Nat Turner

“ The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, in the prison where he was confined, and acknowledged by him to be such when read before the Court of Southampton; with the certificate, under seal, of the Court convened at Jerusalem, November 5, 1831, for his trial. ”

“ Hark got a ladder and set it against the chimney, on which I ascended, and hoisting a window, entered and came down stairs, unbarred the door, and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master's chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. ”

“ Knowing, however, that smoke would attract the attention of the white men, they determined to leave it on their left, and to take shelter amongst the bushes in the thicker part of the wood, being certain that they could not outstrip their pursuers before they came to the open ground. Signals were agreed upon; Nat Turner, who, according to his account, was perfectly calm and confident, laid himself down at the foot of the tree where I had found him, and the rest concealed themselves in the thick bushes. ”

“ But the reason of my return was, that the Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of Heaven, and that I should return to the service of my earthly master—"For he who knoweth his Master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes, and thus have I chastened you." And the negroes found fault, and murmurred against me, saying that if they had my sense they would not serve any master in the world. ”

“ Sir,—You have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection, as you call it—To do so I must go back to the days of my infancy, and even before I was born. I was thirty-one years of age the 2d of October last, and born the property of Benj. Turner, of this county. In my childhood a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind, and laid the ground work of that enthusiasm, which has terminated so fatally to many, both white and black, and for which I am about to atone at the gallows. ”

“ A few nights after, two negroes having started to go hunting with the same dog, and passed that way, the dog came again to the place, and having just gone out to walk about, discovered me and barked, on which thinking myself discovered, I spoke to them to beg concealment. On making myself known they fled from me. Knowing then they would betray me, I immediately left my hiding place, and was pursued almost incessantly until I was taken a fortnight afterwards by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, in a little hole I had dug out with my sword, for the purpose of concealment, under the top of a fallen tree. ”

“ And about this time I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams—and I heard a voice saying, "Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it." ”

“ And my father and mother strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they had always thought from certain marks on my head and breast— [a parcel of excrescences which I believe are not at all uncommon, particularly among negroes, as I have seen several with the same. ”

“ Escaping thence, each individual sought his own safety either in concealment, or by returning home, with the hope that his participation might escape detection, and all were shot down in the course of a few days, or captured and brought to trial and punishment. Nat has survived all his followers, and the gallows will speedily close his career. His own account of the conspiracy is submitted to the public, without comment. It reads an awful, and it is hoped, a useful lesson, as to the operations of a mind like his, endeavoring to grapple with things beyond its reach. ”

“ They included the 'Snowstorm, Avalanche and Inundation,' described as a 'tumult of cloud, wind and raging torrent in the gorge,' the sketch for which he had made on his way to Italy with Munro of Novar; and the 'Departure of Regulus,' which Ruskin included among the 'nonsense pictures.'
Troubles begin to gather about him. Nothing will go right. The beautiful England and Wales series had been received with so little favour that it was decided to discontinue the issue. The stock was put up for auction, but Turner opened negotiations and purchased the whole privately for three thousand pounds. ”

“ So passed the greatest of all landscape painters, weary of men and of orthodox ways, an old man tired of the fret of life, but not tired of nature, an enthusiast to the end in his study of light and its brother colour, and all phenomena, that which is plain to the eyes, and that which hides. Sentiment was in heyday in 1851, and so David Bogue, who made the picture of the 'house where Turner died, sent a ray of sunlight streaming down to the Chelsea room by the river, as if a parent were smiling on a loving and life-loyal child. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What would they have said had they known that Ruskin, the champion of Turner, the foe of Impressionism, when, in 1856, he sifted the nineteen thousand Turner water-colours, drawings, studies, and the "unfinished" paintings, had condemned the sunshine and atmosphere canvases now in the Tate Gallery to half a century of obscurity, because in his opinion they were "unfinished." Turner purposely left them unfinished and elusive as sunrise itself, momentary impressions of the glory of the world. The sun is new each day, ever uncompleted: so are these records of the flame of Turner. ”

“ The horses were studied from the friendly steed 'Crop-ear,' somewhat stiff in the fore-legs, which Turner used to drive about the country when he was staying at Sandycombe. The young Trimmers said [Pg 99] that Turner painted faster than he drove, and Thornbury remarked that he could never draw a horse; but I am sure that he could paint a hoar-frost at sunrise. And if this picture had been happily rolled up and kept in the cellars of the National Gallery with the other sunrise pictures, we might to-day still be enjoying Turner's sparkling vision of hoar-frost. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Landscape might be classically beautiful according to Claude, classically sublime according to Salvator, homely and mildly sunny according to Cuyp, conventionally maritime according to Vandevelde. Turner as a youth was not the man to break tradition. The cunning tradesman in him preferred the well-beaten path. It was his destiny to compete against the popular idols in turn, to sweep past them to Nature herself, and so onwards and upwards to the sun, the source of all light and colour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the boy, who loved the view of 'Orvieto' more than any picture he had ever seen, began to study Turner's art life he amused and confused himself by dividing it, as all his biographers have done, into periods. These he simplified into two broad divisions, first when this ever-ambitious painter pitted himself against his predecessors and contemporaries, and later when, entirely disregarding the works of man, he faced Nature, and challenged nothing less than the source of all light and colour—the sun.
Turner's art life shows no sudden rush of genius. ”

“ Of our many gifted, enthusiastic, and eloquent men, few have been more favored by nature than Henry M. Turner. A native of South Carolina, he seems to have the genius and fire of the Calhouns and McDuffies, without possessing a drop of their blood. Mr. Turner is a good-sized, fine-looking, brown-skinned man, of forty years of age, with a splendid voice, fluent in speech, pleasing in gestures, and powerful in his delivery. It is said that at the tender age of twelve, he had a dream in which he saw multitudes of men coming to him to be taught. ”

“ The rare moment in life has come when criticism is disarmed. Suddenly, and without warning, the observer has been transported to the realms of enchantment.'
It was, perhaps, unfortunate that mingled with these 'unfinished' Turners, these prismatic and pearly visions, these flushes of iridescent colour on white grounds, were some of the laboured but magnificent failures of his later years and other periods. Those who did not know the work of Turner thoroughly had some difficulty in harmonising the brilliant impulses of his maturity with the ambitious works of his decline. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among Turner's strongest passions were his love of fame and his love of money, but the strongest of all was his love of nature. He studied her every day, early and late, throughout his life. On his tours, on foot, on sea, or in the coach, in England, Scotland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy, he was constantly at work, noting as he went, in swift pencil outline, all he thought worthy of memory; and his memory was equal to his industry. No mind was ever so stored with impressions of nature or was so able to weave them at will into visions of beauty. ”

“ That is a happy glimpse of Turner the boy, and with that I leave his boyhood. He has just had a drawing exhibited at the Royal Academy; he is advancing towards proficiency in water-colour, his first and his last love; but not yet has he reached the 'golden simplicity' that Girtin realised, nor the 'silver sweetness' of Cozens.
[Pg 34]
CHAPTER VII 1795: AGED TWENTY
THE DRAWINGS OF 'THE INGENIUS MR. TURNER' ARE STATED BY A NEWSPAPER OF THE DAY TO BE 'TINCTURED WITH TRUTH AND FIDELITY' Five years have passed. Turner is now twenty. We will glance back and see how he has fared. ”

“ Yet it is a picture of which one becomes fond. Who can but be entranced by the distance, Turner's sign mark, the open gate that lures us away from the troubled foreground of the world.
I turn from the sanity of "Crossing the Brook" to the right wall, and straightway I am elated, it is always so, at the sight of one of the magnificent dreams that the old Wizard forced oil [Pg 47] paint and brushes to portray. In the centre of the wall hangs "Ulysses and Polyphemus."
The furnace doors are open, from them stream a fury of glow, and in the fire are the dazzling shapes of Turnerian romance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Scanning the plate with his eagle eye, Turner asked ‘Who did this plate, my boy?’ ‘Mr. Cooke, sir,’ answered Saddler, to which Turner replied, ‘Go and tell your master he is bringing you on very nicely, especially in lying.’ Later on he engraved the vessels in the plate of Turner's ‘Fighting Téméraire,’ the sky of which was the joint production of R. Dickens and J. T. Willmore, A.R.A., and he used to say that Turner took a keener interest in the engraving of this than of any others of his works. ”

“ 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. ”