FROM THE 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' TO THE PERIOD OF THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS
[CHAPTER XXXVI]
1830: AGED FIFTY-FIVE
HE PAINTS THE 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' AND MOURNS THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER, AND OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE
Two events mark this year: one sad, the death of his father which affected his whole after life; the other, an epoch in his development as artist, the painting of the 'Interior at Petworth.' But first a few words about other matters.
As I have remarked before, critics are occasionally hard upon Turner, and sometimes they disagree as to what is fine, and what is poor in his work. Ruskin labelled a parcel of vignette beginnings as 'worthless.' Mr. Rawlinson, referring to the numerous small drawings for vignette illustrations, such as Rogers's Italy of 1830, and the Poems of 1834, while calling them 'marvels of execution,' also sees in them 'an unpleasant note,' often a strangely forced and extravagant colour. Monkhouse considered that it would be difficult to find in the whole range of his works two really greater (though so small in size) than the vignettes of 'Alps at Daybreak,' and 'Datur hora quieti.' Personally, I must confess to a feeling of lukewarmness in regard to the vignettes. 'The Burning of the Houses of Parliament' in Sir Edward Tennant's collection is tight and harsh in colour compared with the loose luxuriance of the oil picture.
Some one has said that Turner must on the whole have been an agreeable person to have in a house—if the house were big enough. His visits to Lord Egremont at Petworth were on much the same footing of intimacy as his visits to Walter Fawkes at Farnley. Turner had his own private studio at Petworth, and nobody but Lord Egremont was allowed admission. Even he, who has been described as 'the rough, cunning, honest old noble-man,' had to give a peculiar knock on the door before entering. It is said that Chantrey, when staying at Petworth, imitated Lord Egremont's peculiar knock, and to Turner's anger entered the room and saw him at work. This pair of eccentrics, Turner and Egremont, foregathered happily, and the friendship was severed only in 1837 by Lord Egremont's death.
The Inventory shows that Turner was at Petworth in 1830. One of the books contains a sketch for that quaint, attractive 'View in Petworth Park with Tillington Church in the Distance,' of which an unfinished version is in the National Collection. The finished oil is in the possession of Lord Leconfield. Most of the Petworth sketches are in brilliant tints of opaque colour on grey-blue paper: they resulted one merry day in that startling, delightful oil picture in the National Collection called 'Interior at Petworth.' Here is Turner working entirely for his own pleasure, absolutely indifferent to the forms of things, seeing the havoc through a mist of sunlight with brilliant rays shining down into the octagonal sculpture gallery beyond, and reflected through the Venetian blinds of a window in an alcove to the right. How the room came to be in this state we do not know. The pugs and spaniels are evidently enjoying the upturned table and the disarranged furniture: they caper delightedly over a lady's orange cloak and feathered bonnet.
I must find room for an extract from a curious and interesting article upon 'Turner's Path from Nature to Art,' by Professor Josef Strzygowski, that appeared in the Burlington Magazine. The learned professor devotes his pen to 'The Frosty Morning' and the 'Interior at Petworth,' which he considers represent the two poles: Nature and Art. After remarking that in the days when the 'Interior at Petworth' was painted no sketch was regarded as a picture, and so Turner never exhibited the Petworth 'Interior' which 'looks almost like an actual palette, and a palette, moreover, on which the colours have been thoroughly daubed together, dashes of colour from the paint-brush and the palette-knife left as they are, without the least intention of hiding the technique'—Professor Strzygowski proceeds:—
'We do not know what is represented; it seems as if the picture might just as well hang upside down. And when we have realised that we are looking upon an interior, where are the separate shapes expressed? We recognise a large sofa on the right, statues on the left, in front a little dog. But these three shapes, and all the others, are so confused, that no one can define their appearance. But what, then, does the picture really mean? asks the layman. That is the real discovery of modern times. Sketches in which an artist gives nothing more than his momentary impression, i.e., lets himself go subjectively, leaving the object, both as regards its meaning and its appearance, quite in the background, are now admitted to be finished works of art. The "Interior at Petworth" is not in Mr. Bell's catalogue. Turner, as we now know, reserved this work, with so many others, as a private confession of faith. ... For him the shape no longer exists; he sees only light and colour, and even those transform themselves in a peculiar way. He does not see a fragment of nature through the medium of his temperament; but gives us rather, on the contrary, his own temperament seen through a fragment of nature. Nature is wholly subordinated to his impetuous need for self-expression.... The representation, the "Interior" in itself, has no value for him, except in so far as its space can be exhibited as the recipient of tone and colour: the pictorial symbol, as the medium of his need for expression, is everything to him; the object, the thing and its shape, are nothing. Thus the cautious painter of "The Frosty Morning" becomes an artist; thus the thing he paints is transformed into spiritual significance, its shape becomes pictorial symbol; and the technique, which before was carefully veiled, changes to the boldest impressionism. ... Art like this is for epicures.'
Plate XXIV. Interior at Petworth (1830) Tate Gallery
Saner and very beautiful is the water-colour, 'On the Lake at Petworth, Evening,' in the National Collection, although I am bound to say that this golden and blue impression is equally beautiful if you look at it upside down.
In the 'Brighton and Arundel' Sketch-Books (1830), we find the following in Turner's handwriting on 'A View Looking Out to Sea with a Sailing Boat':—
'Beautiful effect of——,' 'Green Top' (i.e. to waves), 'foam grey in shade'—'reflections of the Boat ... in water,' 'Reflection of the Boy [?] on the Sail,' 'The warmth of the Tan Sail,' etc.
Perhaps from these notes he painted the luminous and peaceful 'Old Chain Pier, Brighton,' with the sun low in a yellow haze gilding the sail, and the reflections of boat and sail in the still water. Certainly from this 'study' he composed the finished Brighton picture in the collection of Lord Leconfield. 'A Ship Aground,' which appears to be a pendant to 'The Old Chain Pier, Brighton,' is equally luminous and peaceful, in spite of the ground swell, and the movement of the small craft about the disabled ship.
In the 'Dieppe and Rouen and Paris' Sketch-Book, we find sketches of three pictures, probably Claudes or Poussins, with long descriptions in Turner's handwriting, of which the following are samples:—
'The trees are grey and dull green and the whole foreground cold, the earth particularly cold with a few touches of warm red, but the ground in the picture never protrudes itself or through the Colours' ... 'The sky is very blue at the top with some small white clouds with grey shadows, but at the Hor. [horizon] yellow, so that the distant mountains are relieved and Blue.'
In another Sketch-Book are a number of water-colours on blue paper, probably connected with The Rivers of France series, published between 1833 and 1835.
Turner suffered a great blow this year in the death of his father, for whom he had a deep affection. 'Dad' had been of great use to his famous son, helping in the preparation of his canvases, attending to the gallery of unsold pictures, and so forth. When they were staying at Twickenham, he would travel to town every morning to open the gallery, riding with the market gardeners, who conveyed him to London for a glass of gin a day (his own arrangement). 'Dad' was as careful of money as was his son, who was wont to chuckle, 'Dad taught me nothing except to save halfpence.'
Turner was never again the same man after the death of his father. In this year Sir Thomas Lawrence also died. The Turner Collection at Millbank contains a sketch of the funeral, looking like a double-page in an illustrated weekly. The following letter shows how the death of Lawrence affected him:—
Plate XXV. The Old Chain Pier, Brighton (1830) Tate Gallery
'Dear Jones,—I delayed answering yours until the chance of this finding you in Rome, to give you some account of the dismal prospect of Academic affairs, and of the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourn from whence no traveller returns. Alas! only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like for me, or when, God only knows how soon! However, it is something to feel that gifted talent can be acknowledged by the many who yesterday waded up to their knees in snow and muck to see the funeral pomp swelled up by the carriages of the great, without the persons themselves.'
Turner's father was buried in the parish church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, where the painter had been baptized. The plain epitaph was written by Turner; it bears no scriptural text.
[CHAPTER XXXVII]
1831: AGED FIFTY-SIX
HE TURNS HIS 'MAGIC LIMELIGHT' ON 'CALIGULA'S PALACE AND BRIDGE'; VISITS SIR WALTER SCOTT, AND MAKES HIS WILL
The Wizard makes a great effort this year, sending no fewer than six pictures to the Royal Academy, and among them was the famous 'Caligula's Palace and Bridge, Bay of Baiæ,' with this quotation from the Fallacies of Hope:—
'What now remains of all the mighty bridge
Which made the Lucrine lake an inner pool,
Caligula, but massy fragments left
As monuments of doubt and ruined hopes
Yet gleaming in the morning's ray, that tell
How Baiæ's shore was loved in times gone by.'
In this return to classicism Turner is even more wilful than usual with nature. Undoubtedly there are two suns present, as Mr. Wyllie points out, one of them shining straight through the rents in the palace wall, the other illuminating the boy and girl sitting on an unsubstantial yellow rock. In fact, 'Turner has turned his magic limelight on where his fancy prompted him, and has given us only as much nature as he thought good for us.'
Fanciful and unrealised is 'Watteau Painting,' with the following quotation from Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting.
'White, when it shines with unstained lustre clear,
May bear an object back, or bring it near.'
Turner was greatly interested in the theory of colour. He read and annotated Goethe's Theory of Colour, his copy of which is among the 'Relics' at the Tate Gallery.
The 'Watteau Painting' panel shows that artist, standing in the centre of the room, making a drawing of a lady and a gentleman reclining upon a divan. We have a glimpse of Turner's fun in the sketch he made at Petworth of himself, in the place of Watteau, painting in a room surrounded by some of the ladies of the household. I have nothing to say in favour of 'Lord Percy under Attainder,' except to remark that the dame in yellow is taken from a picture by Van Dyck at Petworth.
To this year belongs the golden 'Admiral Van Tromp's Barge at the Entrance of the Texel,' in the Soane Museum. Turner painted three or four Van Tromp pictures at different periods: one is in Sir Edward Tennant's collection, another is loaned by the nation to Sheffield, and a fourth, painted as late as 1844, is in the Royal Holloway College. All bear slightly different titles, and all are breezy and golden. Another picture of 1831, a fine, wild sea-piece, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The title is an apt description: 'Life Boat and Manby Apparatus going off to a Stranded Vessel making Signals (Blue Lights) of Distress.' The 'Sketch of Cochem on the Moselle' needs no description. It is a mere impression of light and movement, a quick record, unfinished if you like, yet quite finished in its statement of essential beauty.
Turner made a special journey to Scotland this year to make illustrations for Sir Walter's Scott Poetical and Prose Works. Turner was the guest of Sir Walter, and together they visited the most interesting spots on the Tweed and the Border, and in one of the plates—the Melrose—he, Scott and Cadell, small figures, are shown together, picnicking on a height overlooking the river and the Abbey.
On the 10th of June he signed his will, to be followed later by codicils, the vast, complicated will that he brooded over so long, that produced interminable litigation, with the result that almost all of his behests were disregarded. The Turner Gallery at Millbank is a magnificent, if tardy, reparation.
[CHAPTER XXXVIII]
1832: AGED FIFTY-SEVEN
HE PAINTS 'CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE' AND IS JOCULAR ON VARNISHING DAY
'... and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world,
Even in thy desert what is like to thee?'
This, the beginning of an extract from Byron, accompanied his 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'—that late golden afternoon, Italy basking in the heat haze. The stone pine has been mercilessly criticised; but although that useful tree and the foreground pictures are carelessly painted, how beautiful is the horse-shoe bend of the placid river, and the suffused light on ruin, convent, walled town, and distant hills, illumined from the sun sinking behind the mountains.
There is a story connected with two of his other pictures of this year, 'Helvoetsluys—the City of Utrecht, 64 Going to Sea,' and that impossible work with the unwieldy title illustrating Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego coming forth from the burning fiery furnace. Turner asked George Jones, R.A., what he intended to paint for the ensuing exhibition. 'Oh!' said Jones, 'the Fiery Furnace, with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.' 'A good subject,' said Turner, 'I'll do it also.'
In the exhibition Jones's picture of 'The Fiery Furnace' was placed opposite to Turner's grey 'Helvoetsluys,' and next to Constable's 'The Opening of Waterloo Bridge.' Turner, who had been watching Constable brightening the flags and decorations of his city barges with vermilion and lake, realised that the flutter of colour was making his own grey picture look insignificant. Suddenly he put a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, and departed without a word. The intensity of the red lead caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak.
When Constable saw the red lead he said—'Turner has been here and fired off a gun.' 'A coal,' cried Cooper, 'has bounced across the room from Jones's "Fiery Furnace," and set fire to Turner's sea.' The great man did not visit the room for a day and a half; 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.
Constable, according to Thornbury, was secretly very severe on Turner's pictures, which does not tally with his spoken and written enthusiasm.
Little did Constable, or any one else, realise the work that Turner was yet to do. In the following year, at the age of fifty-eight, he exhibited his first Venetian picture—Venice—that was to absorb and haunt him, and inspire some of the most lovely visions of his ageing eyes.
[CHAPTER XXXIX]
1833: AGED FIFTY-EIGHT
HE PAINTS HIS FIRST 'VENICE' PICTURE AND RE-PURCHASES SOME OF HIS OWN DRAWINGS AT AUCTION
Venice, 'the last home of his imagination,' if we exclude the mountains of Switzerland, and the Thames of England, where he found his final solace, begins to inspire his brush, but not the visionary Venice that he was to evolve later, visions of colour and light which seem to be floating from sight even as we look at them. First the spade work—that was Turner's way. As he began painting the sea from the pictures of Van de Velde, so he began painting Venice from the pictures of Canaletto, and in this first interpretation, or rather illustration, of Venice, he introduced, in his quaint, admiring way, his hero for the moment, at work. 'The Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom House, Canaletto Painting,' is a sober topographical performance compared with his later pictures of the bride of the Adriatic. Indeed the quotation from Rogers's Italy gives more of a lilt to the imagination than the picture:—
'There is a glorious city in the sea,
The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,
Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed
Clings to the marble of her palaces.'
No fewer than twenty-seven pictures of Venice by Turner have been catalogued.
Between 1833 and 1835 were published the beautiful series of The Rivers of France known as Turner's Annual Tour. The letterpress was by Leitch Ritchie, but they did not travel together 'as their tastes were dissimilar.' Ritchie gives the following description of the artist's methods:—
'His exaggerations, when it suited his purpose, were wonderful; lifting up, for instance, by two or three stories, the steeple, or rather the stunted cone of a village church. I never failed to roast him on the habit. He took my remarks in very good part, sometimes indeed in great glee, never attempting to defend himself otherwise than by rolling back the war into the enemy's camp. In my account of the famous Gilles de Retz, I had attempted to identify that prototype of "Blue Beard" with the hero of the nursery story, by absurdly insisting that his beard was so intensely black that it seemed to have a shade of blue. This tickled the great painter hugely; and his only reply to my bantering was, his little sharp eyes glistening the while, "Blue Beard! Blue Beard! Black Beard!"'
There were sixty drawings in this wonderful series, most of which are in the Turner Gallery. He did not sell these water-colours, preferring to lend them to the publishers for engraving purposes for which he charged from five to seven guineas each. Ruskin tells how one day Turner brought to him the sixty drawings for The Rivers of France rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them for twenty-five guineas each. Ruskin, to his grief, could not persuade his father to spend the money. In later years he had to pay a thousand pounds for the seventeen which he gave to Oxford. To look through this series is to be again impressed by the range of Turner's genius. Which is the most beautiful? I know not. Sometimes one, sometimes another—the blue mystery of 'The Light Towers of Hève,' the huddled splendour of 'Sunset in the Port of Havre,' the wild translucent sweep of the tidal wave in 'Quellebœuf,' the quiet splendour, infinity on a few inches of paper, of 'The Seine between Tancarville and Quellebœuf,' the poetry of 'Caudebec,' the fantasy of 'Jumiéges,' the charm of 'The Post Road from Vernon to Nantes,' the mystery of 'St. Denis.' Invited to pick one, I should hardly know which to choose. What a parcel of dreams for Turner to bring to Ruskin rolled in dirty brown paper. And while Turner the poet was preparing to realise these dreams, Turner the man was casting his acquisitive eye on former works of his own that came into the market. When Dr. Munro died in 1833, Turner attended the sale of his pictures, and acquired a great many of his own early works; no doubt he bought others too, as among the doubtful drawings catalogued at the end of the Inventory, are many by different hands. Turner informed the auctioneer that some of the drawings attributed to him were not his. That must have been an interesting spectacle. For Turner, when he had a grievance, did not conceal it.
[CHAPTER XL]
1834: AGED FIFTY-NINE
SOME OLD STORIES AND SOME AGELESS COLOUR STUDIES
Turner, in his sixtieth year, is on the threshold of the period when colour and light were more and more to obsess him to the exclusion of form and detail. In the Inventory, there are books labelled simply 'Colour Studies,' and among the water-colours connected with his 'Meuse-Moselle-Rhine' tour are some bearing such suggestive titles as 'Crimson Ruins,' 'Vermilion Towers,' 'Tower in Sunbeam,' 'Blue Hills,' 'Ruins with Rainbow.' In the 'Colour Studies' Sketch-Book there are nearly fifty pages described merely as 'Colour Sketches'; and on the last page are several lines of illegible verse. Also, after a sketch of a 'Ruined Castle on a Rock' a recipe 'said to be an infallible cure for the bite of a mad dog.'
In the 'Oxford and Bruges' Sketch-Book he breaks into this:—
'Old Tom, of Christ Church, Oxford. What? is it you Old Tom that keep this row every night? What? is it right that you should summon us to bed at nine continually all the year round? Is it fair that you, Tom, should thus deal with us every night?'
Plate XXVI. Rocky Bay With Classic Figures (1829 or after) Tate Gallery
With my mind full of the visionary Turner, the dreamer and the troubled traveller, I am a little impatient of 'The Golden Bough' of this year; so apparently were the trustees of the National Gallery, as they banished it to Dublin. As to 'St. Michael's Mount,' now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, how beautiful would be the pale gold Mount, rising from a pale gold shore into a grey-blue sky, if the foreground with its fish and figures, boat and lobster-pots, could be banished. The fine and whirling spectacle of the 'Fire at Sea,' that looks so well in its new home at Millbank, was composed, no doubt, from 'The Fire at Sea' Sketch-Book, which has this endorsement by Ruskin: 'A careless book: the fine ships on fire taken out of it and very little left.'
He exhibited another Venice subject this year, probably the Venice about which Thornbury tells a story: how the inevitable Jones, who was showing a picture with a blue sky in it, tried to paint his sky brighter, so as to make it outshine Turner's, which hung alongside. Turner then made his sky still more blue, whereupon Jones painted out his blue sky altogether and put in a white one.
'Ah! Jones,' said Turner, 'you've done me now.'
Here may be told once again the story of the encounter between Gillott the pen manufacturer and Turner, in Thornbury's own words:—
We are told that one day Mr. Gillott, the well-known manufacturer of Birmingham, sallied forth from his hotel, determined at any price to obtain admission to the enchanted house in Queen Anne Street. He was rich, he was enthusiastic—he believed strongly in the power of the golden key to open any door. He arrived at the blistered dirty door of the house with the black-crusted windows. He pulled at the bell; the bell answered with a querulous, melancholy tinkle. There was a long inhospitable pause; then an old woman with a diseased face looked up from the area, and presently ascended and tardily opened the door, keeping the filthy chain up, however, as a precaution. She snappishly asked Mr. Gillott's business. He told her in his blandest voice. "Can't let 'e in," was the answer, and she tried to slam the door. But during the parley the crafty and determined Dives had put his foot in, and now, refusing to any longer parley, he pushed past the feeble, enraged old she-Cerberus, and hurried upstairs to the gallery. In a moment Turner was out upon him like a spider on another spider who has invaded his web. Mr. Gillott bowed, introduced himself, and stated that he had come to buy. "Don't want to sell," or some such rebuff, was the answer; but Gillott shut his ears to all Turner's angry vituperations. "Have you ever seen our Birmingham pictures, Mr. Turner?" was his only remark.
'"Never 'eard of 'em," said Turner.
'Gillott pulled from his pocket a silvery fragile bundle of Birmingham bank-notes (about £5000 worth).
'"Mere paper," said Turner, with grim humour, a little softened, and enjoying the joke.
'"To be bartered for mere canvas," said Gillott, waving his hand at the "Building of Carthage" and its companions.
'"You're a rum fellow!" said Turner, slowly entering into negotiations, which ended in Gillott eventually carrying off in his cab some five thousand pounds' worth of Turner's pictures.'
These old stories, when one has heard them once, are not very exhilarating, but they all have truth in their well of words. It is pleasant to turn from them, and merely to repeat the titles of some of the sketches mentioned before, sounding as beautiful as they look, and to glance at such a delicate drawing as the 'View on the Moselle,' and to follow the river feeling for its level between the flushed hills.
And it is pleasant, too, to know that the time has now come to consider the loveliest of the 'unfinished' oils, the pictures painted for his own delight in moments of exhilaration, that were revealed to the public in 1906. It is probable that the most delicate and evanescent of them were painted at intervals between this year and 1838. Unsigned, unnamed, undated, it is impossible to give them a certain date, and really it does not much matter. Turner painted them; the nation has them: that is all we need to know.
[PART SEVEN]
1833-1845