Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

TEASING THE DONKEY: PETWORTH

WATER COLOUR; ON BLUE. ABOUT 1830

world only indirectly and only in so far as it furnishes or suggests the stuff out of which his pictorial symbols are woven. But we have still to search for the secret power of attraction which these symbols do unquestionably possess. Why is it, we must ask, that these signs and symbols have such power to move men, to delight and intoxicate some, to soothe and cheer others?

The answers to these questions may be conveniently grouped under two heads. In the first place we may consider what are the attractions which Turner’s work shares with the Romantic poets whose works express the same kind of subject-matter, and in the second place we may attempt to indicate what are the qualities which are more intimately connected with his own individuality.

In the first place then, when we consider Turner as a fellow-worker with Byron, Shelley, and Lamartine, we see that like them he appeals constantly and unerringly to that illusion of the romantic temperament which lends a mysterious charm to all that is indefinite and indefinable. In a singularly acute analysis of this temperament Mr. George Santayana has traced one of the chief causes of the delight which this kind of art and poetry awakens to what he calls ‘the illusion of infinite perfection.’ There is, he says, a loose and helpless state of mind to which we all of us approximate when in a state of fatigue. In this state of mind we are not capable of concentrated and serious attention to one thing at a time, so we are apt to ‘flounder in the vague, but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts and semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to think, speak, or imagine. The sum of our incoherencies has, however, an imposing volume and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems to us to come nearest to the ideal, is not what embodies any one possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many, and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive thrill.... That infinite perfection which cannot be realised, because it is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on account of this suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded as higher, more significant, and more beautiful than any determinate one.’[30] These remarks help us to understand the positive qualities of Turner’s indeterminate style; its power of evoking a fallacious sense of profundity and significance, just because of its indeterminateness, its power of suggesting and stimulating emotion, just because it is incoherent and variously interpretable.

Yet when we have pressed these considerations to their extreme limit, we have only drawn attention to certain qualities which Turner’s later work shares with that of many indifferent artists and poets, and, far from exhausting the real and permanent elements of value in that work, they may be justly regarded as a searching and pitiless exposure of its weaknesses and defects. But we are on firmer ground when we turn to the purely personal qualities in this work, to the artist’s delicacy of hand and fineness of sight. It matters not what instrument Turner is working with, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, or whether he is working hurriedly or at leisure, the movement of his hand is always graceful and delightful. His powers of sight also seem to me to have been quite extraordinary; I do not mean that he had merely the power of seeing distant objects distinctly, not mere long-sightedness, though he seems to have had this faculty in an abundant measure, but a quite unusual power of discriminating between minute shades of light and colour. As the born musician is distinguished from other men by his capacity for detecting differences of sound which to others seem the same, so the evidence of Turner’s work—and all who have attempted to copy even the slightest of his sketches will, I am sure, bear me out in this—shows that he possessed an abnormal power of visual discrimination. No doubt his early training and especially the influence of Dayes had something to do with the development of this capacity, but the capacity itself was largely innate. In addition to these two natural gifts, an abnormal delicacy of hand and eye, Turner had the priceless advantage of being passionately and unfalteringly in love with his art. Some of the greatest artists give me the impression of loving their art less for its own sake than for the sake of the content which it enables them to express,—Rembrandt and Jean François Millet, for example, give me this impression, and I do not think that their greatness is imperilled in the least by it—but Turner seems to me to have loved his art, especially in his later years, entirely for its own sake. This strong and deep affection threw a glamour over every detail of his work. Nothing was too high or too low for him. He brought the same inexhaustible patience and alertness of attention to the working out of a complicated problem of perspective as to the finishing of his most ambitious pictures. Like Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ in the midst of danger, he had only to take a pencil into his hand to become ‘attired with sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.’ This concentration, this master-bias, throws a fervour and an inimitable charm over what it seems almost ironical to speak of as the mechanical execution of his works.

It is difficult to define the exact relationship of Turner’s love for his art, with his passionate and unwearying study of natural phenomena. My own impression is that his love of nature was at best to some extent subordinate to his love of art; that he loved nature partly at least as a means to artistic expression, and not altogether for itself. But however this may be, the extent of his knowledge of, and intimate familiarity with, nature’s ways counts for much in the attractions of his pictures. The evidence of his keen though intermittent study of natural phenomena is writ large in the collection of his sketch-books. The very extent of his knowledge, no doubt, led at times to a certain overcrowding of his works, but it forms the secret of his supple and ample style, and the inexhaustible fecundity of his invention.

It is then to the magic of his style that Turner’s later works owe a great deal of their strange power of compelling attention and extorting a sometimes unwilling admiration. He had in a quite pre-eminent degree what Reynolds has called the genius of mechanical execution. And this power is as remarkable in his earlier works as in his later. But in his earlier works this power was used to give definite embodiment to a range of worthy and significant ideas and emotions, and the sheer beauty of their content is apt to divert our attention from the consummate skill implied in this rarest and highest artistic achievement. But in the later work the very weakness and poverty of the content has the effect of keeping our attention fixed upon the suggestiveness and visual beauty of the material elements of expression. In the poetry of the French Symbolists we see a somewhat similar effect consciously aimed at. The poverty of thought is used as a foil to throw the greatest possible emphasis on the beauty of sounds and the faint suggestions of individual words. In this way the attenuation of significance in Turner’s later works throws into startling prominence all the innate and intrinsic splendours of the painter’s palette.

We shall have occasion to amplify and illustrate these observations as we trace the gradual development of Turner’s later manner, the task to which we have now to address ourselves.