If we examine ‘The Evening Star’ and ‘At Petworth’ (both at the Tate Gallery), the ‘Snowstorm’ of 1842, the late Venetian pictures, and the ‘Rain, Storm, Speed’ of 1844, we find these works are all similarly distinguished by their general vagueness of definition and by the fact that they all represent scenes which had come within the range of the artist’s own experience.
Yet it is evident that these two characteristics are not of equal importance. The vagueness of definition was a general characteristic of all Turner’s later work, but a considerable number of these works were purely imaginary compositions, as for example the ‘Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus’ (1839), ‘The Exile and the rock limpet’ (1842), ‘The Evening of the Deluge’ (1843), ‘Queen Mab’s Cave’ (1846), and the various ‘Whaler’ pictures (1845 and 1846). There is obviously, then, no necessary connection between Turner’s vagueness of execution (his distinctively Impressionist manner) and his choice of subject of which he had been actually an eye-witness.
Besides, we must remember that Turner did not wait till his later years before beginning to paint his own impressions. He had been busy painting them ever since he had come to artistic maturity. His ‘Calais Pier’ (1803), the ‘Spithead’ (1809), ‘Petworth—Dewy Morning’ (1810), ‘Teignmouth’ and ‘Hulks on the Tamar’ (1811 and 1812), and ‘Frosty Morning’ (1813),—to name only a few—were certainly works of this kind; as were the ‘Hedging and Ditching’ of the Liber and the ‘Colchester’ of the England and Wales series. But there is no lack of determination in the execution of these works. The difference between Turner’s later attempts to paint his impressions and his earlier must therefore be found in his attitude towards these impressions—the principle of selection, of suppression and adjustment upon which he dealt with the data of sense-perception; and this brings us to the consideration of the rationale of that vagueness of execution which we have agreed to regard as the chief characteristic of Turner’s later work.
An ingenious and at first somewhat plausible attempt has been made to explain the peculiarities of Turner’s later style, on the ground that old age and failing health had brought about an actual organic change in the artist’s powers of sight. But it seems to me that Dr. Liebreich’s arguments[29] and conclusions are vitiated by his failure to discriminate between Turner’s manner of expression and the action of his eyesight. These are two clearly distinct operations. Between the act of seeing and an artist’s fully organised manner of expression, a whole host of considerations—among them the limitations and capacities of the material—interpose themselves. These considerations must all receive their due weight. I know several very short-sighted artists whose pictures are remarkable for their elaborate and sharply defined details, and there are others with strong and good eyesight, whose pictures are confused and indistinct. An artist puts into his pictures only what he chooses to put there. And when we work out in detail the reasons why Turner chose to make his drawings indistinct, we find that such considerations are quite sufficient by themselves to account for his change of style, without having recourse to any hypothetical alteration in his organs of sight.
The clue, then, to the nature of Turner’s later manner of expression is to be found in the character not of his optical sensations but of his thought, or in other words, upon the mode in which his intelligent self reacted upon the immediate data of sense-perception. By the time he had reached the period with which we are now concerned, he had lost much of his interest in the material world. He cared no longer for the strength and weight, the toughness and tang of material; that delight in the solidity of real objects which gives such a manly gusto to his early sea-pieces, is now altogether absent from his work. He cares no longer for the company of men, or for their avocations or joys and sorrows. He is now a lonely old man, with his thoughts mainly centred upon himself, upon his artistic genius, his artistic fame, and the visions of future pictures by which his genius was to continue to manifest itself, and by which his fame was to be increased or sustained.
We have then to think of Turner as a solitary dreamer of dreams, with a professional interest in the capacity of these dreams to startle a rather stupid public. If we want to enter intimately into the spiritual and emotional content of his dreams we have only to turn to the contemporary works of the poets. In pictures like ‘The Fountain of Indolence,’ the ‘Agrippina’ and those I have mentioned above, we see how deeply impressed his mind had become with the ideals of current Romantic poetry; the true Byronic disgust with himself and vague emotions of the infinite, the desire to
‘steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express.’
There is no doubt that these obscure emotions and vague reveries can only be adequately expressed in one particular way. They defy embodiment in clear-cut determinate forms. They demand a style as indeterminate, as vaguely suggestive, as inarticulate as the loose-knit dreams which are calling for embodiment.
This, then, I take to be the proper explanation of the vagueness of Turner’s later manner: It is not that he saw the world indistinctly, but that his ideas were incapable of definition; it is not that his eyes were newly opened to the vapours and mists of the physical world, but that his own thoughts were confused and his emotions, in spite of their strength, were incoherent and inarticulate.
We are now in a position to define the relation in which Turner’s later works stand to modern Impressionism. The exact connotation of this term is not by any means easy to grasp, but so far as Impressionism has distinctive aims I think we are justified in describing them as the attempt to eliminate all those elements in art which are due to the reaction of the intelligent self upon the immediate data of sense-perception. The aim of Impressionism is to get rid of what one eminent psychologist has called the noëtic fringe in a state of consciousness, to abstract from memory and see objects as simple visual elements. The Impressionist wishes to see objects as though he was looking at them for the first time, as though they had no meaning for him. The theoretic justification of this procedure is that, in stripping off the formative and organising action of intelligence we isolate the pure element of objective reality; that pictures painted upon this principle give the real truth of nature and are free from all those errors and distortions which the action of thought is supposed to introduce into the irrefragably trustworthy elements of the given. These assumptions are, I need hardly add, untenable, but this is not the place to criticise them.