PLATE XXII
MEN-OF-WAR’S BOATS FETCHING PROVISIONS (1)
PENCIL ABOUT 1808
between St. Abb’s Head and Dunbar seem to have deeply impressed Turner’s imagination. As we turn over the leaves of this book we seem to hear ‘the sombrous and heavy sound of the billows successively dashing against the rocky beach’ that Scott speaks of in his description of Fast Castle in the Bride of Lammermoor. The artist seems too excited to draw in his old static fashion. The stretches of sullen sea are sketched again and again, the white crests of the incoming waves being dug out furiously with the knife. But only the large masses of light and dark are indicated. Here we have a stretch of cold light in the sky with the dark sea and cliffs looming against it, the whole vague and fragmentary, but irresistibly impressive. But perhaps the most eloquent pages in the book contain two glorious studies of storm-tossed waves. We are looking out from the shore, with the waves breaking at our feet. Even in his more elaborate work Turner has never suggested the tremendous weight and power of the sea-waves so vividly as in these hurried and tiny sketches. The furious work with the knife on both sides of the paper has reduced it almost to a rag; but the rag is eloquent, and such studies as these help us to understand how it was that Turner could paint the sea so very much better than any artist either before his time or since.
‘The Shipwreck,’ one of the most successful of Turner’s early sea-pieces, was painted in 1805. The picture is doubtless a ‘composition’ in which Turner has endeavoured to sum up his knowledge of the sea, but, as was usual with him, it contains a nucleus of directly observed fact. These two sides of his art, tireless and the most searching observation, and the subsequent artistic manipulation of what he had seen and felt, are clearly displayed for us in two little ragged paper-covered note-books labelled by the artist ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Shipwreck 2.’ The first contains the succinct record of an actual shipwreck, the second the series of trial compositions which he made before the final design of the picture was fixed.
Eight of the pages of the first book—it only contains sixteen pages in all—have long been exhibited among the Turner water-colours in the National Gallery. They are framed together, and numbered 535. They represent so many different views of a barque going to pieces on the shore. There can be no doubt of the veracity of these bold, masterly pen sketches; as Mr. Ruskin says of them, ‘I believe even those who have not seen a shipwreck, must recognise, by the instinct of awe, the truth of these records of a vessel’s ruin’ (Ruskin on Pictures, p. 221). In the margin of one of the drawings Turner has scribbled ‘Pepper (?) bargh Vessel. Hemp. O. Iron bundles like Hoop.’ The scenery vaguely suggests the coast of Kent to me,—possibly Gravesend.
These sketches are so impressive that one would have thought that Turner would have been satisfied to take any one of them as a basis for a picture. But his mind seemed unsatisfied until he had exalted actuality into something of epic grandeur. The second little book shows how he set to work to make his pictures express a clearer intention and a wider mental outlook than any single incident could.