Saumur ([Plate X]), on the other hand, was engraved for “The Keepsake” for 1831, and it was republished in Heath’s “Gallery of British Engravings.” It has a magnificent sky, full of the moving pageantry of the heavens, and it is superbly designed. Another and different view of this subject was engraved in the “Rivers of France.” One would hardly recognize the chateau of the Queen of Sicily, on the rock by the bridge, as the same building in the two engravings.
The Wilderness of Sinai ([Plate XIX]), like the Hakewill drawings, was done from the sketch of an amateur, a Major Felix. Turner always lavished more than his usual care and labour on such work. For sheer delicacy and cunning of hand it would be hard to find its equal. The engraving was published in Finden’s “Landscape Illustrations of the Bible” (1836). The rock in the foreground is said by the Arabs to be the one which Moses struck when the Israelites were athirst. The alert figures in the foreground and the two mounted men beyond show how well Turner could draw such things when he wanted to.
We have now to turn our attention to the “England and Wales” series, the most ambitious of Turner’s publications, which occupied much of his time between 1825 and 1838. The scheme as originally planned was to include one-hundred-and-twenty drawings, but the venture was financially unsuccessful and it was abandoned after about a hundred drawings had been made and engraved. Posterity has not endorsed the contemporary indifference to this series. The plates are probably the best known and most widely appreciated of all Turner’s engravings, and the original drawings are certainly the most popular and most eagerly sought after by collectors of his water-colours. They are eminently characteristic of the artist; full to overflowing of evidence of his extraordinary knowledge, powers of observation and incomparable technical skill, and they display freely all his faults of mind and character. Parts of his work are like Shakespeare’s, incorrect, capricious and wanton. Like Shakespeare his imagination was crowded with a tumultuary confusion of images. He had all Shakespeare’s reckless and unquestioning confidence in himself and in his own powers, so that his work often seems vehement and negligent. But if he had Shakespeare’s faults he had also much of Shakespeare’s greatness. We have only to change the word poet to painter to apply Dryden’s encomium of Shakespeare to him. “All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too.... I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind.... But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.”
The “England and Wales” series was represented in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition by eight beautiful drawings:—
30. Saltash, 1825 ([Plate XXI]).
22. Prudhoe Castle, circa 1826 ([Plate XXII]).
24. Windsor Castle, circa 1829.
20. Richmond Bridge—Play, circa 1830 ([Plate XI]).
33. Coventry, circa 1832.