A. J. Finberg

“ 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. ”

“ 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 hollows 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. ”

“ We need not wonder that the most moving and powerful of all the artist’s works were painted after his removal to Harborne.
From 1841 to the end in 1859, Cox’s artistic career was one of unbroken, though limited, success. The weight of years only strengthened the grim certainty with which he grasped the essentials of his art. All his drawing-master dexterity gradually fell away from him, the trivialities of imitative and explanatory art were quietly eliminated, and his art took on the simplicity, the sincerity, and rugged human dignity of the man’s own character. ”

“ Turner was now twenty-three years of age. His exhibits at the Royal Academy in 1796 and 1797 had proved him to be the most accomplished topographical and antiquarian draughtsman which this country had produced, but the limitations of such work were too narrow to satisfy either his ambitions or his powers of expression. He had made up his mind by this time to be an artist and not merely a draughtsman. He had felt the glamour of Richard Wilson’s paintings, and their rich and sombre harmonies of colour were haunting his imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would be useless to pretend that Cox is altogether free from the defects of his qualities. He is often too general, vague and empty. Sometimes he is passive and timid, as though he hoped to get his effects by merely “leaving out,” or by overlooking and scorning the individuality of natural objects. But he possesses in abundance the great and inspiriting virtues of the idealists, as well as some of their defects. He takes us away from the world of bare unrelated fact into regions where the human consciousness can beat its wings and feel glad. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This grave and dignified portrait of the Duke of Orleans was ordered by the King in 1842. It is remarkable for the minuteness and care with which all the details of the uniform and the accessories are rendered.
But if Ingres doubted of human justice, he never doubted about his art. He devoted himself to it with renewed passion and enthusiasm. “The day I quitted Paris,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I broke for ever with everything that has to do with the public. Henceforth I will paint entirely for myself. I belong at last to myself, and I will belong only to myself.” ”

“ The richly blotted washes preserve all their freshness and lustre. Their beautiful quality gives a charm and dignity to the drawing which is worthily supported by the massive simplicity of the design. The placing of the cattle in the water, and the two figures at the side of the tarn, is worthy of Cotman’s impeccable sense of design. As the dignity and authority of such a drawing are the result of selection and the ruthless omission of irrelevancies, every detail which is admitted must possess significance and must contribute actively to the general effect. ”

“ A study is simply a pictorial name, and a name has meaning only in a sentence or by suggesting a sentence. [35] 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 meaning forms, I believe, the essential characteristic of a study, as distinguished from a work of art. ”

“ Instead of the profoundly imaginative realism of the earlier works, we get the unrest of romanticism, with its vague and empty pomp, its cloying self-indulgence, its warm, voluptuous atmosphere. Yet even in the rush of romantic intoxication Turner could often touch the deepest chords of our imagination, especially in his water-colours, with works of the most intense sincerity and sublime insight. We have two examples of such works in the present exhibition, The Longships Lighthouse and the Lowestoft. ”

“ 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 sternness 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 all kinds and shades of emotion, would argue an extraordinary dulness or sheer absence of artistic capacity ”

“ One searches them in vain for signs of originality, for some promise of a new way of thinking or feeling, a new vision, or a new form of expression. Their aims are conventional, and their modest triumphs are triumphs of the commonplace virtues—intelligence, docility, and above all, industry working upon a foundation of natural talent. In them Turner was trying to do exactly what the successful topographical and antiquarian draughtsmen of the day were doing,—Sandby, Rooker, Hearne and Dayes—and the precocious boy has already succeeded in doing such work nearly as well as it can be done. ”

“ If we look at Turner’s French drawings from this point of view, we cannot but admit that they are almost all highly successful. 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the next twenty years his works gain constantly in the sensuous attractiveness of colour and in the formal beauties of rhythm and design. The loss of beauty is compensated by deep draughts of pleasantness. Yet amid the feverish intoxication of sensuous beauty a wild unrest and despair make themselves increasingly felt. The man has sacrificed himself to his art, and the starved human soul turns in bitterness from the ardently desired rewards of the most brilliantly triumphant artistic career that modern times have witnessed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 contemplated. Which aspect does fullest justice to the whole conception 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. ”

“ They are always subordinated to a genuinely imaginative conception. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 delicate 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”