PLATE XVI
BLAIR’S HUT ON THE MONTANVERT AND MER DE GLACE
WATER COLOUR. 1802
of local colour, than as an additional instrument of expression of the subjective mood. Among the drawings elaborated in this way are the sketches upon which several of the Farnley drawings (the large ‘Mer de Glace, Chamounix,’ ‘Falls of the Reichenbach,’ ‘Pass of St. Gothard,’ ‘Blair’s Hut, Mer de Glace,’[13] etc.), were based. In some cases the finished works are less impressive than the first sketches, which are almost overpowering in their concentrated vehemence and gloomy majesty. But we must beware of regarding these as simple sketches from nature. They are more strictly studies for pictures than sketches from nature, and it is hardly too much to say that they owe more of their energetic emotional appeal to the Wilson tradition, which Turner had by this time thoroughly assimilated, than to the immediate inspiration of nature.
CHAPTER IV
THE SEA-PAINTER—1802-1809
Connection between marine painting and the sublime—Turner’s first marine subjects—The ‘Bridgewater sea-piece’—‘Meeting of the Thames and Medway’—‘Our landing at Calais’ and ‘Calais Pier’—‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’—‘Guisborough Shore’ and ‘Dunbar’ sketch-books—‘The Shipwreck’—‘At the Mouth of the Thames’—‘The Nore,’ ‘Sheerness,’ etc.—‘Death of Nelson.’
WE have studied in the preceding chapter the first phase of Turner’s genuinely creative work. We have seen the artist tear himself free from the trammels of the prosaic understanding, with its clear-cut distinctions between external nature and subjective thought and feeling, and plunge whole-heartedly into the concrete world of the poetic imagination. The accomplished draughtsman of the visible has developed into the perfervid poet of the invisible. Objective reality, as such, is shattered and trampled ruthlessly underfoot.
‘Woe! woe!
Thou hast destroy’d
The beautiful world
With violent blow
’Tis shiver’d! ’tis shatter’d!
The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter’d!
Now we sweep
The wrecks into nothingness!
Fondly we weep
The beauty that’s gone!
Thou, ’mongst the sons of earth,
Lofty and mighty one,
Build it once more!
In thine own bosom the lost world restore!’
The distinction between percipient and object is brushed aside, and the external world becomes the medium and the means of manifestation of inward perceptions and ideas. How far the external world can be built up again in the bosom of the self-conscious subject depends largely upon the opportunities and genius of the individual.