The only drawing in the whole series which can be compared for tragic power with the Longships Lighthouse is the Lowestoft. The time represented is an hour before sunrise in winter. A violent storm with rain is passing over the sea; through it the lighthouses and coast are dimly seen. Mr. Ruskin speaks of the “most hopeless, desolate, uncontrasted greys” in this drawing.
26. Lake Nemi, circa 1840 ([Plate XV]).
This representation of the afternoon of a hot and cloudless day was hung immediately above the Longships. It is a truly superb drawing, as fine in its way as the Longships, yet how different! It is so full of purely sensuous delight that one would suppose it the work of some voluptuary who had turned his back on all the sorrows and terrors of life; one who lived only for the gratification of his senses. That some people should shrink from the sternness and cruelty of Longships I can understand; but I simply cannot imagine how any one accessible to the pleasures of pictorial art can resist the triumphal appeal of this regal and happy drawing. It would be difficult to bring together two other drawings which illustrate so well the truly Shakespearean range of Turner’s mind.
28. The Rigi at Sunrise—Lake of Lucerne (“The Blue Rigi”) ([Plate XVII]).
With a fine sense of congruity Messrs. Agnew hung beside the Lake of Nemi a masterpiece of Turner’s latest manner—“The Blue Rigi.” This was painted in 1841, in circumstances described in his own inimitable way by Mr. Ruskin, in the “Epilogue” to his notes on his own collection of Turner’s drawings. There are signs in the drawing that the painter’s age was beginning to tell on him. He was getting near the end of his career as a water-colour painter, though his career as an oil painter lasted a few years longer: for the Burial at Sea; The Opening of the Walhalla; Rain, Steam and Speed; The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, and the other late Venetian paintings were yet to come; which supports the contention that water-colour makes sterner demands on the artist’s physique than oil painting. In “The Blue Rigi” the laboured execution and trembling touch hint at the artist’s physical disabilities. But these signs of weakness harmonize so well with the subject-matter that they only heighten the pathos of this incomparably beautiful drawing.
I think that Turner made hardly more than a dozen finished drawings after “The Blue Rigi.” This was partly because the sustained effort such work demanded was too much for him, and partly because there was no demand among his patrons for such work. But he could still make sketches like the Mouth of the Grand Canal ([Plate XXIII]), Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the Distance ([Plate XX]) and the Alpine Stream, marvellous in their freshness of colour, the vigour and delicacy of their washes, and full of poetical suggestion and pictorial enchantment. The old war-horse no doubt regretted that his patrons would give him no opportunities to elaborate these wonderful sketches—for the distinction which modern criticism has obliterated between a sketch and a “finished” drawing was ingrained in Turner’s mind—but we cannot share these regrets. The gain in fullness and authority of statement would have provided little compensation for the loss of delicacy and freshness, and effortless vigour of execution.
But these remarks have taken me slightly out of my chronological course. The following sketches I am inclined to date conjecturally somewhere between 1835 and 1840.
126. Rheinfels Castle.
Can this drawing be correctly named? It does not seem much like the other drawings and engravings of the old fortress of Rheinfels which I have compared with it. And what is the meaning of “Dib,” which Turner has written in pencil in the foreground? I cannot help wondering whether “Dib” was meant to refer to Dieblich, on the Moselle. If it did, the mountain on the right would be the Niederburg, and the two buildings on the mountain beyond would be the two castles of the Knights of Cobern. Turner passed along this part of the Moselle in 1834. But, as a famous commentator once said, I put forward this suggested emendation without much confidence in its correctness.
115. A Gorge ([Plate XXIV]).