of the town than the groups of trees and the peaceful stretch of fields make their tranquillising influence felt. Several pages of sketches remind me forcibly of the scenery of ‘The Frosty Morning.’ Then we find groups of farm hands resting from their labour, some carts and horses, ploughing scenes, a study of horses and pigs, and then the hurried scribble reproduced in Plate XXV., the germ from which the beautiful ‘Hedging and Ditching’ design in the ‘Liber’ was developed. Then come several Hind Head sketches, and before the hill is out of sight, comes the original sketch of another ‘Liber’ subject, the solemn and tender ‘Water Mill’ (R. 37). After this we stop to watch the blacksmith at work, and peep into some cottages, barns, etc. To eke out his hasty hieroglyphs Turner frequently adds a few explanatory words. On the margin of one sketch we read ‘Woman frying. Boy looking. Children at Tub, a girl beating the barrel, etc.’; and on another ‘W.’ (short for woman) ‘cutting Turnips. Interior of a Barn. Cows eating at the Entrance, etc.’ And before we get quite to the end of the book come four sketches of St. Catherine’s Hill, near Guildford, one of which went to the making of another ‘Liber’ subject (R. 33).
The two sketches here reproduced, of the ‘Windmill and Lock’ and ‘Hedging and Ditching’ subjects (Plates XXVII. and XXV.), illustrate admirably Turner’s attitude towards nature at this period. Such sketches are nothing more nor less than memoranda for the artist’s own use. Taken by themselves they are all but meaningless. Even to the artist himself their significance, as memoranda of real scenes, must have been of the slightest. The focus or real nucleus of their meaning is rather the subjective feelings which the scenes and their whole context evoked in the artist, than the particular objects or scenes themselves. This sentiment, the total emotional impression, is, of course, not expressed in the sketches themselves, though now that the completed designs have told us what this is we can hardly help reading some of it into the sketches. But to the artist himself these sketches were useful as preliminary statements, as tentative objectifications of his meaning. The work of ‘carrying out’ these sketches (or ‘working them out’) was simply the process of the further specification of this meaning. And to describe this work as an attempt to realise or reproduce the actual scenes in nature which Turner had sketched, is only in a very limited sense correct. The point of interest is the complex of subjective feeling aroused on a particular occasion by a chance conjunction of objects and circumstances, and in the final design the artist’s aim is to find a particular conjunction of pictorial signs which shall permanently objectify this emotional complex. Hence the actual objects and the particular form of their conjunction in the real scene lose all the importance which they possess as real objects, and become degraded, or at least subordinated, to a purpose which falls entirely outside their own existence. They are now nothing but pawns or counters in the artist’s game of pictorial expression, and as such the artist has absolute power over them, altering them, and annihilating them, as best suits his purpose. The artist is also entirely within his rights when he introduces fresh elements from other and different scenes to enforce and make clear his meaning. That Turner used these privileges to the utmost in the case of both these subjects is evident when we compare the sketches with the finished designs. These points seem to me worth insisting upon, because the real nature of artistic idealisation is so little understood and so generally misrepresented, and the opportunities of studying it genetically are of rare occurrence.
But the very fact that during the period of which we are now treating, the stress in Turner’s work is nearly always upon the subjective sentiment, and that the objective scenes and objects are relegated to a position of subordination detracts very largely from the immediate interest in the sketches from nature which Turner made during this time. Taken by themselves these sketches are in the highest degree vague and incomplete. They are valuable to us mainly for the purposes of comparison with the completed designs, and as illustrations of Turner’s methods of work. And for these purposes I think the two examples we have just studied are sufficient. I have not, therefore, deemed it advisable to illustrate this chapter with any other sketches of the same class. The three further illustrations I have chosen are of a different character. When Turner was called upon to treat subjects of a definite topographical character he was necessarily
PLATE XXVIII
WHALLEY BRIDGE AND VILLAGE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1808
