Turnstone

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That poor "Buttermere Lake" is still the only picture by Turner that you have ever seen. And now that you are far from here, walking and digging in Sparta, and sailing in insecure little crafts to the Islands, I hold it a duty to write you in detachments this interminable letter explaining as well as I can what I mean by the Flame of Turner. Your sister will read the letters to you, ill-starred student, who, at the beginning of your art career, must not use your eyes for twelve months on penalty of blindness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turner sits on a stool [Pg 37] up in the clouds, painting; the tail of his coat flaps over towards the earth, his boot is crooked into the support of the easel, and beneath him rises the sun with the word "Turner" blazoned amid the rays. But the best of the series, because it has that touch of caricature which often approaches nearer to life than a reasoned drawing, is the portrait by William Parrott made on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1846, when he was seventy-one. Turner is painting furiously upon his picture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turner, to whom the world of men and women was a place to escape from, brooded on scenes that open a pathway to tired eyes leading away somewhere west of the sun and east of the moon; he loved distances, lakes that feel their way round hills to infinity, and sunsets that are a world in themselves. ”

“ The merits of the drawing are, however, still great as a piece of composition. The left-hand side is most interesting, and characteristic of Turner: no other artist would have put the round pier so exactly under the round cliff. It is under it so accurately, that if the nearly vertical falling line of that cliff be continued, it strikes the sea-base of the pier to a hair's breadth. But Turner knew better than any man the value of echo, as well as of contrast,—of repetition, as well as of opposition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Three great figures that trailed through the nineteenth century—a wizard in paint, a wizard in words, a wizard in holiness. Which is the greatest? Ruskin and Martineau explained, taught, chided, interpreted, and uplifted. Turner just acted, was content merely to express himself, to state his wonder at the wonder of the world. [Pg 78] Is not his influence the most enduring? A man of few words and those mostly incoherent, who taught nothing, believed nothing, gazed on the sun with hope, and did superhuman things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Others in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid coloured drawings among them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the edges, in capes and bays of fragile decay; others worm-eaten, some mouse-eaten, many torn half-way through; numbers doubled (quadrupled, I should say) up into four, being Turner's favourite mode of packing for travelling; nearly all rudely flattened out from the bundles in which Turner had finally rolled them up, and squeezed them into his drawers in Queen Anne Street. ”

“ Several changes were made in the picture after its exhibition at the Royal Academy, which the curious can verify by a study of the full-sized sketch at South Kensington. From this year onward the movement of Nature and the brilliancy of objects in sunlight intrigued him more and more, although his passion for light never reached the white-hot fervour of Turner in his latter years. For Turner the sunrise, a world almost too beautiful and evanescent to be real ”

“ The other picture of this year was that glowing and characteristic Turner, with the sun nearly in the centre of the picture, where Claude was wont to place it, now called 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour,' but formerly catalogued as 'The Sun Rising in a Mist,' one of the first of his large pictures of light and atmosphere. Some of his gold he outspreads for us, but he is still under the domination of the crowded, littered foreground. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turnbull strode sturdily to the edge of the cliff and looked out, his companion following, somewhat more shaken by his recent agitation.
"If that's the view you take," said Turnbull, "and I don't say you are wrong, I think I know where we shall be best off for the business. As it happens, I know this part of the south coast pretty well. And unless I am mistaken there's a way down the cliff just here which will land us on a stretch of firm sand where no one is likely to follow us." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turner is now painting the sea in the open air, not in a studio as in the 'Calais Pier' days. The boats in the two pictures of 'Yacht Racing in the Solent' are sailing in broken water, their canvases lit and flecked by sunlight. In No. 2 may be seen the guard-ship moored under the cliffs upon which East Cowes Castle stands. Each of these fresh and direct impressions of nature is a small picture, one measuring 1 foot 5 1/2 inches by 2 feet 4 1/2 inches, the other 1 foot 6 inches by 2 feet. ”

“ There was a sense in earth and heaven as of everything breaking up, and all the revolutionist in Turnbull rejoiced that it was breaking up. The trees were breaking up under the wind, even in the tall strength of their bloom: the clouds were breaking up and losing even their large heraldic shapes. Shards and shreds of copper cloud split off continually and floated by themselves, and for some reason the truculent eye of Turnbull was attracted to one of these careering cloudlets, which seemed to him to career in an exaggerated manner. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I alluded, in speaking before of this Stonehenge, to Turner’s use of the same symbol in the drawing of Pæstum for Rogers’s Italy; but a more striking instance of its employment occurs in a Study of Pæstum, which he engraved himself before undertaking the Liber Studiorum and another in his drawing of the Temple of Minerva, on Cape Colonna: and observe farther that he rarely introduces lightning, if the ruined building has not been devoted to religion. The wrath of man may destroy the fortress, but only the wrath of heaven can destroy the temple. ”