A. J. Finberg

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our modern theorists tell us that if an artist{13} is in love with what he sees and bent on reproducing it, he ceases to “express himself” and becomes a mere mechanic. But this is because they fail to understand that healthy and imaginative artists do not sit at home in the dark anxiously feeling their pulse and worrying about their emotions and their moods. When Turner painted this lovely drawing of Scarborough he was as passionately absorbed in the variety and ever-changing beauty of physical nature as a poet like Wordsworth. ”

“ The plates are probably the best known and most widely appreciated of all Turner’s engravings, and the original drawings are certainly the most popular and most eagerly sought after by collectors of his water-colours. They are eminently characteristic of the artist; full to overflowing of evidence of his extraordinary knowledge, powers of observation and incomparable technical skill, and they display freely all his faults of mind and character. Parts of his work are like Shakespeare’s, incorrect, capricious and wanton. ”

“ But they belong to an undeveloped stage of the art of water-colour painting. The details of architecture are drawn carefully and accurately, the figures are life-like though rather stiff, and the indications of light and shade explain the shapes of the buildings and knit the whole composition together. But the drawings do not go beyond this. The few pale washes of colour diversify the surface, but do not suggest either colour or atmosphere. Every object, the roadway, figures, buildings and the sky, has the same texture, which makes the general effect monotonous and abstract. ”

“ There is a clumsiness, a heavy-handedness, about the workmanship which harmonizes very happily with the subject-matter. The composition is wanting in fineness of feeling and perception. There is a certain awkwardness in the way the church on the cliff projects over the roof of the wooden hut in the foreground, which might easily have been avoided with a little tact and cunning. But the whole drawing is so vigorous, so solid and strong, that it seems to express the blunt, downright habits of thought and feeling of the typical Englishmen of the early part of the nineteenth century. ”

“ The colour is a lovely harmony of deep blues, russet browns and dull crimsons. There is no formalism or heaviness in the design. I hope the fortunate owner of this exquisite drawing will keep it carefully from undue exposure to a strong light, as the blues in it are very sensitive to such influences. When once they have faded they can never be coaxed back. So many of Turner’s drawings of this kind have been ruined by ex{9}posure to the light that one cannot but be anxious that this, one of the most beautiful of them all, should be preserved for the delight of the coming generations. ”

“ Naturalism is a philosophy of observation, and of an imagination that extends the observable; all the sights and sounds of nature enter into it, and lend it their directness, pungency, and coercive stress. At the same time, naturalism is an intellectual philosophy ”

“ The Water Mill shows that Turner forestalled Prout by a good many years. If it were my business to point out to people the qualities of sight, brain-power and manual dexterity which distinguish the works of great artists from those of inferior ones, I should choose the best drawing of Prout I could secure and ask my students to compare it carefully with the Water Mill. Such comparison would show that Turner did everything that Prout did, and did it better; every picturesque detail is rendered with the same affectionate interest and fidelity ”

“ Turner was one of the greatest artists this country has produced, and much of his best work—and nearly all the work by which he has endeared himself to his fellow-countrymen, was done in water-colour; yet water-colour painting, though it has played almost as important a part as oil painting in the history of British art, is not yet recognized by our authorities as an independent branch of art. That Turner the water-colour painter is represented at all in our National Gallery is purely an accident. ”

“ Brunnen in the Distance (Plate XX) and the Alpine Stream, marvellous in their freshness of colour, the vigour and delicacy of their washes, and full of poetical suggestion and pictorial enchantment. The old war-horse no doubt regretted that his patrons would give him no opportunities to elaborate these wonderful sketches—for the distinction which modern criticism has obliterated between a sketch and a “finished” drawing was ingrained in Turner’s mind—but we cannot share these regrets. ”

“ An excellent reproduction in colour of this impressive drawing was published in “The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours” (The Studio, 1918) . Cozens was the first English artist to suggest in his drawings something of the grandeur and beauty of the Alps. A Swiss Valley (Plate XXVII) is one of his finest drawings of this kind. It owes much of its dramatic effect to its magnificently designed sky, which is as daring as it is original. The scene represented is probably in the Splügen Pass. ”

“ Mr. Fawkes bought Turner’s large drawing of Scarborough which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811 (there is a repetition of this drawing in the Wallace Collection) . But by 1818, when Mr. Morland Agnew’s lovely drawing was made, Turner’s style had changed. The earlier “Scarborough” is reserved and stately in design, but its breadth verges on emptiness. It is as though the artist was a little afraid of nature and was determined to keep her at arm’s length, for fear of offending the shades of Poussin, Claude and the other great old masters. ”

“ And as no man stands alone—not even the greatest of geniuses—the educational value of this array of masterpieces was increased by a fine display of the works of those English water-colour painters who had been born and had worked before Turner, and of his contemporaries. ”

“ It need not arise from a selfish preoccupation with what these immense realities involve for our own persons, or may be used to suggest to our self-indulgent fancy. No, the poetry of nature may be discerned merely by the power of intuition which it awakens and the understanding which it employs. ”

“ The naturalistic poet abandons fairyland, because he has discovered nature, history, the actual passions of man. His imagination has reached maturity.”
By the time the Valley of the Washburne and Scarborough drawings were made Turner’s imagination had reached its maturity. In much of his work done after this period one misses something of the earlier freshness, spontaneity, and what, for want of a better word, I must call “integrity.”{14}
These shortcomings are most noticeable in his large oil paintings. ”

“ So understood, nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as well as sensuous variety. Before the sublimity of this insight, all forms of the pathetic fallacy seem cheap and artificial. Mythology, that to a childish mind is the only possible poetry, sounds like bad rhetoric in comparison. ”

“ This was only another instance of our national good luck in finding that private enterprise and initiative so often step in and perform work of public importance which our Government is too stupid or too supine to perform. ”

“ Dayes, for all his cleverness and skill, was not as likeable a man as Sandby.{23} He seems to have been deficient in geniality, generosity and sympathy. These defects of character show in his work. He often seems bored and ill at ease with his subjects; he was seldom if ever capable of taking the delight and interest in a scene which Sandby took in his Edmonton drawing. There is a certain coldness, not only of colour and effect, but of interest in this Norwich Cathedral drawing. ”

“ A drawing like this proves—what nobody should ever doubt—that an artist may be a realist and also a poet.
The late Mr. Francis Bullard has drawn attention (in a privately printed catalogue of some of Turner’s engravings which he generously presented to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) to some valuable remarks by Mr. Santayana on the subject of naturalism in poetry which apply with so much force to Turner’s realism that I will venture to quote them. After pointing out that our interest in nature need not necessarily be shallow and egotistical, Mr. Santayana writes: “Our emotion may be ingenuous ”

“ These are all comparatively early drawings of Prout, done before he turned foreign tourist and became a fashionable drawing-master. His later manner is exemplified by two pleasing drawings of architectural{29} “bits” in Normandy (113 and 119) . The touch is still clumsy, but it has become systematized, and something of the old sincerity seems to have gone.
John Varley (1778-1842) is an attractive figure in the history of English water-colour painting, but his work rarely seems quite worthy of his obvious powers. Perhaps he did too much. ”

“ His latest drawing, Rouen (Plate XXXV) , belongs to the period when he was influenced by, and attempted to rival, Turner’s brilliance of colour. The design is firmly built up, but the absence of emphasis gives it rather an academic air. For once Cotman has abandoned his usual method of painting. The effect of light and brilliance is obtained by an extensive use of the knife or razor over all the sky and distance, and some of the foreground. I do not remember having seen any other drawing by Cotman in which the knife has been so freely used. ”

“ He delights in the sheer loveliness and infinite variety of English scenery. His manner of painting has become more sensitive and refined, to enable him to render the subtle qualities of form and atmosphere. ”

“ Less moving, less dramatic, are the two Roman views. In the Farnesina Gardens (Plate XXVIII) is a pensive sylvan scene of great elegance and charm. The Villa Negroni (Plate XXIX) is a wonderfully fascinating and original design with its noble group of pines and cypresses silhouetted against the sky. In the foreground we get the brow of the hill on which the trees are standing, with sheep feeding near an ancient statue; the ruins on the left, in the middle distance in the plain below, are fragments of the Claudian Aqueduct, those on the right are some of the Neronian arches. ”

“ They never suggest “work.” They always look as though the artist were just enjoying himself by putting down on the paper, without any effort whatever, the thoughts which had taken possession of his mind.
I do not know why this drawing was not “carried on,” as Turner would have expressed it. There is a superb and completely finished water-colour of a very similar view of the banks of the Washburne in the Farnley Hall collection, so perhaps Mr. Fawkes did not want another drawing of quite the same subject. ”

“ It is this untraceable, unconnected, yet perpetual form—this fulness of character absorbed in the universal energy—which distinguishes Nature and Turner from all their imitators. To roll a volume of smoke before the wind, to indicate motion or violence by monotonous similarity of line and direction, is for the multitude ”

“ It is slighter and more summary than the Mountain Stream, being worked with a few simple washes put on at once with unerring skill and knowledge. This masterly little sketch was erroneously ascribed to Alexander Cozens in the catalogue; though why, I cannot imagine, as it does not bear the faintest resemblance to that artist’s style. But the mistake was productive of an incident which caused considerable amusement amongst students of Turner’s works. The art critic of one of the leading London papers happens to be a superior person who finds Turner too “vulgar” for his refined taste. ”

“ I believe an artist can only draw and paint well the scenes of his native country; but Roberts’s public was bored with English and Scottish views, and very much preferred his Spanish and Eastern subjects. Roberts was at Granada in February 1833, when the picturesque street scene here reproduced (Plate XLIII) must have been drawn.
We have now finished our review of the large group of works by Turner’s contemporaries which was included in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition. ”

“ Work has become low, plebeian; only the groundlings work; the really superior person has a private income (or his wife has) and devotes himself to doing things which will benefit humanity at large in the dim and distant future. ”

“ The early topographical draughtsmen whom Turner first set out to imitate and rival, were represented by Paul Sandby’s The Swan Inn, Edmonton (Plate XXV) , Thomas Hearne’s Thaxted Church, Essex, Thomas Malton Junior’s two quaint views of Bath, and many other drawings, mostly in the “stained” manner, by Wheatley, J. I. Richards, Ibbetson, William Payne, Dayes and others. Richard Wilson, the chief influence in directing Turner’s genius to imaginative design, was perforce unrepresented, as he does not seem to have worked in water-colour ”

“ Indeed it is incorrect to call these drawings copies; they are nothing more than exercises in laying washes and inventing systems of light and shade,{24} based upon Cozens’s work. Their mode of production and purpose may be thus described: the outlines were first drawn in pencil with bold, firm strokes, by a careless and free hand, which bears remarkable resemblances to that of Girtin. These outlines must have been done direct from Cozens’s drawings, but what was done afterwards seems to have been done without reference of any kind to them. ”

“ It is stated in the text of Hakewill’s book that the view of Florence from Fiesole was “taken from the garden of the Franciscan convent at Fiesole,” but Mr. Ruskin has pointed out that the little bend of wall within which some monks are standing in the foreground on the left is not really a part of the Franciscan garden, but is one of the turns of the road in the ascent to Fiesole.
Mr. Ruskin regarded the Turin, from the Superga as one of his “very chiefly valued possessions.” And well he might. It is indeed a most exquisite and delightful piece of work. ”

“ Water-Colour Society. There is little evidence of Turner’s influence in the works of Wimperis and Collier.{31} It would be more accurate to describe these artists as the successors of De Wint than of Turner. They carried on the De Wint tradition of healthy realism and freely handled washes with great success; yet each artist preserves his individuality, and their works are steadily increasing in value. The fine drawing of Beeston Castle by Collier (Plate XLIV) is an excellent specimen of his spirited and truthful work. ”

“ The composition is too crowded for Girtin, and the drawing and painting of the{27} cathedral are quite unlike Girtin’s treatment of architecture. I cannot but feel that this attribution to Girtin was made without proper consideration. Yet the drawing is a fine one, and it is evidently the work of a gifted and accomplished artist. In my opinion it is much more probably the work of Peter De Wint than of Girtin. De Wint spent a good deal of time at Lincoln, at first as a visitor to William Hilton, his fellow-apprentice at J. R. Smith’s. Hilton’s sister afterwards became De Wint’s wife. ”