Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

PENCIL. ABOUT 1816

HEYSHAM AND CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS

ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN WHITAKER’S “RICHMONDSHIRE,” 22 AUGUST, 1822

mere unmeaning play of sounds or lines in the process of composition. These external requirements must be subordinated to the requirements of the meaning. And so, though I said just now that these mechanical requirements may have had some share in calling the figures and incidents represented into being, we must be careful not to forget that that share is only of slight and subordinate importance. What is important is the essential congruity of the figures and incidents with the landscape itself; they must appear not as something arbitrarily added, but as a mere development or further determination of the meaning already implicit in the landscape. In the present case so intimate is what I may call the logical identity between the bare view, as represented by the initial sketch, and as a topographical fact, and the whole living and moving scene as represented by the finished design, that the development of the one from the other seems as inevitable as the march of the seasons or the processes of growth and decay to which we ourselves are subject.

From this point of view I think it is easy to see that such a result is attainable in no other way than that which Turner has followed. No actual scene could ever possess quite the same close-knit logical coherence, the same absolute absence of irrelevance, as we find in Turner’s finished drawing; so that the most faithful and loving and skilful reproduction of the most carefully selected aspect of actuality would never give us the same kind of outer and inner unity that Turner has achieved by his method of amplifying, modifying, and interpreting his slight pencil sketches. Only in this way can the active forces of interpretation or assimilation, by which the artist as well as the meanest of us fills out the incoming suggestions of the given, achieve adequate expression. A psychologist might perhaps describe the difference between a faithful transcription of an actual scene and such an effort of the creative imagination as we have just been studying, by saying that the one is a representation of the incoming or given ideas or sensations, while Turner’s picture represents these same ideas or sensations after they have been thoroughly ‘apperceived’ by the masses of ideas stored in the artist’s mind. If we adopt such a description, we must not forget to add that Turner has used his knowledge of the mechanism of the pictorial language to set out his total idea for us in the clearest and pleasantest way.

As with the Heysham sketch, so with the Hornby.[28] I need perhaps hardly call attention to the deliberate heightening of Hornby Castle, and to the way the back of the nearer hill in front of it has been humped in the finished design. This deliberate falsification (as it must seem to the literalist) is paralleled by the treatment of the foreground tree, whose individuality is destroyed, and whose place is taken by a mere alien grown in the fertile climate of the artist’s imagination. I have no doubt that if Turner could have got the same effect without making these alterations he would not have made them. But it is obvious that he could not. From his point of view such alterations are merely grammatical devices by which he throws the required emphasis on qualities which hills and trees do undeniably possess, but which were somewhat slurred over in nature’s momentary presentment of the case. And if we think about the matter calmly, we see that we cannot expect any object to enter into new relations without undergoing some kind of modification; I mean that we cannot expect physical facts to be taken up into the intelligible world and used as factors in the expression of ideas and emotions without requiring some kind of modification.

While Turner was producing these exquisite drawings for Whitaker’s History of Richmondshire, he also executed a series of ten or eleven slightly smaller drawings to illustrate Sir Walter Scott’s Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland. Eight of these drawings were presented by the publishers to Scott, who had them framed from an oak felled on the Abbotsford estate during Turner’s visit there in 1818. The effect of this frame on the drawings, it must be confessed, is atrocious. It might be guaranteed to kill the effect of any water-colour drawings but the radiantly immortal ones for which it was made. No doubt even these would look better out of it, but such as it is it hung in the breakfast-room at Abbotsford till after Scott’s death, and as it then hung, so it hangs now in Mr. Thomas Brocklebank’s hospitable mansion at Heswall, Chester.

When we draw the curtain, which has kept Turner’s beautiful