But even when we make all due allowance for the artist’s power of emphasis and discrimination with regard to the elements which make up the total thought-content of his object, we must confess that the range of expression centred round any single material object is limited. A study of such an object points to the object it was made from—it assures us that this particular object was bodily present to the eyes of the artist when he made the study, but it does not tell us in what ideal context we are to take the object. A study as such is not a work of art, or perhaps it would be better to say that it is a mere fragment of a possible work of art. A study is simply a pictorial name, and a name has meaning only in a sentence or by suggesting a sentence.[35] If we look at a study from the same point of view from which we regard a work of art, we should go on to ask ourselves, ‘Well, what of it, what is the artist’s purpose in painting or drawing this?’ It would start us upon an objectless and endless intellectual exercise, in which we should miss the purpose which every work of art implies.
This indeterminateness and incompleteness of meaning forms, I believe, the essential characteristic of a study, as distinguished from a work of art. One result, then, of our insistence upon the content of pictorial art is the re-emergence of an old traditional usage or term which recent theorising has done its best to discard. Apart from the question of content, I believe there is nothing to distinguish a study or a sketch from a complete picture.
Let us now turn from the elaborate studies of individual objects to the pure outline drawings of places and buildings which Turner made at the beginning of his career. The drawings of ‘Ripon’ and ‘Lincoln Cathedral’ here reproduced may stand as typical of this class of work. Such drawings are defective in the same way as the studies. Their meaning is incomplete. We do not know exactly how to take them. They are very much on the footing of perceptive judgments, that is to say, they are not cut loose from the artist’s personal focus of presentation. This is what he saw at a certain moment; but why did he draw it? As a mere record of fact, or as material which would or might be useful in a subsequent imaginative construction? The drawings themselves do not answer these questions, but their defects of meaning point beyond themselves.
Such drawings are also defective in another way. Being
PLATE LXXXV
ON THE RHINE
WATER COLOUR. 1844