ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN WHITAKER’S “RICHMONDSHIRE,” JUNE, 1822
stipulation that it shall always be protected by a curtain when not being looked at, is still in fairly good condition. The engravings from the whole series were published between the years 1819 and 1823, but the sketches on which the drawings were based were all made during a tour in the summer of 1816.
So far as I know, Turner did not make a single colour sketch from nature during the whole of this tour. All the sketches are in pencil and the water-colours were all painted in the studio entirely from these pencil memoranda. The sketches are very similar to those made for the Southern Coast subjects, but they contain evidence that the artist was in a softer and gentler frame of mind. The conquering Napoleonic insolence has passed into an attitude of human and affectionate solicitude. The touch of the pencil point is everywhere light and graceful, yet it is as swift as ever, never lingering for a moment over details or particular facts. This is especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage; the pencil seeming always to caress the general idea of foliage, while holding the particular shapes and even positions of trees and bushes as of only slight importance. The work, one cannot but feel, is that of a happy and contented man, at peace with himself and pleased with his surroundings. When we remember the close proximity of Farnley Hall to these scenes, and that Mr. and Mrs. Fawkes and their family actually accompanied the artist over part of the ground, we can hardly be surprised at the sunniness of temper evinced by these sketches.
In nearly all the designs human figures and cattle play a prominent part. This is noticeably the case with the two subjects I have chosen for illustration. In the ‘Hornby Castle’ the incident of the broken jug, the weeping maiden, the sympathetic bystanders, the picturesque passer-by on his donkey, the busy milk-maid, and above all the cat, triumphantly lapping up the spilt milk, all this is at least as important an element in the picture as the Castle and view itself. In the ‘Heysham’ the reapers, cattle, milkmaid, and passing waggon seem to form the keynote of the whole design. Yet there are no sketches or even the slightest indications of any of these things in the sketch-books. They were evolved, I firmly believe, entirely by the artists’ creative imagination as each scene came to life under his hands in the studio. To some extent, no doubt, the decorative or mechanical requirements of the subject solicited their existence. In the ‘Heysham,’ for example, lines are wanted in the foreground to repeat with variations the horizontal undulations of the mountains in the distance and middle-distance; the cast shadows do this, and hence we have the presence of the cows and figures as pretexts for these shadows. And then we may as well make these objects useful in themselves; hence the turn of the foreground cow’s neck placed just where it seems to complete the curve of the descending hills, and the sharp silhouette of the head catches the eye while the cast shadow swings it away in a new and happy direction. Exactly why the eye should find such exquisite enjoyment in the plunge down from the hill’s profile to the head of the calf, rubbing her nose against the back of the seated white cow, and then on to the foreground beast, and then in springing off again at a sharp angle to the bottom of the large foreground stone in the corner just above the signature,—exactly why we take pleasure in this kind of visual melody, I do not know, but I know that the tracks laid for visible flights of this kind, crossing each other and interweaving in all directions, form a very large part of the enjoyment which Turner’s drawings provide.
The pencil sketch of Heysham (Plate [LIX.] (a)) thus formed, as it were, the leading motive of the water-colour drawing, or rather it provided a series of shapes which could not be varied beyond certain limits, and these shapes formed the starting-point of the elaborate visual movement which Turner proceeded to invent and weave round it. I called just now this side of the work ‘decorative or mechanical,’ because I wished to distinguish it from a different but related aspect. This unmeaning and abstract play of lines is like the rhyme, assonance and rhythm of a poem; a part, but an unconscious, and as it were dependent, part, of the whole effect. No sane person would read a poem expressly for the jingle of the sounds, unless for the purposes of analysis, and in the same way, no sane lover of pictures would look at this drawing of Heysham merely for the visible play of the lines and masses. Neither can the artist or poet abandon themselves to the
PLATE LIX
HEYSHAM, WITH BLACK COMBE, CONISTON OLD MAN, HELVELLYN, ETC., IN DISTANCE