J.M.W. Turner

“ Ruskin, who might have helped so much, has contributed little to the life of the artist but some brilliant passages of pathetic rhetoric. Overgrown by his luxuriant eloquence, and buried beneath the débris of Thornbury, the ruins of Turner’s Life lay hidden till last year.
Mr. Hamerton’s “Life of Turner” has done much to remove a very serious blot from English literature. Very careful, but very frank, it presents a clear and consistent view of the great painter and his art, and is, moreover, penetrated with that intellectual insight and refined thought which illuminate all its author’s work. ”

“ There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush and now receded from. 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.”
We have spoken of Turner as declining as an artist, but we are not sure that he did so till about 1845, when, Mr. Ruskin says, “his health, and with it in great degree his mind, failed suddenly.” ”

“ What verses of what poet, what episode of history may have been in the artist’s mind is of little consequence, when the thought is expressed in the same terms of infinite sunny distance, crumbling ruin and towering tree. The artist may have meant to embody the whole of Byron’s mind in the Childe Harold, the history of Italy in Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, the folly of life in Apollo and the Sibyl, but it does not matter now, the things are “Turners,” neither more nor less; we doubt very much whether Turner cared greatly for the particular stories attached to many of his pictures. ”

“ If you only knew the good your peacock's feathers have done me, and if you could only see the clever drawing I'm making of one from the blue breast! You know what lovely little fern or equisetum stalks of sapphire the filaments are; they beat me so, but they're coming nice.
That is so intensely true what you say about Turner's work being like nature's in its slowness and tenderness. I always think of him as a great natural force in a human frame. ”

“ Yet, while at a first view this distinction between Turner as a man and Turner as an artist seems complete, further study shows that the man had a great and often a fatal influence on the artist, and that this was not without reaction both serious and deep, and so we find that his art and himself are no more to be divided in any human view of him than were his body and his soul when he was yet alive. ”

“ Jason daring the huge glittering serpent, Syrinx fleeing from Pan, Cephalus and Procris, Æsacus and Hesperie, Glaucus and Scylla, Narcissus and Echo; if we want to know the artists he most admired and imitated, or the places to which he had been, we shall find easily nearly all the former, and sufficient of the latter to show the wide range of his travel. In a word, one who has carefully studied the “Liber” had indeed little to learn of the range and power of Turner’s art and mind, except his colour and his fatalism. ”

“ They form the true centre of his artistic life, the point at which his desire for the simple truth and the imperious demands of his imagination were most nearly balanced.
In 1821 and 1824 Turner exhibited no pictures at the Royal Academy, and it would have been no loss to his fame if his pictures of 1820 and 1822, Rome, from the Vatican, and What you will, had never left his studio; but in 1823 he astonished the world with the first of those magnificent dreams of landscape loveliness with which his name will always be specially associated;—The Say of Baiæ with Apollo and the Sibyl (1823) . ”

“ Opinions are divided, as usual, as to the truthfulness of his art to the spirit of French scenery, and a comparison between The Light-towers of the Hève in our woodcut, and the drawing which he made on the spot (now in the National Gallery) will show how greatly his imagination altered the literal facts of a scene. One who has patiently followed his footsteps in many parts of England and on the Continent testifies to the puzzling effects of Turner’s imaginative records. ”

“ Maiden Lane is not a very brilliant thoroughfare, and was still narrower and darker at this time, but still this picture, though doubtless accurate, seems to make it still darker, and in the engraving of the house in Thornbury’s life of Turner, even the front window that looked into Maiden Lane is rendered ominously black by the shadow of a watchman thrown up by his low-held lantern. To us it seems that there is plenty of dark in Turner’s life without thus unduly heightening the gloom of his first dwelling-place. ”

“ At all events, the degree of his secretiveness is extraordinary. “I knew him,” says an old architect, “when a boy, and have often paid him a guinea for putting backgrounds to my architectural drawings, calling upon him for this purpose at his father’s shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He never would suffer me to see him draw, but concealed, as I understood, all that he did in his bedroom.” When in this bedroom one morning, the door suddenly opened, and Mr. Britton entered. [10] In an instant Turner covered up his drawings and ran to bar the crafty intruder’s progress. ”

“ Mr. W. G. Rawlinson's volume is the authority on the Liber, wherein Turner sought to 'display in engraved form the whole range of his powers, and to rival on their own ground his predecessors —Claude, Poussin, Rembrandt, Backhuysen, Cuyp, Van de Velde, Wilson, Gainsborough, as well as the painters of his day.' Turner made a hundred or more sepia drawings for the work, eighty-four of which are in the Turner Collection at Millbank. ”

“ He worked with his eyes, hand, and spirit: he was Nature's lover. It is certain, too, that after the first irritation felt by his contemporaries at some of the wilder works of Turner's later years had cooled, his fame would have steadily increased, and would have been as high as it is to-day, had Modern Painters never been written.
Plate XXXVI. The Seelisberg—Moonlight. Water colour (about1843) In the collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq. (Size, 11 x 9)
Neither that wonderful book, nor any other book, could serve Turner. ”

“ But the voice that was raised so late in his honour did not die, its vibrations have lasted from that day to this; and if the champion himself seems to be in some need of a defender now, if mouths that once were full of his praise are silent or raised only for the most part to depreciate, it is only what came to Turner and what comes to all who use their imagination too freely to enforce their convictions. A time must come when the spirit of analysis will eat into the most brilliant rhetoric ”

“ Turner, we are in Venice now.”
Unfortunately the brave young champion was too late, the eloquent voice that could translate into such glowing words the dumb poetry of Turner’s pictures had scarcely made the air of England thrill with its musical enthusiasm when black night fell upon the artist. The sudden snapping of some vital chord, of which that same Graduate of Oxford only last year pathetically wrote, took place, and the glorious sun of his genius disappeared without any twilight; he was dead as an artist, and dying as a man. Neither his work nor his life could be defended any more. ”

“ We cannot connect him with John Ruskin's family, any more than we can connect the Ruskins of Dalton-in-Furness in the sixteenth century; but this identity of name suggests that they may have been ancestors. It is a problem which can only be solved by research, but it should be possible, if one had time and money to work out the pedigree from wills and registers.
Turner was his real teacher in seafaring matters, giving him, if nothing more, a true interest in the look of waves and ships. ”

“ Turner determined to print and publish and sell the “Liber” himself, but to employ an engraver. His first choice fell on “Mr. F. C. Lewis, the best aquatint engraver of the day, who at the very time was at work on facsimiles of Claude’s drawings.” [23] With him he soon quarrelled. The terms were, that Turner was to etch and Lewis to aquatint at five guineas a plate. The first plate, Bridge and Goats, was finished and accepted by Turner, though not published till April, 1812 ”

“ So died the great solitary genius, Turner, the first of all men to endeavour to paint the full power of the sun, the greatest imagination that ever sought expression in landscape, the greatest pictorial interpreter of the elemental forces of nature, that ever lived. His life, and character, and art, complex as they were in their manifestation, were as simple in motive as those of the most ordinary man. Art, fame, and money were what he strived for from the beginning to the end of his days, and those days were embittered at the end by fallacies of hope with regard to all three. ”

“ His constant fault, and, as we think, an inexcusable one, is the careless drawing of his figures. It is not an excuse to say that they must not be painted so as to draw attention from the landscape; first, because Turner in his earlier pictures showed that he could introduce well-finished figures without doing this; and secondly, because Turner’s figures in his later pictures do this by their badness. This carelessness gradually grew on him, because he would not take pains with them. He could draw very small figures very well, giving more spirit and essence than any other artist, in a touch. ”

“ They are not from Callimachus, as asserted in the catalogue, but a jumble of the descriptions of two of Ovid’s dragons, the Python, and Cadmus’s tremendous worm, and are just the peculiar mixture of Ovid, Milton, Thomson, Pope, and the quotations in Royal Academy Catalogues, out of which he formed his poetical style. The Turneresque style of poetry is in fact formed very much in the same way as the Turneresque style of landscape, but the result is not so satisfactory. It required a totally different kind of brain machinery from that which Turner possessed. ”

“ FHE the facts of the foregoing chapter it may be fairly presumed that although Turner’s election as Associate in 1799 followed quickly after his fine display of pictures from the northern counties in 1798, he was before this a marked man, whose superiority over all then living landscape painters was visible to critics and lovers of art, and could not have been disguised from the eyes of the artists of the Royal Academy. It did not require a genius like that of Turner to distance competitors on the Academy walls in those days. England was almost at its lowest point both in literature and art. ”

“ THE appearance of Turner’s genius in this world is not to be accounted for by any known facts. Given his father and his mother, his grandfather and grandmother, on the father’s side, which is all we know of his ancestry, given the date of his birth, even though that was the 23rd April (St. George’s day, as has been so childishly insisted on) , 1775, there seems to be positively no reason why William Turner, barber, of 26, Maiden Lane, opposite the Cider Cellar, in the parish of St. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After looking carefully at all the ascertainable facts of Turner’s youth, we can only come to the conclusion that it was not the fault of nature or mankind that he grew into a solitary and disappointed man.
Secretiveness on his own part and want of trust in his fellow-creatures seem to have been bred in him, and to have resisted all the many proofs which the friends of his youth, and we may say of his life, afforded, that there were kind and unselfish persons in the world whom he could trust, and who would trust him. ”

“ On the opposite wall was a picture, by Jones, of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace. [41] “A coal,” said Cooper, “has bounced across the room from Jones’s picture, and set fire to Turner’s sea.” The great man did not come into the room for a day and a half; and then in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.” [42]
This daub of red lead was rather defensive than offensive, and there is no story of Turner which shows any malice in his nature. ”

“ That this applies to all his drawings we do not say, but we are confident that it does to most. Many of his drawings for the “England and Wales” were probably taken from sketches that had lain in his portfolios for years, and were dressed up by him when wanted, with such accessories of storm and rainbow as occurred to his fancy, or to his memory and feelings as connected with the spot. There is, we think, no doubt that Turner strove to be conscientious; but his conscience was a “pictorial” conscience, and no man can judge him. ”

“ The task would be rendered lighter, if not more agreeable, if we were frankly to accept the principle of a dual nature, and cutting up our subject into halves, treat Turner the artist and Turner the man as two separate beings ”

“ 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. ”