ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1827
afternoon, an effect that does not change very rapidly; the slightness of Turner’s sketch was not, therefore, a necessary outcome of the transitory nature of his subject-matter. Had he been so minded he could easily have painted the whole subject out-of-doors. But with the ‘Colchester’ drawing, another of the England and Wales subjects, published about the same time as the ‘Bolton,’ the case was different. There the effect is a momentary one. It is evening, the shades of twilight have gathered, and the sun is on the point of disappearing. There was only time for a few hasty memoranda; but while the modern artist would almost invariably make his memoranda in colour, Turner is quite satisfied with his usual hurried pencil notes. In the sketches here reproduced (Plate [LXVI.]) we have a kind of abstract of the whole scene. There is the miller’s house beside the river at the foot of the hill, while the hill is crowned by a row of trees through which the abbey building and the roofs of the distant town can be seen. The position of the sun and of its reflection in the river are marked.
The general idea of the whole is certainly there in the sketches, but in a rudimentary or indeterminate condition. Note how deliberately vague and undefined the idea of the trees on the brow of the hill has been kept. A distant abbey-building set in the delicate tracery of gracefully branching trees, the whole framed in masses of feathery foliage, that was the general idea of this part of the design, and Turner knew that he was familiar enough with the nature and ways of trees to be able to carry out this idea with all the requisite wealth of detail whenever he should set himself seriously to the task. The exact shapes of the trees actually growing there on the hillside on the day and at the moment when he made this sketch were, apart from their general idea, a matter of indifference to him. If he had cared very much about them he could easily have gone there the next morning and drawn them carefully; they would hardly have altered much in the night. But these shapes would have surely wanted revision, alteration and suppression, before they could have taken their places as a perfectly articulated limb in Turner’s living, organic design. The result could not have been more satisfactory than the one reached without this labour.
As with the row of trees, so with the miller’s house, the cottages creeping up the hillside and the distant town. The pencil hieroglyphs are enough to suggest the general idea of these objects, their appropriate particularities will unroll themselves from the stored treasures of Turner’s mind so soon as he takes his pencil in hand again to carry forward his work; not the actual details of the cottages, etc., existing down there in Essex, but the details appropriate to the picture as an expression of an emotional experience.
The drawings in the England and Wales series produced in this way, in which a definite particular experience of the artist is enshrined as it were in a wealth of appropriate and beautifully arranged shapes and colours, are among the best of the series. But the pressure of professional engagements did not always permit the artist to wait for this kind of inspiration. On such occasions he appears to have fallen back on the material stored in his early sketch-books, and his rhetorical mastery of the elements of design was taxed to the uttermost to provide it with suitable clothing and ornament. An excellent example of this kind of work is provided by the drawing of Stamford, published in 1830. This was founded on one of the sketches made during Turner’s first tour in the North of England, in 1797. This sketch (Plate [LXVIII.]) is no doubt a fairly accurate record of the place, its humdrum streets and houses, with its three triumphant bursts of idealism in the shape of its three unimaginative church towers.
In taking up this sketch thirty years after it was made, Turner seems to have asked himself, ‘What am I to do to make this dull affair into something universally interesting?’ that is to say, into something interesting and even amusing to those who care nothing for Stamford merely for its own sake. Of course the first thing for him to do was obviously to seize upon the three towers and make the most of them, setting them up against a gorgeous sky filled with rain and thunder and the darting rays of the thwarted sun, which, however, must so far triumph in its contest as to flood the towers with its light and transfigure them with its splendour. The street below remains dull and untractable, but yet something may be made of it. We can gain one point by insisting on the smallness and homeliness of the houses, intensifying their
PLATE LXVIII