BORTHWICK CASTLE
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 2 APRIL, 1819
work as fresh as when it was first executed, and look at these drawings, it is difficult to single out any one of them for special attention. But after looking through the engravings made from them in Scott’s book, the marvellous view of ‘Edinburgh from the Calton Hill’ leaves perhaps the most powerful impression on the imagination. I have, therefore, selected the drawing made from nature upon which this design was based as the subject of one of our illustrations (Plate [LX.]).
In this case we find that Turner has followed his sketch with great care, yet the whole material has been hammered this way and that by his powerful hand. We can see that the artist felt impatient with nature’s calm and unhurried chronicle of facts, and was determined at all costs to make a more immediate and concentrated attack on the spectator’s powers of perception. Instead of stretching out calmly and indifferently on both hands, as in the sketch, the city in the finished design seems to soar upwards from the depths beneath our feet. The jail on our left has been squeezed together, making the line from the porch to the central turret much more oblique than it was. The perspective of nearly all the buildings has been modified, yet the artist has taken great care to preserve the character of the silhouettes of the leading planes. But it is in the invention of the play of light which animates the whole, and throws into such strong relief all the telling points of the design, that we find the clearest evidence of the artist’s active intervention.
A curious instance of Turner’s habit of using his notes rather as hints to his imagination than as providing ready-made material waiting for immediate incorporation, is afforded by the sketches of some figures made while he was standing on the Calton Hill. On the back of one of the pages on which our view of Edinburgh is drawn, there is a rough sketch of the brow of the hill with groups of figures on it. Among these figures are three girls attending to the drying of the clothes they have washed. One of these is standing shaking out a cloth in the wind. But though Turner has introduced this incident into the foreground of his picture, the figure there is not a repetition of the graceful figure in the sketch. In the picture the action has been changed, and the figure presented in a different point of view. It is designed altogether afresh. In the same way none of the other figures is repeated in the finished drawing. The figures in the drawing are indeed the same sort of people as in the sketch, but each is designed specially for its place, and with reference to the movement of the whole picture. All this is eminently characteristic of the cast of Turner’s mind, which seems to store scenes and incidents in complete independence of their momentary and particular appearance; he is thus able to set these invisible essences in motion before his mind’s eye, and to wait till they arrange themselves to his complete satisfaction, and he has then no difficulty in clothing them with the attributes of time and space.
We will turn now to a sketch of a different kind. In the ‘Edinburgh,’ ‘Heysham’ and ‘Hornby’ sketches, as in most of those we have examined, we have seen Turner making a note of what we may call the chief items of the topographical data, leaving the problem of their arrangement, modification and amplification for future solution. In the two sketches of Rochester (Plates LXII. (a) and (b)) which I have had reproduced, we see the artist’s mind moving on a different track. A few pages earlier in the sketch-book from which these two leaves are taken, he has indeed made his usual record of the facts about the church, bridge, etc., at Rochester, but apparently, as time did not press, he remained in his boat watching the scene and criticising, as one who understood such things, nature’s own methods of design. His sketches now become not topographical records but swift and eloquent designs for pictures. The concrete particularity of the castle, church, bridge, etc., becomes abrogated or submerged. These objects are now taken up into a new kind of systematic unity, in which their relationship to the whole and to each other is of much more importance than their discrete individuality. Now, the important point is just how the Castle and the other topographical items drop into place with regard to the shipping on the river,—the kind of groups they all make, the way the one item affects the other, half hiding it or setting it off to advantage. In the sketch on page 18 of the sketch-book (Plate [LXII.] (a)) the exact position of the mast of the foreground vessel is the dominant factor,—the way it unites the lines described by the silhouette of the castle and the trees sloping down to the bridge, bringing the
