Steeton Manor House ([Plate XVIII]) is near Skipton. This drawing is on a smaller scale than most of the series.
The Fawkeses, in Turner’s time, were fond of Scarborough, and Turner was sometimes there in their company. Mr. Fawkes bought Turner’s large drawing of Scarborough which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811 (there is a repetition of this drawing in the Wallace Collection). But by 1818, when Mr. Morland Agnew’s lovely drawing was made, Turner’s style had changed. The earlier “Scarborough” is reserved and stately in design, but its breadth verges on emptiness. It is as though the artist was a little afraid of nature and was determined to keep her at arm’s length, for fear of offending the shades of Poussin, Claude and the other great old masters. But by 1818 he had got over his shyness. He had by then taken nature to his bosom. He delights in the sheer loveliness and infinite variety of English scenery. His manner of painting has become more sensitive and refined, to enable him to render the subtle qualities of form and atmosphere. Our modern theorists tell us that if an artist is in love with what he sees and bent on reproducing it, he ceases to “express himself” and becomes a mere mechanic. But this is because they fail to understand that healthy and imaginative artists do not sit at home in the dark anxiously feeling their pulse and worrying about their emotions and their moods. When Turner painted this lovely drawing of Scarborough he was as passionately absorbed in the variety and ever-changing beauty of physical nature as a poet like Wordsworth. The eye was the organ of his mind and spirit. He not only looked at nature, but he understood her, and loved her with intense and self-forgetting devotion. A drawing like this proves—what nobody should ever doubt—that an artist may be a realist and also a poet.
The late Mr. Francis Bullard has drawn attention (in a privately printed catalogue of some of Turner’s engravings which he generously presented to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) to some valuable remarks by Mr. Santayana on the subject of naturalism in poetry which apply with so much force to Turner’s realism that I will venture to quote them. After pointing out that our interest in nature need not necessarily be shallow and egotistical, Mr. Santayana writes: “Our emotion may be ingenuous; it may be concerned with what nature really is and does, has been and will do for ever. It need not arise from a selfish preoccupation with what these immense realities involve for our own persons, or may be used to suggest to our self-indulgent fancy. No, the poetry of nature may be discerned merely by the power of intuition which it awakens and the understanding which it employs. These faculties, more, I should say, than our moodiness or stuffy dreams, draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full vitality and music. Naturalism is a philosophy of observation, and of an imagination that extends the observable; all the sights and sounds of nature enter into it, and lend it their directness, pungency, and coercive stress. At the same time, naturalism is an intellectual philosophy; it divines substance behind appearance, continuity behind change, law behind fortune. It therefore attaches all those sights and sounds to a hidden background that connects and explains them. So understood, nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as well as sensuous variety. Before the sublimity of this insight, all forms of the pathetic fallacy seem cheap and artificial. Mythology, that to a childish mind is the only possible poetry, sounds like bad rhetoric in comparison. The naturalistic poet abandons fairyland, because he has discovered nature, history, the actual passions of man. His imagination has reached maturity.”
By the time the Valley of the Washburne and Scarborough drawings were made Turner’s imagination had reached its maturity. In much of his work done after this period one misses something of the earlier freshness, spontaneity, and what, for want of a better word, I must call “integrity.”
These shortcomings are most noticeable in his large oil paintings. The Wordsworthian calm and absolute sincerity of the earlier paintings, like The Frosty Morning, Lord Essex’s Walton Bridges, the Windsor and the Abingdon, give place to the Byronic Bay of Baiæ (1823), the two Mortlakes (1826-27), Dido Directing the Equipment of the Fleet (1828) and the Ulysses and Polyphemus (1829). Instead of the profoundly imaginative realism of the earlier works, we get the unrest of romanticism, with its vague and empty pomp, its cloying self-indulgence, its warm, voluptuous atmosphere. Yet even in the rush of romantic intoxication Turner could often touch the deepest chords of our imagination, especially in his water-colours, with works of the most intense sincerity and sublime insight. We have two examples of such works in the present exhibition, The Longships Lighthouse and the Lowestoft.
But before coming to these drawings, which form part of the “England and Wales” series, I must refer to the following subjects:—
29. Florence, from near San Miniato, circa 1825 ([Plate XVI]).
23. Saumur, circa 1829 ([Plate X]).
132. Wilderness of Sinai, circa 1832-34 ([Plate XIX]).
This view of Florence is the earliest example in the exhibition of an Italian scene painted from Turner’s own impressions. Yet in spite of this it seems to me to miss something of the charm of the drawings made from Hakewill’s sketches. It is richer in colour and more gorgeous in effect than they; yet it suggests, at least to my mind, more of the opera than of reality. It might have been painted as an illustration to Byron’s “Childe Harold.” It has been stated that this drawing was engraved in “The Keepsake” for 1828, and Mr. Rawlinson says (in his valuable book on “The Engraved Work of Turner”) “there are two apparently identical drawings of this subject, one in the possession of Lord Northbourne, the other in the possession of Mr. J. Beecham.” But the foreground and figures in this drawing (which was once in Sir Joseph Beecham’s collection) are different from those in the engraving. I think therefore that Lord Northbourne’s version, which I do not remember to have seen, must be the original from which “The Keepsake” engraving was made.