A MEMORY: TELLS OF A BOY WHO LOVED TURNER'S 'VIEW OF ORVIETO'
[CHAPTER I]
THE BOY AND GOLDEN ORVIETO
There was a boy who grew up in the seventies of last century when the name of Turner aroused no particular interest or emotion: he was a classic, and he was treated with the incurious veneration that is given to classics. Turner was among the gods, and if a descent to the ground-floor of the National Gallery, where a selection of his water-colours was shown, did startle the wayfarer into amazement at the lyrical loveliness of those visions, compared with the sombre and heavy magnificence of most of the oil pictures, well, they were by Turner, and Turner being a classic, was not a subject for debate. He was with the masters—fit and few—a classic.
I think no one dreamed of the extraordinary revival of interest in Turner and increasing admiration for his genius that was to mark the twentieth century, when the 'unfinished oils' were exhibited, and later when the Turner Gallery at Millbank was opened.
The boy who grew up in the seventies, and to whom, in the first idealism of youth, Turner seemed almost superhuman, has closely followed the public manifestations of interest in the flame and fame of Turner; and now that he is about to write a book on the man of whom M. de la Sizeranne wrote:—'All the torches which have shed a flood of new light on Art, that of Delacroix in 1825, those of the Impressionists in 1870, have in turn been lit at his flame,'—he likes to return in memory to those days in the seventies when Turner first became wonderful, something not quite to be explained, in his life.
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. He did not appreciate all the Turners, but he grasped their coherency, and realised what he was told, that they expressed the growth of one mind groping from darkness to light. Yet it seemed strange to the boy that he who painted the dark and material 'Calais Pier' should also have painted the gorgeous fairy tale called 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'; that the calm and contemplative 'Crossing the Brook' should have proceeded from the same brain and hand that willed that wonder of wonders 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' or the fading loveliness of the picture that was then called the 'Approach to Venice.' The boy was not old enough to understand the interest and importance of studying a painter's work chronologically, which would have made it plain to him why a man could paint the 'Calais Pier' at twenty-eight, 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' at sixty-nine, and the sunlight dreams between whiles, in moments of rapturous vision. These problems did not trouble the boy. He was too young to analyse his impressions, and they were all forgotten when he was shown the small picture called 'View of Orvieto.' That remained to him all through boyhood, and through manhood also, essential Turner, essential Italy, a dream Italy, but more real than the reality.
Yet 'Orvieto' painted in Rome in 1829, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830, when the artist was fifty-five, is not one of his great works. And it is not a view of Orvieto, that is, a correct view. Turner was an interpreter of the soul of what he saw, not a reporter of topographical, historical or architectural accuracy. The golden valley bathed in sunlight, the city on the hill swooning in golden mist, and the magical fading away of the uplands into infinity, that is what the boy cared about. All that is pure Turner, the idealist, the visionary, the lover of light and colour and distances and the enchantments of nature. Turner too, but dual-natured Turner, is the inept foreground, a mere contrivance to throw the middle distance back; things pressed into his service that happened to come to hand, the litter of properties, the 'drawing-master tree,' the uncouth figures, the unsubstantial fountain.
Years later the boy visited Orvieto and found the city far less beautiful than Turner's dream. But by that time he had learnt 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 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.
Plate II. View of Orvieto (1830) National Gallery
[CHAPTER II]
THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER'S ART LIFE
From 'Orvieto' as a starting-point, the boy, who is now a man, proceeded in time to explore the art life of Turner, dwelling oftenest on his golden visions, in which this persistent man, eloquent nowhere but in his art, truly found himself. They were the goals of his pilgrimage, but few appreciated them. 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.
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 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.
Work, work, work—absorbing, concentrated work—that was his life. This 'short, stout man with a red face and covetous eyes,' was hardly what the world calls a fine character, although there are on record many instances of his generosity and kindness, he was as secretive about his work as about his life. The door of his studio, whether in Queen Anne Street or on the hills was, metaphorically, always locked.
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. Step by step he climbed, and had he died in 1802, at the age of twenty-seven, when Girtin, his friend and fellow-student, died, we should have had the record of a youth of great promise, but whose performances were no more wonderful, if as wonderful, as Girtin's. From the period of Training he passed to the period of Rivalry. Of the many painters he strove to outsoar there was none so worthy his challenge as Claude Lorrain, and to this day, in accordance with a condition of Turner's will, two of his pictures hang in the National Gallery side by side with two of Claude's, challenging the Lorrainer from beyond the grave. The challenger has his desire, but Claude is not conquered. The great Englishman does not dethrone the great Frenchman on his own ground. Claude is unrivalled in the balance of his classical pictures, and in their cool and temperate colour. The real Turner, the Turner who challenged the sun, had not yet found himself. In his periods of Power and Splendour, between the ages, say, of forty-five and sixty-five, dominated by such masterpieces as the 'Ulysses' and the 'Fighting Téméraire,' Turner disregarded all other painters. And while he was producing epics this prodigal artist was also throwing off lyrics—the impulsive water-colours, and those 'unfinished oils,' destined, when reclaimed and shown in 1906, to raise the art of Turner to the empyrean of landscape art. They were works of pleasure, easy evocations of his genius, done quickly and gladly, thrown aside, never exhibited.
Of all the periods of his art life there is none to be compared with the period contained in the few glorious years when he was past sixty and drawing near to his seventieth year, the period when light in all its manifestations obsessed him, when he produced the 'Norham Castle, Sunrise,' the 'Hastings' with the red sail, the later 'Venice' pictures, and the later water-colours, so delicate, so flushed with sunshine that the world of sight seems to be swimming in iridescent vapour. Finally, there is the period of decline, but what a decline, that could evoke such a magnificent madness as 'Queen Mab's Grotto,' and such tumbling splendours as the four classical pictures he exhibited the year before he died!
The boy who loved 'Orvieto' despaired of ever being able to write adequately about Turner, so enormous, so diversified, was his achievement. Sometimes he thought he would like to consider nothing but the 'Orvieto,' the 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' the 'Sunrise' pictures and the 'Evening Star'; and among the water-colours a certain dream of blue loveliness called 'Lucerne' and the red 'Righi,' and perhaps the six small pictures, phantom ships and fairy skies, that he bequeathed to Mrs. Booth, and perhaps the four impressions in one frame, sensations they might be called, of Petworth at evening, mere sunset visions, but such visions.
What was the nature of the man who controlled these wonders? The boy read Thornbury's very interesting and very unreliable Life, he read Monkhouse and others, and as he read there rose before him a picture of the dual Turner, the great artist and the crafty tradesman. A little sadly he set himself to understand something of Turner the Man.
Plate III. Lucerne and the Righi—Early Dawn. Water colour (about 1842) In the collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq. (Size, 12 x 9 1/2)
[CHAPTER III]
THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER THE DUMB POET
In thinking over Turner the Man, whom Thornbury called the Dumb Poet, again 'Orvieto' rose before the boy. The twin parts of that picture, the earthly foreground and the heavenly distances, continued to symbolise the dual parts of Turner's nature, as indeed the natures of all of us.
The first book that the boy read about Turner was perhaps the wisest and the most sympathetic of all his biographies, that by the late Cosmo Monkhouse. On page 3 he found two quotations; one astonished, the other shocked him. They neither astonish nor shock him now because he is much older, and he knows that if one passage is exaggerated so is the other. 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; who loved his work before anything in the world, who was not cultured, and whose manners were neither pretty nor engaging, who cared nothing for social conventions, but who went his own rough way, preferring Wapping and the sailors and the river, and rum and brown sherry, to the conventional delights and the fine feeding of Belgravia. Here are the two passages. The first is from Ruskin's Modern Painters, published in 1843, magnificent rhetoric, magical, and meaning very little:—
'Glorious in conception—unfathomable in knowledge—solitary in power—with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of the universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand.'
The second is from Thornbury's Life of Turner, published in 1862. There is no confirmation of Thornbury's suggestion that Turner ever 'wallowed' at Wapping:—
'Towards the end of his career he would often, I am assured on the best authority, paint hard all the week till Saturday night; and he would then put by his work, slip a five-pound note into his pocket, button it securely up there, and set off to some low sailor's house in Wapping or Rotherhithe, to wallow till Monday morning summoned him to mope through another week.'
The boy who was shocked at that extract from Thornbury's Life, following so closely upon Ruskin's eulogy, found consolation in an understanding passage written by Cosmo Monkhouse. It seemed to explain Turner.
'He lived in two worlds—one the pictorial sight-world, in which he was a profound scholar and a poet, the other the articulate, moral, social word-world, in which he was a dunce and underbred. In the one he was great and happy, in the other he was small and miserable; for what philosophy he had was fatalist. The riddle of life was too hard for his uncultivated intellect and starved heart to contemplate with any hope; he was only at rest in his dreamland.'
His dreamland served him to the end, to that day in 1851, when the old war-man, warring always for the beautiful, having lost the cunning of his hand, but not the vision of his eyes, died gazing on the river, his old companion, whom he had loved always.
Gradually, the boy who grew up in the seventies, and who knew golden 'Orvieto' by heart, began to form a mental picture of the man Turner, gathered from the pictures and caricatures of him, and the innumerable stories, some untrue, many exaggerated, that have collected about the hairdresser's son who became the world's greatest landscape painter.
His friend and patron, Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, made a caricature of Turner which shows him as a little man, 'in an ill-cut brown tail coat, striped waistcoat and enormous frilled shirt, the feet and hands notably small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost level with his waist.' Yes, Turner was an odd man, odd in looks, rough in manner. When he had passed middle age the world meant very little to him. He cared for nobody: he was hardly interested in Ruskin's magical extravagance of eulogy. 'My own admiration,' said Ruskin, 'was wild enthusiasm, but it gave him no ray of pleasure. He loved me, but cared nothing for what I said.' About the time that Ruskin was lecturing the world for not admiring Turner, and lashing himself into ecstasy over his idol, the idol was seen on board the old Margate steamer, studying sky and water, and eating his lunch of shrimps out of a huge red handkerchief laid across his knees.
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. We see him in Parrott's Varnishing Day sketch at the age of seventy-one, a short, thick-set, clumsy figure, with ruffled silk hat upon his head and gingham propped against a chair—painting on a large picture, engrossed, oblivious of everything happening around. 'I am told,' says Scarlett Davies, 'it was good fun to see the great man whacking away with about fifty stupid apes standing round him, peeping into his colour-box and examining all his brushes and colours.'
Plate IV. Yacht Racing in the Solent, No. 2 (1827) Tate Gallery
He was in dreamland while the 'stupid apes' watched him.
Did they hope to discover the dreamer's secret? Ah, gentlemen, you did not find the secret in the colour-box. And the dumb poet could never have told in words how he produced his pictures, although when he sold one he was wont to say, 'I've lost one of my children.'
The dumb poet!
There is a chapter in the second volume of Thornbury's Life headed 'Turner's Poetry,' that seemed to the boy who loved 'Orvieto' to express absolutely, strangely, sadly, how illiterate and inarticulate outside his art was Turner, and how eager to express the emotions that moved dimly in his starved brain. Twelve pages of his halting, imperfect verse are printed, scraps from the longest fragments found among his papers after death, perhaps a portion of that interminable, chaotic poem, The Fallacies of Hope, extracts from which he used to append to his Academy pictures. There is hardly a clause that is coherent, there is no continuous thought, and some words are used in any sense. The impulse to sing is there, but the dumb poet has not begun to understand even the elements of the technique of composition. But the boy dug out and remembered two broken lines, and they became almost as much a part of his life as golden 'Orvieto.'
'... still the chief advanced,
Looked on the sun with hope...'
'Looked on the sun with hope' might have served for Turner's epitaph.
'Still the chief advanced' might have served as a motto for that amazing book published in 1909, called A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest.[1]
When that book in two volumes was issued, the boy who loved 'Orvieto' as a middle-aged man. Having read the Inventory—no, read is not the word;—when he had spent many hours over it, his wonder of Turner, if that were possible, increased. And dreaming of the drawings of the Turner Bequest, set forth so fully and patiently in this book, he echoed the words of the Director of the National Gallery, who wrote in the preface, 'There is nothing like it anywhere in the world.'
[1] A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, arranged chronologically by A. J. Finberg. His Majesty's Stationery Office. 2 vols. 15s.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE BOY, HAVING BECOME A MAN, WONDERS AT THE 'INVENTORY' OF THE TURNER BEQUEST DRAWINGS
Not until the Inventory was published was it possible to realise the amount of spade work—loving, minute, unwearying—that Turner did from the age of twelve to the age of seventy-one, spade work that enabled him to will the golden visions of his maturity.
Everybody who has examined the Turner Bequest of water-colours, and sketches in colour and in pencil, numbering over nineteen thousand pieces of paper contained in three hundred Sketch-Books, must agree that 'there is nothing like it anywhere in the world'; and everybody must rejoice that, through the munificence of the late Sir Joseph Duveen, there has now arisen as an annexe to the Tate Gallery the long, long deferred Turner Gallery, a tardy fulfilment of the Wizard's desire, one of the few dispositions, besides his eagerness to found a home for decayed artists, that was clear in his interminable and muddled will and codicils.
The story of the litigation over the will, and of the vicissitudes of the bequest has been often told, and it will have to be told again in its proper place in this book; how the pictures bequeathed by Turner to the nation were gradually selected for exhibition; how in 1857 the number had reached one hundred and five; how in that year Ruskin began to sift and arrange the finished water-colours, the pencil drawings, the colour sketches, and 'unfinished oils'; how he chose what he considered the best of the water-colours for intermittent exhibition; how he rolled up the 'unfinished oils '; how he classified and commented upon the 'nineteen thousand pieces of paper, worm-eaten, mouse-eaten, in various states of fragile decay, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another, many on both sides'; how in 1906 the art world was astonished and delighted by the exhibition at the Tate Gallery of the 'unfinished oils' by Turner, reclaimed from the cellars at Trafalgar Square; and how in 1908 several other 'unfinished' works, described as experiments 'in oil on thin veneer,' and a number of early water-colours and studies were for the first time exposed.
By that time Mr. A. J. Finberg was nearing the end of his vast work of cataloguing the Turner water-colours, and the 'nineteen thousand pieces of paper,' belonging to the nation. The two volumes known as the Inventory are the monument of his labour, which has been thoroughly done, indeed, with an attention to detail that wins the gratitude of all students. Wisely a strictly chronological arrangement was determined upon. The difficulties were immense, owing to the almost entire absence of reliable chronological information as to Turner's movements. He was not the kind of man to babble his plans, and Mr. Finberg admits that some of his judgments as to date and place are tentative; but we now have a guide, trustworthy as extreme care could make it, to the infinite variety of Turner's structural plans, his daily visions, his notes of things seen and quickly recorded, upon which his life-work was based.
The Inventory begins with 1787, when he was twelve; it proceeds, year by year, to almost the end of his life, to 1846, when he was seventy-one. Almost every summer, one might say every summer, with painting materials, knapsack, and umbrella, he was off on his travels through England, Scotland, Wales, or the Continent, and, roughly speaking, to each year there is a sketch-book. Perhaps general-utility book would be the better name, for Turner drew and scribbled anything and everything on the leaves in his almost unintelligible handwriting. Mixed up with his sketches, we read how he got from place to place; of articles of clothing in use and wanted; the numbers of bank-notes; elemental French and German phrases; fragments of poetry, his own and others; extracts from Sir Joshua's Discourses; a cure for the bite of a mad dog; a recipe for surfeit; criticism of pictures, including Rembrandt's 'Mill,' Titian's 'Entombment,' and Rubens's 'Rainbow'; notes on the colours of hills; the names of flowers; descriptions of skies; fragments of letters, such as 'Give my love to Miss Wickham,' and so on, and so on.
Such things are for the general, for anybody and everybody who is interested in the commerce with daily life of a man of genius. For the student of Turner's work, these details of his sketching tours, chronologically arranged, are invaluable.
The boy who loved 'Orvieto,' and who is now a man, having contracted to write a book on 'Turner's Golden Visions,' felt, with this Inventory before him, wherein Turner himself tells in disjointed fragments the autobiography of his working life, that the way to write the book was to take the years in progression, to dwell on each significant epoch and the work it produced, and thus to trace the development of the dumb poet from darkness to light, from the black 'Moonlight at Millbank,' to such an ethereal golden vision as 'Norham Castle at Sunrise.'
He begins at the very beginning with the year 1775, when a son was born to two humble people in a dark court off the Strand, whom they christened Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Plate V. Barnard Castle. Water colour (about 1837) In the collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq. (Size, 8 7/8 x 6 1/2)
[PART TWO]
1775-1803