C. Lewis Hind

“ Really it seemed as if art had become popular. The shell of Anglo-Saxon reserve was broken, and comments of amazement and delight were uttered aloud at the shimmering light of the sunrise series; at the pale beauty of the yachting pictures; at the loveliness of 'The Evening Star' nocturne; at the Monticellian orgy of colour in the 'Interior at Petworth'; at those irresistible final efforts of his imagination, coherent if extravagant, the 'Sunrise with a Sea Monster,' and 'The Burning of the Ships.'
Unfinished? A work of art is finished when the artist has said all he has to say. ”

“ Turner lived outside the world—in his dreamland. When the buoyancy of youth had passed; when 'dad' was dead, he grew more morose, more untidy and more exclusive, but his dream did not change. No! it became more mystical, more subtle, more unrealisable to his ageing eyes. Was he not in dreamland on that Varnishing Day of the Royal Academy of 1846 when George Parrott made a humorous sketch of him. There were four varnishing days in those halcyon times, and it was Turner's habit to send in his pictures merely laid in with white and grey, and to finish them on the walls. ”

“ The boy was taken periodically, for education and pleasure, to the National Gallery, and as he was led through the various rooms astonishment passed into bewilderment. The mixed art of the world was far too complex for the boy's unfolded mind. The clash of personalities, the astonishing divergencies of the various schools of painting confused and distracted him, and only when he entered the Turner room (now dismantled) , and was told, what he had already dimly divined, that the pictures crowded on those four walls were all by one man, did he find rest for his soul. ”

“ Tate Gallery
'I think the blue sea breaking gently on the sandy shore is one of the most perfect of Turner's visions of Italy. The little jetty, the fishing boats, the castle, and the volcanic hill thickly wooded and piled ridge beyond ridge as they pale into the haze are all most splendidly painted; the ruins half hidden in vines and long trailing creepers are well done and take their places in the scheme. There are thin rich glazes and strong yellows in the foreground and two very conventional stone pines, which throw a mos unnatural dark shadow right across the foreground. ”

“ The young chief had advanced; he had been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy; he had removed from dingy Hand Court to decorous Harley Street; and he was about to make the acquaintance of Mr. Walter Fawkes, the squire of Farnley Hall, near Leeds, which was to mean so much to him; but he was not yet a triumphant master. Only in his water-colours has he begun to show glimmerings of his golden visions. In oil he is studying detail rather than light; he is pondering over masses looming in dim airless spaces; he has not even yet begun to see the ethereal manifestations of his maturity. ”

“ One of the drawings rises before me as I write, a late one done a few years before his death, that exquisite 'Study on the Rhine,' body colour on grey paper, in the collection of Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence. I have no words to describe this wonder of misty blue and gold, with the moon riding in a sky charged with the mystery of essential colour. We are all, like Ruskin, extravagant at times in speaking and writing of the finest work of Turner. ”

“ I do not think that Turner ever thought seriously about matrimony. His art was his mistress, and to his art to his dying day he was loyal, to the sacrifice of everything else. And he was loyal in his way—or shall I say faithful in his way—to Hannah Danby, who entered his service in 1800 or 1801, a girl of sixteen; who was housekeeper in Queen Anne Street through his long life; and who, in the end, when he had done all his great work, found him dying in hiding as Mr. Booth, 'husband' of Mrs. Booth, in the little house at Chelsea overlooking the river. ”

“ Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat and old age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every pin's head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale.'
There is nothing sad in that; but who can look at or recall that 'grey, dim drawing, with one or two specks of light from craft on the river,' called 'Twilight in the Lorreli,' without emotion? This was one of the fifty-three drawings that Turner had brought years before straight to Farnley on his return from the Rhine. ”

“ Incline your head a little to the right, and there is 'A Ship Aground,' with the tugging movement of shallow water, the reflections and the gleams portrayed with equal skill. Then turn your eyes still further to the right, and there is 'Rain, Steam, and Speed' and the 'Burial of Wilkie.' For some reason or another—the red walls, or the wonderful lighting of the gallery, or the flame of Turner that in this year of his triumph spiritualises our perceptions—these pictures seem to have taken on more delicate delicacies of eolour, new intricacies of vision. ”

“ He has trained himself; he has fought his rivals, and, perhaps with the exception of Claude, has beaten them all on their own ground. [Pg 119] He has expressed himself in the luminous atmosphere of 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour'; in the hoar-frost sparkle of 'The Frosty Morning'; in the cool blues and greys of 'Crossing the Brook,' and in the splendour of 'Dido Building Carthage.' In water-colour he has advanced from the formalism of the early tinted drawings to the restrained beauty of the Southern Coast and the accomplishment of the Richmondshire series. ”

“ Venice, 'the last home of his imagination,' if we exclude the mountains of Switzerland, and the Thames of England, where he found his final solace, begins to inspire his brush, but not the visionary Venice that he was to evolve later, visions of colour and light which seem to be floating from sight even as we look at them. First the spade work—that was Turner's way. ”

“ Think of it—sixty-three, and wilder, more revolutionary, more indifferent to convention than a hot-headed youth of twenty-three. 'He paints white sails or buildings up against a sunset, which is a thing impossible.' He disregards drawing and form, and squeezes features 'together into one corner of a face, slanting diagonally across it like handwriting' ... True.
But the magician conquered, not through these wildnesses, but in spite of them. Even when most extravagant, there is enough of the essential Turner to make the picture great. ”

“ The sails of the steamship are dark against the evening sky, as if in mourning, and amidships, in a blaze of torchlight, the body of Wilkie is being lowered to his watery grave. Stanfield, who saw the picture on Varnishing Day, thought the effect of the sails was 'untrue,' which, of course, they are, but Turner would not alter them. 'I only wish I had any colour to make them blacker,' said the old warrior. ”

“ Wyllie describes this procession of dancing girls, madly throwing a white Cupid into the air and pirouetting, as woven into a bewildering maze of light and colour.
'Drawing is neglected, and the most audacious expedients resorted to, increasing the brilliancy and the movement of the throng. Some of the faces are white with vermilion shadows. The head of Demosthenes is twisted out of all likeness to human form. In fact everything is sacrificed to colour.'
Never has Turner been so wilful as he is now at the age of sixty-three. ”

“ He knows that Turner was neither saint nor sinner, but a queer-tempered man, with bursts of humour and geniality, and a thirst for knowledge; a man of genius with a dwarfed nature, uneducated, who in art moved easily among great things, and who, try as he would, and he did try, could hardly touch the hem of the garment of great things outside his art ”

“ He stands upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the universe of God, and forward over the generations of men. Let every work of his hand be a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each exertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy; adoration to the Deity, revelation to mankind.'
That is Ruskin at his finest: here is Turner at his—well, as Turner. ”

“ A CRITIC IS CRITICAL, AND A PAINTER IS ENTHUSIASTIC
'Waft me to sunny Baiæ's shore' wrote Turner in the Fallacies of Hope, one of the simple lines, a line that it was quite permissible to print in the catalogue of the Academy of 1823 against his much discussed, much criticised, and much loved 'Bay of Baiæ.' The picture indeed wafts us to Baiæ, one of the most beautiful spots in Italy, and we are content with its beauty if we neglect the pines, their heavy shadows, and the figures of Apollo and the Cumæan Sibyl posing in the shade. ”

“ It is a fantasy of colour and atmosphere. To look closely is to see clouds of smoke rising from distant ships, with suggestions of an arch and buildings, and galleys crowded with rowers; but Turner was beyond form and definition when he painted 'The Burning of the Ships'; he saw only the effect of the fire and the fury, lingering with much loveliness in light. ”

“ But by that time he had learnt [Pg 6] that the true artist is not a copyist of nature, that he states his vision, the effect not the fact. This 'View of Orvieto' remained enshrined in his heart. To him as a boy it was Italy, and Italy never really meant anything else to his young intelligence, just Turner's vision of Orvieto, a golden town on a golden hill under a summer sky; a place where the sun always shines and where there are little white roads leading he cared not whither, because they all led to somewhere in Italy. This is the joy of the artist, a joy that often he never hears of. ”

“ This blackening of pictures should be an anxiety to all serious painters. Ruskin really did a great service to Turner, perhaps even greater than the publication of Modern Painters, when he rolled up the 'unfinished' oils and water-colours and deposited them in the cellars of the National Gallery. Our new joy in Turner, the rush of admiration and veneration that came when those golden visions were exhibited in 1906, could never have been had not they been protected from the light for so many years: then, suddenly, to reveal their splendour. ”

“ Among the few was honest, plain-spoken John Constable, who said of Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy of 1828, which were so unlike his own practical art: 'Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures.' Yet in that year the tale of Turner's golden visions had hardly begun to be told. He was to go on simplifying and simplifying, until modelling became subordinated to colour, and the forms and shapes of things became lost in the effulgence of light. ”

“ In The Harbours of England, the handling is still a little hard, and he does not always escape from the thrall of convention; but there is beauty in the white towers of 'Dover Castle,' rising up from the golden sward; in the rainbow arching over 'The Medway'; in the splendid theatricality of 'North Shields,' with a huge white moon riding in an excited blue sky, and in the golden loveliness of 'Scarborough Castle.'
In 'Totnes on the Dart,' in The Rivers of England, he has almost discarded the foreground muddle and allows himself merely one boat, and a group of water birds. ”

“ Many of us have happy, very happy, memories of days spent among the Turner water-colours in the National Gallery, where they seemed more at home in those little rooms on the ground floor than in their august abode at Millbank. It was an experience [Pg 133] to turn (with 'Calais Pier' and the other dark pictures fresh in the mind) to such lyrical moments as the four sketches of 'Evening at Petworth Park,' to such wonders as 'Ehrenbreitstein,' 'Bellinzona,' 'The Bridge on Moselle at Coblenz,' and the 'Rigi from Lucerne.' But I am again anticipating. ”

“ What did Constable think of the Turner exhibited next year, that magnificent riot of the imagination, 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'?
It was probably during his second visit to Italy that he made the slight and lovely 'Sketch of an Italian Town,' now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This, like the 'Orvieto,' is essential Italy. Rarely has the feeling of an Italian hill town been given with such intimacy of observation, just as it looks, a moment snatched and recorded, artlessly, but with great art. ”

“ Bay with Figures' to the 'Glaucus and Scylla,' which was never published, and the 'Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay,' to the 'Solitude.' Turner, of course, gave no title to these suggestions of colour and atmosphere, and he did not exhibit them. It is only literary pictures that require titles or descriptions. In one, the sun has risen behind a mist-shrouded castle on a bay; in the other, sunrays gleam through a natural arch and light the deep green sea. Greek galleys are moored in the bay and drawn up on the shore. A man with outstretched arms may be dimly seen haranguing a group of sailors. ”

“ Was there ever such a life of industrious and progressive work? It began when he was a mere boy, in the dark court off Maiden Lane near the Strand; the long, laborious, loving effort ended only with the end, that furtive, fugitive end when, tired of man and his ways, the old, self-sufficient painter [Pg 8] disappeared from his haunts and his friends, and under the assumed name of Mr. Booth, the sun his master, the river his companion, met death in a little balconied house overlooking the Thames at Chelsea. ”