Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

PLATE XXIX

WHALLEY BRIDGE

PENCIL. ABOUT 1808

restricted in the liberties he could take. In such cases his field of selection was confined within the possible points of view from which his subject could be regarded. In the two drawings of Whalley Bridge here reproduced (Plates XXVIII. and XXIX.) we see him searching for that aspect of the place which shall fit in or harmonise with the mood which was predominant in his own mind at this time. It is only from the point of view of such a subjective emotional attitude that the first drawing (Plate [XXVIII.]) could have been rejected in favour of the second (Plate [XXIX.]). As a representation of the actual place, the first drawing is much more adequate than the second. But it is evidently just this topographical and objective adequacy which constituted the defect of this fine drawing from Turner’s point of view. In the other drawing there is far less to occupy the attention. Here the interest is concentrated on a few simple forms. The mind is, therefore, thrown back on itself, and forced as it were to call up its own resources to amplify and fill out the painter’s forms. And this is the mood of poetic contemplation or meditation expressed in the beautiful picture of this subject which Turner exhibited in 1811, and which is now in Lady Wantage’s collection.

The third drawing to which I referred is the study for the picture of ‘London from Greenwich Park,’ now in the National Gallery. There is no trace of the emotional setting of the finished picture in the sketch (Plate [XXX.]). It is merely a record of the facts. But the artist has already grasped in his own mind the significance of these facts with such clearness that the bare facts even in this memorandum have become eloquent.

The full scope of Turner’s work at this period, then, can only be gathered from his completed works. And as I have said, I do not think this aspect of Turner’s genius has so far had full justice done to it. I will therefore make an attempt to indicate in a few words what I regard as the distinctive qualities of this group of works; and to simplify my task I will centre my remarks round two pictures, both in the National Gallery, and therefore easily accessible to every one, viz., ‘A Frosty Morning’ and the ‘Windsor,’ which seem to me to typify the qualities and merits of the whole group.

After what has gone before I do not think I need say much to combat the opinion that these pictures are simply reproductions of actual scenes. Their relation to the actual sights of nature is exactly the same as that between the two ‘Liber’ designs we have just examined and the sketches upon which they were based. In the designs, and in these pictures, there is indeed a wealth of subtle and penetrating observation of natural forms, habits, and colours, but this material is never there simply for its own sake. These colours and forms of natural beauty are the elements of which the artist’s language is compounded, the pictorial equivalent of the names of natural objects in the verse of a great poet. To fix one’s attention on these factors in the whole complex structure of such works as ‘A Frosty Morning’ and ‘Windsor,’ and to say that these fragments of meaning are all that they contain, seems to me as inexcusable as it would be to isolate the nouns in a poem, and to insist that we must ignore that play of thought and feeling around this common basis in which the real value of even the simplest poem consists. We can, of course, always stop short in our understanding of any statement, and the temptation is very great to stop short at some superficial characteristic in such a highly complex individuality as a work of modern art. In the case of the two pictures with which we are now concerned, these characteristics happen to be not only superficial and obvious, but they happen also to be easily nameable, whereas the complete ideational and emotional structure of the whole work is very far from being easily named or described. Yet it is just this particular and special emotional and ideational whole which constitutes the very being of the work of art, and which alone gives it value. It is because modern art criticism has seized with such avidity upon the primitive sense-factor in pictorial language, and has insisted with so much energy that the art cannot or ought not to attempt any kind of ideational articulation, that it has failed to do justice to this phase of Turner’s art.

To call these pictures, then, imitations or reproductions of natural scenes is not altogether inaccurate. They are this, but at the same time they are so much more. The forms and colours of nature are there, but they are superseded and sublimated in exactly the way that the particular events described in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal are superseded and sublimated in the poems