Generally, with the really creative artists the two processes go on simultaneously or are fused into one, but here for once we find them separated. The pencil drawing was made as a simple record of facts; the etching was made some five or six years later, and it is curious to see what liberties Turner felt it was necessary and justifiable to take with his original record, before his notion of the requirements of a work of art could be satisfied.
In the drawing from nature the width of the river seems to dwarf the height of the buildings; in the engraving Turner seems to have felt that the height of the buildings ought to form the keynote of the whole design. First, therefore, the two towers of the Cathedral are carried well up above the house by the bridge, the gable of this building being reduced in size, so that it shall not compete in importance with the Cathedral towers. In the drawing, the buildings recede gradually and gently from the bridge, while in the etching, they are pushed into square step-shaped masses, thus emphasising the idea of weight and height. These impressions are further strengthened by deliberately making the supports of the bridge smaller and more fragile than they were in the drawing; in the engraving the straddling supports of the slender wooden bridge give it an air of weakness which makes the buildings at its side seem all the more firmly set by contrast.
These are only a few of the more obvious points of difference, but if the comparison were pursued further, we should find that every sweep of line and silhouette of the original material has been reconsidered and recast before it was allowed to form part of the new construction. I will not pretend that I regard the result obtained in this case as one of the great achievements of the series, but our observations are useful, I think, as showing the habitual thoroughness and earnestness which Turner brought to all his work. His attitude towards the matter in hand is always active and creative. His alterations are not always for the better—indeed, it is open to argument whether some of the changes made in this Basle subject were quite advantageous, but the fact remains that whatever he took up he threw himself heart and soul into, that he felt bound to recreate it from within, and that a mere cold and passive reproduction of the given would have seemed to him a cowardly shrinking from his artistic mission. He feels that he is responsible for the effect the shapes and arrangement of his subject make upon the spectator’s imagination, and that to attempt to apologise for a tame and uninteresting subject by saying, ‘It was so,’—‘It is quite true,’—would have seemed to him an unworthy evasion of his work.
How incapable Turner was of copying even one of his own drawings accurately is clearly shown by the etching of the ‘Little Devil’s Bridge’ (R. 19). When we compare this with the original drawing (No. 476, N. G.) we find that almost every form in the design has been recast, not always to its individual advantage from the point of view of realisation, but with an invariable gain in the direction of greater general cohesion. Note, for example, how the straight tree trunk nearest the bridge in the drawing gets bent slightly to the left, just to make you feel the toughness and obstinacy of the tree itself. The fir-trees on the left, too, are more realistic in the drawing, but they are more forcible and dramatic in the engraving.
As we have been able to reproduce Turner’s original pencil study from nature for the ‘London from Greenwich’ plate, the reader will be able to make his own comparison with the published design. The preliminary sepia drawing for the engraving (No. 493, N. G.) forms an intermediate step between the two, a stage, as it were, in the process by which Turner’s mind took complete possession of the subject. In the sepia drawing, the artist has not yet fully realised the exact rôle the main building has to play in the whole arrangement. When we turn to the engraving we find that the whole character of the mass formed by the hospital has been changed. In the drawing it forms a straggling mass, somewhat like a chance medley of wharves and warehouses, in the engraving this mass has been patted together into a solid and definite structure. The distant parts of the building have been raised, and they now tell as a rigid horizontal line. The gain to the hospital in dignity and in individuality is extraordinary, and its stiff straight lines are exactly what was wanted to throw emphasis on the subtlety and delicacy of the slow sweep of the distant river.
The drawing for the ‘Martello Towers, Bexhill,’ plate is a very tame affair, and the finished plate is only saved from comparative
PLATE XL