full retreat,
the havoc of the foreground proving that the soft chalk is crumb
ling at the touch of its pitiless enemy.
And now we can see the usefulness of the discipline and
training of topographical draughtsmanship. Confronted with a
scene like this, which powerfully stirs his emotions, the artist is
not forced to remain dumb ; he has an organ of expression ready
to his hand. The supple pencil-point hurries its suggestive
outlines over the paper. There is yet time to add some record of
the more delicate passages of modelling, and to suggest something
of the colour of the water and chffs. The artist's brush is as
docile as his pencil. There is no experimental blotting and
splashing ; every touch is expressive, and the pressure of haste
only adds greater certainty to the swift touches. The artist has
to stop before he has tinted half his paper, but he has torn out the
heart of his subject.
Leaving the Isle of Wight, Turner made his way to South
Wales, passing through Wells. The scenery of South Wales
is of a wilder description than that of the Isle of Wight, and
it must have touched his imagination profoundly. But thanks
to his ready science, his hand never falters ; aU the ruined castles
and abbeys, the water-mills and water-falls, the details of the
rocky coast-line, the white-crested waves and tangled forests, are
bundled with celerity into neat little outlines and stored ready
for future use. Among the subjects are the ca.stles of Kidwelly,
Carew, Laugharne, Llanstephen and Goodrich, and they are
drawn as they had never before been drawn or will be again.
One of the views of Carew Castle will serve the artist thirty
years later when he comes to treat this subject for his ' England
and Wales' series. But to me the most significant drawing in
26

PLATE VIII

MELINCOURT FALL, VALE OF NEATH
PE.XCTL, PART IN WATER COLOUR. 1795

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN
the book is the waterfall on page 8. The whole subject is drawn
in with the pencil as usual, and then just the most important part
is finished in water-colour. This piece of water-colour work is
an admirable example of Turner's sensitiveness to impressions,
his quickness and readiness, and the adaptability of his methods.
The rocks and the crystalline facets of the water at the top of
the fall are painted in with sharp staccato touches, while the
skilful dragging of the dry brush suggests the dissolving of the
water into spray with extraordinary vivacity.
This drawing forms our eighth illustration, though no repro
duction can do justice to it. Mr. Ruskin admired the work
warmly, and it formed part of the selection he made for the
Oxford Loan Collection. He named the drawing the 'High
Force of Tees,' but I believe this description to be incorrect. In
the sketch-book the leaf on which the drawing is made follows
immediately a drawing of the water-mill at Aberdulas, and a
note made on the fly-leaf of the book, written by Turner for his
own guidance on the tour, mentions that the ' Rocks and Water
fall' near Aberdulas were 'well worth attention.' The nearest
waterfall to Aberdulas is the cascade formed by the river
Clydach, known as the Fall of Melincourt. I have therefore
ventured to substitute this title for Mr. Ruskin's " High Force of
Tees.' An artist so sensitive to the subtlety and mystery of natural
scenery, as these sketch-books show Turner to have been, and one
so unusually gifted to express these qualities, could not long be
confined within the prosaic limits of topographical and antiquarian
work.

27

CHAPTER III
THE SUBLIME— 1797-1802
Change from pure form to light and shade — 'Millbank' and 'Etvenny
Priory' — Contrast between 'Ewenny' and 'Llandaff' — The transition
from objectivity to subjectivity — The growth of taste for the Sublime —
There are no sublime objects, but only objects of sublime feeling — No
guidance but from art — -The Wilson tradition — The two elements in the
sketches and studies of this period, (1) The study of Nature, and (2) The
assimilation of the Wilson tradition — In the 1797 sketches these t-wo
operations are kept distinct — The North of England tour and its record —
' Studies for Pictures : Copies of Wilson ' — The two operations begin to
coalesce in the 1798 and 1799 sketches — The origin of -Jason' — The
Scotch (1801) and Swiss (1802) tours.
THERE is an evident connection between such a study
of light and shade as the ' Interior of a Cottage ' (406
National Gallery) and at least two of the exhibits in the
exhibition of 1797. One of these, the ' Moonlight, a study at
Millbank,' was probably Turner's first exhibited oil painting ; the
other, ' Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire,' I am inclined
to regard as the first drawing in which the budding genius of the
young artist was authoritatively announced. It is impossible to
be sure whether the direction of Turner's attention to the subtler
problems of light and shade led him to turn to oil painting as
a more suitable medium for the expression of such effects, or
whether his resolution to explore the resources of the more
complex medium had the effect of directing his attention to the
expressional qualities of light and shade. The ' Millbank ' bears
on its face the evidence of Dutch influence (Van der Neer, van
Goyen, etc.) as well as of inexperience of the technical require
ments of the new medium. This inexperience renders the work
28

PLA TE IX

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INTERIOR OF RIPON CATHEDKAL: NORTH TRANSEPT
PENCIL. 1797
THE SUBLIME
insignificant with regard to the development of the artist's
personality, but the bent of his mind towards the mystery and
expressiveness of darkness is notable.
In the water-colour of ' Ewenny Priory ' — now one of the chief
treasures of the Cardiff Art Gallery (Pyke-Thompson Bequest) —
Turner's genius is less hampered by technical difficulties. If this
be indeed the drawing that was exhibited in 1797 ^ it shows an
amazingly rapid development in the artist's powers, especially
when we compare it with the ' Llandaff Cathedral ' (790, National
Gallery), which was exhibited only twelve months earlier. The
' Llandaff" is merely the work of a clever and skilful topo
graphical draughtsman, the ' Ewenny ' is the work of a powerful
imaginative artist. The gloomy interior of the Norman ruin is no
longer an object to be measured, dated, classified and labelled. It
is no longer an 'interesting specimen' that we have set before
us. The artist has now broken with the ordinary, every-day
world of sense-experience, and we plunge with him into the world
of the imagination, where objects are no longer separated from
and held over against the self; they now throb and tingle with
our own emotional life.
This change of aim — we may speak of it for the sake of brevity
as the change fi*om objectivity to subjectivity — is accompanied by
a change of method in the workmanship of the two drawings. In
the 'Llandaff' (as in the 'Lincoln') the forms of all the objects
are made out with the greatest possible clearness. When the
artist has told us as clearly and precisely as possible the exact
shape of every object from his chosen point of view, we feel that
he has done aU that he set out to do, and all that we can reason
ably demand from him. Then these objects are left standing side
by side in relative independence of each other and of us ; they
have no necessary connection one with the other, like the parts of
a piece of music, or the points of an argument. Their only bond
of union is the abstract one of space. The whole effect is of some
thing severed from direct experience ; the objects represented
1 For it appears that there is some doubt about the matter. The Rev. E. S. Dewick
possesses another version of this subject, similar in size and design, but very inferior in
workmanship. The clumsiness and woodenness of the workmanship have been taken as
evidence that the drawing was an earlier one than that at Cardiff. But it may also indicate
that it is merely the work of an unskilful copyist.
29

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
have an unreal air of permanence and immutability, with some
thing of the intellectual coldness and aloofness of a diagram or
mathematical symbol.
In the ' Ewenny ' drawing we are brought into contact with
objects which have not yet been severed from the emotional
colouring of immediate experience. Instead of a series of abstract
spatial determinations, appealing only to the abstract under
standing, we now have a presentation fraught with the infinite
suggestiveness of living, sensible experience. Each object repre
sented is now no longer hqld over against the self as something
alien, something indifferent to and independent of humanity, like
the laws of the physical sciences ; each object has now become
merely a moment in the affective life of an individual. It there
fore touches our own feelings, challenges our hopes and fears,
appeals intimately to our sympathies with the contagion of the
emotions of an actual companion. We cannot remain indifferent
to such an appeal if we would. Unless our nerves tingle as the
eye plunges from the familiar objects of the foreground into the
gloom beyond, the picture has not begun to exist for us. But
immediately it touches our inner life into responsive activity the
picture becomes transformed from so much indifferent paper and
pigment into an aspect of our own affective life. We have caught
the contagion of the artist's emotional experience, in which the
objects of his representation were submerged.
I am far from wishing to suggest that the distinction between
the two kinds of art which I have endeavoured to indicate is either
very obvious or easy to grasp. But it is, I am convinced, a very
real and a very weighty distinction, and as such is worthy of the
most careful study. But, however carefully we study the matter,
and however profoundly convinced we may be that the distinction
is firmly grounded in the essential nature of art itself, yet we can
never hope to describe it in the precise terms of the exact sciences.
We can never hope to understand the exact nature of the ties
which bind the expressive symbols of Romantic art to the echoes
they awaken with mathematical certainty in the breast of each
individual. The problem of the relation between thought and
feeling still agitates the rival schools of philosophy, and this is not
the place to discuss such matters. What is immediately important
30

PLA TE X

CONWAY FALLS, NEAR BETTWYS-Y-COED
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT I798

THE SUBLIME
for us is to see that Turner's art has passed from one stage of
growth to another, and to realise for ourselves as best we can the
nature of this progression. To me it seems clear that the line of
Turner's personal development is following roughly the line upon
which the artistic faculty of mankind has developed ; that the
transition from topography to the stage we have now entered upon
coincides in part with the movement from Classic to Romantic
art, from the art which is in bondage to the world of external
reality, to the art which moves and has its being in the inner
world of our ideas and feelings. The 'Llandaff' and 'Lincoln'
belong to the classic (or the pseudo-classic, if you will) art of the
eighteenth century, while the ' Ewenny ' inaugurates the Romantic
art of the nineteenth century. On its technical side the change is
from form to tone, from a system of predominantly unemotional
space-determinations to a medium which is more immediately in
contact with the inward feeling of all self-conscious beings.
In moving from the Augustan point of view towards the
Romantic, Turner was but walking in an already well-beaten
track. During the last half-century the influence of Milton had
been growing, the taste for the gloomy, the mysterious and the
picturesque had found expression in Young's Night Thoughts, in
Gray's Elegy, in Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and had found
critical exponents in Warton's History of English Poetry, and
in Burke's Essay On the Sublime and Beautiful, (1756). Dr.
Percy's Reliques had found many readers and admirers, and
Macpherson's Ossian had stirred the enthusiasm of Europe. In
painting Richard Wilson and De Loutherbourg had struck the
same note of gloomy grandeur.
Now the essence of this kind of art — the Sublime — is not
merely to strike the spectator dumb with amazement or terror,
but also to make him feel that man's moral freedom is superior
to the most terrible forces of Nature.^ The mere representation
of the fearful and terrible sights of inorganic nature is therefore
not by itself enough to evoke a feeling of the sublime ; before he
can do this the artist must also excite in the spectator the con
sciousness of his power to overcome or resist such objects. It is
1 Cf. Bosanquet's History of Esthetic, p. 277; also Kant's Kritik of Judgment, sections
28 and 29. 31

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
therefore a purely subjective feeling that the artist has to re
present, though this feeling is directed towards or centred round
a certain definite series of objects. But these objects as coloured
with the strength and resolution of the heroic mood — the mood of
Kant's animi strenui ^ — cannot properly be said to exist as natural
objects. The real subject of the artist's work is therefore, strictly
speaking, the invisible and the intangible, a mere mood of the soul,
an attitude of our own mind towards certain objects of thought.
Of course we should all have been justified before the feat had
been accomplished, in declaring that it was impossible for pictorial
art to paint the invisible, but now that it has been accomplished
we have no alternative but to recognise the fact. Common-sense
says the thing is impossible, and experience proves to us that
common-sense is wrong. The careful student of modern criticism
will know how splendidly Mr. Ruskin fought against experience
in this matter and how he was worsted. I am really sorry for
common-sense. To paint the invisible and intangible — it is a hard
nut to crack. But I protest we have no choice in the matter.
The thing is there before us. It is a pity it is not quite so simple
and easy as we should like it to be, but it is best, I think, to face
the difficulties honestly.
Turner's problem, then, as a painter of the sublime, was one in
which the mere study of natural objects could not help him. He
might search out the most fearful sights in nature, watch the
loftiest waterfall of the mightiest river, volcanoes in all their
violence of destruction, hurricanes, lightning flashes and storms,
but these objects alone, though they might stimulate his feel
ing of moral freedom, could not show him how to express this
faculty of moral resistance which ' gives us,' as Kant says, ' the
courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness
of nature.' ^ There was no help for Turner in this task but in
the works of those artists who had succeeded in expressing such
emotions, and it was to Wilson and De Loutherbourg that Turner
went, not to learn how to represent natural objects as such, but to
learn how to use such objects as the media of inward perceptions
and ideas. De Loutherbourg's influence was mainly in the direc
tion of rhodomontade and melodrama, but Wilson's, though not
^ Op. cit. (Dr. Bernard's translation), p. 141. ^ Op. cit. p. 125.
32

PLATE XI

i\

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THE SUBLIME
devoid of danger, led Turner safely into the enchanted regions of
romance. The three chief expressive — as distinguished from representa
tive — factors in Wilson's work are darkness of tone, the scheme
of colour, and the quality of the paint. I am inclined to think
that the general darkness of Wilson's pictures is the necessary
result of the kind of subjects he treated. The darkness is necessary
to tune the mind of the spectator to gloomy and tragic thoughts,
— to spread over his mind what Johnson calls ' a general obscurity
of sacred horror, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expres
sion.' In his worst pictures this darkness of key readily passes
into emptiness and blackness ; but in his best pictures this dark
ness ranges through a gamut of subdued and glowing colour,
which relieves the gloom and comforts us as it were in our distress.
The tone and colour are thus to some extent determined by the
character of the objects represented ; the tone by their general
emotional effect, and the colour scheme as conditioned by the
tone, though controlled within rather wide limits by the natural
colours of the objects represented. But the third element, the
quality of the paint, seems altogether independent of the objects
represented. It seems to reveal only the artist's attitude towards
these objects. It is as thoroughly subjective as the emotional
vibration in the voice of an excited speaker. Under this term,
the quality of the paint, I include all the immediate presentative
elements of painting, the thickness or thinness of the impasto, the
way the paint is put on, the signs of the brushwork, everything, in
short, that tells us how the artist felt towards the objects he was
representing. The main object of Turner's study during the period we are
dealing with was the assimilation of the Wilson tradition, his
study of the facts of Nature, simply as facts, falling into the
second place. For a time the two lines of study are kept distinct.
On the one hand, the work of neat and systematic note-taking
face to face with nature is continued, and on the other hand, a
number of studies aiming at the embodiment of the artist's sub
jective attitude make their appearance. The final synthesis of the
two factors, the without and the within, is of course only arrived
at in the finished work of art, but the contents of the sketch-books
T. S.-3 33

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
of this period fall easily apart, according as they lean either in the
direction of the particular facts or in the direction of the emotional
synthesis. The drawings made during the tour in the north of England,
which Turner made in the summer of 1797, belong almost entirely
to the first kind. In one sketch-book we find most of the more
important ruined abbeys and castles of Yorkshire, Durham, and
Northumberland drawn with the most delightful ease, accuracy,
and charm. Here we have Kirkstall Abbey drawn from every
available point of view, Ripon Cathedral, studied both without
and within, Barnard and Richmond Castles, Dunstanborough,
Bamborough, Durham Castle and Cathedral, Warkworth, Lindis-
farne and Norham. The drawing of the interior of Ripon
Cathedral, reproduced as Plate ix., is merely an average example
of the kind of work that Turner now seemed to produce without
the slightest effort. The most complicated structure and detail
now presented no difficulties to his well-trained eye and hand.
The ease with which he mastered all the material forms that met
his eye may have left his mind at leisure to enjoy the moral
atmosphere of the buildings, may have left his imagination free to
range backward over its past history; but there is no trace of
emotion or imagination in the graceful play of these clear-cut,
accurate, and methodical outlines.
Melrose Abbey formed the highest point north in this journey.
Leaving Melrose, Turner struck across to Cumberland, no doubt
passing through Carlisle to Keswick. After the bustle and noise
of much of the northward half of his journey, the peace and quiet
of the English lakes must have been noticeable. In looking
through the hundred or more pencil sketches made at Keswick,
Buttermere, Ullswater, Patterdale, Windermere, Coniston, etc.,
one is struck by the absence of the conventional note of Romantic
horror. There is no trace of what used to be called the bold and
appalling singularities of nature.^ There is indeed a marked
absence of human activity in these drawings. We are alone with
¦ The conventional eighteenth-century attitude towards these scenes seems well
expressed by a description in Paterson's Road Book. ' To the south of the Derwent-water,'
the passage runs, 'is the rocky chasm of Borrowdale, a tremendous pass, at the entrance of
which dark caverns yawn terriiic as the wildness of a maniac, etc.,' page 43-5
34

PLATE XI 1

O wH<
O QHPi

THE SUBLIME
nature, but nature's aspect is generally peaceful and friendly. The
mountains are high, but we enjoy climbing them and the fine
views we get there. Their shapes above all interest us immensely.
They do not strike us at all as appalling singularities, but as
replete with an infinite grace and variety, under which we feel a
fundamental reasonableness, an intuitive sense of intelligible
design. And then there are not only the bare shapes, but their
wonderful clothing of light and shade ; the play of the gleams of
sunlight and the long shadows across the deep bosoms of the hills,
and the games the wreaths of mist and cloud play with the distant
mountain-tops, and the wild races of the mountain-torrents over
their favourite tracks. Occasionally there is time for more than
the regulation pencil outline. Then the brush and a few colours
come out, and a stretch of the distance wakes from its cold abstrac
tion into life. Such sketches as 'The Head of Derwentwater,
with Lodore Falls and the entrance to Borrowdale,' the ' Hills of
Glaramara,' and ' Buttermere Lake ' (Exhibited Drawings, No.
696), were produced in this way. In these we see beautiful
effects of mist, with the sun playing through them, noted with
subtle sympathy and accuracy, but the general effect is not at all
gloomy ; it is rather one of peace, serenity, and gladness.
This is the raw material out of which Turner set to work in
the autumn and winter of 1797 to manufacture some important
oil pictures full of gloom and wrath. The young artist reminds
me of Johnson's acquaintance who had resolved to be a philosopher,
but found his native cheerfulness always breaking through.
Turner's unaffected delight in Nature certainly stood in the way
of his aspiration towards the subhme. But he was not a man to
be easily thwarted. We can trace in the pictures exhibited in
1798 the conflict between the elements given in perception and
the subjective requirements of the artist, but by sheer diligence
and strength of will he succeeded in moulding his cheerful per
ceptions into concepts full of gloom and horror. The picture of
'Buttermere' (N.G., at present on loan to the Albert Memorial
Museum, Exeter) is based on a pale and delicately-charming water-
colour drawing (696, N.G.), but little of the charm or delicacy of
the original sketch survives in the oil painting, which is ruthlessly
swamped in more than Wilsonian blackness. He succeeded best
35

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
where the record of his perceptions was slightest. There are
several sketches of Norham Castle, but they are all in pencil
and very slight. For some reason or other the artist was evidently
in a hurry. Perhaps partly because of this insufficient note-taking,
here was a favourable subject round which his imagination was
free to play, unhampered by any very clearly determined imme
diate perceptions. The picture of Norham Castle, exhibited at
Somerset House in 1798, was Turner's first distinct success in this
kind of work, and he repeated the subject several times.
A small green-covered pocket-book, which still bears Turner's
label, ' Studies for Pictures : Copies of Wilson,' gives us a
glimpse of the processes by which the sights of nature were con
verted into works of art. Here we see the subjective impulses of
the artist struggling into expression ; the artist's love of gorgeous
colour and dramatic effect nourishing itself and forging a material
foim for its own support. Among the designs in this interesting
little book are several marine and coast subjects, a shipwreck, an
interior of a forge with men busy casting an anchor, some river
scenes, a rainbow standing over a dark city, several church
interiors, and some studies of turbulent skies. It is difficult to
distinguish Turner's studies for his own pictures from his copies of
Wilson, but one of the drawings is probably a copy of Wilson's
' Morning,' and another, of his ' Bridge of Augustus at Rimini.' I
have not been able to see either of these original pictures, so
as to compare them with Turner's copy, but a comparison of
the copy with the engraving by Joseph Farington, published
by Boydell, shows some important discrepancies in the arrange
ment of the light and shade. The character of these discrep
ancies leads one to suppose that they were not made intentionally
by Turner, but were the result of his attempt to reproduce the
general effect of the picture from memory. He may have made
a slight pencil sketch of the picture in some gallery, and washed
in the general effect afterwards from memory.
This is, of course, only a supposition, but it is somewhat
strengthened by examination of a larger and more elaborate copy
of Wilson's ' Landscape with Figures,' a picture now in the
National Gallery (No. 1290). That Turner's water-colour is
intended to be a copy is proved by the endorsement on its back—
36

^., :i:.^Mid^?:u

STUDY OF FALLEN TREES
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1798

%t

. ..£/-<• ¦¦

^-li JL

C.VERNARVON CASTLE
I'KNCII.. 1799

1:

THE SUBLIME
' Study from Wilson,' but when we compare it with the original
we find that the various discrepancies in the copy can only be
accounted for by supposing that Turner was working to a con
siderable extent from memory. I admit the evidence is not con
clusive, but I do not think we shall be far wrong if we take it
that Turner did not at this time make any elaborate copies of
Wilson's pictures, but that he studied them closely and enthusias
tically, and relied more upon his memory than his notes.
In the sketches made during the following years we find that
these two separate operations show a tendency to coalesce.
Turner has evidently taken a dislike to his earlier map-making
style, and tries hard to see nature like Wilson. His sketches
from nature become slighter and more hurried. In his efforts
towards breadth he comes very near emptiness, and in his attempts
to get away from his neat bit-by-bit style of work he often comes
near downright clumsiness and carelessness.
The summers of 1798 and 1799 were largely spent in North
Wales. Here he found exactly the material that chimed in with
the mood of sternness and gloom he wished to express : steep,
convulsive mountains, wild valleys and broken passes, the bare
skeletonlike ribs of broken ships aground on lonely estuaries,
massive ruins of huge castles perched on inaccessible crags,
gnawed to the bone as it were by the wind and rain and
remorseless Time.
His mental grasp has clearly broadened. He no longer sees
buildings as isolated objects, but they now fall into their places as
incidents in the wide panorama of the country. Nothing is now
drawn for itself; the trees are emanations from the ground, the
dry land and the waters are kinsmen, the stones in the foreground
are parts of the distant mountains, and the mountains huge elder
brothers of the pebbles by the river-side. The bubbling waters
are but clouds made captive, the clouds the freed souls of the
brooks, the trees the organ of their transformation ; and castles
like Conway, standing with their roots plunged deep uito their
rocky foundations, seem but rocks raised to a higher power. The
distinction between human art and physical nature is everywhere
broken down. The spirit of life in nature is identified with the
volitions and passions of the artist's own soul : he has become 37

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
sensible * to the moods of time and season, to the moral power,
the affections and the spirit of the place.' ^
This state of mind is closely akin to the mood in which the
myths of the Old World had taken shape. Small wonder, then, if
the broken and withered branches of a stricken tree writhing
among vigorously shooting brushwood should suggest to Turner's
mobile fancy the idea of snakes and dragons. The sketch here
reproduced (Plate xiii.) strikes me as probably the origin of the
picture of ' Jason ' which was exhibited in 1802.
In 1800 or 1801 Turner made a tour through the Highlands of
Scotland. The immediate results were slightly disappointing,
but the experience gained undoubtedly contributed to the effec
tiveness of the work done during the first visit to Switzerland,
made in 1802. In the Scotch sketches Turner had hit upon a
method of working that enabled him to cover a great deal of
ground in a short space of time, and which had the additional
advantage of exercising his memory, and of making his sketches
from nature more like the first draughts of his finished pictures
than like so many unfused notes or memoranda. All the more
promising scenes he met with were sketched slightly in chalk
upon large sheets of paper prepared with a wash of light brown.
These sketches were seldom carried far before the actual scenes,
but as soon after as was convenient — possibly at the inn in the
evening — these skeletons were filled up from the artist's retentive
memory and ever-ready invention. In this way he was able to
fortify himself against the multiplicity of nature's irrelevant facts,
and to find a ready form of expression for the reaction of his own
mind upon the sights of nature.
Colour was very little used in the Scotch sketches, all the
larger drawings — numbering, I think, between forty and fifty —
being worked entirely in black and white. But a considerable
number of the Swiss drawings are coloured, though, I believe,
none of them directly from nature. Turner's procedure in the
case of these drawings appears to have been practically the same
as with the Scotch series, but after the skeleton sketch from
nature had been elaborated with pencil and white and black
chalk, colour was sometimes resorted to, less as a record of facts
1 Wordsworth, Prelude, Bk. xii. 118-120.
38

PLA TE XV

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BLAIR'S HUT ON THE MONTANVERT AND MER DE GLACE
\\-ATER COLOUR. l8o2

THE SUBLIME
of local colour, than as an additional instrument of expression of
the subjective mood. Among the drawings elaborated in this way
are the sketches upon which several of the Farnley drawings (the
large ' Mer de Glace, Chamounix,' ' Falls of the Reichenbach,'
'Pass of St. Gothard,' 'Blair's Hut, Mer de Glace,'^ etc.), were
based. In some cases the finished works are less impressive than
the first sketches, which are almost overpowering in their concen
trated vehemence and gloomy majesty. But we must beware of
regarding these as simple sketches from nature. They are more
strictly studies for pictures than sketches from nature, and it is
hardly too much to say that they owe more of their energetic
emotional appeal to the Wilson tradition, which Turner had by
this time thoroughly assimilated, than to the immediate inspira
tion of nature.
^ See Plate xvi. for the study for the Farnley picture.

39

CHAPTER IV
THE SEA-PAINTER— 1802-1809
Connection between marine painting and the sublime — Turner's first
marine subjects — The 'Bridgewater sea-piece' — 'Meeting of the Thames
and Medway' — 'Our landing at Calais' and 'Calais Pier' — 'Fishermen
upon a Lee Shore ' — ' Guisborough Shore ' and ' Dunbar ' sketch-books —
' The Shipwreck ' — ' At the Mouth of the Thames ' — ' The Nore,' ' Sheer
ness,' etc. — ' Death of Nelson.'
WE have studied in the preceding chapter the first phase
of Turner's genuinely creative work. We have seen
the artist tear himself free from the trammels of the
prosaic understanding, with its clear-cut distinctions between
external nature and subjective thought and feeling, and plunge
whole-heartedly into the concrete world of the poetic imagination.
The accomplished draughtsman of the visible has developed into
the perfervid poet of the invisible. Objective reality, as such, is
shattered and trampled ruthlessly underfoot.
' Woe ! woe !
Thou hast destroy'd
The beautiful world
With violent blow
'Tis shiver'd ! 'tis shatter'd !
The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter'd !
Now we sweep
The wrecks into nothingness !
Fondly we weep
The beauty that's goue !
Thou, 'mongst the sons of earth.
Lofty and mighty one.
Build it once more !
In thine own bosom the lost world restore ! '
The distinction between percipient and object is brushed
aside, and the external world becomes the medium and the means
40

THE SEA-PAINTER
of manifestation of inward perceptions and ideas. How far the
external world can be built up again in the bosom of the self-
conscious subject depends largely upon the opportunities and
genius of the individual.
In pictures like the ' Kilgarran Castle,' ' Norham Castle,' and
' The Trossachs ' — to take perhaps the three most successful works
of the kind of art we have been studying — the mind only partially
coalesces with its objects. Such art only deals with a limited
range of subject-matter, and it treats its objects rather as foils to
the contemplative mind than as having significance and worth in
themselves. The terrors of inorganic nature are not represented
for their own sake, but are paraded to mark the triumph of the
moral freedom that rises superior to them. The artist is therefore
forced to do violence to external nature, to subdue it and degrade
it into a symbol of what is antagonistic in his own conscious
experience. Yet by sheer force of artistic treatment all this
hostile and negative matter is brought within the realm of art, and
made into an object in which the self-scrutinising spirit of man
finds itself mirrored.
But the sublime lies only on the threshold of beauty. It
succeeds, in so far as it does attain its effect, only by making
extreme demands upon the acquired culture and reasoning powers
of the spectator. The sublime cannot be adequately represented
by any sensuous object, but the very inadequacy of these objects
can stir up and evoke this feeling in the properly prepared
spectator. There are ampler possibilities of beauty in the realm of the sea
painter. At first sight it may seem that the change is merely a
change from one region of inorganic nature to another, from rocks,
torrents and glaciers, to the stormy and impetuous sea. But if we
examine the substance of Turner's marine pictures carefully,
we find that they contain elements which lend themselves more
readily to a systematic unity in sensuous form. In his mountainous
pieces Turner found room for very little immediate human interest.
Man and his everyday occupations are banished from the steep
and rocky places he chooses to represent, as incompatible with
the gloomy, awe-struck feeling he wishes to evoke. The only
immediate link with the feelings and interests of those for whom
41

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
he worked which these pictures contained, was the shattered
masonry of a castle built in the recesses of the past by men long
since dead, but whose purposes and fate still awoke echoes in
the historical imagination of the present. In his marine subjects
Turner entered more closely into relation with the substantive
interests of his time. During the Napoleonic wars the sea had
come to be recognised as the chief safeguard of the nation. The
dangers of the sea, the courage and skill of her sailors, were
England's only bulwarks against the invincible legions of
Napoleon. The gathering of the French armies of invasion along
the shores of Brittany, the flotillas of gun-boats and flat-bottomed
boats safely moored at Boulogne and Ambleteuse, focussed the
attention of the nation upon a point outside the limited and
varying interests of the individual citizen, and united them all in
the same community of hopes and fears. The existence and
welfare of the nation were at stake, the need of self-sacrifice was
felt, and the individual became animated with the common senti
ments of the nation. The stress of circumstance woke up what I
may call the merely physical and material nation into a self-
conscious spiritual unity, thinking the same thoughts and throbbing
with the same emotions.
At such a moment the poet's and the artist's task is made
comparatively easy. Their individual experiences are charged
with a universal import ; their art rises to the dignity of a public
function. They have only to be true to their own impulses to
realise the absolute beauty of eternal life. And it was happily at
such a moment in the life of the English nation that Turner
wearied of his ruined castles and terrifying mountains — of the
picturesque in general — and devoted himself to marine painting.
The list of Turner's exhibited works shows that he was early
drawn to the sea and sailors. In 1796 he exhibited a drawing
called ' Fishermen at Sea,' the next year another entitled ' Fisher
men coming Ashore at Sunset, previous to a Gale,' and in 1799
there were two oil pictures, one of ' The Battle of the Nile,' and
the other of ' Fishermen Becalmed previous to a Storm — Twilight.'
I have not, unfortunately, been able to see any of these works, but
some studies and drawings in the National Gallery made about
1796 show that Turner began his career as a marine painter under
42

STUDY FOR THE "BRIDGEWATER SEA PIECE"
PEN AND INK, WASH, AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT iSoi

13

PLATE XVIII

STUHY OF A HARGE WITH SAILS SET
'EN AND INK, WASH, AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. .\BOUT l8o2

THE SEA-PAINTER
the marked influence of Rowlandson, George Morland and De
Loutherbourg. There is one animated little drawing with brown
ink outlines of sailors getting some obstreperous pigs on board a
small coasting vessel in a strong gale of wind. Apparently the
cart has been driven into the sea beside the vessel, an impossible
feat in such a sea ; the sea must also be too deep for the wheels of
the cart to rest on the ground, and if the wheels touch the bottom
there is not enough water for the two boats. But in spite of these
minor defects the subject provides scope for a fine animated group
of men in the cart struggling with the pigs, who have determined
to precipitate themselves into the water rather than go where they
are wanted.
That Turner was not altogether satisfied with his design is
proved by the existence of two other versions of the same
subject. In one of these the motive of the cart in the sea has
been abandoned. The cart is now placed in the foreground on the
beach, and the rearing horses and struggling and shouting men are
clearly inspired by Rowlandson's and De Loutherbourg's treatment
of similar themes. These drawings are in pencil outline only, but
there is also a rather elaborate water-colour of a shipwrecked
sailor clinging to the rocks, with huge glassy-coloured waves in
the manner of De Loutherbourg.
Turner's unfamiliarity with the sea no doubt accounted to
some extent for its attraction. His imagination was here free to
disport itself untrammelled by the bonds of experience, and safe
from the irksome yoke of the familiar. When we come to study
Turner's first important sea-piece, the fine picture in the Bridge-
water House collection of ' Dutch Boats in a Gale : Fishermen
endeavouring to put their Fish on Board ' — first exhibited in 1801,
we can see how little art is bound to depend upon the individual
artist's personal experience. Turner had painted landscapes before
he knew the country, and buildings before he had seen them, so
now he paints sea-pieces before he has been to sea. There is
no evidence to show that he had ventured out of sight of land
before 1802, and then it was only to cross the Channel from
Dover to Calais. But before this he had exhibited not only the
Bridgewater picture to which I have referred, but a large ' Battle
of the Nile' (1799), Lord Iveagh's superb 'Fishermen upon a Lee
43

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Shore ' (1802), and the almost equally fine ' Ships bearing up for
Anchorage ' (1802), in the Petworth gallery.
It is true that he had used to the uttermost the few opportunities
which had fallen in his way of observing the sea from the shore,
and that he had some little experience of ships and sailors in
rivers and on the coast. (See, for example, the series of .sketches
of boats' crews towing men-of-war in the River Usk, in the
' Cyfarthfa ' Sketch-Book of 1798.) What direct knowledge of this
kind he possessed he naturally used, but there can be no doubt
that the main body of his knowledge as well as inspiration was
derived not at first-hand, but indirectly, at first, through the
pictures of English painters like De Loutherbourg, and later,
through the pictures and drawings of the Dutch sea-painters.
The point is worth the attention of those who treat the close con
nection between art and nature which happens to exist just at
present as an inherent characteristic of pictorial art, and make
much of this supposed characteristic in opposition to the freedom
of music. When we cease to keep our attention riveted on the
naturalistic art of the present, we soon find indications that the
essential forms of pictorial art are as much independent construc
tions of the creative mind as the forms of music.
In the group of studies for pictures of the sea which are related
to the Duke of Bridgewater's picture, we see Turner playing
with pictorial forms with as much freedom as a musician plays
with his notes. The horizontal line of the sea, the heaving waves,
the masses of light and dark in the sky, the stolid forms of the big
ships, the instability of the smaller boats, — these are notes which
Turner never seems wearied of evoking, and weaving into ever
fresh combinations. The demands of mere representation count
for almost nothing in these entrancing drawings. The artist
draws simply because he loves his artistic symbols, loves weaving
them into designs, and because his gift of melodic invention is
inexhaustible. The group of drawings to which I refer seems to have been
made originally in a small book, solidly bound in calf On one
of the covers Turner has printed boldly in ink ' Studies P,' and
' Shipping,' which means, doubtless, Studies for Pictures of
Shipping. The paper is blue with a coarse surface, similar to
44

PLATE XIX

<W
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H <
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m 5

2K

PLATE .\'A'

'J -"t

D ?
O 5
ti -
X K
o "
2 i

2; "

Q <

THE SEA-PAINTER
that commonly used by students in the French ateliers, and known
as Michallet paper. The designs were generally roughly pencilled
in, and were then carried further in pen and ink, with bold washes
of Indian ink. White chalk was also freely used. The book was
in use before 1799, as it contains a number of studies for the
painter's diploma picture of Dolbadarn Castle. These studies
are made in coloured chalks, most of them still very effective,
although they have wasted a good deal of their force upon the
pages that have been pressed down over them. This is, I believe,
one of the few occasions on which Turner has been known to work
in pastel. Doubtless many of the shipping designs were never
carried out, but among them there are studies for the large
water-colour of Carnarvon Castle exhibited in 1800, and for the
two water-colours of Pembroke Castle, one (now belonging to
Mrs. Pitt Miller), exhibited in 1801, and the other (the glorious
one now belonging to Mr. Ralph Brocklebank), exhibited in
1806. But the actual studies for the ' Bridgewater Sea-piece ' were
made in a much larger book, a book which seems to have been
devoted at first to the purpose of making life studies at the
Academy classes. But it contains only about half a dozen draw
ings of this kind, while about sixty pages are devoted to studies of
pictures, some historical, like the ' Deluge,' etc., but most of them
sea-pieces. The paper is coarse blue, like the smaller book, the
size of the leaves being 17 x 10^ inches, and most of the studies
are continued over the two open pages. Throughout the book
one recognises a certain sense of pride and exaltation in the mere
size of the paper, and in the unchecked freedom with which the
artist's hand and imagination could disport themselves.
One of the earliest studies for the 'Bridgewater Sea-piece ' repre
sents simply a straight line of sea with two ships on it in the
distance, one foreshortened, the other in profile. In the extreme
distance is a line of white chalk suggesting a strip of sunlight on a
distant coast. The idea is so bald and empty and so unlike the
final result that one would not connect the study with the picture
did it not bear Turner's inscription, 'Duke's Picture,' in the
margin. The next study shows that Turner's mind is occupied with the
45

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
idea of filling up the emptiness of the middle distance and fore
ground. On the left we have two fishing-boats pitching to the
right in shadow, while the two frigates ride at anchor in the dis
tance, very much as in the first sketch. The two groups are
united simply by the cast shadow on the water thrown by the
fishing-boats in the direction of the frigates (Plate xvii.).
The next study shows the artist trying to find a more interest
ing way of uniting the two groups. Here the two motives are
tied together as it were by a small rowing-boat with men in it half
hidden in the trough of the waves. The group of fishing-boats is
also slightly altered, their sails accentuating their common sway
ing motion. In this drawing the various objects are no longer
juxtaposed in a seemingly casual or arbitrary way. A subtle bond
of union has sprung up between them. The rowing-boat rocks
the reverse way to that of the large group of sailing vessels. The
two rocking motions reinforce and explain one another. The
movement of each gains in vividness, and they both increase the
intensity of our perception of the steadiness and weight of the boat
riding at anchor out there on the right. In this way the sea comes
to life in its effects, and the design is ready to be transferred to
the canvas and for further elaboration.
This playing with our feelings of equilibrium and movement
constitutes one of the prime factors of Turner's enjoyment in his
earlier sea-pieces. He is taking possession of his new realm,
getting his sea-legs as it were. We see this plainly in the beautiful
little picture of ' The Meeting of the Thames and Medway ' in the
National Gallery. (This is a small version of the larger picture now
in America. There is also another equally fine small version in the
University Galleries, Oxford.) The strong heaving wave on which
the buoy dances in the foreground sets the main motive of the
picture — the play of wind and waves — clearly forward. The
small boat with the four men in it is flung sideways and upward.
We feel it as the light plaything of the heavy waves. In the
middle distance there are two groups of heavier craft with sails
set, one group, on the left, coming straight towards us, the other
group scudding straight across the picture plane, just about to
disappear out of the frame on the right. The dancing buoy and
the light rowing-boat in the foreground make us feel at once the
46

PLA TE XXI

T~

O 2

H t

1^ d*^

THE SEA-PAINTER
weight and bulk of these sailing hoys. We feel them settling
down in the mettlesome sea, gripping it tight as a rider grips his
horse with his knees, while they fling out their sails to the wind.
They are like living, panting, quivering animals. In the far
distance rides a large frigate at anchor, and the firm base line of
the horizon might stand as a symbol of the self-possession, strength
of will, and unity of the conscious self, which delights in differences,
while never entirely losing itself in the multifarious maze of
experience. In our sketch-book there are some of the undeveloped germs
of this picture. In these sketches parts of the design have been
firmly grasped, but the whole movement has not yet come to
light. In the fine drawing running across pages 90 and 91, for
example, the action of the two scurrying hoys on the right, together
with the rocking boat in the foreground, is clearly marked. But
there is nothing to counterbalance the swift rush of these boats.
If we look at this study with the remembrance of the final design
in our minds we feel there is something missing. We want the
heavy waddling hoys on the left coming towards us, with their
hulls jammed deep in the waves ; we want something to give us a
sense of solidity, something, as it were, to hold on to, to steady
ourselves in the sway and rush.
All these trial sketches, this laborious piecing together of the
designs, suggest that Turner was not trying to realise something
that he had actually seen. No doubt this was the case, yet we
must not hastily conclude that he was simply making it all up out
of his head, as the common saying runs. His smaller sketch
books show that he had constantly watched such scenes. The
object of his trial sketches was therefore to find an adequately
expressive form which would do justice to the wealth of his experi
ence. He was not trying simply to make an abstractly beautiful
composition. His task was rather to knit together into conceptual
unity his wide range of experience, and then to body this forth in
a carefully selected and articulated sequence of sensuous signs.
But some of the pages of the book in which the sketches^
referred to above occur, prove that the well-known picture of
' Calais Pier ' is in the main an attempt to realise a scene that
Turner had actually witnessed. On pages 58 and 59 there is a
47

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
vigorous drawing in black and white chalk inscribed ' Our landing
at Calais— nearly swampt.' The packet boat had evidently had a
rough crossing, and now the passengers are being landed in boats
with considerable difficulty. In this sketch the boat seems to
have stuck on the harbour bar, and, beyond, the packet which the
passengers have just left is lowering its mainsail. Another sketch
shows the small boat flung finally on the shore with the passengers
struggling among the surf The picture is no doubt an attempt to
realise the scene which presented itself immediately on the arrival
of the packet boat, before the passengers began to land. This
was Turner's general idea, but the composition had to be invented
and appropriate details found to sustain and reinforce the main
idea. This incident occurred in 1802, and we have to go back to the
previous year to find what seem to me the materials used in the
construction of Lord Iveagh's superb ' Fishermen upon a Lee-
Shore in Squally Weather,' a picture that will be fresh in the
public mind, as it formed one of the chief attractions at the exhibi
tion of English pictures at the Franco-British Exhibition held in
London last year (1908). Two little pocket-books, used during
Turner's journey to the Scotch lakes, are filled with drawings of
the heavy billows of the North Sea thundering on a lee shore.
The first book was used on the Yorkshire coast, the other on the
wild coast between Berwick and Edinburgh. The Yorkshire book
bears Turner's label, ' Guisborough Shore,' on the back. It con
sists of a small number of pages of coarse blue paper. These
pages are filled with magnificent impressions of waves dashing
against rocks, and of dark, heavy fishing-boats silhouetted against
the foaming white sea. The ' Liber ' design of the ' Coast of
Yorkshire near Whitby ' (R. 24) was doubtless suggested on this
occasion. The other book, the ' Dunbar ' sketch-book as Turner named
it, consists of leaves of stout Whatman coated with washes of a
murky pinkish brown. The advantage of using white paper pre
pared in this way is, that the artist can get his fights by simply
using his knife to scratch away the preparation. This book con
tains sketches of the ruins of Roslin Castle, the Bass Rock, Tan-
tallon and Dunbar Castles. The wild and disconsolate scenes
48

I .\-

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i'l

MEN-OF-WAR'S BOATS FETCHING PROVISIONS (1)
I'ENCIL. ABOUT 1808

THE SEA-PAINTER
between St. Abb's Head and Dunbar seem to have deeply
impressed Turner's imagination. As we turn over the leaves of
this book we seem to hear ' the sombrous and heavy sound of the
billows successively dashing against the rocky beach ' that Scott
speaks of in his description of Fast Castle in the Bride of Lammer-
moor. The artist seems too excited to draw in his old static
fashion. The stretches of sullen sea are sketched again and again,
the white crests of the incoming waves being dug out furiously
with the knife. But only the large masses of light and dark are
indicated. Here we have a stretch of cold light in the sky with
the dark sea and cliffs looming against it, the whole vague and
fragmentary, but irresistibly impressive. But perhaps the most
eloquent pages in the book contain two glorious studies of storm-
tossed waves. We are looking out from the shore, with the waves
breaking at our feet. Even in his more elaborate work Turner
has never suggested the tremendous weight and power of the sea-
waves so vividly as in these hurried and tiny sketches. The furious
work with the knife on both sides of the paper has reduced it
almost to a rag ; but the rag is eloquent, and such studies as these
help us to understand how it was that Turner could paint the sea
so very much better than any artist either before his time or since.
' The Shipwreck,' one of the most successful of Turner's early
sea-pieces, was painted in 1805. The picture is doubtless a ' com
position ' in which Turner has endeavoured to sum up his knowledge
of the sea, but, as was usual with him, it contains a nucleus of
directly observed fact. These two sides of his art, tireless and the
most searching observation, and the subsequent artistic manipula-
lation of what he had seen and felt, are clearly displayed for us in
two little ragged paper-covered note-books labelled by the artist
' Shipwreck ' and ' Shipwreck 2. The first contains the succinct
record of an actual shipwreck, the second the series of trial composi
tions which he made before the final design of the picture was fixed.
Eight of the pages of the first book — it only contains sixteen
pages in all — have long been exhibited among the Turner water-
colours in the National Gallery. They are framed together, and
numbered 535. They represent so many different views of a
barque going to pieces on the shore. There can be no doubt of
the veracity of these bold, masterly pen sketches ; as Mr. Ruskin
T. S.-4 49

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
says of them, ' I believe even those who have not seen a shipwreck,
must recognise, by the instinct of awe, the truth of these records
of a vessel's ruin ' (Ruskin on Pictures, p. 221). In the margin
of one of the drawings Turner has scribbled 'Pepper (?) bargh
Vessel. Hemp. O. Iron bundles like Hoop." The scenery vaguely
suggests the coast of Kent to me, — possibly Gravesend.
These sketches are so impressive that one would have thought
that Turner would have been satisfied to take any one of them as
a basis for a picture. But his mind seemed unsatisfied until he
had exalted actuality into something of epic grandeur. The second
little book shows how he set to work to make his pictures
express a clearer intention and a wider mental outlook than any
single incident could.
The first sketch shows us a large ship settling down at the
bows, with a single rowing-boat in the foreground. We are far
away from the shore. The tragedy is intensified by taking place
on the high seas, but the presentment is evidently too bare and
matter-of-fact for the artist. In the next sketch the ship is
turning over towards us, though slightly to the right, so that
we see its decks plainly, with the masts foreshortened towards
us. Somewhat nearer to us is a welter of boats and figures, with
a fishing-boat with sails set on the right, all placed low down in
the trough of the sea. On page 13, the vessel is turned half over
towards us, but to the left. The fishing-boat in the foreground
sailing into the picture also has its mast and sails sloping violently
to the left. This swing in the same direction of the two most
prominent objects in the design strikes us as monotonous, and
doubtless for this reason excited Turner's disapproval. On page
16, the vessel is brought nearer and made a more prominent object
in the design. It is now turned over away from us and slightly
to the left. The welter of boats and figures is placed beyond the
vessel, instead of in the foreground. In another sketch the ship
lies on its side helpless on the right of the design, its masts and
rigging in the water stretching right across the picture. Another
of the sketches has been reproduced as Plate xxi. This is, per
haps, a little more fully realised than some of the others. It
seems to have been drawn straight off" in pen and ink, then the
stormy sky and waves were indicated with an impetuous wash of
50

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MEN-OF-WARS BOATS FETCHING PROVISIONS (2)
PENCIL. ABOUT l8o8

THE SEA-PAINTER
Indian ink, which was then thumbed, dabbed, and coaxed to give
the requisite modelling. The sweep of the waves, their vicious
choppy spurts and explosions of spray, are given with a directness
and simplicity of means that I believe would have excited the
admiration of Korin himself.
I need not continue to describe all the pages in detail. The
point of interest is that Turner tried successively every possible
movement in the sinking of a big ship and looked at them from
every possible point of view. Then he finally decided that his
second sketch was the most suggestive and striking, so he took it
up again, and after considerable modification in the details, de
veloped it into the completed work.
Between 1805 and 1809 Turner must have spent a good deal
of his time sailing up and down the lower reaches and the mouth
of the Thames. The contents of several sketch-books prove this.
In one there is a view of the Dutch coast with Flushing in the
distance, evidently drawn from the sea. But the subjects as a
rule are nearer home. In the book labelled ' River and Margate '
the subjects range from the Fishmarket at Hastings to Cobham
and Walton Bridges. These include sketches near London
Bridge, at Purfleet, Greenwich, Gravesend, Southend, Heme Bay,
and Margate. But these are only treated as backgrounds to the
ships and boats. We have pages and pages of wherries and
Thames barges bundling along with all sails set past massive ships
of the line at anchor, all drawn as swiftly as they seem to move.
These are almost too slight for reproduction, but the two
animated scenes of men-of-war's boats victualling, reproduced as
Plates XXII. and xxiii., give an excellent idea of the spirit in which
Turner worked on these occasions. Looking out to sea we see a
number of ships of the line riding at anchor. Round the landing-
stages in the foreground are the ships' boats taking in stores of
bread, hay and straw, sheep and fish. The day is fine, but there
is evidently a wind blowing; the sea is choppy; there is plenty of
spray about, and the pennants stand out taut fi:om the masts of
the big ships in the offing. It is all drawn with a few hurried,
nervous pencil outlines, nothing is described in detail, yet the
whole scene is brought as vividly before us as the most elaborate
oil-painting could bring it. 51

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Another little book, labelled ' Boats. Ice,' shows that Turner
was no mere fair weather sailor. The sketches were evidently
made during a severe winter. The book starts off with several
lurid sunsets. On page 9 we see some boatmen on their barges,
a church, probably Gravesend Church, in the distance. The sun
has disappeared behind a bank of clouds. These have the word
' grey ' scribbled over them. Over a few hurried lines of pencil
radiating from a centre behind these clouds are the suggestive words
' Fire and Blood.' On page 12, we have a stretch of river with a
distant group of trees on the left looming through the fog. The
river is strewn with fragments of ice. On the right a single boat
is visible, its tall mast and stays standing out boldly against the
sky. Above, the upper part of the sun's face is just appearing
through the clouds. This slight, sensitive sketch is helped out for
the artist — though for the imaginative spectator it hardly needs
such help, so eloquent is it — by scribbled notes of colour ; ' Boat
. . . yellow,' the water in the foreground, ' Greenish Black in
Shadows. Ice white and grey.'
On the next page we find two barges with brittle fragments of
ice hanging round them. On page 16, there is a barge moored
beside what seems to be a huge iceberg, with two figures on it,
though it may only be a rocky shore distorted by snow and ice
into its fantastic appearance. But the sketch on the next page
looks emphatically like an iceberg. The following sketch is here
reproduced (Plate xxiv. ), so the reader may judge for himself what
it is. To me it looks like floating icebergs, the foremost one con
taining a wrecked vessel embedded in its surface. This page was
cut out by Mr. Ruskin and exhibited at Oxford with the title,
' The Inscrutable.'
Turner has summed up these experiences of his in a group of
absolutely unrivalled sea-pieces. Pictures like Mr. F. H. Fawkes's
' Pilot hailing a Whitstable Hoy,' Mr. G. J. Gould's ' The Nore,'
Mr. P. A. B. Widener's ' Meeting of the Thames and Medway,'
and Lady Wantage's ' Sheerness,' seem to me beyond all question
the most glorious pictures of the sea ever painted. The finest
Dutch pictures of this kind, with all their admirable qualities, do
not seem ever to get beyond a certain prosaic outlook. This
matter-of-fact effect is enhanced by — if it is not altogether due to it
52

PLA TE XXIV

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THE SEA-PAINTER
— the ruthless display the artists make of their special knowledge
of the construction and rigging of their vessels. I believe Turner's
knowledge of this kind was almost as exhaustive as theirs, but
whether as fuU or more limited, he made a better use of what he
did know. His objects are never there simply for themselves.
They are always subordinated to a genuinely imaginative concep
tion. His pictures, therefore, are not the work of a man with a
professional speciality. They are real epics of the sea. From
their own imaginative point of view their workmanship is almost
perfect. Their style is sonorous and weighty. They are as solemn
and majestic in conception as they are manly in feeling. They
have something of that 'beauty which, as Milton sings, hath
terror in it.' Together 'they move in perfect phalanx to the
Dorian mood' — the noblest sequence of poems ever dedicated
to the majesty of the sea.
When we compare such pictures as these with a subject like
' The Death of Nelson,' in the National Gallery, — a subject dealing
directly with a particular historical incident — we cannot but feel
that they owe something of their loftiness and grandeur to their
exaltation above all merely limited feelings of patriotism. I
suppose a Frenchman could hardly be expected to look at the
' Nelson ' with quite the same feelings as an Englishman ; or a
Dane to regard the ' Spithead ; Boat's crew recovering an anchor '
— which actually represents the return of the English fieet with
the Danish ships captured at Copenhagen — in the way this event
was hailed in England. The feehng of patriotism is no doubt an
admirable and useful one in real life ; but in so far as art is tied
down to the service of a particular kind of patriotism, it is limited
to this definite end, and is not entirely free in and for itself. And
art which is not entirely free from all finite ends cannot rise to the
full height of its own destiny.
Yet in the very greatest art there is no opposition to all that is
essentially noble and heroic in patriotism. A masterpiece like
Lady Wantage's ' Sheerness,' for example, is as full of all the
essential virtues of patriotism as a picture like the ' Death of
Nelson.' The difference is only in the degrees of emphasis placed
on certain aspects of the whole conception. In the ' Sheerness '
the interest is concentrated on the guardship at the Nore, and all
53

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
that is implied in this aspect of a nation's discipline, hardihood,
watchfulness, and self-sacrifice. And on this idea of military (or
naval) service for the Fatherland the possibility of actual struggle
and, if need be, death at the hands of any national enemy is
clearly involved. The ' Death of Nelson,' therefore, only makes
explicit a single moment held in solution in the other picture.
Hence the question is not between the value of patriotic feeling and
a shallow, empty form of cosmopolitanism as artistic motives, but
merely under which aspect the virtues of patriotism are to be con
templated. Which aspect does fullest justice to the whole con
ception of personal devotion and sacrifice to the commonweal?
My own feeling is that the point of view which raises itself above
the particular interests of one nation, and treats the hardships
and dangers of national defence as an inevitable condition of
human life, is more in accord with the freedom and universality
of the highest art. The question, I repeat, is only one of degree,
and these remarks will be entirely misunderstood if they are taken
to imply that I should have wished that either the ' Nelson '
or the ' Spithead ' had not been painted. In the ' Spithead,' as a
matter of fact, the connection with the particular historical
incident which called it into existence has long dropped out of
sight, whilst the 'Nelson' has always caused a certain feeling of dis
satisfaction even among the most ardent and exclusive of patriots.
This vague feeling is possibly at the root of the adverse technical
criticisms to which it has been subjected by sailors and naval
experts. These criticisms are generally in themselves entirely
wrongheaded and sometimes fatuous, for the picture is certainly a
grand and impressive one, and by far the most adequate repre
sentation in pictorial art of an event of the greatest national
importance. But the intuitive sense of the nation has always
thought more highly of such a picture as ' The Fighting Tdm^raire
tugged to her last Berth,' than of the ' Death of Nelson.' In ' The
Fighting Tem^raire,' as in the earlier masterpieces to which I have
referred, there is no touch of chauvinism or vainglory, yet it is
generously and passionately patriotic: but it is magnanimous
patriotism, which honours its foe and looks beyond and above the
present momentary noise and strife.
54

CHAPTER V
'SIMPLE NATURE'— 1808-1813
The works of this period an important yet generally neglected aspect of
Turner's art — Turner's classification of ' Pastoral ' as opposed to ' Elegant
Pastoral ' — The Arcadian idyll of the mid-eighteenth century — The first
' Pastoral ' subjects in ' Liber ' — ' Windmill and Lock ' — The capture of the
Danish Fleet in 1807 — Turner's visit to Portsmouth — His return journey
— 'Hedging and Ditching' — An attempt to define the mood of pictures
like ' The Frosty Morning,' ' Windsor,' etc. — Distinction between mood
and character.
THE phase of Turner's work which we are now to consider
seems to me one to which the critics have hardly done
justice. The supreme beauty of two of the pictures of
this group has certainly been recognised— I allude to the ' Trout
Stream ' and Lady Wantage's ' Walton Bridges,' but these
works have been treated mainly on their individual merits, instead
of in their connection with a clearly-marked and most significant
aspect of the artist's genius. Chronologically, this period ranges
from about the year 1808 to 1813, and it includes, in addition to
the two works just mentioned, the ' Windsor,' ' Abingdon,'
' Kingston Bank,' ' Frosty Morning,' ' Union of the Thames and
Isis ' and ' Sandbank with Gipsies,' all in the National Gallery, as
well as Sir Frederick Cook's ' Windmill and Lock ' and Mr.
Orrock's ' Walton Bridges.' These works all strike me as
characterised by a certain mood or standpoint which possesses the
profoundest significance for modern art, — a mood, moreover,
which has not yet, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily analysed,
and which Turner could never afterwards recall in all its essential
beauty, though he frequently made the attempt.
I must confess that in spite of all my efforts I am quite unable
to find a term that will adequately characterise this phase of
55

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Turner's art. Turner's own classification of such subjects as those
mentioned above is ' Pastoral,' as distinguished from the ' Elegant
Pastoral.' But this description is inadequate, because it seems to
refer simply to the objects contained in the works, while it is
exactly the mood or emotional standpoint from which the subject-
matter is treated that seems to me all-important. The con
temporary term for this kind of work, and one which Turner
sometimes used himself, was ' Simple Nature,' and this description,
though inadequate enough, is perhaps as good as any other we
might hit upon. It indicated, at least, an antagonism to any
artificial way of treating natural scenes, and suggested a certain
unsophisticated plainness and directness of approach, and these
qualities are certainly contained in the complex and subtle con
ception we are in search of. It is, then, as a painter of ' Simple
Nature ' that we have now to consider our subject.
In externals, this phase of Turner's art is occupied with scenes
of ordinary rural life ; it deals with the country as the home and
working-place of the peasantry. This gives us the distinction
between the ' Pastoral ' and the ' Elegant Pastoral ' subjects in
the ' Liber,' the elegant pastorals dealing with the country as the
imaginative home and background of the stock figures of conven
tionally imaginative art. The elegant pastoral subjects are
generally peopled with nymphs, classical shepherds and shepherd
esses, goddesses and peacocks, while the pastoral subjects which
are not elegant are peopled with real labouring men and women
and unideal-looking children.
But the external subject-matter of a work of art tells us very
little by itself. The important point is the universal which binds
these objects together or organises them into an individual
conception. We must think of our group of pictures as falling
within the larger class of strictly pastoral subjects, but character
ised by a special method of treatment and conception. One way
of approaching this special conception will be to mark off a few
of the pastoral subjects in the ' Liber ' which do not fall within it.
And this is aU the easier because Turner's first pastoral subject in
the ' Liber ' is conventional and empty, and he only gradually
worked himself into a conception of the full possibilities of the
category. That is to say, he first took up this form of art in a
56

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SKETCH FOR "HEDGING AND DITCHING'
P!NCIL. ABOUT 1807

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PLA TE XXVI

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'SIMPLE NATURE'
casual and external way, and then gradually took possession of it
and mastered it.
The first three plates in the ' Liber ' are classified as ' Pastoral,'
' Elegant Pastoral,' and ' Marine.' When we compare the marine
subject (the so-called ' Flint Castle,' which we now know to have
been a scene on the French coast ^) with the two pastoral subjects,
we cannot but be struck with the disparity between the two
classes of subjects. The marine subject is vigorous and veracious,
the pastoral subjects unreal and conventionally poetical. This
point of view is in keeping with the conception of the elegant
pastoral, but ' The Bridge and Cows ' (R. 2) — the pastoral subject
¦ — is as gentle and pretty as a picture in an idyll of Gessner or
Thomson. This, indeed, represents Turner's point of departure
as a painter of rural subjects — the standpoint of the senti
mental, affected, and unconvincing Arcadian idyll of the middle
of the eighteenth century.
The ' Straw-yard,' the second pastoral subject in the ' Liber,'
strikes me as a cross between a Gainsborough and a Teniers.
Gainsborough's influence is noticeable in the landscape, while the
ungainly horses, the awkward men and clumsy farm implements
are in the spirit of Dutch realism. These hints of the plainness
and toughness of the marine subjects suggest what Turner will do
when he feels equally at home in rural subjects, but at present we
have merely two incompatible points of view in arbitrary juxta
position. ' Pembury Mill,' the third pastoral, is rather more
homogeneous in intention. It is a scene of cheerful industry and
plenty, the noise of the millstone minghng with the cooing of
pigeons, and lush leaves growing beside the water-wheel. It is
a pretty subject, while no conscious attempts have been made to
prettify or blink the actual facts of the case. The ' Farm- Yard
with the Cock' (R. 17) still belongs to the eighteenth-century
idyll. It is a pleasing combination of Gainsborough and Morland,
or perhaps an echo of Wheatley. In the ' Juvenile Tricks ' (R. 22) ^
Turner's bent towards homely realism is clearly marked, but we
do not get definitively away from the eighteenth century till we
come to the ' Windmill and Lock ' (R. 27).^ Here we are in an
entirely different world from that of Arcadian poetry. We have
1 See Plate xxxvn. ^ Plate xxxviii. ^ Plate xxvii (6).
57

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS «
now put away childish things, and are face to face with the big
real world in which man earns his bread with the sweat of his
brow; in which men and women labour and sin, sorrow and
repent. It is indeed the real world, the world of common per
ception and common experience, yet transfigured with the solemn
glow of the truest and profoundest poetry.
The engraving of the ' Windmill and Lock ' was published in
.lune, 1811, but the picture and drawing were made some time
before this date. In the part of the ' Liber ' pubhshed immedi
ately before the one which contained this plate, there was a plate
of ' Hind Head Hill ' (R. 25), which bears the date of 1st January,
1811. This subject was sketched in November 1807. It is
therefore probable that the two drawings were made soon after
wards, let us say in 1808.
The period of the inception of ' Hind Head Hill,' then, marks
the commencement of the era of Turner's deeper and more solemn
conception of the poetry of rural life. This subject itself, though
classified in the ' Liber ' as ' mountainous,' belongs to all intents
and purposes to the phase of art which we are now studying.
The bare hills dotted with sheep, with the murderer's corpse
creaking upon the distant gibbet, are quite in harmony with the
mood of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. In the same sketch-book
are also the first ideas of no less than three other ' Liber ' subjects,
all conceived in the same mood of spiritual exaltation, and all
sketched during the same journey from Portsmouth to London.
The events connected with this journey were of a nature
calculated to throw Turner's mind out of its ordinary habits and
thoughts, to carry him 'out of himself,' and to prepare him for
seeing the familiar scenes of everyday life in a fresh light. These
events have therefore a special interest for us in this connection.
In May 1807 the Prince Regent of Portugal warned the
Prince of Wales that Napoleon was on the point of invading
England with the Portuguese and Danish fleets, and that the
Emperor of Russia had bound himself by secret articles in the
Treaty of Tilsit to support him in this measure. The ministry
were informed of the plot, and Canning lost no time in dealing
with the situation. An envoy was sent to the Crown Prince of
Denmark at Kiel, with the demand that the Danish navy should
58

'SIMPLE NATURE'
be delivered over to England, to be taken care of in British ports,
and restored at the end of the war. The demand was, of course,
indignantly refused. But the situation was so serious that the
ministry felt compelled to order the seizing of the Danish fleet,
if it was not lent quietly. Denmark held the keys of the Baltic.
Napoleon's troops were ready to overrun it at a moment's notice,
and seize the fleet and all the naval stores, all that he wanted, in
fact, for his attack on England. In securing the Danish fleet,
the English then were simply taking it from Napoleon, and were
merely acting for the purpose of self-preservation. By the 1st of
September the French had occupied Stralsund. Copenhagen was
immediately bombarded, and on the 8th the British entered the
city, and the navy and arsenal were surrendered.
How this blow aff'ected Napoleon is shown from a passage in
Fouche's Memoirs, published in 1824. 'About that time it was,'
says Fouch^, 'that we learned the success of the attack upon
Copenhagen by the English, which was the first derangement of
the secret stipulations of Tilsit, by virtue of which the Danish fleet
was to be placed at the disposal of France. Since the death of
Paul I., I never saw Napoleon give himself up to such violent
transports of passion. That which astounded him most in that
vigorous enterprise was the promptitude with which the English
ministry took their resolution.' (Quoted in Miss Martineau's
History of England, 1800-1815, p. 283). At the time the mind of
the public was profoundly stirred by this event. But the victors
had almost brought the Danish ships within sight of England
before the news of the frustration of Napoleon's plans was made
public. Turner must have been as excited as any one, for he set
off immediately to Portsmouth, to see the victors sail into the
harbour with their prizes and to celebrate the occasion in his
own way.
When Turner left London his sketch-books as a rule bear
witness of the fact. In the ' Spithead ' sketch-book there is no
record of the journey down from London. The first thirty pages
are taken up with sketches of the movements of vessels in Ports
mouth harbour, on one of them being a sketch of a boat's crew
recovering an anchor. In the following May, Turner included
in his one-man show at his studio in Queen Anne Street
59

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
West, an unfinished picture 'of the Danish ships which were
seized at Copenhagen, entering Portsmouth Harbour' (Review
of Publications of Art, No. 2, June 1, 1808, p. 167). In the
foreground a ' packet with soldiers on board ' is mentioned, and
' two boats toward the left hand corner of the picture, one of
which is heaving or letting go an anchor.' The whole description,
and these details in particular, prove beyond a doubt that this was
the picture which, when finished, was exhibited in the following
year (1809), at the Royal Academy, under the title of ' Spithead :
Boat's Crew recovering an Anchor,' and which hangs now in the
National Gallery under this name. The change of title was most
probably due to prudential considerations, as, after the first
revulsion of popular feeling, the ministry had to endure consider
able obloquy on account of this action, Napoleon's intention of
invading the country as well as the existence of the secret articles
of the Treaty of Tilsit being stoutly denied, and the government
being pledged not to reveal the source of the information on which
they had acted.
Our immediate interest in this event is with the effect pro
duced on Turner's mind by the scenes which he had witnessed in
and around Portsmouth. The sight of the united English and
Danish fleets was one calculated to stir Turner's imagination pro
foundly. The artist's sensitive nature must also have been deeply
affected by contact with the excited and jubilant populace, and
with the sailors and fighting men upon whose individual
exertions the safety of the country depended.
Such moments of national excitement tend inevitably to dwarf
the petty and merely particular interests and prejudices of the
individual. The substantive interests of the community, the
universal forces that move men and hold them together, then pre
sent themselves in all their stark reality and overwhelming import
ance to every heart and mind. In such a mood, with a mind
humbled and humanised, Turner set out to return to London.
As we turn over the leaves of the ' Spithead ' sketch-book we
can see clearly that the sights of the common round of rural life
which greeted the artist after he had left Portsmouth behind, had
gained a new interest and significance for him, by contrast with
the stirring scenes he had just witnessed. He is no sooner clear
60

PLATE XXVII

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.<^i

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MILL ON THE f.KANJ) JUNCTION CANAL, NEAR HANWELL
PENCIL. ABOU-P l8og

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"WINDMILL AND LOCK"
EN<;i;A\'IN(i PUBLISI-IHU IN " LIBER STUDIORUM," I JUNE, 1811

'SIMPLE NATURE'
of the town than the groups of trees and the peaceful stretch of
fields make their tranquillising influence felt. Several pages of
sketches remind me forcibly of the scenery of ' The Frosty Morn
ing.' Then we find groups of farm hands resting from their
labour, some carts and horses, ploughing scenes, a study of
horses and pigs, and then the hurried scribble reproduced in Plate
xxv., the germ from which the beautiful ' Hedging and Ditch
ing ' design in the ' Liber ' was developed. Then come several
Hind Head sketches, and before the hill is out of sight, comes
the original sketch of another ' Liber ' subject, the solemn and
tender 'Water MiU' (R. 37). After this we stop to watch the
blacksmith at work, and peep into some cottages, barns, etc. To
eke out his hasty hieroglyphs Turner frequently adds a few
explanatory words. On the margin of one sketch we read
'Woman frying. Boy looking. Children at Tub, a girl beating
the barrel, etc. '; and on another ' W.' (short for woman) ' cutting
Turnips. Interior of a Barn. Cows eating at the Entrance, etc'
And before we get quite to the end of the book come four
sketches of St. Catherine's Hill, near Guildford, one of which
went to the making of another ' Liber ' subject (R. 33).
The two sketches here reproduced, of the ' Windmill and
Lock ' and ' Hedging and Ditching ' subjects (Plates xxvii. and
xxv.), illustrate admirably Turner's attitude towards nature at
this period. Such sketches are nothing more nor less than memo
randa for the artist's own use. Taken by themselves they are all
but meaningless. Even to the artist himself their significance, as
memoranda of real scenes, must have been of the slightest. The
focus or real nucleus of their meaning is rather the subjective
feelings which the scenes and their whole context evoked in the
artist, than the particular objects or scenes themselves. This
sentiment, the total emotional impression, is, of course, not
expressed in the sketches themselves, though now that the
completed designs have told us what this is we can hardly help
reading some of it into the sketches. But to the artist himself
these sketches were useful as preliminary statements, as tentative
objectifications of his meaning. The work of ' carrying out ' these
sketches (or ' working them out ') was simply the process of the
further specification of this meaning. And to describe this work
61

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
as an attempt to realise or reproduce the actual scenes in nature
which Turner had sketched, is only in a very limited sense
correct. The point of interest is the complex of subjective
feeling aroused on a particular occasion by a chance conjunction
of objects and circumstances, and in the final design the artist's
aim is to find a particular conjunction of pictorial signs which
shall permanently objectify this emotional complex. Hence
the actual objects and the particular form of their conjunction
in the real scene lose all the importance which they possess as
real objects, and become degraded, or at least subordinated, to a
purpose which falls entirely outside their own existence. They
are now nothing but pawns or counters in the artist's game of
pictorial expression, and as such the artist has absolute power over
them, altering them, and annihilating them, as best suits his
purpose. The artist is also entirely within his rights when he
introduces fresh elements from other and different scenes to
enforce and make clear his meaning. That Turner used these
privileges to the utmost in the case of both these subjects is
evident when we compare the sketches with the finished designs.
These points seem to me worth insisting upon, because the real
nature of artistic idealisation is so little understood and so generally
misrepresented, and the opportunities of studying it genetically
are of rare occurrence.
But the very fact that during the period of which we are now
treating, the stress in Turner's work is nearly always upon the
subjective sentiment, and that the objective scenes and objects are
relegated to a position of subordination detracts very largely
from the immediate interest in the sketches from nature which
Turner made during this time. Taken by themselves these
sketches are in the highest degree vague and incomplete. They
are valuable to us mainly for the purposes of comparison with the
completed designs, and as illustrations of Turner's methods of
work. And for these purposes I think the two examples we have
just studied are sufficient. I have not, therefore, deemed it
advisable to illustrate this chapter with any other sketches of the
same class. The three further illustrations I have chosen are of a
different character. When Turner was called upon to treat
subjects of a definite topographical character he was necessarily
62

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PLA TE XXVIII

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WHALLEY BRIDGE
I'KNCIL. ABOUT 1808

'SIMPLE NATURE'
restricted in the liberties he could take. In such cases his field of
selection was confined within the possible points of view from
which his subject could be regarded. In the two drawings of
Whalley Bridge here reproduced (Plates xxviii. and xxix.) we see
him searching for that aspect of the place which shall fit in or har
monise with the mood which was predominant in his own mind at
this time. It is only from the point of view of such a subjective
emotional attitude that the first drawing (Plate xxviii.) could
have been rejected in favour of the second (Plate xxix.). As a
representation of the actual place, the first drawing is much more
adequate than the second. But it is evidently just this topo
graphical and objective adequacy which constituted the defect of
this fine drawing from Turner's point of view. In the other
drawing there is far less to occupy the attention. Here the
interest is concentrated on a few simple forms. The mind is,
therefore, thrown back on itself, and forced as it were to call up
its own resources to amplify and fill out the painter's forms. And
this is the mood of poetic contemplation or meditation expressed
in the beautiful picture of this subject which Turner exhibited in
1811, and which is now in Lady Wantage's collection.
The third drawing to which I referred is the study for the
picture of 'London from Greenwich Park,' now in the National
Gallery. There is no trace of the emotional setting of the
finished picture in the sketch (Plate xxx.). It is merely a record
of the facts. But the artist has already grasped in his own mind
the significance of these facts with such clearness that the bare
facts even in this memorandum have become eloquent.
The full scope of Turner's work at this period, then, can only be
gathered from his completed works. And as I have said, I do
not think this aspect of Turner's genius has so far had full justice
done to it. I will therefore make an attempt to indicate in a
few words what I regard as the distinctive qualities of this group
of works ; and to simplify my task I will centre my remarks
round two pictures, both in the National Gallery, and therefore
easily accessible to every one, viz., ' A Frosty Morning ' and the
' Windsor,' which seem to me to typify the qualities and merits
of the whole group.
After what has gone before I do not think I need say much to
63

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
combat the opinion that these pictures are simply reproductions
of actual scenes. Their relation to the actual sights of nature is
exactly the same as that between the two 'Liber' designs we
have just examined and the sketches upon which they were
based. In the designs, and in these pictures, there is indeed a
wealth of subtle and penetrating observation of natural forms,
habits, and colours, but this material is never there simply for its
own sake. These colours and forms of natural beauty are the
elements of which the artist's language is compounded, the
pictorial equivalent of the names of natural objects in the verse
of a great poet. To fix one's attention on these factors in the
whole complex structure of such works as ' A Frosty Morning '
and ' Windsor,' and to say that these fragments of meaning are all
that they contain, seems to me as inexcusable as it would be to
isolate the nouns in a poem, and to insist that we must ignore that
play of thought and feeling around this common basis in which
the real value of even the simplest poem consists. We can, of
course, always stop short in our understanding of any statement,
and the temptation is very great to stop short at some superficial
characteristic in such a highly complex individuahty as a work of
modern art. In the case of the two pictures with which we are
now concerned, these characteristics happen to be not only super
ficial and obvious, but they happen also to be easily nameable,
whereas the complete ideational and emotional structure of the
whole work is very far from being easily named or described. Yet it
is just this particular and special emotional and ideational whole
which constitutes the very being of the work of art, and which
alone gives it value. It is because modern art criticism has
seized with such avidity upon the primitive sense-factor in
pictorial language, and has insisted with so much energy that the
art cannot or ought not to attempt any kind of ideational articu
lation, that it has failed to do justice to this phase of Turner's art.
To call these pictures, then, imitations or reproductions of
natural scenes is not altogether inaccurate. They are this, but at
the same time they are so much more. The forms and colours
of nature are there, but they are superseded and sublimated in
exactly the way that the particular events described in Dorothy
Wordsworth's journal are superseded and sublimated in the poems

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PLNCIL. APOU'P 1809
'SIMPLE NATURE'
which her brother founded upon these events. ' The array of act
and circumstance, and visible form' becomes exactly what the
poet's or artist's 'passion makes them.'^ In other words, the
matter of sense intuition is taken up into the world of intelligence.
This matter, which in the first place was something immediate or
given, now loses its natural and positive attributes, loses its
authority as fact, but gains a wider scope and ampler authority by
being taken up into the world of mind and used as a sign. And
here again an opportunity presents itself for shallow and wrong-
headed criticism. Those who are under the dominion of the
theory that art should only represent sensuous facts in their
immediacy resent the transformation which the data of sense must
undergo before they can take their place in the organised world of
meaning. To them, therefore, such pictures as these are defective ;
the colouring is not sufficiently natural, not bright enough, nor are
the contrasts sufficiently strong. These pictures are not painted
in ' the key of nature.' In a word, they are old-fashioned, because
the artist has done something more in them than the theories of
impressionism can consecrate.
We have then to avoid two mistaken ways of regarding these
works. We must not look upon them (1) as attempts to repro
duce the actual brilliancy and colour of natural lighting, nor must
we treat them (2) as prosaic and literal imitations of actuality
devoid of all the higher poetry of art. That these works are open
to — nay, have almost invariably fallen victims to — these two
opposite forms of depreciation, is a striking proof of the success
with which they have avoided those fatal extremes in which so
much of the art of the present lies engulfed.
But it is not enough simply to avoid the dangers which
modern theorising throws in the way of the interpreter. A really
concrete and fruitful criticism will not stop short till it has made
the attempt to grasp, however imperfectly, by thought the full
and special significance of each work. And again, when we have
made it clear'to ourselves that
' the array
Of act and circumstance, and visible form.
Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind
What passion makes them,' —
1 The Prelude, Bk. xiii. 1. 287 sq.
T. 8.-5 65

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
when we have agreed that Turner has used the sights of nature as
a means to express the emotions or the mood which they aroused in
him, — when all this is granted we are still merely at the threshold
of the works themselves. A mood, an emotion, a state of feeling,
these are all vague and general terms. There is nothing necessarily
admirable or beautiful in a mood or a state of feeling. Feeling
and emotion may be pleasant or unpleasant, harmonious or jarring,
depressing or invigorating. And if the main value and beauty of
these pictures resides in the particular and definite mood or state
of feeling which they induce, this mood must have distinguishable
contents, and it is the business of art criticism to do what it can
to define these contents.
In Wordsworth's ' Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern
Abbey,' he contrasts his present state of feeling towards nature
with that of his youthful days. In the days of his thoughtless
youth, he says, the forms and colours of the landscape had haunted
him like a passion. He had loved them for themselves. But
now, he says. Nature is no longer 'all in all' to him. It has
now gained a remoter charm supphed by thought, an interest
' unborrowed from the eye.' He now hears
' the still, sad music of humanity.
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.'
Before the sights of nature he now feels the presence of elevated
thoughts, a sense of something 'more deeply interfused,' a
sense of something discernible only with the inner eye ; a sense
of the Divine that animates both nature and humanity, both what
the eye sees and what the heart and mind create, — the spirit
' whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,' the spirit
' that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought.
And rolls through all things.'
It is in this mood, it seems to me, that Turner contemplates
the scenes and incidents of rural life which he represents in these
pictures, and it is this mood which these pictures embody. The
' Frosty Morning ' is therefore very much more than a representa
tion of a country road, with a little hedging and ditching going on
66

PETWORTH HOUSE, FROM THE PARK

PENCIL. ABOUT l8

13

PLA TE XXXIII

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'SIMPLE NATURE'
on one side, an ordinary stage-coach in the distance, and a little
sparkling hoar-frost on the ground. The ' Windsor ' is also much
more than a representation of some drovers with their cattle in
one of the meadows near Windsor Castle on a summer (or spring)
morning. Not only are these bare facts represented, but the mood
in which we must contemplate them is also stated. We have not
read these "pictures aright, we have not really brought them into
contact with our own life, until we contemplate the bare external
facts in the light of the mood which the artist has prescribed for
them. It is, I know, commonly taken for granted that pictorial
art is impotent to achieve this kind of determination ; that the
artist is at the mercy of any chance mood which the spectator
may bring to his work ; that the artist can only represent objects
and spatial relations, and that he can lay no constraint on the
spectator to think and feel about these objects in any particular
way. And no doubt a large proportion of modern art productions
actually do no more than this, and attempt no more. But these
are merely the failures of modern art. All the great works of
modern art — such as those of Rembrandt and Jean Francois
Millet — not only represent objects and scenes, but lay down the
related thoughts and feelings which they are to inspire. Yet it is
of course always possible for the spectator to stop short at the
bare recognition of the pictorial signs, in the same way that it is
possible for the reader of a poem to recognise the meaning of
a few prominent words and ignore the context in which they
occur.^ But the point which I cannot hesitate to press home —
because I see clearly that the whole question of the value and
place of art in modern civilisation depends upon it — is this, that
the work of art is nothing less than its full significance. It is
only in so far as we master or appropriate this wealth of inner
significance that the work of art can be said to exist for us ; we
must not only read the words of a poem, but we must understand
them, and in the same way we must not merely look at such
pictures as these of Turner, but we must translate the artist's signs
into their appropriate ideas and feelings.
It is only when we succeed in getting clear of that shallow
1 See, for example, Jeffrey's account of the Sixth Book of the Excursion, quoted in
Professor Raleigh's Wordsworth, pp. 8 and 9.
67

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
materialism which clings to the letter, while it ignores the power
behind it, that the full scope of pictorial art can dawn upon us.
But when we once realise that the mood expressed in such pictures
as the ' Frosty Morning ' and ' Windsor ' is an essential part — nay,
is the very essence of the works themselves, we shaU begin to
understand how nearly related great art is to religion; how
insensibly the one passes into the other. In such pictures as
these — and I do not hesitate to rank them among the truest and
highest that Christianity has yet produced — in pictures like these
the ordinary scenes of rural life and labour are impressed with the
quietness and beauty of the best part of the artist's own nature,
and fed with the lofty thoughts that only poets dare utter in
words. Such pictures are indeed in the old monkish sense an act of
worship. The mood they call up and sustain is a blessed mood in
which the mystery and the weight of this unintelligible world are
lightened. Such pictures as these are literally an imitation or
reminiscence of the great moments of life, and possess life and
food for future years.
I will conclude this chapter by answering some objections that
I believe are likely to be made to the interpretation I have offered
of this group of Turner's works. These objections would be based
on arguments drawn from the commonly received idea of Turner's
personal character. The mood expressed in this group of pictures
is, it might be urged, the habitual mood or way of feeling of the
perfectly good man ; it is only in the perfectly good and religious
life that we find this reconciliation of inner Freedom and external
Necessity, and Turner, we have reason to suppose, was not a
perfectly good and religious man. This objection I admit has
force, but I think it is fully met by pointing to the distinction
between a mood, a passing state of feeling, and a permanent habit
of mind or settled character. It may not have been Turner's
happiness to mature this mood of reconciliation into the master
light of his whole life, yet the mood itself is one that few, if any,
human hearts are entirely unfamiliar with. It is a mood that
sits about us all in our earlier days. The feelings of love and
reverence may well be one of the primary facts of human nature.
It may be that Turner, if we examine the whole of his life,
68

PLA TE XXXIV

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PEN AND INK. ABOUT 1811

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PLAN OF GARDEN: SANDYCOMBE LODGE
PEN AND INK. ABOUT l8l2

'SIMPLE NATURE'
cannot be regarded as a perfectly good and religious man, yet at
this particular period of his life his works prove beyond all shadow
of doubt that he was capable of feeling towards nature and man
in the way that is habitual with the perfectly good man. As an
artist these works of his show that at this time he was able to
raise himself in the point of feeling to the level of a good and
complete man. But this is a very different thing from the demand
that the artist shall himself be at that time and for the remainder
of his life the kind of man whose momentary state of feehng he
represents. The actual behaviour of the artist as an individual
has only an indirect bearing on the question of the moral worth
of his work. What is important is, that the content of the moral
idea shall be present in the state of feeling expressed in his work.
He may not have laid firm hold of the good will ; he may not have
made it a permanent part of his own life. All that is necessary
for his immediate purpose is that he shall have grasped it in idea,
— a much easier task, and one that constant reading of the poets
is quite sufficient to accomplish.
That Turner was always a great lover and reader of poetry
is already well known. After he broke away from strictly
topographical work, he seldom exhibited a picture without the
accompaniment of some poetical quotation. To judge from these
quotations Thomson's Seasons was a favourite book with him,
and we also find Milton, Ossian, Akenside, Dr. Langhorne, and
Mallet laid under contribution. But the clearest evidence of the
place poetry occupied in his mind at this time is afforded by his
sketch-books, which contain on the whole even more poetry than
drawings. On almost every sheet we find transcriptions or
reminiscences of verses that had caught his fancy, or attempts of
his own to express himself in metre. These attempts, it must be
confessed, are seldom far from failure, for the artist's command of
words was not instinctive, like his power over pictorial signs.
Yet the quantity of these attempts and the patient persistence
with which he ground out indifferent verse, prove that the art of
poetry was one that held at least as high a place in his affections
as his own art.
As Turner's verses were on the whole so unsuccessful, I will
only offer the reader one example, and that a short one. It was
69

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
written in one of his sketch-books about the year 1809. He had
gone to Purley on the Thames, near Pangbourne, to indulge
himself with a few days' fishing — his sole form of recreation. But
the rain had kept him in all day, and to while away the time he
betook himself to poetry. He begins by apostrophising the fair
leaves of his sketch-book which ' Delusion ' tempts him to violate
with his pen. The rain seems to have continued, for on the next
page he begins again : —
' Alas, another day is gone
As useless as it was begun.
The crimson' d streak of early mom
Checks the sweet lark that o'er the corn
Fluttered her wings at twilight grey ;
Expectant eyed the moving ray,
Twitter'd her song in saddening mood
To ¦( , , y her clamorous callow brood
IhushJ
In hope of less inclement skies.
The hapless fisher 

No fly can tempt the finny brood
When the wash'd bank gives up its mud.
Beneath some tree he takes his stand
 in doubtful shelter
Anxious to fancy every streak a ray.
Not so the cotter's children at the door.
Rich in content, tho' Nature made them poor.
Standing on threshold emulous to catch
The pendant drop from off the dripping latch.
The daring boy — thus Briton's early race
/To feel the heaviest drop upon his face \
(Foremost, must feel the drops upon his face,/
Or heedless of the storm or his abode
Launches his paper boat across the road —
Where the deep gullies which his father's cart
Made in their progress to the mart
Full to the brim, deluged by the rain.
They prove to him a channel to the main.
Guiding his vessel down the stream
Even the pangs of hunger vanish like a dream.'
As poetry these lines have little to recommend them, but they
give us a glimpse of the man himself, and they prove that he
70

'SIMPLE NATURE'
had something of the poet's comprehensive sympathies ; that
he was ' a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and
who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in
him ; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions in
the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create
them where he does not find them.'

71

CHAPTER VI
THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
The object of this chapter— The first 'Liber' drawings were made at
W. F. Wells's cottage at Knockholt, Kent — 'Bridge and Cows' —
Development of the so-called ' Flint Castle '—Mrs. Wells— View of Basle '
— ' Little Devil's Bridge ' and ' London from Greenwich ' — ' Martello
Towers, Bexhill,' and ' Kirkstall Crypt ' — ^Scene at Isleworth — The etching
of the ' Raglan Castle ' and ' Source of the Arveron ' plates— Suggestion
for the better exhibition of the ' Liber ' drawings.
THE Liber Studiorujn is an important aspect of Turner's
genius — so important that it seems to deserve a chapter
to itself, even in so summary an investigation as the
present. Yet from the point of view of its subject-matter, it is
evident that the ' Liber ' does not throw into relief any side of
Turner's art not amply illustrated in his paintings. What light
the sequence of ' Pastoral ' subjects throws upon the gradual
development of his conception of realistic art, has already been
touched upon in the previous chapter. But there remains one
point of view from which it seems to me the ' Liber ' possesses a
special interest for our present study. In these designs we can
study the formal elements of Turner's art freed from the disturbing
influence of colour. Each plate is primarily an arrangement in fine
and light and shade, and the requirements of what I may call melodic
invention are considered before those of mere representation ; that
is to say, the emphasis is always on the subjective and constructive
side of art, as opposed to its power of reproduction of the elements
immediately given in ordinary perception.
Especially important from this point of view are those subjects,
generally amongst the earlier plates, in which considerable
alterations were made during the course of execution. An
examination of a few of the cases in which there are important
72

THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
differences between the first preliminary drawing and the com
pleted engraving is certainly well within the limits of our present
inquiry; and such comparisons are worth making for their own
sake, as they bring out very clearly certain characteristics of
all pictorial art, and especially of Turner's, which are not easily
grasped when our observations are complicated by the presence of
colour. The first drawings executed for the work were made in October
1806, when Turner was on a visit to Mr. Wells, at Knockholt, in
Kent. One of Mr. Wells's daughters has told us that it was
mainly on her father's advice that Turner decided to undertake
the work. But he required ' much and long continued spurring '
before he could be induced to make a beginning. ' At last,' we
are told, ' after he had been well goaded, one morning, half in a
pet he said, " Zounds, Gaffer, there will be no peace with you till
I begin — well, give me a sheet of paper there, rule the size for me,
tell me what I shall take." ' The lady adds, ' I sat by Turner
laughing and playing whilst he made the drawings,' ' and before
he left us the first five subjects which form the first number were
completed and arranged for publication greatly to my dear
Father's delight.' (The letter is given in extenso in Mr. Rawlin-
son's Liber Studiorum, 2nd edition, pp. xii and xiii.)
One of the subjects executed at Knockholt was almost certainly
the faded sepia drawing which hangs at present in the National
Gallery, under the title of ' Bridge and Cows' (No. 504, N. G.) ;
the engraving made from it was published (without a title) as the
first ' Pastoral ' subject in the first part of Liber.
This drawing is slightly faded, but the fading does not
altogether account for its feeble and commonplace look. The
design itself is feeble, the draughtsmanship petty, and the character
of the figures and trees weak and amiable. These objects are not
actually ' out of drawing ' — that is to say, incorrect from a physio
logical or botanical point of view, but they are sadly lacking in
intention. They have a listless air, and seem to take very little
interest either in themselves or in each other. They seem, indeed,
to be mildly wondering why they are there at all. In a word, it is
just the sort of drawing that an artist would make when external
circumstances induced him to sit down to ' do something,' while
73

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
no strongly-felt subject-matter within him was urgently demand
ing expression.
This drawing (it is in reverse of the engraving) was traced on
to the copper, and the etching was made from it by Turner
himself The etching is practically an accurate copy of the
drawing: the objects represented are the same in each, and neither
the actions nor positions of any of the figures have been altered.
Yet in the etching there is a perceptible briskening-up of every
thing. It all hangs together better than in the drawing. In
some way the whole now seems to have come to life in the artist's
imagination. In the drawing we can see him laboriously bringing
the parts together : in the etching he has infused the breath of life
into them.
The change is due entirely to the execution. The line which
defines the contours of the chief objects has lost its listlessness.
It is now instinct with intention. Everywhere it hurries along,
building up the design as a whole while defining the parts. The
compulsion of the whole makes itself felt in every detail. It
is certainly difficult to put into words the difference between
the two versions, but I believe every one who will take the
trouble to compare them carefully will be sure to feel it. In the
two works there is an actual difference in the quality of the artist's
stream of consciousness, and the difference makes itself felt in the
workmanship, though, in all probability, he himself was quite
unaware of the difference in his frame of mind, and regarded the
etching as simply a mechanical process of transference from one
medium to another. Yet from a psychological point of view, the
impulsion of his mind was in each case in a contrary direction.
In the drawing the scene as a whole was being laboriously invoked
piecemeal, a collection of objects was being formed into a sum
total ; in the etching the subject as a whole is a real and living
thing, guiding the artist's hand and moulding all the details into
kinship with itself
The whole now feels that certain of its parts require adjust
ment, i.e. demand to be brought into more intimate cohesion with
the general purpose. The contrast between the rigidity of the
dead branches of the willow on the right, and the springiness of
the living branches nearer the foreground, calls out for clearer and
74

f^^^Sr^

1:

5l^'
SCENE ON THE FRENCH COAST
.SEfTA. AimUT l£o6
PLATE XXXVII

H o
t/l o
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a -
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THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
more emphatic statement. The dance and sweep of the foliage,
the bending bridge, the falling bank, require steadying by a bolder
assertion of the straight horizontal line of the distant hills. The
soft and rounded undulations of the tree-tops, running right
across the upper part of the drawing, give a somewhat featureless
though amiable character to it; in the etching, greater pro
minence is given to the harsher lines of the rigid white wall of the
distant cottage and its sloping roof, as well as to the supports and
planks of the rustic bridge. In this way, without altering the
position of a single part of the design, or introducing any new
matter, the whole is transformed ; instead of a mere collection of
parts, related to each other by a kind of chance or indifferent
contiguity, we have now a definite whole, fused through and
through into conceptual and emotional unity. The objects before
our eyes have ceased to be merely indifferent and external facts ;
they have now become elements or members of a richly coloured
whole of thought and feeling.
The careful and rather timid-looking drawing described as
'Flint Castle' (Plate xxxvi.), is certainly another of the designs
made at the cheerful Knockholt cottage. On the margin of this
drawing the artist has scribbled some verses, which I suppose
one of the merry party had discovered in a book or magazine,^ and
which they were all delighted with. Probably the discoverer was
Mrs. Wells, for the young ladies were too young to care much for
books, and the only scrap of information we possess about their
mother seems to suggest that she was something of a bluestocking,
and what is now sometimes called a 'f^ministe.' Among the
sketches in one of Turner's pocket-books there is the following
jotting : — ' There is not a quality or endowment, faculty or
ability which is not in a superior degree possest by women. —
Vide Mrs. Wells, Knockholt, Oct.' The poem itself is not strictly
germane to our present study, but as there lingers about it a faint
echo of those scenes of' fun and merriment ' which one of Turner's
young playmates recalled in after years, I cannot deny myself the
pleasure of transcribing it.
' A Row of Poplars in disgrace
Because they would not stop their pace
' It is, of course, possible that the verses were composed by Turner himself.
75

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Or grew unnecessarily tall.
Their Master came and topped them all.
Some neighbourly poplars stood hard by
Beheld their growth with jealous eye,
Now saw — exulting — cried
" How near is pride to earth allied."
" Friends," said the poplars in disgrace,
"You see the fault of making haste.
Ambition's greatness caused our woe.
Ambition shun, mind how you grow,
For while you run you are bare below." '
The drawing, like the poem, is not a remarkable one. As a
design it differs little from the average work of accomplished
landscape draughtsmen like Westall, Arnald, Daniell, etc. But
from a comparative point of view it is of singular interest, as
the diff'erences between this preliminary drawing and the
published engraving are greater than those in any other Liber
subject. It starts as a rather jejune and drawing-masterlike
composition, and comes out finally as one of the most vigorous
and impressive marine designs in the whole series.
The etching was made by Turner himself As the spacing and
arrangement of the etching differ considerably from those of the
drawing, it is most likely that an intermediate study was made.
The changes, however, might very well have been made on the
tracing-paper used to transfer the original design to the copper,
and this would naturally have been destroyed as soon as it had
been used. When the design had been drawn on the copper and
bitten in, a few proofs were taken of the etching, and over one of
these Turner set to work again with washes of sepia to guide
Charles Turner, the engraver, who was to mezzotint the plate.
This second design is now in the National Gallery (No. 522) and
has been reproduced here as Plate xxxvii.
Of course we cannot hope to grasp the whole difference that
has taken place in this second version of the design. But here are
two drawings made by the same hand, within a short space of time
of each other, of the same size and the same subject, yet one is
obviously a work of genius, and the other is as tame and lifeless as
its companion is vivid, energetic, and full-blooded. The com-
76

THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
parison is worth making, not, indeed, that there is the slightest
hope that any of us may learn from it how to work such miracles,
but because it will help to impress upon us the importance of the
form or ' style ' of a work of art, as opposed to the objects it
represents, — the importance of ' mere technique ' ; it will also give
us some insight into the real nature of artistic expression, — will
show us how far removed the whole process is from that pious and
passive reproduction of what is ' given ' in sense-perception which
plays such a large and dangerous part in current practice. Let us
see therefore what we can discover.
In the first place it is evident that in the second version of the
subject the design has been what artists call ' pulled together.'
The foreground boat on the left (it is of course on the right in the
plate) has been made, if not actually bigger, yet more important as
a mass, by the addition of the sails of a second boat immediately
behind it. The apparent height of the boat has been increased
by dropping the height of the man standing in the cart in the
water beside it, and by making the horses, carts and men relatively
smaller. The castle in the distance has been shifted nearer to
the boat, the height of the two masts of the boat in the middle
distance which abut on to the castle have been reduced, so that the
masts and sails of its neighbour on the right seem higher and
bigger. More has been made of the men, boats, etc., at the foot
of the low hills which appear on the right of the drawing, and the
foreground group of men and horses has been shoved nearer to
the figure of the man just entering the water, and, to make the
connection firmer, the cask and grappling irons on the ground
have been carefully added.
But it is useless merely cataloguing these changes, if we cannot
discover the reasons for them. Is all this shuffling and rearrange
ment for the sake of balance and visual harmony ? No doubt to
some extent it is. But notice in the remodelled design the effect
of that firm straight line of the distant sea in the centre, and the
way the distant castle rises out of it. That is the nerve of the
whole design. See how all the other fines and shapes fret the eye
with their sharp and jagged forms, and yet lead it inevitably back
to that one untroubled space. All this artfully calculated playing
with lights and shadows, this complicated conspiracy of lines and
77

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
forms, is assuredly something more than an aimless trifling with
appearances. In that untroubled stretch of water we cannot but
feel the steady, never-resting, inexorable march of the real powers
of nature. It brings the whole mighty background of human life
into the drawing ; and this real spiritual presence sets the daily
toil and hardship of everyday life in a new light, solemnising it,
dwarfing it, yet not crushing it. It is as though we had heard the
rustle of the wings of eternity in the passing moment. To do
this, to produce this effect unerringly and with logical certainty
upon every normally constituted Englishman who looks carefully
at the drawing, cannot exactly be the chance result of a dihgent
shuffling and reshuffling of mere shapes and shadows. There is
something of divinity in it. The shapes and shadows have mean
ing, and this timeless and spaceless meaning is the life-blood that
animates and transfigures these bald signs and symbols. If art
deals only with appearances, we must remember that appearance
is also a form of reality, and that form and content can be so
closely interwoven that the distinctions of our meddling under
standing may become idle and misleading.
It is only from some such point of view as this that we can
hope to grasp the full importance of what clever people call ' mere
technique. '
Let us turn now to the ' Basle ' design. Although this
engraving was published in the first part of Liber I am inclined to
doubt whether the preliminary drawing was made in the Wells's
cottage. This design is based upon a sketch made at Basle in
1802, and it is hardly likely that Turner would have had this
sketch-book with him when he went to spend a few days with his
friends in Kent. Moreover, the first sepia drawing is not with the
others in the National Gallery. Mr. Rawlinson believes that it
passed into the hands of an American collector ' many years ago '
(Liber Studiorum, p. 19). But we have Turner's etching of the
subject, and if we compare this with the drawing made fi-om nature,
which certainly formed the ground-work of the subject, we see
clearly what a great difference there really is between two pro
cesses which modern uncritical thought persistently confounds —
between the process of ' drawing what you see ' and ' copying nature
faithfully,' and the process of artistic construction and invention.
78

JUVENILE TRICKS
SEl'lA. ABOUT 1808

PLATE XXXIX

C :

THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
Generally, with the really creative artists the two processes go on
simultaneously or are fused into One, but here for once we find
them separated. The pencil drawing was made as a simple record
of facts ; the etching was made some five or six years later, and it
is curious to see what liberties Turner felt it was necessary and
justifiable to take with his original record, before his notion of the
requirements of a work of art could be satisfied.
In the drawing from nature the width of the river seems to
dwarf the height of the buildings ; in the engraving Turner seems
to have felt that the height of the buildings ought to form the
keynote of the whole design. First, therefore, the two towers of
the Cathedral are carried well up above the house by the bridge,
the gable of this building being reduced in size, so that it shall not
compete in importance with the Cathedral towers. In the draw
ing, the buildings recede gradually and gently from the bridge,
while in the etching, they are pushed into square step-shaped
masses, thus emphasising the idea of weight and height. These
impressions are further strengthened by deliberately making the
supports of the bridge smaller and more fragile than they were in
the drawing; in the engraving the straddling supports of the
slender wooden bridge give it an air of weakness which makes the
buildings at its side seem all the more firmly set by contrast.
These are only a few of the more obvious points of difference,
but if the comparison were pursued further, we should find that
every sweep of line and silhouette of the original material has been
reconsidered and recast before it was allowed to form part of the
new construction. I will not pretend that I regard the result
obtained in this case as one of the great achievements of the
series, but our observations are useful, I think, as showing the
habitual thoroughness and earnestness which Turner brought
to all his work. His attitude towards the matter in hand is
always active and creative. His alterations are not always for
the better — indeed, it is open to argument whether some of the
changes made in this Basle subject were quite advantageous,
but the fact remains that whatever he took up he threw himself
heart and soul into, that he felt bound to recreate it from
within, and that a mere cold and passive reproduction of the given
would have seemed to him a cowardly shrinking from his artistic
79

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
mission. He feels that he is responsible for the effect the shapes
and arrangement of his subject make upon the spectator's imagi
nation, and that to attempt to apologise for a tame and uninterest
ing subject by saying, ' It was so,' — ' It is quite true,' — would
have seemed to him an unworthy evasion of his work.
How incapable Turner was of copying even one of his own
drawings accurately is clearly shown by the etching of the ' Little
Devil's Bridge ' (R. 19). When we compare this with the original
drawing (No. 476, N. G.) we find that almost every form in the
design has been recast, not always to its individual advantage
from the point of view of realisation, but with an invariable gain
in the direction of greater general cohesion. Note, for example,
how the straight tree trunk nearest the bridge in the drawing gets
bent slightly to the left, just to make you feel the toughness and
obstinacy of the tree itself. The fir-trees on the left, too, are
more realistic in the drawing, but they are more forcible and
dramatic in the engraving.
As we have been able to reproduce Turner's original pencil
study from nature for the ' London from Greenwich ' plate, the
reader will be able to make his own comparison with the pub
lished design. The preliminary sepia drawing for the engraving
(No. 493, N. G.) forms an intermediate step between the two, a
stage, as it were, in the process by which Turner's mind took com
plete possession of the subject. In the sepia drawing, the artist
has not yet fully realised the exact role the main building has to
play in the whole arrangement. When we turn to the engraving
we find that the whole character of the mass formed by the
hospital has been changed. In the drawing it forms a straggling
mass, somewhat like a chance medley of wharves and warehouses,
in the engraving this mass has been patted together into a solid
and definite structure. The distant parts of the building have
been raised, and they now tell as a rigid horizontal line. The
gain to the hospital in dignity and in individuality is extraordi
nary, and its stiff straight lines are exactly what was wanted to
throw emphasis on the subtlety and delicacy of the slow sweep of
the distant river.
The drawing for the ' Martello Towers, Bexhill,' plate is a very
tame affair, and the finished plate is only saved from comparative
80

PLA TE XL

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PLATE XLI

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THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
failure by its fine sky. Yet it is worth comparing the two to
trace out the subtle differences which spring up under Turner's
hand in the etching. All the objects are forced into shapes that
act more powerfully on the imagination, everywhere the tendency
of the line is towards emphasis and distinctness.
In the ' Kirkstall Crypt ' (R. 39), the design is also recast in
the etching. The group of cows is altered, the foreground pillar
is made thinner, the space between the two columns in the centre
is widened out, and the aperture in the wall above the cows on
the left is made light, instead of dark. These changes are all for
the better. A careful study of these seemingly trivial alterations
is valuable as an instance of the subtleties of design upon which
all really fine art depends.
As these remarks indicate, I am in agreement with the general
opinion that the engravings represent Turner's intentions more
fully than his preliminary drawings. But though this is generally
the case, there are exceptions, and the most notable is, I think,
that of the plate sometimes known as 'Twickenham — Pope's
Villa,' and sometimes as ' Garrick's Temple and Hampton Court,'
but which really represents a scene at Isleworth. In this case
the drawing (Plate xl.) is much finer than the plate, although
Turner etched the subject himself. But somehow the spacing of the
whole is much less felicitous in the engraving than in the drawing.
The rendering of the trees, too, is more conventional, but this is a
characteristic of nearly all the plates, and is due to the difficulties
of the medium, it being impossible to get the same subtlety of
tone and delicacy of form in etching and mezzotint that can be
got with a pen and wash on paper.
This question of the comparative conventionality of the foliage
in the engravings induces me to say a few words about one of the
loveliest renderings of woodland scenery in the whole series — the
so-called ' Raglan Castle ' (R. 58).^ This is one of the plates that
Turner mezzotinted himself, yet because the etched lines are not so
free and supple as those of the preliminary drawing (No. 865, N.G.),
it has been assumed that Turner left the etching to be done by
one of his engravers, probably Dawe. This assumption is one
that I cannot accept. The lettering on the plate, 'Drawn and
^ Plate XXXIX.
T. S.— 6 81

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Engraved by J. M. W- Turner, etc.,' points to the conclusion that
Turner was responsible both for the etching and the mezzotinting.
And when we compare the etching with the drawing, a number
of sHght but successful differences emerge, which no engraver would
either have attempted to make or could have made if he had
desired to do so.
' The Source of the Arveron ' (R. 60), another of the plates
' drawn and engraved ' by Turner, has also had its etching con
demned and attributed to Dawe. If the plate is really so fine as
all the critics of this kind insist, it is curious that the etching can
be so poor as they say and yet not affect the excellence of the
whole. This is inconsistent with the proper appreciation of the
important r61e the etched lines play in all these mezzotints. That
Turner regarded the etching as far more important than the
scraping is shown by the simple fact that he undertook (nomin
ally at least) to do it all himself, but he had no hesitation in
handing the scraping over to the engravers.
These general considerations are further strengthened when we
compare tlie finished plate (I am speaking only of the etching in
the published states, and not of the rare ' first state ' of the etching
in the late Mr. J. E. Taylor's collection) with the preliminary
study made for it, now in the National Gallery (No. 879). The
size and proportions of the plate differ from those of the drawing,
so the etching could not have been traced from it, while the
etching nowhere follows the drawing with the accuracy one
would expect if it were merely an engraver's copy. There is no
authority in this drawing for the shapes given to the crests of the
distant mountains in the centre, nor for the shapes of the upper
portions of the nearer mountains on the left. The lower parts
of the design are also modified from the forms in the drawing in
exactly the way Turner habitually recast all the drawings he
etched. It is also hard to suppose that Dawe or anybody but
Turner could have recast the vague shapes of the disappearing
ridge of the glacier on the left in the masterly way this has been
done in the etching, or that anybody but Turner could have
invented, on the strength of the loose indications in the drawing,
the masterly lines that give definition to the stretch of valley
against which the ice of the glacier is relieved. The shapes of the
82

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VIEW OF A RIVER, FROM A TERRACE
SOMETIMES CALLED " MACON "
SEPIA. ABOUT 1818

-0

CROWHURST, SUSSEX
SEPIA. ABOUT 1818

THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM'
first two upright pines near the centre have also been recast by
the mind and hand of the master, not copied by another hand
from the indications given in the drawing. Alterations have also
been introduced in the character of the stems and their branches
which a professional engraver would not dare to make in an
ostensible copy ; the same remark applies also to the tops of the
pines on the right. For these reasons, I think, those critics are
mistaken who deny that the workmanship of the whole plate is
Turner's. And the mistake has arisen to a large extent, I feel
inchned to add, through attaching too much importance to
a priori notions of technical mastery. As the late Mr. Arthur
Strong very justly said, we are inclined to start with an idea that
masters are always masterly and classical, and we often end by
finding that they have left nothing behind them quite worthy of
our preconceived ideas of what they ought to have done.
These are a few of the points suggested by a comparison of
the preliminary designs for the Liber plates with the finished
engravings. But to get any good out of it every student must
take the trouble to make these comparisons for himself. Should
my remarks succeed in inducing even a few adventurous spirits to
make such an experiment, I shall feel satisfied that I have done
something towards spreading an intelligent interest in the mar
vellous process of artistic creation. Perhaps, too, some day in the
future, the authorities of the National Gallery may see their way
towards the display of these drawings so that such a process of
intelligent study may be performed without the inconvenience
which the present arrangement entails. It is probably not neces
sary to have the whole series of drawings on exhibition at the
same time, but if those that are exhibited could be accompanied
by the finished engravings, and, where possible, by one or two
proofs of the unfinished states, I beheve the gain to the public
would be considerable.

83

CHAPTER yil
THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS, OR 'WHAT YOU WILL'—
1813—1830
A survey of the ground we have covered— The training of Turner's
sympathies by the poets — The limits of artistic beauty — and of a
merely 'musical' education — Turner unlike Wordsworth — the predomin
antly sensuous bent of his genius — The parting of the ways — The de
pendence of art upon society — Turner 'the fashion' — The influence of
the Academy — The Italian visit in 1819 — Turner's Italian sketches — Their
beauty and uselessness — The Naturalistic fallacy — Turner's work for the
engravers — The Southern. Coast series — ' Watchet ' and ' Boscastle ' —
Whitaker's History of Richmondshire — ' Hornby Castle ' and ' Heysham ' —
Scott's Provincial Antiquities — ' Edinburgh, from the Calton Hill ' —
' Rochester,' in the Rivers of England series — England and Wales —
'Bolton Abbey' and 'Colchester' — 'Stamford' — 'Tynemouth.'
WE have now followed the development of Turner's mind
from boyhood to youth and well into manhood. We
have watched the architectural and topographical
draughtsman develop into an artist under the guidance of his
admiration for Wilson. Then the mind of the painter of th^
sublime, of the picturesque in general, struck its unseen roots
deeper into the interests and sympathies of the people amongst
whom he lived. In the hour of national danger his heart beat
high with courage and determination. His pictures of the sea are
like war songs ; they strike the Dorian note, they represent the
tone of mind of a brave man who faces wounds and death and all
contingencies with unflinching endurance. Then the mind of the
laureate of a nation in arms takes a still wider sweep. It embraces
humanity and animate and inanimate nature in one glance, and
finds the soul of good in all things. The Dorian harmonies give
place to the Phrygian.
In all this Turner's attitude seems entirely passive or receptive.
84

PLATE XLIV

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THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
His amazingly rapid growth seems to be merely an effortless
assimilation of the moral atmosphere of his time. All that was
fairest and of good repute in the common spiritual heritage of the
people seems to have passed insensibly into his thoughts and
feelings. His art is a social or national phenomenon, so imper
sonal (or superpersonal) that it is difficult to point to traces of the
mere individual in his work. The individual is lost in his universal
function. The man himself is nothing but the voice or thought
of what Hume has caUed ' a man in general.' Yet his work is as
far removed as any work can be from the vagueness and coldness
of the abstract universal. Behind every touch of his hand and
every thought or idea in his mind beats the pulse of a full-blooded
and passionate personality. Only, by some miracle, this man
happens to be free from the local prejudices and limitations that
deflect the judgment and sympathies of most men from the one
true standard.
This education of Turner's sympathies and feelings was the
work, we have seen reasons for concluding, of the poets and artists
whom he loved and admired. In the light and warmth of their
ideal creations his own high instincts were quickened into fife and
activity. Under their influence he had entered into the common
spiritual world, and they had given the direction to his impulses
and ideas regarding things human and divine. But education
must be a lifelong process, and there comes a time in the growth
of each individual when the need of something more clear-cut and
permanent than his own impulses and desires, however wholesome
they may be, declares itself. As Plato pointed out long ago, to
secure the happiest results of the best ' musical ' education, some
thing more than a merely ' musical ' education is needed. We
have now reached that period in Turner's life when the lover of
beautiful sights and thoughts and feelings must make a determined
effort to unify these manifold beauties by an explicit principle, to
exchange opinion for knowledge, if he is to preserve the advantages
he has already won. In life there is no standing still, no resting
upon our gains. We must go forward to higher victories, or find
our arms tarnish and our gains dissipate themselves. But it may
well be doubted whether art is capable of reaching a higher point
of beauty than that which Turner had already reached. Forced85

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
to its extreme limits beauty insensibly passes into something
which is at once more and less than beauty. Such pictures as
the ' Frosty Morning,' ' Windsor,' and ' The Trout Stream ' are,
perhaps, the most beautiful that art is capable of producing. And
the example of Wordsworth, who did strive upward to * an
intelligence which has greatness and the vision of all time and of
all being,' is not on all points reassuring. His poetry, simply as
poetry, did suffer from his philosophic studies. There may be
something in the very nature of the human soul which sets bounds
to the creation or expression of beauty.
But Turner was not like Wordsworth. He was for good and
ill essentially and solely an artist. The play of shapes and colours
was probably dearer to him than food or raiment. Having by
sheer good fortune carried his art to its highest attainable pitch of
beauty before he had reached his fortieth year, he was placed in
an embarrassing position. The dialectical movement of beauty
would now carry him outside his art, into regions where the
individual man might reap rich gains, but where the artist could
reap only sorrow and disappointment. The artist in Turner was
stronger than the man. He loved the sensuous medium of art
more than the spiritual beauty into which the current of traditional
wisdom had carried him. The remainder of his life is therefore
dedicated to the passionate and audacious development of the
material beauties of his art.
We have now to trace in his works the gradual encroachments
of the purely sensuous side of his art. For a time all seems well,
perhaps more than well, for the gain in aU the lower elements of
his art is very striking. During the next twenty years his works
gain constantly in the sensuous attractiveness of colour and in the
formal beauties of rhythm and design. The loss of beauty is com
pensated by deep draughts of pleasantness. Yet amid the feverish
intoxication of sensuous beauty a wild unrest and despair make
themselves increasingly felt. The man has sacrificed himself to
his art, and the starved human soul turns in bitterness from the
ardently desired rewards of the most brilliantly triumphant artistic
career that modern times have witnessed.
It is usual in treating mainly of Turner's oil paintings to fix
upon the year 1815 as the great turning-point in his career. After
86

PLA TE XL VI

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1815 there is a marked change in the aims and character of
Turner's art, and it is convenient to date this change from the year
that saw the end of the Napoleonic wars, and inaugurated a new
era in the social and political condition of this country. From this
date, too, the conditions of artistic production changed. The rapid
development of industrial concerns brought a new class of patrons
upon the scene. Before 1815, Turner's patrons had been mainly
the landed aristocracy ; after 1815, his chief patrons were the
successful merchants of the great towns. From that time the men
of commerce and the manufacturers ousted the aristocracy from
the leading position which they had held in the councils of the
country. With the change of men a change took place in the
ideals, manners and taste of the country ; and Turner, with his
extraordinary sensibility, his ready powers of intuition and rapid
assimilation, seemed bound to reflect the change in his work.
Yet if we look closer into Turner's career, we find that 1815
was rather the year that saw the brilliant pubhc inauguration of
the new era, than the actual beginning of the change. The ' Cross
ing the Brook,' exhibited in 1815, is often regarded as the impres
sive close of Turner's early manner, yet this beautiful picture already
bears the impress of that folic des grandeurs to which we owe
most of the excesses of the new manner. The ' Frosty Morning '
of 1813 is really the last work in which the inspiration rings true
throughout, in which the form and content are absolutely indis
soluble. ' Dido and ^neas,' the only picture exhibited in 1814, is
a frigid pseudo-classical pomposity, the due development of the
strain of baser metal in Turner's genius, which had already betrayed
itself in the 'Macon ' of 1803, the ' Narcissus and Echo ' of 1804,
and the ' Schaffhausen ' of 1806. In glancing rapidly over Turner's
career we have been able to ignore these works ; in the rush and
splendour of his general development such pictures fall into insig
nificance, as casual indications that a busy professional man's
industry may outrun his inspiration.
After 1813 it is impossible to ignore this side of Turner's
production. It was just this regrettable side of his work that
appealed most strongly to the middle-class public for whom he had
now to cater. 'Dido Building Carthage' (1815) is a picture
exactly to the taste of the admirers of the first instalment of
87

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Childe Harold, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara.
It has the historical remoteness, the vague and empty grandeur,
the mysterious dreaminess, the warm, voluptuous atmosphere and
intoxicating lyrical movement of the contemporary phase of
Romantic poetry. In ' The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire '
(1817), 'The Field of Waterloo " (1818), ' Richmond HiU, on the
Prince Regent's Birthday' (1819) and 'Rome from the Vatican'
(1820), we recognise the contemporary and fellow-worker of Byron,
Moore, Southey, Chateaubriand and Lamartine. In 1822 Turner's
only picture at the Royal Academy was entitled ' What you W^ill '!
— an ominous but significant title. It seems to put into words
the ruling motive of this new phase of his art ; to show that
Turner is fully conscious that he is trimming his barque to catch
the breath of popular applause. 'The Bay of Baiae' (1823), the
two 'Mortlakes' (1826-27), 'Dido directing the Equipment of the
Fleet' (1828) and 'Ulysses' (1829) indicate clearly the predominant
bent of the artist's mind towards the grosser pleasures of his art.
These works brought and kept Turner prominently before the
public eye. They made him the pride and glory of the Royal
Academy, and put him on a level of celebrity with Sir Thomas
Lawrence. They made him, in short, in Sir Walter Scott's
words, ' the fashion,' yet it is these works that Turner's admirers
of the present day regard with only moderate enthusiasm.
Compared with the work of the previous decade, such pictures
cannot but strike us as unworthy of the artist's genius. Yet we
have a tendency nowadays, I think, to overrate the independence
of the artist. The modern artist, in so far as he is dependent
upon the support of the society in which he works, is not an
entirely free agent. The society that applauded them and for
whose pleasure they were produced must therefore accept perhaps
the main responsibility for the middle-class ideals stamped upon
these pictures. In tracing the reaction of society upon art and
art upon society, it is an extremely difficult matter to decide
which factor is the more powerful, but I am inclined to think it is
not art. But however this may be, it is certainly the duty of the
individual to fortify himself as best he can against the contagion
to which he is exposed. And it must be confessed that Turner
was but ill-provided within himself with the means to resist the
88

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
deadening influences of the atmosphere of bad taste into which he
was now launched. It is true that Turner was not exactly what
is called a ' society-man,' and he might therefore have more easily
escaped the contagion of those drawing-room ideals to which men
like Tom Moore succumbed. But Turner was a member of the
Royal Academy. It was the recognised organisation of his
profession, and he valued highly the honours it had to confer.
His lack of general education made him an easy victim to the
pretensions of officialism; like all uneducated people, he had a
ridiculous reverence for the trappings and mummery of the learned
world, for degrees, diplomas, titles. He was inordinately proud
of the right to write ' R.A.,' 'P.P.,' after his name, and to alter
these letters to P.R.A. was the height of his ambition. Under
these circumstances he could not but identify himself with the
immediate practical aims of the Royal Academy. Now this ill-
starred institution is so unwisely and so unfortunately constituted,
that its very existence, and all its powers of activity as a profes
sional benevolent society, are made to depend almost entirely
upon its popularity as an exhibition society. The Academy throve
then as it thrives now, in proportion as it succeeds in catering for
the taste of the fashionable and moneyed public ; it could only
lose ground if it made the slightest attempts to guide or educate
the public sense of beauty. In this way it had become in
Turner's time nothing more nor less than an organisation for
stamping the ideals of the drawing-room upon English art.
In 1819 Turner made his first visit to Italy, the material for
the pseudo-classical pictures painted before this having been
derived from other artists' pictures and engravings. It is curious
that he should have waited till his forty-fifth year before making
this journey. The Continent, it is true, had to a great extent been
closed to English travellers since the outbreak of the French
Revolution ; but in spite of politicarand other difficulties Turner
had managed to see a good deal of France, Belgium, Savoy and
Switzerland, and he had been down the Rhine. If he had been
equally keen to see Italy he could certainly have gone there also,
especially as Italy was more generally accessible to an Englishman
than any of the other countries he had visited. This curious
shrinking from Italy may very likely have been due to the prompt- 89

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
ings of his own nature. When we examine his art as a whole we
clearly see that he found more delight in the wildness, irregularity
and caprice of Switzerland and the Rhine valleys than in the
more regular scenery of Italy. Even Mr. Ruskin admits that
Turner got no good from Italian scenery; Naples, Rome and
Florence only put him out and bewildered him; Venice is the
only Itahan city that lent itself at all gracefully to his genius, and
Venice is the most northern in character of all the Italian cities.
But the requirements of his patrons and the peculiar Academic
misunderstanding of the principles of landscape art conspired to
send Turner to Italy. There the scenery is more beautiful in
itself and richer in historical associations than elsewhere in
Europe, therefore it is the duty of the ambitious landscape
painter who happens to have had the misfortune to be born
somewhere out of Italy to stop painting the mere scenes of his
own country as soon as possible, and to set out at once for such
spots as Tivoli, Narni and Lago Maggiore, the spots approved,
stamped and consecrated by generations of the prosperous
travellers of all the chief countries of Europe. The theoretical
error at the root of this dangerous prejudice is the confusion of
the materially pretty, agreeable, and pleasant, with artistic beauty,
which is something essentially different from any of these things.
But this confusion of the pleasant and the beautiful was a
doctrine which the Academy of Turner's time was bent on
inculcating by its teaching and exemplifying in its practice.
It happened that Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the most
brilliant exponents of the gospel of the pretty and pleasant, was
spending the summer of 1819 in Rome. In the intervals of his
labours and relaxations with the great and beautiful of society, he
found time to notice the grandeur and beauties of the scenery
around him. During this time ' his letters to England were full
of entreaties addressed to their common friends to urge upon
Turner the importance of visiting Rome while " his genius was in
the flower." "It is injustice to his fame and his country," he
writes on another occasion, " to let the finest period of his genius
pass away . . . without visiting these scenes."'^ Whether these
' Bell, Article on ' Turner and his Engravers,' in The Genius of Turner (Studio Extra),
pp. 142-143.
90

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PENCIL. 1819
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PENCIL. 1819
THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
appeals had any special weight with Turner we do not know, but he
set out for Italy within a month or two of the writing of these letters.
He went from Calais to Paris, followed the usual coach-route
to Turin, explored the Lakes of Como, Lugano and Maggiore,
and reached Venice by way of Milan, Brescia and Desenzano.
He must have spent some time at Venice to judge from the
number of drawings made there, then went to Bologna, Cesena
and Rimini, and continued along the coast of the Adriatic to
Ancona. At Ancona he turned inland to Loreto and, following
the high post road through Recanati and Macerata, entered the
Via Flaminia at Foligno, and passing through Narni and Orticoli
entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo, probably sometime in
October. From Rome he explored Frascati, Tivoli and Albano,
and made a tour to Naples, Baiae, Pozzuoli, Pompeii, Amalfi,
Sorrento and Herculaneum. He was back in Rome by the
2nd December, then visited Florence, and, recrossing the Alps on
the 24th January 1820, returned through Piedmont and France.
On the 12th February we find him dining at Grosvenor Place,
London, with his friends the Fawkeses.
To judge from the number of sketch-books filled on this
journey Turner must have had the pencil in his hands practically
the whole time he was away. Before starting he had ' got up '
the subject carefully from books and engravings, and he knew
exactly what buildings, antiquities and views he ought to look for
at each place he went to. In this way he lost no time mooning
about, like a modern artist, looking for unexpected beauties. He
just went straight from one guide-book point of interest to
another, sketched each methodically from every possible point of
view and hurried on to the next. The sketch-books he used were
generally about 7^ by 4^^ inches in size, composed of ordinary
white paper. His favourite medium was a hard-pointed pencil.
His sketches 'are always made with a view to information, never
for effect. In this way about a dozen books were filled, each of
about a hundred pages, and most are drawn on on both sides of the
pages. Our reproductions of the sketches of the Grand Canal,
the Piazzetta at Venice, and Trajan's Column (Plates xlviii., l.,
and LIII.) may stand as examples of the main body of work done
by Turner during this visit. 91

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
In addition to these small sketch-books he also used some of
larger size, with the paper prepared with a wash of grey. He used
one of these books at Tivoli, and another at Rome and Naples.
The grey tint was of such a nature that it lifted quite easily when
rubbed with bread or india-rubber. In this way he was able to
indicate the chiaroscuro of his sketches with ease and celerity. The
more elaborate drawings of Rome were made in this way, among
them those exquisite views from Monte Mario, which have long
been among the most admired of the drawings exhibited in the
Turner Water-Colour Rooms at the National Gallery. Where the
subject was an interesting one he occasionally worked over it, or
over parts of it, with water-colour, as in the " View of Rome from
Monte Mario' (No. 592) here reproduced (Plate ll), and 'The
Colosseum' (No. 596) among the exhibited drawings. But the
number of drawings in which Turner had recourse to colour is
extremely limited, quite nineteen-twentieths of them being simply
in pencil. The drawings made during this visit are, in Mr. Ruskin's
opinion, the best Turner ever made from nature. ' All the artist's
powers,' he wrote, ' were at this period in perfection ; none of his
faults had developed themselves ; and his energies were taxed to
the utmost to seize, both in immediate admiration, and for future
service, the loveliest features of some of the most historically
interesting scenery in the world.' ^ And again, ' They are, in all
respects, the most true and the most beautiful ever made by the
painter.'^ And assuredly it would be difficult to praise these
superb drawings too highly or too enthusiastically ; for sheer grace
of pencilling, for skilful composition, for loving, unwearied rendering
of architecture and natural scenery they are absolutely unrivalled.
But it is only as drawings, as works that contain their end
within themselves, that they can be praised so highly. They are
probably the most beautiful topographical drawings that have ever
been made, but Turner did not regard himself as a topographical
draughtsman, and from his point of view the results of this
journey cannot have been completely satisfactory. If he had
valued himself at all on his capacity for making beautiful topo-
1 Turner Catalogue, written in 1881. National Gallery edition, 1899, p. 37.
2 Ibid.
92

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PENCIL. 1819
PLATE Ll

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THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
graphical drawings, he would surely have taken some steps to
bring these achievements to the notice of the public' He did
nothing of the kind. We have seen that it was his settled habit
to regard his sketches and drawings from nature as merely the
prehminary stages of his pictures. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed
out. Turner, after his few years of apprenticeship, never drew
from nature without altering and arranging what he saw. He
never accepted the given momentary facts in a passive spirit. It
is on record that once he said to the companion of one of his
sketching tours who had got into a muddle with the drawing he
was making, ' What are you in search of ? ' And this active
spirit had been one of the chief characteristics of all the drawing
from nature he had done before his visit to Italy : he had always
been in search of something, he had always had a very clear
and exact idea of what he wanted, and he had almost invariably
managed to grasp just what he wanted, while encumbering himself
with very little else.
This clearness of intention is absent from the Italian drawings.
The scenery, the buildings, the people, the shipping and the
effects of light are all new to him, and delightfully interesting.
The novelty of his surroundings carries him out of himself He
becomes for a time a mere common tourist with a kind of
accidental knack of making rapid and wonderfully beautiful
pictorial memoranda. It is as though the creative artist had
said to his familiar daemon, ' We are now in fair Italy. Sleep
thou, and take a well-earned rest. The business of note-taking
will go on automatically without thee ; and when we are once
more back in dreary London thou shalt awake as a giant refreshed
with slumber, and shalt knead with renewed vigour the material
that has been accumulated.' But the results achieved were not
as satisfactory as Turner might have expected. The best that
could be made of these wonderful sketches was two or three
charming water-colours for Mr. Fawkes, a weak and empty
' Forum Romanum ' for Mr. Soane's Museum, and a large ' Bay
of Baiae,' which, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, ' is encumbered with
1 It is also worth remarking that the value of these drawings from a topographical
point of view, i.e. as giving information pure and simple, is probably diminished by the
fact that the material they contain is so skilfully selected and arranged.
93

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
material ; it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good
picture, and yet is so crude in colour as to look unfinished.'^
It therefore depends very much upon what we are in search of,
what conclusions we shall come to about these Italian drawings.
If we are evangelists with a mission to preach the Gospel of
Naturalism, we may accept them as the finest works of art
Turner ever produced, in spite of the fact that he found them
useless and worse than useless for his artistic purposes. From
such a point of view it would be Turner's fault if these beautiful
things threw him out and led him astray ; or, as Mr. Ruskin puts
it, ' the effect of Italy upon his [Turner's] mind is very puzzling
... he seems never to have entered thoroughly into the spirit of
Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but
awkwardly introduced into his large compositions.'^
But if the processes of artistic creation are worth studying,
we shall go on to ask ourselves how it is that the most elaborate,
painstaking and thoroughly delightful drawings Turner ever made
from nature were actually the least useful to him as a maker
of pictures ; and how it is that exquisitely deliberate and dainty
drawings like those in the Roman and Neapolitan sketch-books
lead actually to the production of frigid, hybrid, pseudo-classical
pictures, while hurried and scarcely intelligible scribbles like those
reproduced in Plates xxvii. and xxv. had been the means of bringing
into existence such noble and impressive pictures as the ' Wind
mill and Lock,' and designs like the ' Hedging and Ditching ' ?
The answer to these questions is not far to seek. The state
of mind necessary for the production of the two kinds of drawings
is essentially different, and the one, which produces the exhaustive
and accurate drawing, is antagonistic to the state of mind in
which a strongly imaginative work of art is conceived, while
the other, which produces a less immediately satisfying record,
is actually the state of mind in which a passionately felt work of
art comes to birth. In the drawing which we admire so much
the emotional element is in abeyance, the cognitive or sense-per
ceptive is predominant ; in the other the emotional element is
predominant. , But in the first case, while the immediate result,
considered simply in itself, is more delightful, there has been
1 Modem Painters, vol. i. p. 132. 2 /j,-^ p jgo
94

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no real quickening of the artist's spirit; in the second case,
while the immediate result is deplorable for us, it is eloquent and
glorious for the artist himself as the first stirring of his new
born spiritual progeny.
The object of these remarks is not to attempt to convince
us that these charming Italian drawings are at all less
charming than they seem ; it is rather to combat the false
deductions which Naturalism has succeeded in drawing from
the fact that they are so genuinely delightful and so self-
satisfying. It is inevitable that an artist shall constantly be
making studies from nature, sharpening and exercising his powers
of observation, and storing his note-books and memory with facts
of natural appearances. But it does not follow that this business
of observing and recording visual facts is the essential or even
most important part of the artist's function. Naturalism assumes
that it is. It therefore treats the power to copy natural objects
faithfully and without alteration as the exact equivalent of
the power of pictorial expression.' And so far as the system
of art education pursued in this country has any rational
foundation, it is based upon this doctrine of Naturalism. Hence
the only kind of training that is provided for English art students
is training in this capacity of reproducing objects of sight
accurately. This has come to be the beginning and the end
of modern art education, with what results we have only to walk
into any summer exhibition of the Royal Academy to see. Under
these circumstances, I think it is important that we should give
its due weight to any evidence that tends to invalidate these
generally received opinions. Of course the evidence of the
practice and line of development of one artist, even an artist
as great as Turner, is nOt by itself sufficient to settle such a
question ; but still, I submit, this evidence has a distinct bearing
on the subject and should receive its due attention.
If the doctrine of Naturalism possessed the universal validity
it is assumed to possess, the pictures based upon the truest and
most elaborate drawings Turner ever made from nature — and
that too of the most beautiful and the most historically interest
ing scenery in the world — should have been the best he had so
1 Elements of Drawing, Preface, p. x.
95

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
far produced. They are admittedly among the worst. If the
training acquired by making such drawings is essential to the
development of the artist's powers of pictorial expression, how
comes it that in Turner's case this training came after the pro
duction of his most perfect pictures, — these Italian drawings bemg
made in 1819, the ' Sheerness,' ' Windsor,' ' Abingdon,' and ' Frosty
Morning ' having been painted between 1809 and 1813, and he
had never worked from nature Hke this before? This is the
evidence. I can only beg the candid reader to give it the earnest
consideration it seems to me to deserve.
Turner's oil paintings produced between 1815 and 1830 cannot
but strike us as disappointing, especially when we compare them
with the output of the years immediately preceding this period.
It is only as a sea-painter that Turner reminds us of his former
mastery, and with the exception of the 'Dort' (1818) 'Entrance
of the Meuse' (1819), the Greenwich ' Battle of Trafalgar' (1823)
and ' Now for the Painter' (1827), it would do Turner's reputa
tion little harm if all his oil pictures produced during these years
were destroyed. His real greatness is only shown in this period
by the water-colours produced mainly for the engravers. In the
work done for the Southern Coast, Scott's Provincial Antiquities,
the Rivers and Ports of England, and the England and Wales
series, Turner displayed all the genuine nobleness and sweetness
of his nature. I propose therefore to occupy the remainder of
this chapter with a rapid survey of these undertakings, singling
out from each one or two representative designs for closer
examination. We have now seen what was the character of Turner's pictures
which gained him most applause and favour in Academic circles
and with the public of the Academy. It is no doubt regret
table that a man of his talents should have to waste his time — as it
seems to us — in the manufacture of puerile and pretentious
specimens of Academic ' high art,' but we can easily make too
much of the matter. There is something altogether incommensur
able about such a man ; he is like some great natural force,
copious, abundant and unwearying. He must have drawn and
painted with as little effort as ordinary mortals exert when they
play cards or write letters to their friends. I have no doubt that
96

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
the 'high art' concoctions bothered him much more than his
better works, for it was all ratiocinative, conscious, all spun out
of the understanding without any deep-struck roots in the uncon
scious life of his affections. But no doubt he felt prouder of the
results, simply because he was more conscious of the efforts. We
have no grounds for supposing that he did not enjoy the work,
and in return it certainly gave him comparative independence,
and encouraged him to produce. Printsellers and publishers were
anxious to get the celebrated Academician to work for them, and
the big middle-class public were eager to possess themselves of
engravings from the great man's designs. It was certainly a clear
gain that the designer of the Southern Coast, the Richmondshire
drawings, Scott's Provincial Antiquities, the Rivers and Ports of
England, and the England and Wales series could afford to keep
publishers and editors at arm's length, that he was so strong in
public favour that his work was influenced by none but artistic
considerations. It hardly comes within the scope of the present essay to study
the drawings in detail which form the originals of Turner's en
graved work, important as these drawings are as examples of the
artist's genius. Each drawing is a perfect work of art in itself, the
fact that an engraving was to be made from it counting practically
as nothing with the artist. If the subject did not lend itself quite
satisfactorily to the engraver's requirements, Turner introduced
various modifications into the engraver's proofs, but he did not
alter the drawings. In this way the original drawings were kept as
independent creations. Into them the artist was free to pour all
that spontaneous native side of his talent which could find no out
let in his ambitious ' high art ' productions. As water-colours the
originals of the engravings that were issued between 1814 and
1830 are among the most remarkable and consummate achieve
ments of the medium. With hardly an exception they are
worked entirely in transparent colour, and for sheer range of inven
tion, variety of effect, and loveliness of colour they have no equals.
But their place is among the artist's completed works, and as our
immediate business is with the sketches and studies, we can only
touch upon these exquisitely beautiful water-colours incidentally ;
i.e. only in so far as they help us to grasp the significance of
T. S.-7 97

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
the sketches and preliminary drawings which went to their
production. It is a curious sign how little conscious Turner was of the
nature and limitations of his own capacities, that the plan of the
Southern Coast series of engravings, as it first took form in his mind,
included a long narrative poem from his own hand describing the
history and local peculiarities of the places he proposed to illus
trate. It is hardly probable that an individual with less capa
city for verbal expression ever sat down to write a long poem.
Yet it is easy to see how it was that Turner came to think himself
competent to undertake such a task. The stamp of his mind was
genuinely poetic. He had, and knew that he had, in a high
measure ' the vision and the faculty divine.' The inspiration of
his best works had been drawn from the poets, from Thomson,
Akenside, and Milton. His pictures, so far as it is possible to
distinguish content from form, are real poems. And the technical
accomplishment of pictorial art had come to him so easily and
naturally that it may well have seemed to flow inevitably from the
innate strength of his emotions and the vivid hue of his imagina
tion. He probably thought that he had only to take a pen in his
hand to find the accomplishment of verse following with the
same ease and inevitability.
The verses Turner did succeed in writing are pathetic failures ;
the mind so intimately versed in the subtleties of visible melody
and harmony was dead to the witchery of verbal sound. It is
true that his failure is not quite so abject as the extracts Thorn-
bury has printed from the attempted Southern Coast epic would
lead one to expect, but, when all due allowance is made for Thorn-
bury 's blunders of transcription, the result is still quite hopeless.
But it is otherwise when we turn to the designs made from the
same subject-matter, and, in spite of Lessing and a host of modern
theorists, I must insist that in their heart and essence they are
indeed poems.
The first number of the Southern Coast was published in
January 1814, and the last number was not issued till May 1826,
but with only one or two exceptions the whole of the Dorsetshire,
Devon, Cornwall and Somersetshire subjects (and these form
about three-quarters of the whole work) were made from sketches
98

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
taken during a single journey in the summer of 1811.
These sketches are the kind of notes that a poet would take ; from
the point of view of the historian or topographer they are
singularly incomplete. Occasionally we come across a tolerably
elaborate drawing of a ruined castle or stretch of rocky coast, but
even these are summary and hurried in comparison with the Italian
drawings, and Turner seldom chose such sketches as the bases of
his finished pictures. He certainly found them useful as the
means of making a methodical analysis of the pictorial con
stituents of what he saw, and as storing his memory and giving
matter and fulness to his own conceptions of natural phenomena.
But there their usefulness ended. The actual embryo of the
pictures he painted is generally a hurried scrawl about two square
inches in size, made with a blunt pencil.
Among the Southern Coast sketch-books is a fat little volume
bound in brown calf, having a brass clasp and lettered on the back,
British Itenary (sic). The title page runs as follows : — The British
Itinerary \ or | Travellers Pocket Companion | throughout | Great
Britain | Exhibiting | the Direct Route to Every | Borough and Com
mercial Town I in the | Kingdom | with the principal | Cross Roads |
Compiled from Actual Measurement | and the best Surveys and
Authorities | By | Nathanl. Coltman ; | Surveyor. | Employed by
the Post Office in Measuring the Roads of | Great Britain |
London. | Printed and Published, by Wm. Dickie, No. 120 Strand ;
and N. Coltman, Green Walk ; Black Friars Road. | Price 3s.
Sewed.' It contains two hundred and fifty leaves, the printed
matter only occupying about a third of the total number, the re
mainder having been left blank for notes. These are now filled
with Turner's notes of expenses incurred, the draft of the poem he
attempted to write, and a number of minute sketches. Among
these it is possible to recognise the originals of several of the
Southern Coast designs, including those of Combe Martin,
Watchet, Boscastle and Clovelly, the ' Dartmouth ' and ' Dart
mouth Castle ' of the Rivers of England series, and the sketch
upon which the superb ' Stonehenge at Daybreak ' (R. 81), in
the unpublished 'Liber,' was probably founded. Two of these
sketches have been reproduced on Plates lv. and lvi., together
with the engravings of the completed designs. That the finished 99

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
drawings could have been made from such slender material can
hardly appear less than astonishing to those familiar with the
methods of artists of the present day ; but to the best of my
belief, Turner had no other sketches or drawings of these places
to assist him in his work, and it can only add to our amaze
ment when we notice that in all probability the finished draw
ings were made, one nearly eight years, and the other nearly
fourteen years, after the sketches were taken; the 'Watchet'
plate having been published in April 1820, and the 'Boscastle'
in March 1825.
When we examine carefully the sketch of Watchet we find
that it gives us very little more than the general idea of a small
fishing village, with a curved breakwater and a stretch of rocky
coast running off into the distance. This general idea must have
been all that the artist retained of his experiences of the place,
i.e., he cannot possibly have retained any bare unattached visual
sensations of any of the particular objects comprised in the
scene. The details of the construction of the breakwater in the
engraving may, for all I know (I have never visited the place),
be exactly like those of the actual one which Turner saw there,
but what little I know of his ordinary methods of work inclines
me to doubt it. It is probably true enough to the general facts
of the case, but all those little local accidents of form which the
conscientious realist of to-day would linger over so lovingly are
certainly ignored. No doubt when Turner was on the spot he
looked at the breakwater, as at everything, with keen and vigilant
eyes, and his impression of the structure would have contributed
to the building up in his mind of a definite and concrete idea of
the laws and customs of breakwaters in general. And when he
set to work to elaborate his sketch it was doubtless this general
idea which came into play, and which turned those half-dozen
rudely scratched lines in the sketch into a sharply defined mental
picture, as vivid to Turner's imagination as a real scene, and
infinitely more useful for his immediate purpose, for the task
of selection and rejection was already done. In this way the
whole subject came to life ; the sketch, a fixed point in present per
ception, beckoning forth the stored essential riches of the artist's
mind. Those three upright lines inside the breakwater turn into
100

PLATE LV

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PENCIL. AliOU-r 1823
THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
an array of fishing boats, the sea ripples into the harbour and creeps
up the shore, the village straightens itself out and grows into
a collection of habitable houses, with gardens and parting walls,
the women come out of the houses to spread their washing on the
grass to dry, others gossip in the roadway, the men have a little
business loading or unloading one of the boats, or else see to the
nets, or stroll idly along the jetty, and a couple set off on im
portant business along the road that leads over the hill and far
away. The whole process, of course, is absurdly easy and familiar.
Even the least imaginative of us is capable of some kind of
success in this line of imaginative interpretation. The only point
of difference between the least of us and the greatest in this
kind of exercise is in the quality of the subjective filling -out
with which we clothe our meagre data, in the wealth of ex
perience stored and refined by thought, its coherence, and above
all, its clear-cut precision and definition. The power to force
all the floating imagery thus called up to what I think Blake
called ' the seeing point ' — to make the mental imagery as clear-
cut and vivid as an actual object of sight, and then to use it as
the material for the construction of a picture, these are ex
ceptional capacities ; but we can hardly doubt that the psycho
logical processes which connect sketch and imaginative amplifica
tion, even in the mind of the most gifted artist, are the same as
those which connect sign and interpretation in the minds of all
normally constituted individuals.
To an artist trained in modern methods of literal trans
cription, it is curious to notice the liberties Turner allows himself
to take with his own sketch. In it the main shapes of the mass
of rock in the middle distance are pretty clearly marked, but
instead of carefully retaining these and amplifying them, his
busy mind sets to work and builds the whole structure up afresh.
In the end it comes out very different from the sketch, but it
is so well and truly put together, it is so thoroughly steeped in
the profound knowledge garnered in years of the sharpest ob
servation and study, that we accept it more gladly than an
unintelligent transcript of any particular rock formation. Nay
more, even if we had forced Turner himself to stay there on the
spot, and elaborate his representation with the scene in front of
101

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
his eyes, there would have been no gain to the drawing, for the
result could not possibly have been more thoroughly penetrated
with the laws of human thought and observation.
We notice the same freedom in deahng with the ' Boscastle '
sketch. The general character only of the rocks on the right
is there indicated, but in the engraving the whole mass is re
created from the stores of the artist's knowledge. In the sketch,
too, there is no authority for the solid masonry on the rock
to the left, immediately below the gang of men assisting the
vessel into harbour. Note also the alteration in the profile of
this rock, which slopes less abruptly in the sketch than in the
engraving. It is true that these two plates can hardly be ranked as
among the finest of the Southern Coast subjects ; the ' Watchet ' is,
I think, rather a poor design, and though the ' Boscastle ' is finer,
it can hardly be classed with such consummate achievements as
the ' Plymouth Dock, from Mount Edgecumbe,' ' Poole,' or ' The
Land's End.' In these designs the subjective synthesis has a
more distinctly emotional setting, but there can be no doubt
that the processes of imaginative construction are on exactly the
same lines as those we have just indicated. In every case the
active motive force is something within the artist's own soul;
it is not given from without.
The next important publication with which Turner was con
nected after the commencement of the Southern Coast, was
Whitaker's History of Richmondshire, to which he furnished a
series of twenty illustrations. This set of drawings, often spoken
of as ' the Yorkshire series,' has always been regarded with peculiar
affection by all lovers of Turner's water-colour work. The
originals are nearly all in private collections (where I hope they
will be carefully guarded from the light, as the blues in them are
of a fugitive nature), but there are two permanently accessible
to the public in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge — thanks
to Mr. Ruskin's generosity — and a third is in London, in the
Victoria and Albert Museum. The Cambridge drawings, the
' Richmond, Yorks,' and the ' Mossdale Fall,' are already
somewhat faded, especially the latter one, but the London
drawing, of ' Hornby Castle,' thanks to Mr. Vaughan's wise
102

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PENCIL. ABOUT i8l6
PLATE lA^III

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
stipulation that it shall always be protected by a curtain when
not being looked at, is still in fairly good condition. The engrav
ings from the whole series were published between the years 1819
and 1823, but the sketches on which the drawings were based
were all made during a tour in the summer of 1816.
So far as I know, Turner did not make a single colour
sketch from nature during the whole of this tour. All the
sketches are in pencil and the water-colours were all painted
in the studio entirely from these pencil memoranda. The
sketches are very similar to those made for the Southern Coast
subjects, but they contain evidence that the artist was in a softer
and gentler frame of mind. The conquering Napoleonic insolence
has passed into an attitude of human and affectionate solicitude.
The touch of the pencil point is everywhere light and graceful,
yet it is as swift as ever, never lingering for a moment over
details or particular facts. This is especially noticeable in the
treatment of foliage ; the pencil seeming always to caress the
general idea of foliage, while holding the particular shapes and
even positions of trees and bushes as of only slight importance.
The work, one cannot but feel, is that of a happy and contented
man, at peace with himself and pleased with his surroundings.
When we remember the close proximity of Farnley Hall to
these scenes, and that Mr. and Mrs. Fawkes and their family
actually accompanied the artist over part of the ground, we can
hardly be surprised at the sunniness of temper evinced by these
sketches. In nearly all the designs human figures and cattle play a
prominent part. This is noticeably the case with the two subjects
I have chosen for illustration. In the ' Hornby Castle ' the
incident of the broken jug, the weeping maiden, the sympathetic
bystanders, the picturesque passer-by on his donkey, the busy
milk-maid, and above all the cat, triumphantly lapping up the
spilt milk, all this is at least as important an element in the
picture as the Castle and view itself. In the ' Heysham ' the
reapers, cattle, milkmaid, and passing waggon seem to form the
keynote of the whole design. Yet there are no sketches or even
the slightest indications of any of these things in the sketch
books. They were evolved, I firmly believe, entirely by the artist's
103

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
creative imagination as each scene came to life under his hands
in the studio. To some extent, no doubt, the decorative or
mechanical requirements of the subject solicited their existence.
In the 'Heysham,' for example, lines are wanted in the fore
ground to repeat with variations the horizontal undulations of
the mountains in the distance and middle-distance ; the cast
shadows do this, and hence we have the presence of the cows
and figures as pretexts for these shadows. And then we may as
well make these objects useful in themselves ; hence the turn of
the foreground cow's neck placed just where it seems to complete
the curve of the descending hills, and the sharp silhouette of the
head catches the eye while the cast shadow swings it away
in a new and happy direction. Exactly why the eye should
find such exquisite enjoyment in the plunge down from the
hill's profile to the head of the calf, rubbing her nose against
the back of the seated white cow, and then on to the foreground
beast, and then in springing off again at a sharp angle to the
bottom of the large foreground stone in the corner just above
the signature, — exactly why we take pleasure in this kind of
visual melody, I do not know, but I know that the tracks laid
for visible fiights of this kind, crossing each other and inter
weaving in all directions, form a very large part of the enjoy
ment which Turner's drawings provide.
The pencil sketch of Heysham (Plate lix. (a)) thus formed,
as it were, the leading motive of the water-colour drawing, or
rather it provided a series of shapes which could not be varied
beyond certain limits, and these shapes formed the starting-point
of the elaborate visual movement which Turner proceeded to
invent and weave round it. I called just now this side of the
work ' decorative or mechanical,' because I wished to distinguish
it from a different but related aspect. This unmeaning and
abstract play of lines is like the rhyme, assonance and rhythm of
a poem ; a part, but an unconscious, and as it were dependent, part,
of the whole effect. No sane person would read a poem expressly
for the jingle of the sounds, unless for the purposes of analysis,
and in the same way, no sane lover of pictures would look at this
drawing of Heysham merely for the visible play of the lines and
masses. Neither can the artist or poet abandon themselves to the
104

PLA TE LI.K

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HEYSHAM, WITH BLACK CO.MBE, CONISTON OLD MAN, HELVELLYN, ETC., IN DISTANCE
PENCIL. AlinUT t8i6
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HEYSHAM AND CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN WHITAKER'S " RICHMDNDSHIRE, " 22 AUGUST, 1822
THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
mere unmeaning play of sounds or lines in the process of com
position. These external requirements must be subordinated to
the requirements of the meaning. And so, though I said just
now that these mechanical requirements may have had some
share in calling the figures and incidents represented into being,
we must be careful not to forget that that share is only of slight
and subordinate importance. What is important is the essential
congruity of the figures and incidents with the landscape itself;
they must appear not as something arbitrarily added, but as a
mere development or further determination of the meaning already
implicit in the landscape. In the present case so intimate is what
I may call the logical identity between the bare view, as repre
sented by the initial sketch, and as a topographical fact, and the
whole living and moving scene as represented by the finished
design, that the development of the one from the other seems as
inevitable as the march of the seasons or the processes of growth
and decay to which we ourselves are subject.
From this point of view I think it is easy to see that such a
result is attainable in no other way than that which Turner has
followed. No actual scene could ever possess quite the same
close-knit logical coherence, the same absolute absence of irrele
vance, as we find in Turner's finished drawing; so that the
most faithful and loving and skilful reproduction of the most
carefully selected aspect of actuality would never give us the
same kind of outer and inner unity that Turner has achieved by
his method of ampfifying, modifying, and interpreting his slight
pencil sketches. Only in this way can the active forces of inter
pretation or assimilation, by which the artist as well as the meanest
of us fills out the incoming suggestions of the given, achieve
adequate expression. A psychologist might perhaps describe the
difference between a faithful transcription of an actual scene and
such an effort of the creative imagination as we have just been
studying, by saying that the one is a representation of the incom
ing or given ideas or sensations, while Turner's picture represents
these same ideas or sensations after they have been thoroughly
' apperceived ' by the masses of ideas stored in the artist's mind.
If we adopt such a description, we must not forget to add that
Turner has used his knowledge of the mechanism of the pictorial 105

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
language to set out his total idea for us in the clearest and
pleasantest way.
As with the Heysham sketch, so with the Hornby.^ I need
perhaps hardly call attention to the deliberate heightening of
Hornby Castle, and to the way the back of the nearer hill in
front of it has been humped in the finished design. This de
liberate falsification (as it must seem to the literalist) is paralleled
by the treatment of the foreground tree, whose individuahty is
destroyed, and whose place is taken by a mere alien grown in the
fertile climate of the artist's imagination. I have no doubt that
if Turner could have got the same effect without making these
alterations he would not have made them. But it is obvious that
he could not. From his point of view such alterations are merely
grammatical devices by which he throws the required emphasis
on qualities which hills and trees do undeniably possess, but which
were somewhat slurred over in nature's momentary presentment
of the case. And if we think about the matter calmly, we see
that we cannot expect any object to enter into new relations
without undergoing some kind of modification ; I mean that we
cannot expect physical facts to be taken up into the intelligible
world and used as factors in the expression of ideas and
emotions without requiring some kind of modification.
While Turner was producing these exquisite drawings for
Whitaker's History of Richmondshire, he also executed a series of
ten or eleven slightly smaller drawings to illustrate Sir Walter
Scott's Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scot
land. Eight of these drawings were presented by the publishers
to Scott, who had them framed from an oak felled on the Abbots-
ford estate during Turner's visit there in 1818. The effect of
this frame on the drawings, it must be confessed, is atrocious. It
might be guaranteed to kill the effect of any water-colour draw
ings but the radiantly immortal ones for which it was made. No
doubt even these would look better out of it, but such as it is
it hung in the breakfast-room at Abbotsford till after Scott's
death, and as it then hung, so it hangs now in Mr. Thomas
Brocklebank's hospitable mansion at Heswall, Chester.
When we draw the curtain, which has kept Turner's beautiftil
1 Plate tvii.
106

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EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL
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PLAIE I.X

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I'ENXIL. 1818
liORTHWICR CASTLE
ENG1CA\'ING I'L liLISHEI> IX SCO'IT's " i'KOVINCIAL A^ 'I |i,>L' 11 lES i iK SCOTLAND," 2 APKIL, l8ig
THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
work as fresh as when it was first executed, and look at these
drawings, it is difiicult to single out any one of them for special
attention. But after looking through the engravings made from
them in Scott's book, the marvellous view of ' Edinburgh from the
Calton Hill ' leaves perhaps the most powerful impression on the
imagination. I have, therefore, selected the drawing made from
nature upon which this design was based as the subject of one of
our illustrations (Plate lx.).
In this case we find that Turner has followed his sketch with
great care, yet the whole material has been hammered this way
and that by his powerful hand. We can see that the artist felt
impatient with nature's calm and unhurried chronicle of facts, and
was determined at all costs to make a more immediate and con
centrated attack on the spectator's powers of perception. Instead
of stretching out calmly and indifferently on both hands, as in the
sketch, the city in the finished design seems to soar upwards from
the depths beneath our feet. The jail on our left has been
squeezed together, making the line from the porch to the central
turret much more oblique than it was. The perspective of nearly
all the buildings has been modified, yet the artist has taken great
care to preserve the character of the silhouettes of the leading
planes. But it is in the invention of the play of light which
animates the whole, and throws into such strong relief all the
telling points of the design, that we find the clearest evidence of
the artist's active intervention.
A curious instance of Turner's habit of using his notes rather
as hints to his imagination than as providing ready-made material
waiting for immediate incorporation, is afforded by the sketches
of some figures made while he was standing on the Calton Hill.
On the back of one of the pages on which our view of Edin
burgh is drawn, there is a rough sketch of the brow of the hill
with groups of figures on it. Among these figures are three girls
attending to the drying of the clothes they have washed. One
of these is standing shaking out a cloth in the wind. But though
Turner has introduced this incident into the foreground of his
picture, the figure there is not a repetition of the graceful
figure in the sketch. In the picture the action has been changed,
and the figure presented in a different point of view. It is
107

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
designed altogether afresh. In the same way none of the other
figures is repeated in the finished drawing. The figures in the
drawing are indeed the same sort of people as in the sketch, but
each is designed specially for its place, and with reference to the
movement of the whole picture. All this is eminently charac
teristic of the cast of Turner's mind, which seems to store scenes
and incidents in complete independence of their momentary and
particular appearance ; he is thus able to set these invisible
essences in motion before his mind's eye, and to wait till they
arrange themselves to his complete satisfaction, and he has then no
difficulty in clothing them with the attributes of time and space.
We will turn now to a sketch of a different kind. In the
' Edinburgh,' ' Heysham ' and ' Hornby ' sketches, as in most of
those we have examined, we have seen Turner making a note of
what we may call the chief items of the topographical data,
leaving the problem of their arrangement, modification and
amplification for future solution. In the two sketches of Rochester
(Plates LXII. (a) and (b)) which I have had reproduced, we see the
artist's mind moving on a different track. A few pages earher in
the sketch-book from which these two leaves are taken, he has
indeed made his usual record of the facts about the church, bridge,
etc., at Rochester, but apparently, as time did not press, he
remained in his boat watching the scene and criticising, as one
who understood such things, nature's own methods of design.
His sketches now become not topographical records but swift and
eloquent designs for pictures. The concrete particularity of the
castle, church, bridge, etc., becomes abrogated or submerged.
These objects are now taken up into a new kind of systematic
unity, in which their relationship to the whole and to each other
is of much more importance than their discrete individuality.
Now, the important point is just how the Castle and the other
topographical items drop into place with regard to the shipping
on the river, — the kind of groups they all make, the way the one
item affects the other, half hiding it or setting it off to advantage.
In the sketch on page 18 of the sketch-book (Plate lxii. (a)) the
exact position of the mast of the foreground vessel is the dominant
factor, — the way it unites the lines described by the silhouette of
the castle and the trees sloping down to the bridge, bringing the
108

PLA TE LXII

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WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1822 :\i

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
curves to a focus, as it were, and providing a rigid base for them
to spring from again. In the other sketch (Plate lxii. (b) ) Turner
is trying a different arrangement of the material, or, to put it more
accurately, nature is trying another effect, and Turner is watching
and making notes of the experiment.
In this way, before Turner shut up his book he had made over
a dozen skeleton designs, which he had only to clothe in colour
and light and shade to develop into beautiful pictures. But when
he got home and actually set to work to make the drawing
of Rochester for the Rivers of England series, he deliber
ately ignored every one of nature's pregnant suggestions, and
began to build up his own design in his own way. Perhaps he
thought nature's designs wanted more space than he had at his
command in a plate that was to be only a few inches square ;
perhaps it was the sheer delight in the exercise of his creative
powers that was the main motive force, for though his sketch
books teem with designs caught in this way on the wing, yet he
never once, so far as I can discover, adopted one of them in his
own pictures, without so modifying and recasting it as to make
it into a quite new and independent construction.
I am not at all sure of the exact date when the sketch of
Bolton Abbey (Plate lxiv.) was made. It is the sketch upon
which the water-colour engraved in the England and Wales
series was based. The engraving was published in 1827, so the
water-colour must have been made a year or two earlier, but as
the sketch occurs in a book which contains a number of the
Devonshire Rivers subjects, it probably belongs to about the time
of Turner's second visit to Devonshire. This visit took place in
either 1812 or 1813, and the Wharfedale sketches, of which the
'Bolton' is one, cannot have been later than 1815. So it is
probable that at least ten years elapsed between the making of
the sketch and the water-colour drawing in which the sketch was
elaborated. The drawing itself is one of the most universally admired of all
the England and Wales subjects. Mr. Ruskin alludes to it again
and again in the various volumes of Modern Painters. In the
fourth volume (chapter xvi.) he gives an admirable analysis of
the imaginative conception, and in volume three (chapter ix.) he
109

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
dwells with his usual eloquence on the knowledge displayed in the
treatment of the foreground trees. With the general tenor of
these remarks I am in entire agreement, and if the passages were
not so long I should like to introduce them here, but unless the
reader is very careful, I am inclined to think that Mr. Ruskin's
constant appeal to ' the facts ' is hkely to mislead him into the
belief that all the details of the design, and especially those of the
foreground trees, are elaborately studied and accurately reproduced
from the actual scene. Turner's sketch proves that this was not
the case. Each individual tree, every curve in its trunk, the
texture of its bark, the stains and hoUows and flickering lights
and shadows upon it, and the intricate play of the trees' upper
branches, all these have been, not painstakingly studied from
nature, but invented by the artist in his studio, and each detail has
been invented not entirely for its own sake, but as a note, a chord,
in the whole complex of visible harmony.
I do not thkik any more wonderful example could be given of
the intense activity of creative genius than that which is furnished
by a careful comparison of this drawing with the sketch upon
which it was based. We look at the sketch, and all the subject
seems there ; as a synopsis of the finished picture it seems tolerably
complete. Yet in the drawing we find almost every detail has
been altered. Notice the way the foreground trees have been
pushed nearer to each other. In the sketch one has to search for
the abbey, and then one's eyes begin to wander about aimlessly.
But in the drawing everything is brought into connection with
everything else ; it is all welded together. The abbey is the first
thing one sees, then the eye goes easily and inevitably to the
second couple of foreground trees, the seated angler and the
distant river-bank. In passing from one object to the other
the eye feels something of the same kind of pleasure that the ear
takes in the rhythm of verse, so that one's gaze travels over the
drawing not vagrantly and with effort, but gladly, and to the
spectator all this visible melody and delight seem like the
unconscious expression of the secret joy with which the artist's
mind played round the scene, an echo of the mysterious music of
his happy memories.
The effect of the ' Bolton ' drawing is that of a bright summer's
110

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COLCHESTER, ESSEX
e\'GRA\im:; published in " picturesque views in e.n'gland and U'AI.ES," 1827

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
afternoon, an effect that does not change very rapidly ; the slight-
ness of Turner's sketch was not, therefore, a necessary outcome of
the transitory nature of his subject-matter. Had he been so
minded he could easily have painted the whole subject out-of-
doors. But with the 'Colchester' drawing, another of the
England and Wales subjects, pubhshed about the same time as
the ' Bolton,' the case was different. There the effect is a momen
tary one. It is evening, the shades of twilight have gathered,
and the sun is on the point of disappearing. There was only time
for a few hasty memoranda ; but while the modern artist would
almost invariably make his memoranda in colour. Turner is quite
satisfied with his usual hurried pencil notes. In the sketches here
reproduced (Plate.Lxvi.) we have a kind of abstract of the whole
scene. There is the miller's house beside the river at the foot of
the hill, while the hill is crowned by a row of trees through which
the abbey building and the roofs of the distant town can be seen.
The position of the sun and of its reflection in the river are
marked. The general idea of the whole is certainly there in the sketches,
but in a rudimentary or indeterminate condition. Note how
deliberately vague and undefined the idea of the trees on the brow
of the hill has been kept. A distant abbey-building set in the
delicate tracery of gracefully branching trees, the whole framed in
masses of feathery foliage, that was the general idea of this part of
the design, and Turner knew that he was familiar enough with the
nature and ways of trees to be able to carry out this idea with all
the requisite wealth of detail whenever he should set himself
seriously to the task. The exact shapes of the trees actually
growing there on the hillside on the day and at the moment when
he made this sketch were, apart from their general idea, a matter of
indifference to him. If he had cared very much about them he
could easily have gone there the next morning and drawn them
carefully; they would hardly have altered much in the night.
But these shapes would have surely wanted revision, alteration
and suppression, before they could have taken their places as a
perfectly articulated limb in Turner's living, organic design. The
result could not have been more satisfactory than the one reached
without this labour. Ill

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
As with the row of trees, so with the miller's house, the
cottages creeping up the hillside and the distant town. The
pencil hieroglyphs are enough to suggest the general idea of these
objects, their appropriate particularities will unroll themselves
from the stored treasures of Turner's mind so soon as he takes his
pencil in hand again to carry forward his work ; not the actual
details of the cottages, etc., existing down there in Essex, but the
details appropriate to the picture as an expression of an emotional
experience. The drawings in the England and Wales series produced in
this way, in which a definite particular experience of the artist is
enshrined as it were in a wealth of appropriate and beautifully
arranged shapes and colours, are among the jDest of the series.
But the pressure of professional engagements did not always
permit the artist to wait for this kind of inspiration. On such
occasions he appears to have fallen back on the material stored in
his early sketch-books, and his rhetorical mastery of the elements
of design was taxed to the uttermost to provide it with suitable
clothing and ornament. An excellent example of this kind of
work is provided by the drawing of Stamford, published in 1830.
This was founded on one of the sketches made during Turner's
first tour in the North of England, in 1797. This sketch (Plate
LXVIII.) is no doubt a fairly accurate record of the place, its
humdrum streets and houses, with its three triumphant bursts of
idealism in the shape of its three unimaginative church towers.
In taking up this sketch thirty years after it was made, Turner
seems to have asked himself, ' What am I to do to make this dull
affair into something universally interesting ? ' that is to say, into
something interesting and even amusing to those who care nothing
for Stamford merely for its own sake. Of course the first thing
for him to do was obviously to seize upon the three towers and
make the most of them, setting them up against a gorgeous sky
filled with rain and thunder and the darting rays of the thwarted
sun, which, however, must so far triumph in its contest as to flood
the towers with its light and transfigure them with its splendour.
The street below remains dull and untractable, but yet something
may be made of it. We can gain one point by insisting on
the smallness and homeliness of the houses, intensifying their
112

PLATE LXVIII

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PLATE LXX

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TYNEMOUTH PRIORY
pencil, with part in water colour. 1797

TYNEMOUTH, NORTHU.MBERLAND
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN "PICTURESQUE VIEWS LN E.XGLAND AND WALES," 1831

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
unimaginative character into something approaching the grotesque.
Better the actively ugly, for that at least makes our dullest and
largest church tower look almost beautiful by contrast, than the
passively commonplace. And then, lest our modest efforts remain
of small avail, we invent a couple of quaint old travellers hurrying
across the road to their inn, accompanied by the barks and gambols
of a lively little white dog ; by good luck and our own skilful
management they come just in front of our dull row of houses, so
that what with one thing and another we find our eyes and
thoughts very pleasantly diverted. As for the houses on the left
we can shut off a great part of them by simply drawing up a
lumbering stage-coach on that side of the road and heaping it with
ample females in swelling draperies, with burgeoning umbrellas and
bounteous baggage. And having got so far, we can now see exactly
what it is we want to make our foreground and distance more
immediately effective. In the sketch there is a hint that the road
dips just a trifle down from the foreground to the church ; we
increase this slight inequality till we get a dip of something like
forty or fifty feet between us and the church, a drop that gives
uncommon height and dignity to our humble towers. And now,
having got our street laid out to our liking, we want to make the
most of its possibilities, so we set another stage-coach down at the
foot of our little hill, load it with passengers impatient to be out
of their wet clothes, and give it a couple of rearing, prancing,
steaming horses to gallop it in hot haste up the declivity, so that
now, as we look at the engraving, we can almost hear the ring of
the horses' hooves on the stones and feel the rush of wind made
by the coach as it dashes past us; all this merely by way of
amplifying the artist's statement about his imaginary hill, and to
drive the idea of his well-invented fiction home into the conscious
ness of even the dullest of his audience.
The ' Tynemouth ' design, published in 1831, is on a higher
plane of imaginative creation than the ' Stamford ' subject, yet it
was built up in just the same way from a sketch made at the same
time on another leaf of the same sketch-book. The ' Stamford '
design shows Turner struggling valiantly against the absence of
any very pressing inspiration, and emerging with credit from the
ordeal ; the ' Tynemouth ' drawing, on the other hand, shows that
T.S.-S 113

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
his youthful and thirty-year old topographical sketch had served to
set his imagination aflame with all the urgency of a recent personal
experience. The vision conjured up by what I can only call the
potential or possible associations of a rocky coast had so much
completeness, so much innate driving force, that Turner had no
need to resort to the purely external and arbitrary tricks of
composition which had proved such valuable auxiliaries in the
' Stamford ' drawing. In the case of the ' Stamford ' subject, we
might almost say that the pictorial equivalent of the rhyme and
metre had suggested the sense ; in the case of the ' Tynemouth '
drawing the idea itself is so vivid that it creates its own lilt and
harmony. In looking through a number of Turner's drawings the hasty
observer — especially should he be a professional student eager to
pick up useful knowledge — is inclined to jump to the conclusion
that the important thing about rocks and mountains is to be high,
and that when the height of the most prominent buildings,
especially if they happen to be in ruins, has been increased three
or fourfold, all the duties of the imaginative designer have been
attended to. In the ' Tynemouth ' drawing we see how free
Turner is from the constraint of any such ready-made and purely
external rules of design. He has here deliberately lowered the
apparent height of his buildings and cliffs, and, if we examine the
matter carefully, we see that he has done this not at the dictates
of a passing whim or fancy, but because the heart of the matter —
the so-called ' subject,' that vague, intangible, elusive something
which seems to sit in the centre of the dynamical idea and pump
blood and life into every outlying portion of the organism, and
tyrannises so beneficently over the structure and function of each
part of the design — because this heart of the matter would clearly
have it so.
In the sketch we have an item of brute fact waiting, as it were,
pathetically to be taken up into the world of thought and feeling,
asking, so to speak, to be made significant and human. The artist
has granted the request in his finished design by making the
physical facts the mere passive spectators of man's sorrow and
suffering. In the sketch, the tall cliffs and ruined walls of the
priory tower above the small fishing-boat struggling into port ; in
114

THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS
the picture, the tall masts of the wrecked schooner dwarf the priory
and the cliffs and drive them into subordination. The real centre
of interest is the active, restless power of the sea for ill. The
baneful little leaps of the waves that fill nearly all the lower part
of the design tell their story of storm and wreck plainly enough.
The wrecked barques under the cliffs are in a sad plight, but
the pieces of floating mast and broken plank in the foreground
tell of worse things. On the shore we have the thrifty gatherers
of flotsam and jetsam, and a crowd of willing helpers. On all this
moving scene the wreck of the priory looks down not without
sympathy ; it too, it seems to say, is a part of man's activity and
ambition, it suffers also from the taint of mortality and from the
merciless power of the wind and rain.

115

CHAPTER VIII
MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY, AND THE ORIGIN OF
IMPRESSIONISM— 1830-1845
Mental characteristics of 1815-1830 period — Their influence on form —
and colour — Colour enrichment a general characteristic of Romantic Art —
What further development is required to give us the transition to Impres
sionism } — The first of Turner's so-called Impressionistic -works — Vague
ness or indistinctness as a means of expression — Two ways of painting one's
impressions — Turner's earlier -way — contrasted -with the modern Impres
sionistic way — The change, after 1830, is it a change in terms of sight or
of thought — visual or mental ? — The content of Turner's later -work — The
relation of Turner's later work to Impressionism defined — The gradual
development of Turner's later manner — The Petworth sketches (1830) —
The discovery of the artistic value of the indeterminate — The Vignettes —
'Rivers of France' — Venetian sketches (1834-1840) — Swiss and Rhine
sketches (1841-1844)— The end.
WHEN we try to make clear to ourselves the inner char
acteristics of the period studied in the last chapter,
we notice at once a change from the gloom, sternness
and patient endurance of the earlier decade to a brighter and
more cheerful frame of mind. Turner's predominant frame of
mind is proud and happy. He seems to rejoice in the splendour
of the world and exult over the richness and variety of its
material. His attitude towards humanity is not so easily defined.
In the best of his oil paintings, as in the ' Pas de Calais' (' Now
for the Painter '), and in his water colours, there is an abundance
of close and sympathetic observation of the labours and sorrow
of mankind. But in spite of the graces of a naturally kind heart
Turner's attitude towards these labours and sufferings is not
entirely free from traces of hardness and selfishness. His instinct
for the picturesque side of this kind of subject-matter is so keen,
and his insistence on this picturesqueness is so constant and so
116

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
emphatic, that it is hard to resist the suspicion that his interest
is rather professional than personal. He does not seem to feel
himself an actor and a fellow-sufferer. He was on the other side
of the fence ; he was the artist, and labouring, suffering mankind
his material. And so far as he himself was concerned he had
every reason for exultation. The nature that could endow a
humbly born youth with such gifts as he possessed, and the society
that had rewarded these talents so generously, might be said to have
fairly earned the young painter's gratitude. He gave it effusively,
with none of the ulterior reserves an educated Greek would have
felt in the presence of a great happiness or pre-eminent success.
Let us now turn to the outward and visible results of this
exultant and somewhat heartless and selfish enjoyment. The
movement of the design, the quality of the tone and colour, and
the spirit of the handling of the pictures in which such a frame
of mind is expressed, could not possibly be the same as in
Turner's earlier pictures. The sober and restrained colouring
of pictures like the ' Windsor,' the ' Frosty Morning ' and ' The
Nore,' is in perfect harmony with the patient strength and stern
ness of the emotional colouring of their inspiration. The same
mood could not be expressed in any other scheme of lighting and
colour. But to treat what, for want of a better word, I may call a
pictorial metre, as though it were equally admirable as a means
of expression for aU kinds and shades of emotion, would argue
an extraordinary dulness or sheer absence of artistic capacity ;
and Turner's shortcomings, if he had any, were moral rather than
artistic. Given then the mood of exultant enjoyment of the physical
amenities of the world, a lighter and brighter colour scheme than
that of Turner's earlier pictures was bound to be forthcoming, if
that mood was to be fully expressed by pictorial art. And as a
matter of history Turner was the first modern artist in the range
of landscape art to give adequate expression to this sentiment of
unrestrained enjoyment of the physical delights of nature, though
we see the same swelling sense of the pride of life finding a
similar form of expression in the works of contemporary figure-
painters like Sir Thomas Lawrence, Shee and Hayter in England,
and Delacroix, Isabey, and others in France. 117

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
In the present chapter I propose to deal with the closing phase
of Turner's art. In the works of this period Turner has been
said to have initiated a new kind of art, or at least to have
invented or introduced certain important innovations in the
region of colour and tone, which have had the effect of develop
ing new possibilities in the art of landscape-painting. It is from
this point of view, and with reference to this aspect of Turner's
work, that he has been hailed as the father of Impressionism.
Before discussing the value of the innovations Turner introduced
and their infiuence on subsequent developments of the art, it is
important to study the immediate causes which brought them
into existence. In other words, we must study this new phase
of Turner's art in relation to its immediate antecedents ; in the
first place, to see how far it can be regarded as a necessary develop
ment of what had gone before, and in the second place, to discover
exactly what is new in it.
The two most striking characteristics of Turner's later work
are the brightness and extended range of his colour schemes. But
this formal characteristic is clearly taken over bodily from the
previous period, and we have just seen that it was but the neces
sary outward expression of the spiritual content with which
Turner was then preoccupied. In a picture like ' Ulysses deriding
Polyphemus' (1829), for example, we have a colour scheme as
bright and as extended as that of any of the later works, and yet
it is emphatically a work of the Romantic period. It is all ablaze
with the light and fiame of human pride. Its gorgeous array of
blues, its burnished gold and glowing crimson and scarlet and
white are but the triumphant expression of the mood of unre
strained sensuous enjoyment which formed the key-note of the
work we have just been examining.
But if the lightening of the colour scheme was simply an in
heritance from the Romantic phase of art, what are we to regard
as the special contribution of the later manner ? A comparison
of a few of Turner's later works with the ' Ulysses ' will show us
at once. The earliest example of Turner's later and so-called
Impressionistic manner with which I am familiar is the ' Calais
Sands, low water — Poissards collecting bait,' which was exhibited
in 1830, and is now in the Bury Art Gallery. Its colour
118

PLA TE LXXI

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MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
scheme is actually more subdued than the 'Ulysses,' but the
whole effect is more vaporous and the figures are less distinct.
So far as I am able to judge, this is the chief diferentia of
Turner's later manner, and of all Impressionistic work on its
formal side. As a second characteristic we may add the fact
that it deals with a scene of contemporary hfe, something that
Turner had actually seen with his eyes, not something that he
had read about and imagined, as in the ' Ulysses.'
If we examine ' The Evening Star ' and ' At Petworth ' (both
at the Tate Gallery), the ' Snowstorm ' of 1842, the late Venetian
pictures, and the ' Rain, Storm, Speed ' of 1844, we find these works
are all similarly distinguished by their general vagueness of defini
tion and by the fact that they all represent scenes which had
come within the range of the artist's own experience.
Yet it is evident that these two characteristics are not of
equal importance. The vagueness of definition was a general char
acteristic of all Turner's later work, but a considerable number of
these works were purely imaginary compositions, as for example
the ' Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus ' (1839),
' The Exile and the rock limpet ' (1842), ' The Evening of the
Deluge' (1843), 'Queen Mab's Cave' (1846), and the various
'Whaler' pictures (1845 and 1846). There is obviously, then,
no necessary connection between Turner's vagueness of execution
(his distinctively Impressionist manner) and his choice of subject
of which he had been actually an eye-witness.
Besides, we must remember that Turner did not wait till his
later years before beginning to paint his own impressions. He
had been busy painting them ever since he had come to artistic
maturity. His 'Calais Pier' (1803), the 'Spithead' (1809),
' Petworth — Dewy Morning ' (1810), ' Teignmouth ' and ' Hulks
on the Tamar' (1811 and 1812), and 'Frosty Morning' (1813),
— to name only a few — were certainly works of this kind ; as
were the ' Hedging and Ditching ' of the Liber and the
' Colchester ' of the England and Wales series. But there is
no lack of determination in the execution of these works. The
difference between Turner's later attempts to paint his impres
sions and his earlier must therefore be found in his attitude
towards these impressions — the principle of selection, of suppres- 119

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
sion and adjustment upon which he dealt with the data of sense-
perception ; and this brings us to the consideration of the
rationale of that vagueness of execution which we have agreed
to regard as the chief characteristic of Turner's later work.
An ingenious and at first somewhat plausible attempt has
been made to explain the peculiarities of Turner's later style, on
the ground that old age and failing health had brought about
an actual organic change in the artist's powers of sight. But
it seems to me that Dr. Liebreich's arguments ^ and conclusions are
vitiated by his failure to discriminate between Turner's manner
of expression and the action of his eyesight. These are two
clearly distinct operations. Between the act of seeing and an
artist's fully organised manner of expression, a whole host of con
siderations — among them the limitations and capacities of the
material — interpose themselves. These considerations must all
receive their due weight. I know several very short-sighted
artists whose pictures are remarkable for their elaborate and
sharply defined details, and there are others with strong and
good eyesight, whose pictures are confused and indistinct. An
artist puts into his pictures only what he chooses to put there.
And when we work out in detail the reasons why Turner chose
to make his drawings indistinct, we find that such considerations
are quite sufficient by themselves to account for his change of
style, without having recourse to any hypothetical alteration in his
organs of sight.
The clue, then, to the nature of Turner's later manner of
expression is to be found in the character not of his optical
sensations but of his thought, or in other words, upon the mode
in which his intelligent self reacted upon the immediate data
of sense-perception. By the time he had reached the period with
which we are now concerned, he had lost much of his interest
in the material world. He cared no longer for the strength and
weight, the toughness and tang of material ; that delight in the
sohdity of real objects which gives such a manly gusto to his
early sea-pieces, is now altogether absent from his work. He
cares no longer for the company of men, or for their avocations
1 'Turner and Mulready.— On the Effect of certain Faults of Vision, etc' By R.
Liebreich. Macmillan's Magazine, April 1872.
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MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
or joys and sorrows. He is now a lonely old man, with his
thoughts mainly centred upon himself, upon his artistic genius,
his artistic fame, and the visions of future pictures by which his
genius was to continue to manifest itself, and by which his fame
was to be increased or sustained.
We have then to think of Turner as a solitary dreamer of
dreams, with a professional interest in the capacity of these dreams
to startle a rather stupid pubhc. If we want to enter intimately
into the spiritual and emotional content of his dreams we have
only to turn to the contemporary works of the poets. In pictures
like ' The Fountain of Indolence,' the ' Agrippina ' and those I
have mentioned above, we see how deeply impressed his mind had
become with the ideals of current Romantic poetry ; the true
Byronic disgust with himself and vague emotions of the infinite,
the desire to
' steal
From all I may be, or have been before.
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express.'
There is no doubt that these obscure emotions and vague
reveries can only be adequately expressed in one particular way.
They defy embodiment in clear-cut determinate forms. They
demand a style as indeterminate, as vaguely suggestive, as in
articulate as the loose -knit dreams which are calling for
embodiment. This, then, I take to be the proper explanation of the vague
ness of Turner's later manner : It is not that he saw the world
indistinctly, but that his ideas were incapable of definition ; it
is not that his eyes were newly opened to the vapours and
mists of the physical world, but that his own thoughts were
confused and his emotions, in spite of their strength, were in
coherent and inarticulate.
We are now in a position to define the relation in which
Turner's later works stand to modern Impressionism. The exact
connotation of this term is not by any means easy to grasp, but so
far as Impressionism has distinctive aims I think we are justified
in describing them as the attempt to eliminate all those elements 121

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
in art which are due to the reaction of the intelligent self upon the
immediate data of sense-perception. The aim of Impressionism
is to get rid of what one eminent psychologist has called the
noetic fringe in a state of consciousness, to abstract from memory
and see objects as simple visual elements. The Impressionist
wishes to see objects as though he was looking at them for the
first time, as though they had no meaning for him^ The theoretic
justification of this procedure is that, in stripping off the formative
and organising action of intelligence we isolate the pure element
of objective reality ; that pictures painted upon this principle give
the real truth of nature and are free from all those errors and
distortions which the action of thought is supposed to introduce
into the irrefragably trustworthy elements of the given. These
assumptions are, I need hardly add, untenable, but this is not the
place to criticise them.
Now if Impressionism aims at getting rid of all the cognitive
elements in concrete perception (recognition, classing, naming,
etc.) as well as the later processes of interpretation and associative
reflection, and would express only the bare sensational element of
impression, it is clear that Turner cannot be properly described
as an Impressionist. Turner's artistic aim was consistently
lyrical, i.e. strongly subjective and emotional, while the chief aim
of Impressionism is to eliminate all the merely subjective colour
ing from perception, with the single purpose of isolating and
reproducing what is regarded as the objective element. So far,
then, as Impressionism has adopted Turner's results, it seems
open to the charge of having done so without understanding their
real nature or significance.
Yet this result, however helpful it may prove to the student of
present-day art, cannot be wholly satisfactory from another point
of view. From the point of view of Turner's work our result
is largely negative. We have endeavoured to make it clear that
to regard his later work as a new and triumphant attempt to
represent what is called the ' truths of nature ' is pure misunder
standing; that Turner's aim is not to represent either truths
of atmosphere, of lighting or of natural colour, or any kind or
class of physical fact; that he is busied mainly with his own
emotions and fancies, and that he is concerned with the objective
122

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MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
world only indirectly and only in so far as it furnishes or suggests
the stuff out of which his pictorial symbols are woven. But we
have still to search for the secret power of attraction which these
symbols do unquestionably possess. Why is it, we must ask, that
these signs and symbols have such power to move men, to delight
and intoxicate some, to soothe and cheer others ?
The answers to these questions may be conveniently grouped
under two heads. In the first place we may consider what are the
attractions which Turner's work shares with the Romantic poets
whose works express the same kind of subject-matter, and in the
second place we may attempt to indicate what are the qualities
which are more intimately connected with his own individuahty.
In the first place then, when we consider Turner as a fellow-
worker with Byron, Shelley, and Lamartine, we see that like
them he appeals constantly and unerringly to that illusion of
the romantic temperament which lends a mysterious charm to
all that is indefinite and indefinable. In a singularly acute
analysis of this temperament Mr. George Santayana has traced
one of the chief causes of the delight which this kind of art and
poetry awakens to what he calls ' the illusion of infinite perfec
tion.' There is, he says, a loose and helpless state of mind to
which we all of us approximate when in a state of fatigue. In
this state of mind we are not capable of concentrated and serious
attention to one thing at a time, so we are apt to ' flounder in
the vague, but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-
thoughts and semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exalta
tion of our mood is emphatic and overpowering in proportion
to our incapacity to think, speak, or imagine. The sum of
our incoherencies has, however, an imposing volume and even,
perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves laden
with an infinite burden ; and what delights us most and seems
to us to come nearest to the ideal, is not what embodies any one
possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests
many, and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with
a pervasive thrill. . . . That infinite perfection which cannot
be realised, because it is self-contradictory, may be thus
suggested, and on account of this suggestion an indeterminate
effect may be regarded as higher, more significant, and more
123

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
beautiful than any determinate one.'^ These remarks help us
to understand the positive qualities of Turner's indeterminate
style ; its power of evoking a fallacious sense of profundity and
significance, just because of its indeterminateness, its power of
suggesting and stimulating emotion, just because it is inco
herent and variously interpretable.
Yet when we have pressed these considerations to their
extreme limit, we have only drawn attention to certain qualities
which Turner's later work shares with that of many indifferent
artists and poets, and, far from exhausting the real and permanent
elements of value in that work, they may be justly regarded as
a searching and pitiless exposure of its weaknesses and defects.
But we are on firmer ground when we turn to the purely personal
qualities in this work, to the artist's delicacy of hand and fineness
of sight. It matters not what instrument Turner is working
with, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, or whether
he is working hurriedly or at leisure, the movement of his hand
is always graceful and delightful. His powers of sight also
seem to me to have been quite extraordinary ; I do not mean
that he had merely the power of seeing distant objects distinctly,
not mere long-sightedness, though he seems to have had this
faculty in an abundant measure, but a quite unusual power of
discriminating beween minute shades of light and colour. As
the born musician is distinguished from other men by his capacity
for detecting differences of sound which to others seem the same,
so the evidence of Turner's work — and all who have attempted
to copy even the slightest of his sketches will, I am sure, bear
me out in this — shows that he possessed an abnormal power of
visual discrimination. No doubt his early training and especially
the influence of Dayes had something to do with the development
of this capacity, but the capacity itself was largely innate. In
addition to these two natural gifts, an abnormal delicacy of
hand and eye, Turner had the priceless advantage of being
passionately and unfalteringly in love with his art. Some of the
greatest artists give me the impression of loving their art less for
its own sake than for the sake of the content which it enables
1 The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana. A. & C. Black, 1896, p. 149 .
124

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
them to express, — Rembrandt and Jean Fran9ois Millet, for
example, give me this impression, and I do not think that their
greatness is imperilled in the least by it — but Turner seems to
me to have loved his art, especially in his later years, entirely for
its own sake. This strong and deep affection threw a glamour
over every detail of his work. Nothing was too high or too low
for him. He brought the same inexhaustible patience and alertness
of attention to the working out of a complicated problem of per
spective as to the finishing of his most ambitious pictures. Like
Wordsworth's ' happy warrior ' in the midst of danger, he had
only to take a pencil into his hand to become 'attired with
sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.' This concentration, this
master-bias, throws a fervour and an inimitable charm over what
it seems almost ironical to speak of as the mechanical execution
of his works.
It is difficult to define the exact relationship of Turner's love
for his art, with his passionate and unwearying study of natural
phenomena. My own impression is that his love of nature was
at best to some extent subordinate to his love of art ; that he
loved nature partly at least as a means to artistic expression, and
not altogether for itself. But however this may be, the extent
of his knowledge of, and intimate familiarity with, nature's ways
counts for much in the attractions of his pictures. The evidence
of his keen though intermittent study of natural phenomena is
writ large in the collection of his sketch-books. The very extent
of his knowledge, no doubt, led at times to a certain overcrowding
of his works, but it forms the secret of his supple and ample style,
and the inexhaustible fecundity of his invention.
It is then to the magic of his style that Turner's later works
owe a great deal of their strange power of compelling attention
and extorting a sometimes unwilling admiration. He had in a
quite pre-eminent degree what Reynolds has called the genius of
mechanical execution. And this power is as remarkable in his
earlier works as in his later. But in his earlier works this power
was used to give ' definite embodiment to a range of worthy and
significant ideas and emotions, and the sheer beauty of their
content is apt to divert our attention from the consummate skill
implied in this rarest and highest artistic achievement. But in
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TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
the later work the very weakness and poverty of the content has
the effect of keeping our attention fixed upon the suggestiveness
and visual beauty of the material elements of expression. In the
poetry of the French Symbolists we see a somewhat similar effect
consciously aimed at. The poverty of thought is used as a foil
to throw the greatest possible emphasis on the beauty of sounds
and the faint suggestions of individual words. In this way the
attenuation of significance in Turner's later works throws into
startling prominence all the innate and intrinsic splendours of the
painter's palette.
We shall have occasion to amplify and illustrate these
observations as we trace the gradual development of Turner's
later manner, the task to which we have now to address ourselves.
I have alluded above to what I regard as the first oil painting
in which the change that took place in Turner's artistic aims
about the year 1830 was clearly indicated. This was the ' Calais
Sands, low water,' exhibited at the Royal Academy in May, 1830.
But before painting this picture Turner had been experimenting
in his new manner in a series of water-colour sketches. These
sketches were made at Petworth, where Turner went to stay for
a few weeks with Lord Egremont, probably in 1829, after his
return from his second journey to Italy.
The two oil paintings of Petworth Park, still in the Petworth
collection, as well as the brilliant unfinished sketch of ' Petworth
Park ' in the National Gallery (No. 559), were probably painted
in the house during this visit ; at any rate, the sketches in water-
colour upon which these canvases were based were made at this
time. But when Turner was not busy at his easel or sketching
in the park and neighbourhood, he seems to have felt the time
hang heavily on his hands, so, to save himself from the ennui of
small-talk and idleness, he began making colour sketches, first of
the various rooms, then of the furniture and bric-k-brac, and
finally of the people staying in the house. These sketches, which
number about a hundred, indicate clearly a distinct change in
Turner's outlook upon nature. Up to this time he had invariably
employed form as the basis of his work. In these studies we see
him turning his attention directly to colour as the chief element
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of representation. The difference is no doubt largely a matter of
degree, for both elements are indispensable. Yet we have only
to compare , say, a drawing like that of ' Rochester,' in the Rivers
of England series, with any one of the Rivers of France sub
jects to see that the change of emphasis, upon colour instead
of form, was fraught with important technical results. From a
psychological point of view the change is also significant. It
shows that Turner was dissatisfied with the language of form,
which had served him so well all his life ; the vague unrest
and confiicting emotions which now surged in his bosom
demanded a less static, a more fluent and elusive medium of
expression. Let us examine one of these Petworth subjects, a sketch of
people ' Waiting for Dinner.' The scene takes place in a large
drawing-room. The fireplace comes in the centre of the design,
and before it a corpulent and dignified figure in evening dress
stands facing us. On either side there are groups of figures, also
in evening dress, the white of the ladies' muslin frocks relieved
with the yellow and black of an effulgent matron and the black
suits and scarlet uniforms of the men. Examined in detail, the
drawing of the figures is childish, but viewed at a proper distance,
so that the eye can range freely over it all without bringing any
one point into sharp focus, the effect is extraordinary. It is like
catching a glimpse of the actual scene. The whole goes together,
the room is filled with atmosphere, the sharp staccato touches
sprinkled with such amazing cunning among the floating wreaths
of colour give exactly that sense of relief which the eye experi
ences as it wanders over an actual scene, — the sense of angles and
sharp points of resistance which artists speak of as the ' lost and
found' of nature. The very slightness of the execution of the
drawing and the reckless carelessness of the handling add to the
feeling of immediate contact with reality, for the lack of definition
is indissolubly associated in our minds with the experience of
movement and change, and the figures whose precise forms elude
us seem only to be moving before our eyes. Yet this effect would
certainly not be produced were it not for the wonderful accuracy
and subtlety with which the relative values of the masses of tone
have been observed, — the relation, for instance, between the exact
127

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
shade of grey of the shirt-front of the noble lord with his back to
the fire and the exact tint of the firelight itself seen through his
legs, or, in short, between every touch of colour and the whole
which they constitute.
Yet when we compare this drawing with any of the more
elaborately worked ones, we cannot but realise the enormous
importance of slightness of definition as a means of expression.
In the ' Spinnet Player,' for example, we find the same skill in
the observation and rendering of tones as in ' Waiting for Dinner,'
and the same extraordinary science of colour declension ; yet the
effect it produces is one of static unreality.
In this drawing a lady dressed in blue is seated in the fore
ground at a spinnet ; on the left, there is another lady in white on
a couch, and on the right, in the middle distance, a group of figures
are seated round a table apparently playing cards, while a figure
in a light-coloured dress stands behind the chair of one of the
players. The objects on the wall of the room, the near furniture
and figures are all considerably more defined than any of the
objects in ' Waiting for Dinner,' but the definition of these parts
sets up a standard which condemns the drawing as a whole. We
feel disappointed, after getting so much definition, that we do not
get more. The middle-distance figures are so well drawn, or
rather are so vivaciously observed and full of individuality, that we
cannot help complaining that the foreground lady's neck and
shoulders are impossible, and that the lady on the couch is so
much like a wooden doll. These observations suggest that each
drawing sets up its own standard of definition. The comparative
failure of such a drawing could not but help to impress on Turner
the immense value for his purposes of a wise and consistent
vagueness of statement.
In the vignettes made to illustrate the works of Rogers, Scott,
Byron and Campbell we see the lesson of the Petworth experi
ments driven home. Though these drawings were made expressly
with the object of being engraved in black and white, they are
conceived entirely upon a colour basis, while their lack of
definition must have made quite unwarrantable demands upon
the skill and resources of the engravers. But it is evident that
Turner had now firmly grasped the fact that the glamour and
128

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intoxication of colour had become the dominant and essential
factor in his art, and that the vagueness of his ideas could only be
adequately expressed by allusion and suggestion. These vignettes
and the engravings made from them vary widely in value. One
or two of them are worthy of the artist, for example the ' Datur
hora quieti,' ' The Alps at Daybreak ' and the ' Melrose,' but for
the most part they owe the very great popular success they have
enjoyed to the skill with which the artist has entered into the
spirit of the second- and third-rate poetry he was called upon to
illustrate, and to the admirable way in which his suggestions were
engraved. The designs for the Rivers of France are conceived in a
somewhat similar strain of lyrical abandonment to the sensuous
charm of colour. Translated into mere black and white they leave
us but half convinced. It is rather like a prose translation into a
foreign language of the poetry of Victor Hugo, Swinburne or
Shelley. To feel their full effect we must turn to the original
water-colours, with all their ravishing intoxication of colour. It is
as though our reason must needs be lulled asleep by the dominant
flood of purely sensuous delight, before we can feel about these
drawings as the artist would have us feel.
We have seen, in the case of the ' Stamford ' design in the
England and Wales series, that Turner's interest in a place was
specifically different from that of a resident or an historian. He
cares little or nothing for local facts, merely as facts ; his main
concern is to skim off from the surface of observation a few telling
points, a few heads of discourse as we might call them, which
serve as a point of departure to his own abundant pictorial im
provisation. The result may be more or less like the locality
which furnishes the title of the drawing, but it is never in any
strict sense of the word an accurate representation of the place.
Yet the gulf that yawns between local fact and Turner's lyrical
inspiration is never of quite the same character in the Enghsh
drawings as in the French. In both the gulf is wide, but in the
English subjects the artist's intimate knowledge of the general
characteristics of the scenery gives such an air of plausibility to
his improvisations that one might be tempted to explain his
poetical hcences as the result of an ardent striving after general
T.S.-9 129

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
and specific truth.^ With the French drawings it is impossible to
make such a mistake. Turner was not at all intimate with
French scenery. He got up the subject in a most perfunctory
manner in a few short and hurried tours. He merely paid a flying
visit to the chief places mentioned in his guide-book and, instead
of studying what he saw with a moderate degree of attention, was
quite satisfied to look for mere hints of Turnerian phantasies ; he
did not want facts, but suggestions for pictorial inventions. So
that in spite of his voluminous note-taking we find scarcely an
accurate detail in the whole of the sixty engravings. The twin
towers of Tancarville Castle are certainly the result of a misunder
standing of the hurried sketch made on the spot, and I have no
doubt that the ' errors ' and ' inaccuracies ' so relentlessly ferreted
out by Mr. Hamerton, in the representations of the Castle of
Amboise, the towers of Notre Dame and St. Jacques de la
Boucherie, the old Hotel de Ville and the Pump, were caused in
the same way. From the point of view of the topographer there
can be no doubt that Hamerton's statement ^ that the engravings
of this series contain only ' a sort of muddled reminiscence ' of the
objects and places Turner had seen is in the main correct.
The object of these remarks is far from that of suggesting that
the presence of ' errors ' and ' inaccuracies ' of this kind interferes
in any way with the purely artistic value of these drawings. It is
rather to emphasise the fact that it is only when we judge them
from a totally irrelevant point of view, that we can begin to talk of
errors and inaccuracies. Rightly understood these so-called errors
and inaccuracies are not only the justifiable licences of the artist,
but the absolutely inevitable and proper and solely right means of
expression which the artist had at his disposal. His aim is to
produce a state of consciousness in which feeling looms large, and
thought-determination is reduced almost to the vanishing point.
One might say, without exaggeration or unfairness, that mental
confusion formed an important part of his artistic aim. He had
then to represent the objects he depicted not as they appear to a
cool, level-headed, and accurate observer, but as they appear to a
highly sensitive subject in a state of morbid excitement.
^ This, I need hardly add, is Mr. Ruskin's explanation.
2 Hamerton's Turner, p. 244.
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MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
If we look at Turner's French drawings from this point of
view, we cannot but admit that they are almost all highly suc
cessful. They are stamped with the impress of the genuinely
romantic fervour, the lyrical movement of unbridled feeling. In
them the joy of artistic creation has become triumphant, almost
insolent. They are deep draughts of artistic intoxication,
exultant with the rush of man's undying passion for pleasure,
and of the resistless energy that moulds the world of matter into
forms more harmonious with our own distinctly human cravings
and aspirations ; Chateaux Gaillards or ' Saucy Castles ' of the
imagination one might almost call them.
It was characteristic of Turner — I might almost say it was a
necessity of his position as a landscape painter — that he felt com
pelled to search far and wide for material out of which to spin his
web of visible phantasy. The need of novel shapes, glowing
colours, striking and elaborate combinations was constantly felt.
The rivers Meuse, Moselle and Rhine were diligently and re
peatedly explored. The East — for his Bible illustrations — he
was content to take at second-hand, through the medium of
other men's sketches, but he sailed down the Danube, as far as
Vienna (or Buda-Pesth perhaps ?), ransacked Germany, Italy,
Switzerland, France, Holland and Belgium and part of Austria.
But as the years moved on, his mental grip of the real world
became always looser. His mind played only with the fugitive
shades on the surface of appearances ; but not with the elasticity,
the free disinterestedness of youth and of the young-hearted.
The professional bias became ever more pronounced, the point
of view ever more abstract and one-sided.
One of his richest mines of pictorial imagery was Venice ;
not so much the actual city of the Adriatic, as the fragmentary
ideas of an ideal Venice as they floated in the imagination of the
ordinary Englishman, — the unconscious crystallisation of the
desires of the average middle-class tourist for Southern warmth,
freedom, colour, variety, and bodily pleasure. With all the un
canny certainty of genius he gathered up the threads of these
incoherent and fugitive desires and fixed them in the forms of
immortality. Let us look carefully at the two Venetian sketches here repro-
131

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
duced. In ' Shipping on the Riva degli Schiavone ' (No. 55,
N.G.) we see the Campanile and Ducal Palace on the right, a
blaze of warm, palpitating light. In the centre there is a stretch
of limpid green water, with a tangle of boats on it leading the
eye to the opalescent Madonna della Salute in the extreme dis
tance. There is a secondary group of shipping on the left, among
whose masts the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore can be seen.
No words can describe the intense blaze of light, the brilliance
of the colours and their perfect harmony. The execution is
breathlessly hurried and seemingly reckless, yet always perfectly
under control ; the artist's hand is so audaciously swift because
the full value of his colours can only be got in this way. Human
skill can go no further in this direction, and no reproduction can
do anything like justice to the wonderful original.
We find the same qualities in ' The Approach to Venice :
Sunset ' (51, N.G.), and ' Riva degli Schiavone, from near the
Public Gardens ' (56, N.G.).
In all these drawings Turner seems to be playing with his
material medium, fondling and caressing his colours and the
intrinsic beauties of water-colour. Yet it is not mere colour
as colour that he gives us, not the cheap and arbitrary and
mechanical splendour of merely decorative art. The colour is
dehcate and subtle, full of surprises, and as varied as nature
herself; it is controlled and marshalled by the authority of the tone
scheme ; it is nature grasped by human intelligence, and made
obedient to its organising power. And a large part of the
attractiveness of these drawings is due to the ease and grace with
which the reign of purpose and intelligence is maintained.
After all it is the marvellous technical skill which they display
which is the essence of the charm of these works. The subject-
matter counts for less than the execution, the objects portrayed
are less eloquent than the sense of freedom, mastery and real
happiness evident in the artist's work. He wanted nothing
beyond this ; the work to him was not a symbol of somethmg
higher, — it did not point beyond itself. It was at once means
and end, process and fulfilment, work and reward, the toil of life
and its consummated bliss.
The intrinsic poverty of the subject-matter no doubt serves to
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intensify what I may call the material beauty of the workmanship.
Yet we must beware of ranking this subject-matter too low. It
is not mere sensuous feeling, it is not entirely devoid of the
element of thought. The conscious action of thought is probably
entirely absent. The scenes float before us in all the bareness of
immediate sensation. They give us nothing more than a moment
of immediate experience caught, as it were, on the wing, and pinned
down all quivering with life. But the momentary experience is
that of a man whose visual sensations have been organised by a
life-time of strenuous intellectual control. The brain and the
senses are but the organs of one function. There is not a single
definite thought present, the artist has sunk himself in the fiow
of the merely animal life, yet his naked sentience is conditioned
through and through and characterised by the pervasive activity
of the mind.
To transfix a fleeting moment of immediate living experience
is a very different thing from the deliberate analysis of the process
of perception and the wilful abstraction of one of its elements.
In other words, this work of Turner is essentially different in kind
from the work of the modern Impressionists. The Impressionist
adopts the methods of science. He operates on his perceptions,
and cuts away this element and that, and in the end presents you
with a dead and potted psychological abstraction, a diagram of
the ' pure ' visual sensation, which delights us with its ingenuity
and neatness, but which no one would take for a fragment of the
living flow of thought and emotion which all concrete experience
is. Impressionism is cold and heartless ; it is merely intellectual
and ratiocinative, and therefore essentially inartistic. But the
so-called impressionistic work of Turner, in spite of its other
defects and shortcomings, remains ever in the flood of concrete
living experience. It is never abstract ; it never loses its emotional
contagion, though its emotional suggestiveness is somewhat vague
and indefinite. Its power of evoking emotion is very strongly
pronounced, but the emotions it calls up are sadly lacking in
definition, and seem to lie very much at the mercy of chance
associations. The cause of this vagueness and emptiness is no doubt
closely connected with Turner's ti'iumphant grasp of the fleeting
133

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
momentary experience. His work is almost, though not quite, as
empty and indeterminate as an isolated fragment of immediate
sensation. A single steady look by a cool observer would grasp
more of the character of a given scene than we find in these
sketches. But the time occupied in a steady look at a scene is
too long for Turner; though the look should last but half a
minute the mind has time to grasp and organise the sensuous
data. Turner's object is to catch these data of sense in their least
organised condition. To do this, he must reduce the time of
contact between the scene and his senses to its shortest possible
extent. Some of the later Impressionists have found that merely
to open and shut the eyes gives their senses and intelligence too
long an exposure ; they have therefore devised a mechanical
instrument which they hold in front of their eyes, and which
operates very much like a shutter used for taking instantaneous
photographs. In this way they obtain a glimpse of a scene of
shorter duration than the most rapid opening and shutting of the
eyes can give. We have no reason for suspecting that Turner had
recourse to any such mechanical aids, but he achieved similar
results. He gives us the momentary bedazzlement of the sunlight,
and, within this impression, a confused and fragmentary perception
of objects. The objects seen are hardly recognisable, their attri
butes are reduced to a minimum, and the blur of living emotion
which forms part of such rudimentary perception is reduced to
its lowest terms. The control such sketches exercise over the
thoughts and feelings of the spectator is therefore small and
possesses very little individuality.
But even Venice soon palled upon Turner's imagination. He
seemed desirous of getting away as far as possible from the dis
turbing influences of human association. Only among the lonely
valleys and mountain tops of Switzerland could his perturbed
and wearied spirit find something like the peace he sought so
feverishly. Even here he shrank from the common light of
ordinary day. He loved the solemn stillness of night, and would
wait to surprise the first rosy hues of dawn upon Mount Pilatus
or the Rigi. His sympathies are all with the silent and primary
things of nature.
It is as though he were seeking to strip himself of the attri-
134

PLATE LXXXI

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PLATE LXXXII

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MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY
butes of humanity, to sink into the unconscious vegetative
life of nature. Even when roused to activity his mind seems
curiously dehumanised. When he draws for us the towers and
churches of a place like Freiburg we seem to be looking at the
work of a disembodied spirit. The city is divested of all its
human associations. His eye seems now to classify and arrange
what it sees in terms of space and motion, much as we should
imagine an eagle to look down upon the welter and turmoil of
our lives. I get the same impression from the ' Village and Castle
on the Rhine ' (82, N.G.), and ' The Via Mala ' (73, N.G.).
In all this, in this gradual impoverishment of mind and feel
ing, it is difficult to discover anything more than the silent and
inevitable ravages of old age. But it is not their poverty of
content that makes these later drawings of Turner so remarkable.
It is the virile and glorious artistic skill which only fiames the
brighter amid the decay of all Turner's other faculties. The
man was dead before the incomparable master of tone and colour
was exhausted. It is this curious combination of an unexhausted
special aptitude with a moribund mentality that gives this later
work of Turner its uniqueness, its lurid and uncanny fascination.
In the whole history of pictorial art we have never had before
quite the same display of senile apathy gilded and transfigured
by the dying shafts of an incommensurable natural capacity.
By the time Turner was seventy years of age his bodily
infirmities prevented him from visiting Switzerland. For a year
or two we find him haunting the coast of Normandy, about
Dieppe, Eu and Ambleteuse. Then he is unable to cross the
Channel. For a short season he flits about Sussex and Kent —
at Folkestone, Margate, Deal, and Sandwich — and then there is
silence.

135

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION
The distinction between Art Criticism and Aesthetic — The aim of this
chapter — Art and physical fact — The ' common-sense ' conception of
landscape art as evidence of fact — The relation of Art and Nature — Mr.
Ruskin's treatment of this subject — He distinguishes (a) physical fact and
(b) the artist's thoughts and feelings about these facts, yet maintains that
the representation of (a) is equivalent to the expression of (b)— His
confusion of Nature and Mind exemplified in his remarks on the ' Pass of
Faido ' — Art as the organ of Beauty implies that the dualism of Nature
and Mind is transcended — Nature is neither given nor immediate — Art
therefore cannot copy nature — What does art represent.'' — An individualised
psychical content present to the mind of the artist — Classification of
Turner's sketches and studies from the point of view of their logical
content — The difference between (1) Studies of particular objects, (2)
Drawings from nature, and (3) Works of art proper — The logical reference
of a work of art — The assertions in a work of art do not directly qualify
the ordinary world of reality, but an imaginary world specially constructed
for the artist's purpose — The ideal of complete definition — Yet the content
must determine the form — Plea for a dynamic or physiological study of
artistic forms.
WE have been engaged thus far upon a genuinely inductive
investigation, upon a voyage of discovery, and not upon
a dogmatic exposition of ultimate aesthetic principles.
Our general aim has been to study the processes of artistic
expression, but to study them as we find them in definite concrete
instances. Moreover, the nature of our subject-matter rendered
it necessary to keep faithful to the point of view of art criticism.
We were dealing with particular works of art, and to leave them
while we plunged into general questions of aesthetic would hardly
have been polite. But, as I have ventured to observe before,
though art criticism and general aesthetic can be distinguished
they cannot be rigidly separated. Aesthetic without close con-
136

CONCLUSION
versance with the concrete subject-matter of art criticism is
necessarily loose and empty, while art criticism without a firm
grasp of the broad principles of beauty easily degenerates into
casuistry or a useless and rather despicable form of self-assertion.
And however much we try to keep questions of principle apart
from our estimation and study of particular works of art, we are
bound inevitably to fail. We can begin as it were at either end
of the scale, we can busy ourselves with the one or with the many,
but before we have gone very far we are bound to realise that we
are concerned with exactly the same problems. The distinction
of art criticism from aesthetic is merely one of convenience and
degree. In all that has gone before we have been concerned with the
fundamental problems of aesthetic, though we have not treated
them directly. In all that we have written a more or less definite
and consistent answer to these problems has been implied. In
this final chapter, therefore, I propose to draw out as well as I
can some of the more general results of our observations and
analyses, or rather to endeavour to state in a more general form
the laws of artistic expression and action which we have dis
covered. The ultimate aim of art criticism, as I understand it,
is to grasp and render intelligible the whole region of artistic
activity, and I cannot but think that it will facilitate our grasp of
the wider laws of artistic phenomena, as well as help to consolidate
or disprove the results of our detailed observations, if I make an
attempt to render explicit what has only been implied in our
remarks upon particular concrete instances.
I will begin by calling attention to a fact that has been
repeatedly forced upon our notice. Though our attention has been
mainly fixed upon Turner's studies and sketches from nature, we
have never come into direct contact with the plain physical reality
which, according to the invariable usage of common-sense, it is
the mission of art to represent. Common -sense tells us that the
' subject ' of every landscape painting is a group of physical
realities — the fields, rivers, mountains, trees, houses, etc., in such
and such a place, together with their invariable physical accom
paniments, the air and any particular effect of light and weather
that the artist may choose to select. Our analysis has invariably 137

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
shown us that the slightest sketch — much more then a fully
organised work of art ! — is something more than and something
radically different from a mere representation of such physical
constituents. The physical objects are indeed portrayed, but when
we have recognised this touch of colour or that shape as the
representation of this or that natural fact, we have not exhausted
the meaning of the artist's work. This recognition is nothing
more than what I may call the plain dictionary meaning of the
words the artist has chosen to employ. It is not till we have
gone on to grasp the special significance of the order in which
these elements have been grouped, that we really begin to come
into contact with the work of art itself As we cannot interpret
the meaning of the simplest sentence unless we give due weight
to its grammatical construction, so with a picture we must take
into consideration what I can only call the grammatical con
struction and distinctions proper to pictorial expression. When
we penetrate in this way to the real significance of any of Turner's
works we find we have been brought into contact with the artist's
thoughts and emotions. We start, as it were, with trees and rocks
and physical details, which, as such, are independent of man and
indifferent if not actually hostile to human hopes and fears, joys
and sorrows ; and we end by finding that our so-called physical
facts are but elements in a definitely organised whole of thought
and feeling. We seem to start with natural facts, and they change
under our hands into the symbols of mere ideas and emotions.
Our whole conception of the scope and possibilities of art turns
upon the view we take of the artist's means of expression. Are we
to regard pictorial art as a medium for imaging and recording the
visible facts of the physical world, or as symbols of states of
consciousness ? And if we take the latter view, what is the exact
relation of these symbols to the visible world, to the world of
common perception ?
So far as I know, only one English art critic has attempted
anything like an adequate discussion of these questions. It will
help us, I think, if we glance for a moment at Mr. Ruskin's treat
ment of these subjects. In the first volume of Modern Painters
we are told that the two great ends of landscape painting are
(1) to induce in the spectator's mind the faithful conception of
138

CONCLUSION
any natural object whatsoever, and (2) to inform him of the
thoughts and feelings with which these ' (i.e. the natural objects)
'were regarded by the artist himself (Modern Painters, Part ii..
Sec. 1, Ch. i. p. 44).
In attaining the first end, Mr. Ruskin adds, ' the painter only
places the spectator where he stands himself; he sets him before
the landscape and leaves him. . . . But he [the spectator] has
nothing of thought given to him, no new ideas, no unknown
feelings, forced on his attention or his heart.'
' But in attaining the second end, the artist not only places the
spectator, but — makes him a sharer in his own strong feelings and
quick thoughts ; — and leaves him . . . ennobled and instructed,
under the sense of having not only beheld a new scene, but of
having held communion with a new mind, and having been en
dowed for a time with the keen perception and the impetuous
emotions of a nobler and more penetrating intelligence.'
It may seem at first sight that Mr. Ruskin is simply distinguish
ing two kinds of landscape painting, such as the simply topo
graphical from the more imaginative kind. And he does say that
'it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art,
the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the re
presentation of thoughts.' But the point he is chiefiy concerned
to emphasise is the complete dependence of the second of these
aims upon the representation of facts. An artist can give us
physical facts, he says, without expressing his thoughts and feel
ings, but no artist can express thoughts and feelings without the
accurate representation of facts. This is the point, he says, that he
wishes at present ' especially to insist upon,' and this dependence of
thought upon fact, or ' truth ' as he generally prefers to call it,
forms, as I understand it, the theoretical basis upon which a large
part of Mr. Ruskin's art teaching rests.
All great art, he admits, gives us ' the thoughts and feelings of
the artist,' but we have no standard by which we can test the
value of mere thoughts and feelings ; but as there is a ' constant
relation ' between an artist's thoughts and feelings and his ' faith
fulness in representing nature,' we have only to examine ' the
botanical or geological details ' in a landscape to ' form a right
estimate as to the respective powers and attainments ' of the artist.
139

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
It is from this point of view that he calls ' the representation of
facts ' 'the foundation of all art,' and in the preface to The Elements
of Drawing, the power ' to copy ' natural objects ' faithfully, and
without alteration,' is treated as equivalent to the power ' of
pictorial expression of thought.'
Now there is a point of view from which these statements
could be defended, and I will endeavour a little later to indicate
that point of view, but as Mr. Ruskin expresses and applies these
ideas, I think they lead to confusion. Much of the welter of con
fusion into which the reader of Modern Painters finds himself
plunged seems to me caused by the author's persistent refusal to
discriminate between physical reality and mind, between external
nature and ideas. The mountains, trees, and clouds become human
thoughts and feelings, not in a metaphysical sense, but as a matter
of ordinary observation, and the artist is bidden to go out into the
fields and draw, with the patience and precision of a geologist or
land-surveyor, the visible shapes and hues of these materialised
emotions and ideas.
Yet Mr. Ruskin is far too fearless and candid a thinker to
attempt deliberately to falsify his evidence. He admits, when the
point presents itself to him, that Turner ' never draws accurately
on the spot ' ; and in the wonderful analysis of Turner's 'Pass of
Faido,' in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, we are clearly
shown that the artist's representation contains hardly a single
accurate and faithful statement of the physical features of the
place. Yet we are assured that in some inexplicable way the
picture is truer to the facts of the place than the place itself.
The artist, we are told, made 'a few pencil scratches on a
bit of thin paper ' during a momentary stoppage of the diligence
in the pass. Afterwards he put a few blots of colour to these
pencil scratches, possibly ' at Bellinzona the same evening ' but
' certainly not upon the spot.' In the course of a few months he
showed this sketch to Mr. Ruskin, who commissioned the artist
to make a finished water-colour from it. (The sketch is repro
duced as the frontispiece of the present volume, so the curious
reader may compare it at his leisure with the reproduction of
the completed drawing and Mr. Ruskin's topographical drawing
made on the spot in Modern Painters.)
140

PLATE LXXXIII

XPn CO
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PLATE LXXXI r

CONCLUSION
The first sketch is certainly sufficiently inaccurate as a repre
sentation of the physical facts of the scene, but in the finished
drawing Turner permitted himself further liberties. In it ' the
whole place is altered in scale.' The rocks on the left which should
be four or five hundred feet high are made to look ' about a thou
sand feet.' ' Next, he raises, in a still greater degree, all the
mountains beyond, putting three or four ranges instead of one.'
In this way all the parts of the scene are modified, important
features are eliminated at will, and facts that the artist had seen
elsewhere are freely introduced. This is what we find Mr. Ruskin
means when he talks about receiving ' a true impression from the
place itself, and the accurate and faithful representation of physical
facts ' (Modern Painters, vol iv. p. 21.)
Now I am far from denying that Turner's procedure was
thoroughly justified, but from the ordinary standpoint of common-
sense it does stand in need of justification, and it seems to me that
it is not a proper way to justify it by passionately declaring that
the imaginative vision of the artist does indeed give us ' the real
facts of the world's outside aspect,' or a faithful and unaltered copy
of a portion of physical reahty. Indeed I feel very strongly that
this playing fast and loose with Nature and Mind (with physical
fact and mental interpretation) is no gain to the cause Mr. Ruskin
has at heart. In spite of all his passionate eloquence and trans
parent earnestness and good faith, the ordinary reader continues
to regard nature as the hypostatised world of the physical sciences
and as that part of the world which falls outside of mind. And
when we regard nature in this way as a mechanical and external
system, and declare that it is ' God's work,' we can go on, as Mr.
Ruskin does, to attack ' idealisation,' and heap contumely on such
painters as Claude and Poussin, for daring to modify God's works
and for casting the shadow of their puny selves on the works of
then- Creator (Modern Painters, vol. i. Preface to second ed. p.
xxvi.). But if we do this we must at least go on to admit that Turner
and all the other great artists sinned in exactly the same way.
There is only one way, I am convinced, of working our way to
a firmer and more consistent point of view, and that is to get
above this naive dualism of human and physical nature. I may
even say that before we can understand the nucleus of truth in
141

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
Mr. Ruskin's own work, we must get above the unreflective
realism in which the theoretical parts of his writings are steeped.
Again and again, in passages of the noblest wisdom and insight,
he transcends the limitations of his own thought and language,
but always to sink back into the confusion inevitable to all
adherents of the psychological philosophy when they come to deal
with mental and moral questions.
The influence of Locke and Hume upon the form of Mr.
Ruskin's theories is obvious and avowed. He believes that ' fact,'
'nature,' and 'truth' are only given in sense-perception, and
that therefore sensation gives us the truest and fullest knowledge
of reality ; his distrust of ideas is due to the belief that they dis
tort and obscure the revelations of this unerring mirror of reality.
But these assumptions do justice neither to the real independence
of the physical world, nor to the claims of the mind to discover
and possess absolutely reliable knowledge. And when we are
dealing with such a concrete reality as pictorial art we cannot
afford to do less than the fullest justice to both nature and mind.
We cannot, like the practical man or the students of the physical
sciences, rule out the unseen world of human feeling as irrelevant
to our immediate purposes, any more than we can neglect the
concrete course of phenomena, like the student of the a priori
forms of knowledge. In art we have to do with nature and mind
in active co-operation. We are therefore bound to treat them as
two factors in a common process. We cannot have two aims in
art, and we cannot separate (a) physical objects from (b) an
artist's thoughts and feelings ; if we make the attempt we are
inevitably driven, as we have seen Mr. Ruskin driven, to maintain
that (a) is (b), and (b) (a), and then the point of our distinction
seems lost. In art criticism the problem is not to separate mind
from nature, but to unite them — to bring out the permanent and
universal relation which binds them together. And the only way
to do this is to treat them both as elements or members in the
formed world of the self-conscious subject.
It is not the special business of art criticism to show that the
conception of nature as what is ' given ' in sense-perception, and
as ' God's work ' as distinguished from the action of human
intelligence, is contradictory and untenable. The work is already
142

CONCLUSION
done. The theory of the perceptive judgment, upon which all
modern philosophies, realist as well as ideahst, are based, is too
firmly established to render necessary any further discussion of
Locke's and Hume's imperfect analysis of perception. All that
art criticism has to do is to realise that its own point of view is
essentially identical with the point of view of logic and meta-
physic, and to adopt and use any of the established truths of these
sciences which are relevant to its purposes.
In insisting that the philosophical point of view is the only pos
sible platform from which the facts which art criticism deals with
can be adequately correlated, I am aware that I am advancing a
somewhat novel proposition. It is also one which I do not think
it advisable to defend in detail on the present occasion. The pre
sent volume is the outcome of an attempt to apply this point of
view. So far as all that has gone before is in harmony with my
intentions, it is an exemplification of the practical usefulness of
such a working hypothesis, but the subject seems to me to call
for full and free discussion, and I hope on a suitable occasion to
revert to it. At present I hope it will be sufficient if I say that
art criticism, if it is to be regarded as a form of knowledge, can
have only one consistent aim, and that is intellectual satisfaction.
And the subject-matter of art criticism is essentially a form of
communication, and therefore is concerned only with certain
aspects of the formed world of human experience. And in deal
ing with any aspects of the ' world of discourse ' with a view to
the satisfaction of our intellectual requirements of coherency
and consistency of thought, the terms and ideas used in our
non-systematised everyday thought and language are certainly
inadequate, and those in use in all the special sciences, though
valid enough when confined within the limits prescribed by their
initial assumptions, are no less unsatisfactory for our purpose.
For the artist to regard nature as anything but an existing
reality independent of individual experience and given ready-
made in immediate perception must, no doubt, be exceedingly
difficult. Both the original bent of his mind and the whole
course of his professional training and practice have tended to
consolidate his spatial intuitions into something apparently primary
and instinctive. But an artist, as an artist, is not called upon to
143

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
undertake the business of art criticism. The difficulty, however,
remains nearly as great for the art critic, for he also is necessarily
one whose visual faculties have received early and special develop
ment. When even an art critic looks at the familiar objects with
which he is surrounded and notices their sharply defined forms
and colours, he finds it hard to believe that the very distinctness
of these perceptions is the result of a long process of education
which his own faculties have undergone. The clearness seems so
unmistakably to belong to the objects. Yet however difficult
the step, it must be taken. We are bound to admit that animals
and infants cannot have the same ordered visual image of space
definitely stretching away all round them which we are apt to
regard as one of the primary and fixed constituents of the external
world. But if the spatial system into which objects of perception
fall so easily has to be constructed in some way by each human
being for himself, it follows that pictorial art, which as a means of
expression and communication is based entirely upon that system,
cannot by any possibility present us with bare physical fact, with
a nucleus of solid, ready-made reality — of 'God's work,' in Mr.
Ruskin's sense of these terms. So that when we talk of art as
representing nature, it is evident that we must be careful to dis
tinguish exactly what we mean by such an expression. If we
take it to mean that art does or can or ought to give us a copy
of the given actual world as it exists apart from what Mr.
Ruskin calls the meddling action of man's intelligence, then it is
obvious that we have fallen into a very serious error. Apart from
the action of his intellect, an artist could not possibly make the
external world an object of his thought ; he could not, therefore,
represent it on paper or canvas ; and even if we suppose these
difficulties overcome, and the copy of bare unadulterated reality
fixed on the canvas, nobody could possibly recognise it or know
that it was there.
If this is so, I think it is clear that art cannot portray or
represent or imitate or copy nature, at least in the sense in which
nature is taken at the unreflective level of thought. What art
portrays must be some part of the ideal construction present to
the mind of the artist. Perhaps the simplest way of putting this
is to say that the artist can operate only with ideas, and not with
144

CONCLUSION
any directly given elements of reality ; with idea, in short, in the
sense of ¦'meaning,' 'significance,' or 'logical content,' and not
with idea as physical fact or immediate experience. But as ideas
in this sense — which we must be careful to remember includes
emotion — are not gifted with the property of visibility, it seems
on the whole better not to say that a work of art imitates or
portrays them. Strictly speaking, a work of art is a symbol, and a
symbol is not a copy or imitation of the meaning it stands for.
The meaning of pictorial art is then always some connected circle
of psychical states with their presentative and emotional contents.
These contents may refer to the common physical world of
ordinary experience, or they may refer to a dream-world that has
no existence except as an element of human consciousness ; and
this reference is determined in each case by the nature of the
contents themselves.
In reducing nature in this way to an element within the
consciousness of the artist and spectator, I may seem to have
destroyed at a blow all the pure unsullied beauty of the external
world as it exists in apparent independence of human experience.
I have done nothing of the kind. I have insisted that nature, as
an existent independent of individual experience, is an unreal
abstraction; that the very fulness and reality and splendour of
nature exist for each of us nowhere but in the world of our own
consciousness, and that within that world of consciousness nature
does exist as a system of objects acting and reacting on one
another, and is therefore independent of the presence or absence of
the consciousness which presents them.
Such a conception of nature seems to me an inevitable corol
lary from the general conception of the purpose and mode of
action of art forced upon us by our previous investigations. From
this point of view I will define a work of pictorial art as an
arrangement of spatial symbols embodying an individualised
psychical content present to the mind of the artist, and intended
to call up always the same ideas and emotions in the minds of
others. I will make no attempt to conceal my opinion that such
a theory is valid of all pictorial art, and I will add that I am
also disposed to think that such a point of view is a peculiarly
fruitful one from which the whole field of art criticism could be
T.s._io 145

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
reconstituted. And as criticism, as at present understood and
practised, is declared on all hands — even by its most accomplished
exponents— to be bankrupt,^ I might urge that the revolutionary
character of any general theory was a strong argument in its
favour. But the present occasion is not a suitable one for dwelling
upon the general and far-reaching character of this theory. Here
I am only justified in insisting upon its validity as a working
hypothesis for the proper understanding of our immediate subject-
matter. Only on such an hypothesis, it seems to me, can we give
an intelligible explanation of the essential character of Turner's
studies and sketches and drawings from nature, and of their
connection with his completed works.
Whether this assertion is justified at all, and if so how far,
depends, of course, upon the whole of the foregoing study of
Turner's works, but I will add a few cursory remarks, partly of a
recapitulatory nature, but treating our subject-matter from the point
of view of its logical content or meaning. In these remarks I wiU
try to deal with some of the difficulties that stand in the way of
such a treatment.
We will deal first with Turner's studies of separate objects,
such as those of an arm-chair (No. 563, N. G.), of fishes (373,
374, N. G.) and birds (375, 415, N. G.) among the exhibited
drawings.^ Here the artist works directly from an external
object, and seems to be aiming not at the expression or
representation of his own ideas, but at the reproduction of
the attributes or qualities given in sense perception and belong
ing to an independent reality. The object was there before
the artist began to draw it, and the artist's drawing only
reproduces the visible qualities (form and colour) of the object
itself But the object is much more than its visible qualities, and
even its visible qualities are far from exhausted by the one aspect
of them which is all that the artist can represent. He therefore
takes one aspect of an object and uses that as a sign or symbol of
all the other possible aspects and sense qualities which we may
suppose the object to possess. So that even if we insist on
regarding the image on the paper as a particular image, it is clear
1 See, for example. Professor C. J. Holmes's Notes on the Science of Picture-Making.
Introduction. " Two of these studies are reproduced in The Genius of Turner.
146

CONCLUSION
that it must be used as a universal sign, if it is to be understood.
The profile view of a face, for instance, means or implies not only
the whole head, but also the whole concrete individuality of the
person to whom the profile belongs.
So far, then, as a particular visual image is used as a rallying
point for calling up the whole range of ideas which constitute the
thing as an object of thought, so far have we to do with a logical
idea, with an element in our world of knowledge, with what is
strictly an universal or an identity. A sharply defined sensuous
image of a thing forms, no doubt, a more easily and generally
recognisable vehicle of reference than a name, but its function as a
means of communication is the same. And as in speaking and
writing it is not a matter of indifference what words we use to
designate the objects about which we are thinking, so in pictorial
communication, the particular sensuous image employed has con
siderable importance in directing attention to certain constituents of
the total idea called up. In this way pictorial signs certainly have a
general tendency to focus attention upon the corporeity of objects,
but it is, I believe, a grave error of principle not to acknowledge
that all the properly associated elements of the subject referred to
are more or less involved. Some elements are kept more in the
background of consciousness than others, but they are very far
from being non-existent.
It is important, certainly, to think of pictorial signs as endlessly
supple and fluid. Even the rigidity of the meanings of words has
been absurdly overstated. Poetry is only possible because the
powers of evocation possessed by words are much less limited
and defined than certain theorists would have us believe. But
pictorial signs are more delicate agents than words. They vary
in ways that words cannot. They are made de novo on every
occasion of their use, and therefore they can adapt themselves
more adroitly to each new context. And every shade of variation
in the constitution of the sign has its influence in determining the
constitution of the mental presentation which it calls up.
But even when we make all due allowance for the artist's
power of emphasis and discrimination with regard to the elements
which make up the total thought-content of his object, we must
confess that the range of expression centred round any single
147

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
material object is limited. A study of such an object points to
the object it was made from — it assures us that this particular
object was bodily present to the eyes of the artist when he made
the study, but it does not tell us in what ideal context we are to
take the object. A study as such is not a work of art, or perhaps
it would be better to say that it is a mere fragment of a possible
work of art. A study is simply a pictorial name, and a name has
meaning only in a sentence or by suggesting a sentence.^ If we
look at a study from the same point of view from which we regard
a work of art, we should go on to ask ourselves, ' Well, what of it,
what is the artist's purpose in painting or drawing this ? ' It
would start us upon an objectless and endless intellectual exercise,
in which we should miss the purpose which every work of art
implies. This indeterminateness and incompleteness of meanuig forms, I
believe, the essential characteristic of a study, as distinguished
from a work of art. One result, then, of our insistence upon the
content of pictorial art is the re-emergence of an old traditional
usage or term which recent theorising has done its best to discard.
Apart from the question of content, I believe there is nothing to
distinguish a study or a sketch from a complete picture.
Let us now turn from the elaborate studies of individual
objects to the pure outline drawings of places and buildings which
Turner made at the beginning of his career. The drawings of
' Ripon ' and ' Lincoln Cathedral ' here reproduced may stand as
typical of this class of work. Such drawings are defective in the
same way as the studies. Their meaning is incomplete. We do
not know exactly how to take them. They are very much on the
footing of perceptive judgments, that is to say, they are not cut
loose from the artist's personal focus of presentation. This is
what he saw at a certain moment ; but why did he draw it ? As a
mere record of fact, or as material which would or might be useful
in a subsequent imaginative construction ? The drawings them
selves do not answer these questions, but their defects of meaning
point beyond themselves.
Such drawings are also defective in another way. Being
1 See Dr. Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic, p. 91 sq.
148

PLATE LXXXV

PLATE L.XXXVI

X
O2;

o
o

'^'^•'.yyist^4.f .""

CONCLUSION
entirely in outline they make abstraction of the tone, colour, and
light and shade. If we are to take them as topographical illustra
tions they demand further visual determination, if, as having an
imaginative purpose, the emotional setting of the facts calls for
specification. So far, then, we have been dealing with operations preliminary
or subservient to the genuine processes of artistic expression. In
studies and sketches made in the presence of the object or model
the personal focus of presentation, and therefore time reference,
remains clearly in evidence. It is not, I am inclined to think, till
the drawing or painting cuts itself loose from the demonstrative
of immediate perception that we find ourselves on the threshold
of free artistic expression.
Such a sketch as that of the ' Hedging and Ditching ' subject
(Plate xxv.) may serve as a connecting link between the two cate
gories. Like the drawings of Lincoln and Ripon Cathedrals, it
is probably only a record of a scene actually witnessed, and as a
record of the objects constituting such a scene and their relations
to one another it is considerably less complete than they are.
But somehow I find it hard to take it simply as a record of fact,
perhaps simply because of its very incompleteness. As a symbol
of a determinate complex of feeling present to the mind of the
artist, it demands to be placed in a different category from those
drawings which only aim at the accumulation of the raw material
of artistic invention ; and this in spite of its defects and insuffi
ciencies which make it, it must be admitted, quite unintelligible as
such a symbol to everybody but the artist himself Yet here, it
seems to me, we have crossed the threshold which divides a study
from a work of art proper. The reference to reality is no longer
direct. The artist is no longer giving evidence about matters of
fact. He has cut himself free from the demonstrative of immediate
perception and is groping his way towards a definitory judgment.^
We have here an operative identity cut loose from its context,
though in a singularly inarticulate form. But if so, the sketch
must be taken as an incipient work of art, which possesses the
capacity of growth or development.
1 The transition is from the singular to the universal judgment. See Dr. Bosanquet's
Logic, vol. i. chap. v. ; and Essentials of Logic, p. 64 sq.
149

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
In the sepia drawing of this subject, reproduced in Plate xxvi.,
we come to a later stage of this development. Here the whole
subject has become defined, not indeed to the point of realisation
that would satisfy a modern artist, but sufficiently to evoke and
control the ideas and emotions present to the mind of the artist.
We can say if we like that such a drawing is or may be a more or
less accurate realisation of an actual scene, and though such an
assertion would require qualification, I do not think we could
reject it altogether. But if we said that it was nothing more than
such a reaUsation we should certainly be wrong. It is a great
deal more. The connection between any fact or series of facts
and the emotional standpoint from which we regard them is
at times a matter of chance. But in Turner's design the connec
tion between subjective feeling and the objects upon which our
attention is focussed is not left to the caprice of chance or to the
accidents of individual initiative; the connection is necessary, and
objective and universal. Indeed if we examine the matter care
fully we find that the whole raison d'itre of the drawing turns
upon its power of evoking and qualifying ideally a definite range
of emotion. The objects selected and the manner of their pre
sentation are such that a normal mind, so far as it understands the
artist's symbols, is bound to feel about the presented scene in
exactly the way that the artist felt.
Now, so long as the scene which the artist evokes exists only
for the sake of suggesting and limiting a certain range of emotion,
the relation of this scene to fact is entirely irrelevant. The artist
is not bearing witness to what he has seen, he is defining a definite
complex of thought and emotion ; and as an artist, his work is
complete when he has worked out this definition. When he has
done this his work is complete within itself, and aU direct reference
to a particular time and place in the world of fact is wiped out.
What we have before us is a hypothetical connection of ideal and
universal meanings. We are now in the region of the hypothetical
judgment. The hypothetical form is adopted not because there is
any uncertainty in the matter, but because the artist wishes to
concentrate attention on the attributes themselves, and not on
any particular embodiment of them. The subject is taken, not
given, and taken not for its own sake but for the sake of that
150

CONCLUSION
which is to follow from it, — in this case, the whole emotional
complex which is to be called up.
We might, if our space were not limited, attempt to work this
out more in detail. We might exhibit others of Turner's studies
and designs as steps or stages in the process which aims at the
complete analysis or definition of its content. But the main con
ception will, I hope, have been made evident. If the work of art
as operative is nothing but a connection of content, it can rely
upon no other driving force than that of systematic rationality.
The assertions made in a work of art are made on the strength of
rational grounds, and not on the strength of testimony. If the
artist uses fact, he does not use it as fact, and the most outrageous
fiction may be truer than fact within the four walls of his special
construction. In interpreting pictures, as in following fiction, we
are engaged in an act of comprehensive abstraction ; the conjunc
tion of objects or events is all within a judgment that we are deal
ing with abstractions used for a certain purpose. Colonel New-
come and Turner's trees and mountains are as much abstractions
and as unreal as the abstractions of the physical sciences, as matter,
force, atoms, etc., — as unreal, but also quite as real, and probably
in the same way. They are provisional conceptions employed for
certain purposes. And all the details and secondary judgments
used in interpreting a picture must be recognised as transformed
by the system to which they belong.^
But each work of art though rational is nevertheless a unique
individual, and though all works of art as forms of communication
must necessarily aspire to the ideal of complete definition, yet it
does not follow that some of the stages short of absolute deter
mination may not very well possess considerable aesthetic interest
of their own. Conversation among people who understand each
other tends to become elliptical. A hint of one's meaning is
generally sufficient for a friend ; indeed, when we are thoroughly
assured of the good will of our auditor, a hint often conveys our
meaning better than a more laboured form of expression. It is
the same in pictorial art. To those who understand the language
and are on terms of intimacy with the artist's usual modes of
1 The best discussion of these points with which I am acquainted is contained in Dr.
Bosanquet's Knowledge and Reality, pp. 140-156. 151

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
expression and habitual range of thought and feeling, a few hurried
scribbles or washes are as delightfully suggestive and full of
significance as a completed painting ; and at the same time, from
the very fact that we have gone more than half-way to meet the
artist, we enjoy the additional pleasure of intimate intercourse. The
sympathetic and imaginative and well-informed spectator is there
fore apt to resent the suggestion that such delightfully eloquent
sketches as the ' Pass of Faido,' ' Lucerne,' ' Zurich,' and a hundred
others equally eloquent and suggestive, are in any way short of
perfection. And no doubt from the strictly aesthetic point of
view they are right. ' The best of this kind are but shadows, and
the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.' But I think
it is clear that considerable experience of the completed works of
an artist is necessary before even the privileged spectators
can feel perfect confidence in their own interpretation of
the artist's slighter work. When dealing, for example, with
some of the sketches and studies for marine subjects, as ' Fisher
men launching a Boat in a rough Sea' (Plate xix.), or with the
marine and pastoral subjects in the Liber, we can interpret them
with perfect confidence because, in pictures like ' The Guard Ship
at the Nore,' ' Windsor,' and ' Frosty Morning,' the artist has
shown us exactly the kind of completion his sketches point to.
But with the latest sketches (Faido, Lucerne, etc.), we are on a
different footing. A few only of these sketches were carried
farther, and I believe I am right in saying that according to the
consensus of educated opinion the subjects lost rather than gained
by elaboration. I believe this opinion to be correct, and I would
suggest that the explanation is not entirely to be found in the
waning powers of the artist. Some mental and emotional contents
are incapable of definite embodiment. The vague yearning and
enigmatical unrest which form the most prominent elements in
these designs are probably of that kind. Contents of such a
nature that they are only partially amenable to artistic treatment
are therefore more adequately treated in the less explicit forms of
art. Such cases as these impress on us the importance of not con
fusing that mechanical kind of realisation which is known in
artistic circles as ' finishing ' or ' high finishing ' with the demands
for ideal determination. The ideal towards which all works of art
152

PLATE LXXXVII

w\ o
pr! 5
u f-

CONCLUSION
aspire is that of making the connection universally valid between
the sign and the state of consciousness which is its meaning, i.e. to
exclude all kinds of accidental and not strictly necessary emotional
effects. But this demand is only a formal one. Where a certain
ambiguity of interpretation forms a necessary factor in the mean
ing of the work, the demand for definition is obviously limited.
The form, on a final analysis, must be determined by the content,
and not vice versa.
In conclusion, I will only say that I am well aware of the
inadequacy of these remarks, but that I cannot regard this as the
proper place to amplify or develop them. I have said enough, I
hope, to draw attention to the point of view which the novel
character of our subject-matter has forced upon us. In dealing
with the completed work of art, as art criticism mainly does, it
is comparatively easy to rest satisfied with a mere analysis of
external shape, or a simple description of the machinery or
anatomy of pictorial art ; to treat works of art, in short, as the
dried specimens of the botanist's herbarium. But when we come
to study the rudimentary forms of artistic expression, — an artist's
sketches and studies — we begin to discover the shortcomings of
the merely statical or morphological point of view. Works of
art, we find, are something more than the fossil remains or dead
bodies of artistic activity. They are factors in the living process
by which the artist's thought and emotion are kindled afresh in
the bosom of the spectator. Instead, therefore, of merely de
scribing the anatomy of the dead specimen, we have had to ad
dress ourselves to the much harder task of attempting to compre
hend the living activity of art. The old static or morphological
point of view had to give place to a dynamic or physiological
system of interpretation. The emphasis was placed on function
rather than on structure. The new ideal of art criticism which
has thus been forced upon me is a synthetic view of function and
form, the interpretation of function in relation to structure. Art
criticism would thus become a science which treats of the
mode of action of works of art and of the function of their
parts. It would be concerned entirely with the positive facts
of ^rt as an active method of communication, and it would
153

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
seek only for verifiable generalisations — for a classified and unified
account of the phenomena of artistic activity.
The present volume, with all its shortcomings and defects, is,
I hope, at least a feeble and hesitating step in this direction.

154

INDEX

The names of Turner's oil-paintings and water-colours are printed in italics. Oil-paintings
in the National Gallery have the gallery numbers immediately after the names, thus
(N.G. 623); water-colours and drawings in the National Gallery have their reference
numbers in the official Inventory of the Turner Bequest, thus (T.B. cclxxx. 184). Where
I have been able to do so I have added references to the books where reproductions of the
paintings, etc., have been published. These are placed at the end of the entries, in square
brackets, thus [Turner Gallery, PI. 4].

List of Volumes referred to
'The Turner Gallery.' With Memoir, etc., by R. N. Wornum.
London : James S. Virtue, . . Referred to as
'Turner and Ruskin.' Edited by Fredk. Wedmore.
London : George Allen, 1900, . . . „
'Turner.' By Sir Walter Armstrong. London: T.
Agnew and Sons, 1902, . . . . ,,
'The Genius of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. Edited by
Charles Holme. Offices of ' The Studio,' 1903, . „
'Hidden Treasures at the National Gallery.' 'Pall
Mall' Press. Holborn, 1906, . . . „
'The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A.' By P. G.
Hamerton. London : Seeley and Co., Ltd., 1895, ,,
'J. M. W. Turner, R.A.' By W. L. Wyllie, A. R.A.
London : G. Bell & Sons, 1906, . . . „
' The Water-Colours of J. M. W. Turner.' Offices
of ' The Studio,' 1909, . . . . „
'J. M. W. Turner, R.A.' By Robert Chignell.
London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1902, . „
'Ruskin on Pictures.' Edited by E. T. Cook,
London : George' Allen, 1902, . . . „
' James Orrock, R. I. Painter, etc. ' By Byron Webber.
London, 1903, . . . . . „

Turner Gallery
Turner and Ruskin
ArmstrongGenius
Hidden Treasures
Hamerton
Wyllie Water-Colours of Turner
Chignell
Ruskin on Pictures
Byron Webber
155

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

Abbotspobd, 106.
Aberdulas, Mill at, 27.
Abingdon, 11.
Abingdon, Berkshire, with a View of the
Thames : Morning (N.G. 486), 6, 65, 96.
[Turner Gallery, PI. 12; Ruskin on
Pictures, p. 24 ; Chignell, p. 24.]
' Aesthetic, History of (B. Bosanquet's), 31.
Agnew, Messrs., 20.
Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germani
cus. Ancient Rome (N.G. 623), 119, 121.
[Genius, 0-17.]
Aitken, Dr., 19.
Akenside, M., 69, 98.
Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, 35.
Alps at Daybreak, The (T.B. cclxxx. 184), 129.
Ambleteuse, 42, 135.
Anchorage, Ships bearing up for (Petworth
House Collection), 44.
Anderdon Catalogues (Print Room, B.M.),
17.
Anselm's Chapel, with part of Thomas d
Becket's Crown, St. (Whitworth Insti
tute), 18, 19.
Antinoiis, The Belvedere, 14.
Antique Class, R.A. Schools, 14.
Apollo and Python (N.G. 121), 6. [Turner
and Ruskin, vol. i. p. 42.]
Apollo, The Belvedere, 14.
Arm Chair, Study of an (T.B. xcv.(a) p.),
146.
Arnald, G., 76.
Art Criticism and Aesthetic, separation of, 3,
136.
Arveron, Source of the (Farnley Hall Collec
tion), 82. [Study for. Genius, mw-10.]
Avon, R., 15.
Baiae, Bay of, with Apollo and the Sibyl (N.G.
605), 88, 93. [Genius, 0-11 ; WyUie,
p. 68 ; Chignell, p. 64.]
Bamborough Castle, 34.
Barnard Castle, 34.
Basire, J., 9.
.Basle (R. 5), 78, 79.
Bass Rock, the, 48.
Bath Abbey from the North-East (T.B. vii. p.),
14, 15.
Bell, Mr. C. F., 90.
Bellinzona, 140.
Bembridge Mill (T.B. xxiv. 49), 25.
156

Bernard, Dr. J. H., 32.
Berry Pomeroy Castle (R. 58), 81.
Berwick, 48.
Birds, Studies of (T.B. ccLxm. 340 and 341),
146. [Genius, w-7.]
' Birmingham,' 20.
Blair's Hut, Mer de Glace (Farnley Hall
Collection), 39. [Turner and Ruskin,
vol. ii. p. 198.]
Blaze Castle (T.B. vi. 20a), 16.
'Bolton Abbey,' 109, 110, 111.
Borrowdale, 34.
Bosanquet, Dr. B., 'Essentials of Logic,'
148, 149.
 ' History of Aesthetic,' 31.
 ' Knowledge and Reality,' 151.
 ' Logic,' 149.
Boscastle, 99, 100, 102.
Boulogne, 42.
Boydell, John, 36.
Brading, Isle of Wight, 25.
Bridge and Cows (R. 2), 67, 73.
Bridgenorth, 20.
Bridgewater Sea Piece, The, 43, 44, 46, 46.
[Turner Gallery, PI. 2.]
Bristol, 14, 15.
' British Itinerary, The,' 99.
Brocklebank, Mr. Ralph, 45.
 Mr. Thomas, 106.
Burke, Edmund, 31.
Bury Art Gallery, 118.
Buttermere, 34.
Buttermere Lake (T.B. xxxv. 84), 36.
Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromack-water,
Cumberland; a Shower (N.G. 460), 35.
Byronism, 121, 123.
Byron, Lord, 128.
Byron's ' Childe Harold,' 88.
Caernarvon Castle, North Wales (T.B. lxx. m),
46.
Calais, 43.
Calais, Pas de. See Now for the Painter.
Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing
for Sea : an English Packet arriving
(N.G. 472), 23, 47, 119. [Hamerton,
p. 92 ; Turner Gallery, PI. 3.]
Calais Sands, Low Water : Poissards collecting
Bait (Bury Art Gallery), 118, 126.
[Illus. Cat. Bury Art GaUery, p. 72.]
Callcott, Sir A. W., 4.

INDEX

Cambridge, 20.
Campbell, T., 128.
Canning, 68.
Canterbury Cathedral, St. Anselm's Chapel,
with part of Thomas d Becket's Crown
(Whitworth Inst.), 18, 19.
Cardiff Art Gallery, 29.
Carew Castle, 26.
Carisbrook Castle, 26.
Carlisle, 34.
Carthaginian Empire, Decline of the (N.G.
499), 88. [Turner Gallery, PI. 21.]
'Castle of Otranto ' (Walpole's), 31.
Chamounix, Mer de Glace (Farnley Hall Col
lection), 39. [Genius, mw-24; Turner
and Ruskin, vol. ii. 196.]
Chateaubriand, 88.
Chepstow, 24.
Chester, 20.
Chinese Art, 22.
Christchurch Gate, Canterbury, 17.
Clifton Nuneham, 11.
Clydach, R., 27.
Clovelly, 99.
Cobham, 61.
Colchester, 111, 119.
Coltman, N., 99.
Combe Martin, 99.
Coniston, 34.
Content, Form and, 3.
Conway Castle, 37.
Cook's Folly, Bristol, 16.
Cook, Sir Frederick, 56.
Copper Plate Magazine, 20.
Cottage, Interior of a (T.B. xxix. x.), 23,
24, 28. [Genius, mw-5.]
Cox, David, 4.
Crossing the Brook (N.G. 497), 87. [Turner
Gallery, PI. 18; Armstrong, PI. 68;
Genius, 0-10 ; Wyllie, p. 60.]
Crowle, Mr., 6.
Cumberland, 34.
Cyfarthfa Sketch Book (T.B. xli.), 44.
Dacre Castle, Cumberland (T.B. i. d.), 9.
Daniell, Thomas, 76.
Danish Ships seized at Copenhagen entering
Portsmouth Harbour. See Spitheady
Boat's Crew, etc.
Dartmouth, 99.
Dartmouth Castle, 99.

Datur hora Quieti, 129.
Dawe, H., 81, 82.
Dayes, E. 18, 19, 124.
Deal, 136.
Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (N.G.
499), 88. [Turner Gallery, PI. 21.]
Delacroix, 117.
De Loutherbourg, 18, 19, 31, 32, 43.
Deluge, The (N.G. 493), 46.
Derby, 20.
Derwentwater, 34.
Derwentwater, The Head of {T.B. xxxv.82),36.
Devil's Bridge, Cardiganshire, 17.
Devil's Bridge, The Little (R. 19), 80.
' Devonshire Rivers, The,' 109.
Dewick, Rev. E. S., 29.
De Wint, P., 4.
Dido and Aeneas (N.G. 494), 5, 87.
[Turner Gallery, PI. 16.]
 building Carthage (N.G. 498), 87.
[Genius, 0-9; Wyllie, p. 62; Turner
Gallery, PI. 19.] /
 directing the Equipment of the Fleet
(N.G. 506), 88. [Hamerton, p. 216].
Diskobolos, The, 14. ?
Dolbadern Castle (Diploma Gallery, R.A.),
45. [Genius 0-1.]
Dort (Farnley Hall Collection), 96. [Mag.
of Art, July, 1887, p. 300.]
Dover, 43.
Dunbar Castle, 48.
Dunbar Sketch Book (T.B. liv.), 48.
Dunstanborough Castle, 34.
Durdham Downs, Bristol, 15.
Durham, 34.
Durham Castle, 34.
Durham Cathedral, 34.
Dutch Boats in u. Gale (The Bridgewater
Sea-piece), 43. [Turner Gallery, PI. 2.]
Dying Gaul, the, 14.
EDI^fBURGH, 48.
Edinburgh from the Calton Hill (T.B. lx.
H.), 107, 108.
Egremont, Lord, 126.
'Elegy,' Gray's, 31.
Ely Minster, Transept and Choir of, 23,
' Ely Minster, View of (Girtin's), 19.
' England and Wales ' Series, 4, 26, 96, 97,
109, 111, 112, 119, 129.
' Environs of Manchester,' Dr. Aitken's, 19,
157

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

Evening of the Deluge, The (N.G. 631), 119.
Evening Star The (N.G. 1991), 119. [Cassell's
Illustrated Catalogue, N.G. of B. Art.,
p. 33.]
Ewenny Priory, Transept of, 28, 29, 80, 31.
Exile and the Rock Limpet, The (N.G. 629),
119. [Cassell's Cat., p. 136.]
Fabris, 7.
Faido, Pass of (T.B. ccclxiv. 209), 140,
152. [See ' Mod. Painters,' Isted. vol. iv.
pi. 20; Turner and Ruskin, vol. ii.
p. 168.]
Farington, Joseph, 36.
Farm Yard with the Cock (R. 17), 67.
Farnley Hall Collection, The, 39, 52.
Fast Castle, 49.
Fawkes, Mr. F. H., 52.
Fawkes, Walter, 91, 93, 103.
Fishermen at Sea, 23, 42.
 becalmed previous to a Storm —
Twilight, 42.
 coming Ashore at Sunset, 42.
 launching a Boat, etc. (lxviii. 3), 162.
 upon a Lee-shore (Lord Iveagh),23, 43,
48. [Armstrong, p. 60.]
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 18, 102.
Flint, 20.
Flint Castle. See French Coast, Scene on the.
Flushing, 61.
Folkestone, 135.
Folly Bridge and Bacon's Tower (T.B. i. a.),
9. [Genius, mw-1].
Form and Content, 3.
Forum Romanum (N.G. 504), 93.
Fouche's ' Memoirs,' 69.
Fowler, Captain, 16.
Franco-British Exhibition, The, 48.
Freedom and Necessity, Reconciliation of,
68.
French Coast, Scene on the (R. 4), 67, 75-78.
Frosty Morning, A (N.G. 492), 4, 6, 66, 61,
63, 64, 66, 68, 86, 87, 96, 117, 119, 152.
[Hamerton, p. 148; Wyllie, p. 66;
Armstrong, p. 112].
Gainsborough, T., 57.
Garrick's Temple and Hampton Court (R. 63).
See Isleworth, Scene at.
' Genius of mechanical excellence,' 10.
Gessner, 57.
158

Gilpin's ' Northern Tour,' 9.
Girtin, Thomas, 19.
Glaramara, Hills of (T.B. xxxv. 83), 36.
Goodrich Castle, 26.
Gould, Mr. G. J., 52.
Goyen, Van, 28.
Gravesend, 50, 51.
Gray's 'Elegy,' 31.
Greenwich, 51.
Greenwich Park, London from (N.G. 483),
63, 80. [Genius, 0-14.]
Grose's ' Antiquities,' 9.
Guisborough Shore Sketch Book (T.B. lii.),
48.
Hamerton's 'Turner,' 130.
Hannibal Crossing the Alps (N.G. 490), 6.
[Turner Gallery, PI. xiv.].
Harding, J. D., 12.
Hardwick, P. C, 10, 11, 14.
Hastings, 51.
Hayter, G., 117.
Hearne, Thomas, 18, 19.
Hedging and Ditching (R. 47), 61, 94, 119,
149.
Hereford, 15.
Heme Bay, 51,
Heysham, 103-106, 108.
High Force of Tees, 27.
Hind Head Hill(R. 26), 58, 61.
Hoare, Sir R. C, 25.
Holmes, Mr. C. J., 146.
Holt, Collection of the late Mr. R. F., 23.
Hornby Castle, 102, 103, 106, 108.
Hotwells, Bristol, The, 16.
Hugo, Victor, 129.
Hulks on the Tamar (Petworth House), 119.
[Armstrong, p. 74.]
Hume, David, 85, 142, 143.
Indolence, The Fountain of, 121.
Interior of a Cottage (T.B. xxix. x.), 23, 24,
28. [Genius, mw-6.]
Isabey, 117.
Isle of Wight, 24, 26, 26.
Isleworth Old Church, 11, 12.
Isleworth, Scene at (R. 63), 81.
Italy, 6.
Iveagh, Lord, 23, 43, 48.
Japanese Art, 22.

INDEX

Jason (N.G. 471), 38.
Jeffrey, F., 67.
Johnson, Dr., 33, 35.
' Judgement, Kritik of (Kant), 31, 32.
Juvenile Tricks (R. 22), 67.
Kant's ' Kritik of JunoEMBNT,' 31, 32.
Kershaw, Mr., 26.
Keswick, 34.
'  Lake, View of (Dayes), 19.
Kidwelly Castle, 26.
Kilgarran Castle, 41. [Armstrong, p. 40.]
King's College, Cambridge, 20.
Kingston Bank (N.G. 491), 65.
Kirkstall Abbey, 34.
Kirkstall Crypt (Soane Museum), 91.
Korin, 61.
Lamartine, 88, 123.
Lambert, Mr., 25.
' Landscape with Bathers ' (R Wilson), 36.
Landseer, Mr. C, 25.
Land's End, 102.
Langhorne, Dr., 69.
Laugharne Castle, 26.
Laurie, Mr., 25.
Lawrence, Sir T., 88, 90, 117.
Lee-Shore, Fishermen on a (Lord Iveagh),
23, 43, 48. [Armstrong, p. 60.]
Liebreich, Dr., 120.
Lessing, 98.
' Liber Studiorum,' 4, 48, 56, 67, 68, 61, 64,
72-83, 99, 119.
Lichiield, 20.
Life Class, R.A. Schools, 14.
Lincoln, 20.
Lincoln, Cathedral Church at (Print Room,
B.M.), 20, 21, 22, 29, 31, 148, 149.
[Genius, mw-4].
Lindisfarne, 34.
Lippincott, Sir H., 15.
Llandaff Cathedral (T.B. xxviii. a), 23, 29,
31.
Llanstephen Castle, 26.
Locke, 142, 143.
London from Greenwich Park (N.G. 483), 63,
80. [Genius, 0-14.]
Loutherbourg, De, 18, 19, 31, 32, 43.
Lucerne (T.B. ccclxiv. 324), 152.
Lysons' ' Environs of London,' 10.

Macon (Lord Yarborough), 87.
Macpherson, James, 31.
Maiden Lane, 6.
Maiden, Viscount, 26.
Mallet, David, 69.
Malmesbury Abbey, 16.
Malvern Abbey, Porch of Great (Man. Whit
worth Inst.) 17, 18.
Manchester, Whitworth Institute, 18, 20.
Margate, 61, 136.
Marshall, J. M. W., 11, 14.
Martello Towers, Bexhill (R. 34), 80.
Martineau, H., 59.
Matthews, Dr. , 26.
Matlock, 20.
'Mechanical Excellence, Genius of,' 10, 126.
Meleager, the Vatican, 14.
Melincourt, Fall of (T.B. xxxvi. 8), 27.
Melrose, 129.
Melrose Abbey, 34.
Mer de Glace, Chamounix (Farnley Hall), 39.
[Turner and Ruskin, vol. ii. 196 ;
Genius, mw-24.]
Meuse, Entrance of the (N.G. 601), 96.
[Armstrong, p. 84; Hamerton, p. 170.]
Millbank, Study at (N.G. 469), 28.
Miller, Mrs. Pitt, 46.
Millet, J. F., 67.
Milton, 31, 53, 69, 98.
Mitchell, Mr., 26.
' Modern Painters ' (Ruskin), 2.
Monmouthshire, 16.
Monro, Dr. 19.
Moonlight Study at Millbank (N.G. 469), 28.
Moore, T., 88, 89.
Morland George, 43, 57.
' Morning ' (Wilson), 36.
Mortlake, Early (Summer's) Morning, 88.
[Armstrong, p. 118.]
 Terrace : Summer's Evening, 88. [Arm
strong, p. 120.]
Mossdale Fall, 102.
' Musical ' Education, Defects of, 85.
Naples, Part of, with the Ruin'd Tower of
St. Vincent, 7.
Napoleon, 42, 68, 69.
Narcissus and Echo (Petworth House), 87.
Narraways, The, 14.
Naturalism, Wordsworthian, 4.
Nature and Art, 3, 4, 8, 11, 15.
159

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

Needles, The, 25.
Neer, Van der, 28.
Nelson, The Death of (N.G. 480), 63, 64.
[Genius, 0-6; Turner Gallery, PI. 9.]
Newcome, Col. 161.
Newport, Isle of Wight, 25.
'Night Thoughts' (Young), 31.
Nile, The Battle of the, 42, 43.
Nore, Guardship at the. See Sheerness.
Norham Castle, 34.
Norham Castle on the Tweed, Summer's Morn,
36, 41. [Armstrong, p. 34.]
Northampton, 20.
Northumberland, 34.
Norwich School, the, 4.
Nottingham, 20.
Now for the Painter (J. M. Naylor), 96, 116.
[Turner Gallery, PI. 27.]
Nuneham Courtenay, 11.
Orbock, Mr. J., 55.
' Ossian,' 31, 69.
Oxford, 11, 15.
 Almanack,' 9.
 Loan Collection, 27.
 Sketch Book, The (T.B. ii.), 14.
 University Galleries, 46.
Oxford, View of High Street (Wantage Coll.),
5. [Illus. Cat. of Wantage Coll.]
Oxford, View of the City of {T.B. iii. b), 13.
' Pastoral ' and ' Elegant Pastoral,' 56.
Paterson's ' Road Book,' 34.
Patterdale, 34.
Pembroke Bay, 24.
Pembroke Castle : Clearing up of a Thunder-
¦storm (R. Brocklebank), 45. [Turner
and Ruskin, vol. ii. p. 158 ; Armstrong,
p. 50.]
Pembroke Castle : Thunderstorm approaching
(Mrs. W. Pitt Miller), 46. [Genius, w-1 . ]
Pembury Mill (R. 12), 57.
Percy's ' Reliques,' 31.
Peterborough, 20.
 Cathedral : West Entrance, 20.
Petworth, Interior at (N.G. 1988), 119.
 Dewy Morning (Petworth House Coll.),
119.
 House Collection, 44, 126.
 Parfc (Petworth House Coll.), 126.
160

Petworth Park (N.G. 569), 126. [Wyllie,
p. 48.]
Pilot hailing a Whitstable Hoy (Farnley Coll.),
52. [Turner and Ruskin, vol. i. p. 132;
Genius, 0-7.]
Plato, 85.
Pleasant and Beautiful, The, 90.
Plymouth Dock, from Mount Edgecumbe, 102.
' Pocket Magazine,' 20.
' Poetry, History of English ' (Warton), 31.
Poetry, Turner's, 69, 70.
Poole, 102.
Pope's Tower, Stanton Harcourt, 11.
Portrayal and Portrayed, Problem of, 3.
'Ports of England ' Series, 4, 96, 97.
Portugal, Prince Regent of, 58.
'Prelude, The' (Wordsworth), 66.
Print Room, British Museum, 6, 17, 20.
'Provincial Antiquities,' Scott's, 4, 96, 97,
106.
Purfleet, 54.
Purley, nr. Pangbourne, 70.
Pyke-Thompson Bequest, 29.

queen Mab's Cave (N.G. 648), 119.
Radley Hall, near Abingdon, 11, 12, 13.
Raglan Castle. See Berry Pomeroy Castle.
Bain, Storm, and Speed, (N.G. 538), 119.
[Turner and Ruskin, vol. ii. p. 270 ;
Genius, 0-23 ; Wyllie, p. 132.]
Raleigh's (Professor), ' Wordsworth,' 67.
Rawlinson's ' Liber Studiorum,' 73, 78.
Reichenbach, Falls of the (Farnley Hall
Collection), 39. [Genius, m.w.— 19.]
'Reliques,' Percy's, 31.
Rembrandt, 67, 125.
' Review of Publications of Art,' 60.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 10, 125.
Richmond Castle, Yorkshire, 34.
Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birth
day (N.G. 502), 88.
' Richmondshire, The History of,' 4, 97, 102,
106.
Richmond, Yorks, 102.
' Rimini, Bridge of Augustus at ' (Wilson),
36.
Ripon Cathedral (T.B. xxxv. 6), 34, 148,
149.

INDEX

' Rivers of England ' Series, 4, 96, 97, 99,
109, 127.
' Rivers of France ' Series, 127, 129.
' Rochester Castle ' (Sandby), 19.
Rochester on the Medway (T.B. ccviii. w.),
109, 127.
Rogers, Samuel, 128.
Romantic Art, Inauguration of, 31.
Rome, from Monte Mario (T.B. clxxxix.
33), 92.
Rome from the Vatican (T.B. clxxxix. 41),
88.
Rooker, M. A., 18, 19.
Roslin Castle, 48.
Rowlandson, T., 43.
Royal Academy Schools, 14.
Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition, 11.
Ruskin Bequest, Cambridge, 102.
Ruskin, Mr. John, 8, 27, 49, 90, 92, 93, 94,
110, 130.
' Ruskin on Pictures,' 60.
Ruskin's ' Elements of Drawing,' 95, 140.
 ' Modern Painters,' 109, 138 sq.
St. Abb's Head, 49.
St. Anselm's Chapel, etc. — Canterbury
Cathedral' (Man. Whit. Inst.), 18,
19.
St. Catherine's Hill, near Guildford (R. 33),
61.
St. Gothard, Pass of (Farnley Hall Collec
tion), 39.
St. Vincent's Tower, Naples (T.B. i. b.), 6,
9.
Sahsbury, 26.
Sandbank with Gipsies (N.G. 467), 55.
Sandby, Paul, 7, 13, 18.
Sandwich, 136.
Santayana, Mr. George, 123, 124.
Schaffhausen, Fall of the Rhine at (Tabley
House), 87.
Scott, Sir Walter, 49, 88, 106, 128.
Scott's ' Provincial Antiquities,' 4.
Shee, Sir Martin A., 117-
Sheerness (Wantage Collection), 52, 53,64,
96, 117, 162. [Armstrong, p. 52 ; and
Illus. Cat., Wantage Collection.]
SheUey,P. B.,123, 129.
Ships bearing up for Anchorage (Petworth
House Collection), 44.
Shipwreck, Studies of a (T.B. lxxxviii. 1-8),
49. [Wyllie, pp. 19-22.]
T. S.-ll

Shipwreck, The (N.G. 476), 23, 49, 60.
[Genius, 0-3 ; Monkhouse, p. 50 ; Wyllie,
p. 36.]
Shrewsbury, 20.
' Simple Nature, 4, 5.
Snowstorm, The (N.G. 530), 119. [Wyllie,
p. 126 ; Turner and Ruskin, vol. ii. p.
220.]
Soane Museum, The, 93.
Southampton, 26.
Southend, 51.
' Southern Coast, The,' 4, 96-102, 103.
Southey, R., 88.
Spinnet Player, The (T.B. ccxliv. 37), 128.
Spithead: Boat's Crew recovering an Anchor
(N.G. 481), 63, 64, 60, 119. [Armstrong,
p. 66 ; Turner and Ruskin, vol. i. p.
154.]
Spithead Sketch Book (T.B. c), 69, 60.
Stamford, Unc, 112, 113, 114, 129.
Stanton Harcourt, 11.
' Stanton Harcourt, The Old Kitchen at,' 9.
Stoke, near Bristol (Mrs. A. Thomas), 16.
Stonehenge at Daybreak (R. 81), 99.
Straw Yard, The (R. 7), 57.
Strong, The late Mr. Arthur, 83.
Subject and Treatment, 3.
' Sublime and Beautiful, Essay on the '
(Burke), 31.
Sunningwell, 14.
 Church, 11, 12.
Symbolists, The French, 126.
Swinburne, A. C, 129.
Tantallon Castle, 48.
Taylor, The late Mr. J. E., 82.
Tees, High Force of, 27.
Teignmouth, 119.
Temeraire, The Fighting (N.G. 624), 5, 54.
[Armstrong, p. 116 ; Genius, 0-19 ;
Hamerton, p. 282; Wyllie, p. 118.]
Teniers, 57.
Thames and Medway, The Meeting of the
(N.G. 813), 46. [Wyllie, p. 142.]
 (Mr. Widener's), 62. [Arm
strong, p. 54.]
Thomas, Mrs., 15.
Thomson, 57, 98.
Thomson's Lyre (Basildon House), 5.
Thornbury, Walter, 6.
Tilsit, Treaty of, 68. 161

TURNER'S SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS

Tintern Abbey (V. and A. Museum), 18
[Genius, mw-3].
Topographical Art, limitations of, 22.
Trafalgar, Battle of, (Greenwich Hospital),
96 [Turner and Ruskin, vol. i. p. 4;
'Hidden Treasures,' p. 91.]
Treatment and Subject, 3.
Trossachs, The, 41.
Trout Stream, The, 65, 86. [Armstrong,
p. 68.]
Truth, 3.
Turner, Charles, 76.
Twickenham — Pope's Villa. See Isleworth,
Scene at.
Tynemouth, 118-116.

Ullswater, 34.
Ulysses deriding Polyphemus (N.G. 508),
88, 118, 199. [Armstrong, p. 114; Tur
ner and Ruskin, vol. i. p. 64 ; Genius,
0-12 ; Hamerton, p. 224 ; Wyllie, p. 80.]
Union of the Thames and Isis (N.G. 487),
66.
Usk, R., 44.

Van der Neer, 28.
Van Goyen, 28.
Vatican Meleager, The, 14.
Vaughan Bequest, 102.
Venice, Riva degli Schiavone, from near the
Public Gardens (T.B. cccxvi. 21),
132.
Venice, Shipping on the Riva degli Schiavone
(T.B. cccxvi. 20), 132.
Venice, The Approach to (T.B. cccxvi. 16),
132.
Ventnor, 26.
Venus de' Medici, 14.
Via Mala, The (T.B. ccclxiv. 362), 135.
Victoria and Albert Museum, 18, 19, 102.
Village and Castle on the Rhine (T.B.
cccLxix. 22), 135.

Waiting for Dinner (T.B. cccxliv. 31),
127, 128.
Wallis Wall, Bristol, 16.
Walpole, Horace, 31.
Walton Bridges, 51.
162

Walton Bridges (Wantage Collection), 65.
[Armstrong, p. 58.]
 (Mr. J. Orrock), 66. [Byron
Webber, vol. i. 94].
Wanstead, New Church at, 10.
Wantage, The Lady, 62, 55, 63.
Warkworth Castle, 34.
Warton, Joseph, 4, 31.
Watchet, 99, 100, 101, 102.
Waterloo, Field of {N.G. 600), 88.
Water Mill, The (R. 37), 61.
Wells, 26.
Wells, Mrs., 76.
 W. F., 73.
Welsh Bridge, Shrewsbury (Man. Whit.
Inst.), 20.
Welsh Coast, A View of the, from Cook's
Folly; (T.B. VI. 9), 16.
Westall, William, 76.
Whalers (N.G. 646, 547), 119.
Whalley Bridge and Abbey (Wantage Col
lection), 63. [Illus. Cat. Wantage Col
lection.]
' Whatman's Turkey Mills,' View of (Sand
by), 19.
What You Will, 88.
Wheatley, F., 18, 19, 67.
Wheeler, Mrs., 76.
Whitstable Hoy, Pilot hailing a (Farnley
Hall Collection), 52. [Turner and
Ruskin, vol. i. p. 132 ; Genius, 0-7.]
Widener, Mr. P. A. B., 52.
Wight, Isle of, 24, 25, 26.
Wilson, R., 4, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 84.
Winchester, 25.
Windermere, 34.
Windmill and Lock (R. 27), 67, 68, 61,
94.
 (Sir Frederick Cook), 56 [Genius
0-8].
Windsor, 15.
Windsor (N.G. 486), 4, 56, 63, 64, 67, 68,
86, 96, 117, 152.
Wint, De, 4.
Worcester, 16.
Wordsworth, 4, 65, 86, 126.
 Dorothy, 64.
'Wordsworth' (Prof. Raleigh), 67.
Wordsworthian Naturalism, 4.
Wordsworth's ' Excursion,' 67.

INDEX

Wordsworth's ' Lines, composed a few miles
above Tintern Abbey,' 66.
 ' Lyrical Ballads,' 68.
 ' Prelude,' 66.
Wrexham, 20.
Yorkshire, 34.

Yorkshire, Coast of, near Whitby (R. 24), 48.
'Yorkshire Series, The.' See 'Richmond
shire, History of.'
Young, Edward, 4, 31.
Zurich (T.B. CCCLXIV. 289), 162. [Water-
Colours of Turner, PI. xxvii.]

163

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