25. Worcester, circa 1833 ([Plate XII]).
27. The Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End, circa 1834 ([Plate XIII]).
31. Lowestoft, circa 1835.
The most glorious in colour of these drawings is, I think, the Windsor Castle, but the Richmond Bridge ([Plate XI]) runs it very close. The latter subject is interesting because it was the first water-colour by Turner which Mr. Ruskin acquired; “my father buying it for me,” he tells us, “thinking I should not ask for another—we both then agreeing that it had nearly everything characteristic of Turner in it, and more especially the gay figures!” Mr. Ruskin was naturally very much attached to this drawing and he was never tired of trying to analyse it; but “after thirty years’ endeavour, I finally surrender that hope—with all similar hopes of ever analysing true inventive or creative work.” He drew attention, however, as an instructive piece of composition, to the way the parasols in the foreground repeat and reverse the arches of the bridge, and the feather head-dresses of the ladies repeat the plumy tossing of the foliage. These are merely Turner’s habitual tricks of composition. We find these habits of design in most of his earlier and later work, but the results are not always equally fortunate. One of the most exquisite and perfect examples of this practice of placing and grouping the figures and objects so as to repeat or emphasize the most salient features of a landscape, is afforded in my opinion by the large oil painting of Walton Bridges, which was painted in 1809 for the Earl of Essex. In some of the later drawings and paintings the results are not always so happy.
The execution of the Richmond Bridge is unequal. The group of figures in the foreground on the right is imperfectly imagined and fumbling in touch, but the smaller figures on the left are vivid and alert; the big group of trees on the right, with the sunlight striking athwart them, is dashed in with extraordinary vigour and certainty. The drawing is in splendid condition, and the general effect is breezy, reckless, gorgeous—and, I cannot help thinking, a trifle vulgar, probably on account of the gay foreground figures. It certainly has everything “characteristic” of Turner, the beauties and the defects.
In the Coventry and Worcester ([Plate XII]) there is some flagging of Turner’s power—hints of weariness and a sense of effort. There is some “swelling into bombast” in them. But the Longships Lighthouse ([Plate XIII]) is one of the most wonderful and flawless drawings ever made by Turner, or any other artist. Turner must have been nearly sixty years of age when he made it, but there are no signs of human weakness in it. It is all pure gold and immortal work. For once Turner had found a subject exactly suited to his genius, “a fit subject for his wit.”
It is of course impossible to do justice in words to the grandeur and terrible beauty of this wonderful drawing, but Mr. Ruskin has so nearly succeeded in this impossible task that I will venture to quote his words. “In the Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End, we have clouds without rain—at twilight—enveloping the cliffs of the coast, but concealing nothing, every outline being visible through their gloom; and not only the outline—for it is easy to do this—but the surface. The bank of rocky coast approaches the spectator inch by inch, felt clearer and clearer as it withdraws from the garment of cloud—not by edges more and more refined, but by a surface more and more unveiled. We have thus the painting, not of a mere transparent veil, but of a solid body of cloud, every inch of whose increasing distance is marked and felt. But the great wonder of the picture is the intensity of gloom which is attained in warm grey, without either blackness or blueness. It is a gloom, dependent rather on the enormous space and depth indicated, than on actual pitch of colour, distant by real drawing, without a grain of blue, dark by real substance, without a stroke of blackness; and with all this, it is not formless, but full of indications of character, wild, irregular, shattered, and indefinite—full of the energy of storm, fiery in haste, and yet flinging back out of its motion the fitful swirls of bounding drift, of tortured vapour tossed up like men’s hands, as in defiance of the tempest, the jets of resulting whirlwind, hurled back from the rocks into the face of the coming darkness; which, beyond all other characters, mark the raised passion of the elements. It is this untraceable, unconnected, yet perpetual form—this fulness of character absorbed in the universal energy—which distinguishes Nature and Turner from all their imitators. To roll a volume of smoke before the wind, to indicate motion or violence by monotonous similarity of line and direction, is for the multitude; but to mark the independent passion, the tumultuous separate existence of every wreath of writhing vapour, yet swept away and overpowered by one omnipotence of storm, and thus to bid us
Be as a Presence or a motion—one
Among the many there—while the mists
Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth,
As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument,—
this belongs only to Nature and to him.”
And in a later chapter of the same volume (“Modern Painters,” Vol. I.) Mr. Ruskin again refers to this drawing as “a study of sea whose whole organization has been broken up by constant recoils from a rocky coast.” “The entire disorder of the surges,” he continues, “when every one of them, divided and entangled among promontories as it rolls in, and beaten back part by part from walls of rock on this side and that side, recoils like the defeated division of a great army, throwing all behind it into disorder, breaking up the succeeding waves into vertical ridges, which in their turn, yet more totally shattered upon the shore, retire in more hopeless confusion, until the whole surface of the sea becomes one dizzy whirl of rushing, writhing, tortured, undirected rage, bounding, and crashing, and coiling in an anarchy of enormous power, subdivided into myriads of waves, of which every one is not, be it remembered, a separate surge, but part and portion of a vast one, actuated by internal power, and giving in every direction the mighty undulation of impetuous line which glides over the rocks and writhes in the wind, overwhelming the one, and piercing the other with the form, fury, and swiftness of a sheet of lambent fire. And throughout the rendering of all this, there is not a false curve given, not one which is not the perfect expression of visible motion; and the forms of the infinite sea are drawn throughout with that utmost mastery of art which, through the deepest study of every line, makes every line appear the wildest child of chance, while yet each is in itself a subject and a picture different from all else around. Of the colour of this magnificent sea I have before spoken; it is a solemn green grey (with its foam seen dimly through the darkness of twilight), modulated with the fulness, changefulness, and sadness of a deep, wild melody.”