Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

PLATE LXXXVI

BADEN, LOOKING NORTH

WATER COLOUR. 1844

entirely in outline they make abstraction of the tone, colour, and light and shade. If we are to take them as topographical illustrations they demand further visual determination, if, as having an imaginative purpose, the emotional setting of the facts calls for specification.

So far, then, we have been dealing with operations preliminary or subservient to the genuine processes of artistic expression. In studies and sketches made in the presence of the object or model the personal focus of presentation, and therefore time reference, remains clearly in evidence. It is not, I am inclined to think, till the drawing or painting cuts itself loose from the demonstrative of immediate perception that we find ourselves on the threshold of free artistic expression.

Such a sketch as that of the ‘Hedging and Ditching’ subject (Plate [XXV.]) may serve as a connecting link between the two categories. Like the drawings of Lincoln and Ripon Cathedrals, it is probably only a record of a scene actually witnessed, and as a record of the objects constituting such a scene and their relations to one another it is considerably less complete than they are. But somehow I find it hard to take it simply as a record of fact, perhaps simply because of its very incompleteness. As a symbol of a determinate complex of feeling present to the mind of the artist, it demands to be placed in a different category from those drawings which only aim at the accumulation of the raw material of artistic invention; and this in spite of its defects and insufficiencies which make it, it must be admitted, quite unintelligible as such a symbol to everybody but the artist himself. Yet here, it seems to me, we have crossed the threshold which divides a study from a work of art proper. The reference to reality is no longer direct. The artist is no longer giving evidence about matters of fact. He has cut himself free from the demonstrative of immediate perception and is groping his way towards a definitory judgment.[36] We have here an operative identity cut loose from its context, though in a singularly inarticulate form. But if so, the sketch must be taken as an incipient work of art, which possesses the capacity of growth or development.

In the sepia drawing of this subject, reproduced in Plate [XXVI.], we come to a later stage of this development. Here the whole subject has become defined, not indeed to the point of realisation that would satisfy a modern artist, but sufficiently to evoke and control the ideas and emotions present to the mind of the artist. We can say if we like that such a drawing is or may be a more or less accurate realisation of an actual scene, and though such an assertion would require qualification, I do not think we could reject it altogether. But if we said that it was nothing more than such a realisation we should certainly be wrong. It is a great deal more. The connection between any fact or series of facts and the emotional standpoint from which we regard them is at times a matter of chance. But in Turner’s design the connection between subjective feeling and the objects upon which our attention is focussed is not left to the caprice of chance or to the accidents of individual initiative; the connection is necessary, and objective and universal. Indeed if we examine the matter carefully we find that the whole raison d’être of the drawing turns upon its power of evoking and qualifying ideally a definite range of emotion. The objects selected and the manner of their presentation are such that a normal mind, so far as it understands the artist’s symbols, is bound to feel about the presented scene in exactly the way that the artist felt.

Now, so long as the scene which the artist evokes exists only for the sake of suggesting and limiting a certain range of emotion, the relation of this scene to fact is entirely irrelevant. The artist is not bearing witness to what he has seen, he is defining a definite complex of thought and emotion; and as an artist, his work is complete when he has worked out this definition. When he has done this his work is complete within itself, and all direct reference to a particular time and place in the world of fact is wiped out. What we have before us is a hypothetical connection of ideal and universal meanings. We are now in the region of the hypothetical judgment. The hypothetical form is adopted not because there is any uncertainty in the matter, but because the artist wishes to concentrate attention on the attributes themselves, and not on any particular embodiment of them. The subject is taken, not given, and taken not for its own sake but for the sake of that which is to follow from it,—in this case, the whole emotional complex which is to be called up.