Turner

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am fond of standing by a bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the crowd,—‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’ ‘Don’t it hurt your eyes?’—expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking the sun full in the face with the most perfect comfort and entire facility of vision. It is curious after hearing people malign some of Turner’s noble passages of light to pass to some really ungrammatical and false pictures of the old masters in which we have color given without light. ”

“ One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner’s landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist nor the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory—but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What Turner might have done for us, had he received help and love, instead of disdain, I can hardly trust myself to imagine. Increasing calmly in power and loveliness, his work would have formed one mighty series of poems, each great as that which I have interpreted,—the Hesperides; but becoming brighter and kinder as he advanced to happy age. Soft as Correggio’s, solemn as Titian’s, the enchanted color would have glowed, imperishable and pure; and the subtle thoughts risen into loftiest teaching, helpful for centuries to come. ”

“ You must like Turner as soon as you see landscape completely. His affectations—or prejudices, I do not wish or expect you to like—any more than I should have expected him to like roses drawn like truffles. ”

“ 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 have told you truly what Turner was. You have often heard what to most people he appeared to be. Imagine what it was for a man to live seventy years in this hard world, with the kindest heart, and the noblest intellect of his time, and never to meet with a single word or ray of sympathy, until he felt himself sinking into the grave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turner, or to thank him for the ride or the bouquet of branches or even the geranium slips which she had received under false pretenses, she hurried away to her room, oppressed with Heaven only knows what mortification, and also with what wonder at the ways of men! ”

“ Turner did this with scientific accuracy, not because he was himself learned in science, but because of his genius for seeing into the heart of things and seizing their essential form and character, and that is what is meant by saying “Turner’s landscape is ideal,” and that is why he is the great impressionist he is. His pictures are of scenes not as any one might gather, but as representations of how he himself saw them. He at all times painted his impressions. ”

“ Visited the Royal Academy Exhibition. Particularly struck with a sea-view by Turner; fishing vessels coming in, with a heavy swell, in apprehension of tempest gathering in the distance, and casting, as it advances, a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore. The whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist; but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department. ”

“ Turner smiled anew, with a mock little bow and a wave of the fingers, a trick picked up abroad and maddening in its influence on a man with the feeling that it meant he was too small to have words with. ”

“ In Turner we see an obscure outlined form in everything, for though the warm tints of the masses of clouds serve to break down and diffuse the colour of the sails, their form is disturbed by the handling of his brush. ”

“ Nothing is more wonderful about Turner than the resolute way in which he avoids all imitation, even when the objects are in the foreground and clearly defined. He gives you an oak, or a beech, or an elm, so as to be unmistakable, and yet he never thinks of giving their leaves botanically, so as that we might know the tree from a leaf. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Things that began before history, were meeting from very different sides. Nature extended one hand to the inflow of civilisation, another to the rude holding of it back. There was a point of contact in the adventure of a settler, Turner by name, whom Sir George Grey met near the Murray River. It fell out comedy, but might have been tragedy; and how often those two flirt with each other round a corner!
The fact, upon which the affair hinged, was that Turner wore a wig, no doubt for sufficient reason. He was making a journey across country, and with him were a few natives, guides and packmen. ”

“ But if we examine the substance of Turner’s marine pictures carefully, we find that they contain elements which lend themselves more readily to a systematic unity in sensuous form. In his mountainous pieces Turner found room for very little immediate human interest. Man and his everyday occupations are banished from the steep and rocky places he chooses to represent, as incompatible with the gloomy, awe-struck feeling he wishes to evoke. ”

“ This is his joy—to touch a young heart to ecstasy, ay! even by a second-rate picture, and to keep in that young heart a vision that the world and time can never destroy, and that a visit to the place cannot dispel. To that boy Turner's 'Orvieto' meant Italy: since he has become a man he has wandered through Italy again and again from end to end, but even now if he wishes to recall Italy, to be kindled by the thought of that word meaning so much to Englishmen, he still turns to Turner's picture. For him it cannot fade: it cannot change. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have now seen what was the character of Turner’s pictures which gained him most applause and favour in Academic circles and with the public of the Academy. It is no doubt regrettable that a man of his talents should have to waste his time—as it seems to us—in the manufacture of puerile and pretentious specimens of Academic ‘high art,’ but we can easily make too much of the matter. There is something altogether incommensurable about such a man; he is like some great natural force, copious, abundant and unwearying. ”

“ Turner might have been what is called a better-informed man, but we question if he would have been so good, not to say a better representer of the wonderful works of God, which were painted on his retina, and in his inner chamber—the true Camera lucida, the chamber of imagery leading from the other,—and felt to his finger-tips. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”