FREIBURG: THE DESCENT FROM THE HOTEL DE VILLE
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1841
PLATE LXXXII
RUINED CASTLE ON ROCK
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1841
of humanity, to sink into the unconscious vegetative life of nature. Even when roused to activity his mind seems curiously dehumanised. When he draws for us the towers and churches of a place like Freiburg we seem to be looking at the work of a disembodied spirit. The city is divested of all its human associations. His eye seems now to classify and arrange what it sees in terms of space and motion, much as we should imagine an eagle to look down upon the welter and turmoil of our lives. I get the same impression from the ‘Village and Castle on the Rhine’ (82, N.G.), and ‘The Via Mala’ (73, N.G.).
In all this, in this gradual impoverishment of mind and feeling, it is difficult to discover anything more than the silent and inevitable ravages of old age. But it is not their poverty of content that makes these later drawings of Turner so remarkable. It is the virile and glorious artistic skill which only flames the brighter amid the decay of all Turner’s other faculties. The man was dead before the incomparable master of tone and colour was exhausted. It is this curious combination of an unexhausted special aptitude with a moribund mentality that gives this later work of Turner its uniqueness, its lurid and uncanny fascination. In the whole history of pictorial art we have never had before quite the same display of senile apathy gilded and transfigured by the dying shafts of an incommensurable natural capacity.