Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

CHAPTER VIII
MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY, AND THE ORIGIN OF IMPRESSIONISM—1830-1845

Mental characteristics of 1815-1830 period—Their influence on form—and colour—Colour enrichment a general characteristic of Romantic Art—What further development is required to give us the transition to Impressionism?—The first of Turner’s so-called Impressionistic works—Vagueness or indistinctness as a means of expression—Two ways of painting one’s impressions—Turner’s earlier way—contrasted with the modern Impressionistic way—The change, after 1830, is it a change in terms of sight or of thought—visual or mental?—The content of Turner’s later work—The relation of Turner’s later work to Impressionism defined—The gradual development of Turner’s later manner—The Petworth sketches (1830)—The discovery of the artistic value of the indeterminate—The Vignettes-‘Rivers of France’—Venetian sketches (1834-1840)—Swiss and Rhine sketches (1841-1844)—The end.

WHEN we try to make clear to ourselves the inner characteristics of the period studied in the last chapter, we notice at once a change from the gloom, sternness and patient endurance of the earlier decade to a brighter and more cheerful frame of mind. Turner’s predominant frame of mind is proud and happy. He seems to rejoice in the splendour of the world and exult over the richness and variety of its material. His attitude towards humanity is not so easily defined. In the best of his oil paintings, as in the ‘Pas de Calais’ (‘Now for the Painter’), and in his water colours, there is an abundance of close and sympathetic observation of the labours and sorrow of mankind. But in spite of the graces of a naturally kind heart Turner’s attitude towards these labours and sufferings is not entirely free from traces of hardness and selfishness. His instinct for the picturesque side of this kind of subject-matter is so keen, and his insistence on this picturesqueness is so constant and so emphatic, that it is hard to resist the suspicion that his interest is rather professional than personal. He does not seem to feel himself an actor and a fellow-sufferer. He was on the other side of the fence; he was the artist, and labouring, suffering mankind his material. And so far as he himself was concerned he had every reason for exultation. The nature that could endow a humbly born youth with such gifts as he possessed, and the society that had rewarded these talents so generously, might be said to have fairly earned the young painter’s gratitude. He gave it effusively, with none of the ulterior reserves an educated Greek would have felt in the presence of a great happiness or pre-eminent success.

Let us now turn to the outward and visible results of this exultant and somewhat heartless and selfish enjoyment. The movement of the design, the quality of the tone and colour, and the spirit of the handling of the pictures in which such a frame of mind is expressed, could not possibly be the same as in Turner’s earlier pictures. The sober and restrained colouring of pictures like the ‘Windsor,’ the ‘Frosty Morning’ and ‘The Nore,’ is in perfect harmony with the patient strength and sternness of the emotional colouring of their inspiration. The same mood could not be expressed in any other scheme of lighting and colour. But to treat what, for want of a better word, I may call a pictorial metre, as though it were equally admirable as a means of expression for all kinds and shades of emotion, would argue an extraordinary dulness or sheer absence of artistic capacity; and Turner’s shortcomings, if he had any, were moral rather than artistic.

Given then the mood of exultant enjoyment of the physical amenities of the world, a lighter and brighter colour scheme than that of Turner’s earlier pictures was bound to be forthcoming, if that mood was to be fully expressed by pictorial art. And as a matter of history Turner was the first modern artist in the range of landscape art to give adequate expression to this sentiment of unrestrained enjoyment of the physical delights of nature, though we see the same swelling sense of the pride of life finding a similar form of expression in the works of contemporary figure-painters like Sir Thomas Lawrence, Shee and Hayter in England, and Delacroix, Isabey, and others in France.

In the present chapter I propose to deal with the closing phase of Turner’s art. In the works of this period Turner has been said to have initiated a new kind of art, or at least to have invented or introduced certain important innovations in the region of colour and tone, which have had the effect of developing new possibilities in the art of landscape-painting. It is from this point of view, and with reference to this aspect of Turner’s work, that he has been hailed as the father of Impressionism. Before discussing the value of the innovations Turner introduced and their influence on subsequent developments of the art, it is important to study the immediate causes which brought them into existence. In other words, we must study this new phase of Turner’s art in relation to its immediate antecedents; in the first place, to see how far it can be regarded as a necessary development of what had gone before, and in the second place, to discover exactly what is new in it.

The two most striking characteristics of Turner’s later work are the brightness and extended range of his colour schemes. But this formal characteristic is clearly taken over bodily from the previous period, and we have just seen that it was but the necessary outward expression of the spiritual content with which Turner was then preoccupied. In a picture like ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus’ (1829), for example, we have a colour scheme as bright and as extended as that of any of the later works, and yet it is emphatically a work of the Romantic period. It is all ablaze with the light and flame of human pride. Its gorgeous array of blues, its burnished gold and glowing crimson and scarlet and white are but the triumphant expression of the mood of unrestrained sensuous enjoyment which formed the key-note of the work we have just been examining.

But if the lightening of the colour scheme was simply an inheritance from the Romantic phase of art, what are we to regard as the special contribution of the later manner? A comparison of a few of Turner’s later works with the ‘Ulysses’ will show us at once. The earliest example of Turner’s later and so-called Impressionistic manner with which I am familiar is the ‘Calais Sands, low water—Poissards collecting bait,’ which was exhibited in 1830, and is now in the Bury Art Gallery. Its colour