Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

Some neighbourly poplars stood hard by
Beheld their growth with jealous eye,
Now saw—exulting—cried
“How near is pride to earth allied.”

“Friends,” said the poplars in disgrace,
“You see the fault of making haste,
Ambition’s greatness caused our woe.
Ambition shun, mind how you grow,
For while you run you are bare below.”’

The drawing, like the poem, is not a remarkable one. As a design it differs little from the average work of accomplished landscape draughtsmen like Westall, Arnald, Daniell, etc. But from a comparative point of view it is of singular interest, as the differences between this preliminary drawing and the published engraving are greater than those in any other Liber subject. It starts as a rather jejune and drawing-masterlike composition, and comes out finally as one of the most vigorous and impressive marine designs in the whole series.

The etching was made by Turner himself. As the spacing and arrangement of the etching differ considerably from those of the drawing, it is most likely that an intermediate study was made. The changes, however, might very well have been made on the tracing-paper used to transfer the original design to the copper, and this would naturally have been destroyed as soon as it had been used. When the design had been drawn on the copper and bitten in, a few proofs were taken of the etching, and over one of these Turner set to work again with washes of sepia to guide Charles Turner, the engraver, who was to mezzotint the plate. This second design is now in the National Gallery (No. 522) and has been reproduced here as Plate [XXXVII.]

Of course we cannot hope to grasp the whole difference that has taken place in this second version of the design. But here are two drawings made by the same hand, within a short space of time of each other, of the same size and the same subject, yet one is obviously a work of genius, and the other is as tame and lifeless as its companion is vivid, energetic, and full-blooded. The comparison is worth making, not, indeed, that there is the slightest hope that any of us may learn from it how to work such miracles, but because it will help to impress upon us the importance of the form or ‘style’ of a work of art, as opposed to the objects it represents,—the importance of ‘mere technique’; it will also give us some insight into the real nature of artistic expression,—will show us how far removed the whole process is from that pious and passive reproduction of what is ‘given’ in sense-perception which plays such a large and dangerous part in current practice. Let us see therefore what we can discover.

In the first place it is evident that in the second version of the subject the design has been what artists call ‘pulled together.’ The foreground boat on the left (it is of course on the right in the plate) has been made, if not actually bigger, yet more important as a mass, by the addition of the sails of a second boat immediately behind it. The apparent height of the boat has been increased by dropping the height of the man standing in the cart in the water beside it, and by making the horses, carts and men relatively smaller. The castle in the distance has been shifted nearer to the boat, the height of the two masts of the boat in the middle distance which abut on to the castle have been reduced, so that the masts and sails of its neighbour on the right seem higher and bigger. More has been made of the men, boats, etc., at the foot of the low hills which appear on the right of the drawing, and the foreground group of men and horses has been shoved nearer to the figure of the man just entering the water, and, to make the connection firmer, the cask and grappling irons on the ground have been carefully added.

But it is useless merely cataloguing these changes, if we cannot discover the reasons for them. Is all this shuffling and rearrangement for the sake of balance and visual harmony? No doubt to some extent it is. But notice in the remodelled design the effect of that firm straight line of the distant sea in the centre, and the way the distant castle rises out of it. That is the nerve of the whole design. See how all the other lines and shapes fret the eye with their sharp and jagged forms, and yet lead it inevitably back to that one untroubled space. All this artfully calculated playing with lights and shadows, this complicated conspiracy of lines and forms, is assuredly something more than an aimless trifling with appearances. In that untroubled stretch of water we cannot but feel the steady, never-resting, inexorable march of the real powers of nature. It brings the whole mighty background of human life into the drawing; and this real spiritual presence sets the daily toil and hardship of everyday life in a new light, solemnising it, dwarfing it, yet not crushing it. It is as though we had heard the rustle of the wings of eternity in the passing moment. To do this, to produce this effect unerringly and with logical certainty upon every normally constituted Englishman who looks carefully at the drawing, cannot exactly be the chance result of a diligent shuffling and reshuffling of mere shapes and shadows. There is something of divinity in it. The shapes and shadows have meaning, and this timeless and spaceless meaning is the life-blood that animates and transfigures these bald signs and symbols. If art deals only with appearances, we must remember that appearance is also a form of reality, and that form and content can be so closely interwoven that the distinctions of our meddling understanding may become idle and misleading.

It is only from some such point of view as this that we can hope to grasp the full importance of what clever people call ‘mere technique.’

Let us turn now to the ‘Basle’ design. Although this engraving was published in the first part of Liber, I am inclined to doubt whether the preliminary drawing was made in the Wells’s cottage. This design is based upon a sketch made at Basle in 1802, and it is hardly likely that Turner would have had this sketch-book with him when he went to spend a few days with his friends in Kent. Moreover, the first sepia drawing is not with the others in the National Gallery. Mr. Rawlinson believes that it passed into the hands of an American collector ‘many years ago’ (Liber Studiorum, p. 19). But we have Turner’s etching of the subject, and if we compare this with the drawing made from nature, which certainly formed the ground-work of the subject, we see clearly what a great difference there really is between two processes which modern uncritical thought persistently confounds—between the process of ‘drawing what you see’ and ‘copying nature faithfully,’ and the process of artistic construction and invention.