Turner's Sketches and Drawings

by A. J. Finberg

We might, if our space were not limited, attempt to work this out more in detail. We might exhibit others of Turner’s studies and designs as steps or stages in the process which aims at the complete analysis or definition of its content. But the main conception will, I hope, have been made evident. If the work of art as operative is nothing but a connection of content, it can rely upon no other driving force than that of systematic rationality. The assertions made in a work of art are made on the strength of rational grounds, and not on the strength of testimony. If the artist uses fact, he does not use it as fact, and the most outrageous fiction may be truer than fact within the four walls of his special construction. In interpreting pictures, as in following fiction, we are engaged in an act of comprehensive abstraction; the conjunction of objects or events is all within a judgment that we are dealing with abstractions used for a certain purpose. Colonel Newcome and Turner’s trees and mountains are as much abstractions and as unreal as the abstractions of the physical sciences, as matter, force, atoms, etc.,—as unreal, but also quite as real, and probably in the same way. They are provisional conceptions employed for certain purposes. And all the details and secondary judgments used in interpreting a picture must be recognised as transformed by the system to which they belong.[37]

But each work of art though rational is nevertheless a unique individual, and though all works of art as forms of communication must necessarily aspire to the ideal of complete definition, yet it does not follow that some of the stages short of absolute determination may not very well possess considerable aesthetic interest of their own. Conversation among people who understand each other tends to become elliptical. A hint of one’s meaning is generally sufficient for a friend; indeed, when we are thoroughly assured of the good will of our auditor, a hint often conveys our meaning better than a more laboured form of expression. It is the same in pictorial art. To those who understand the language and are on terms of intimacy with the artist’s usual modes of expression and habitual range of thought and feeling, a few hurried scribbles or washes are as delightfully suggestive and full of significance as a completed painting; and at the same time, from the very fact that we have gone more than half-way to meet the artist, we enjoy the additional pleasure of intimate intercourse. The sympathetic and imaginative and well-informed spectator is therefore apt to resent the suggestion that such delightfully eloquent sketches as the ‘Pass of Faïdo,’ ‘Lucerne,’ ‘Zurich,’ and a hundred others equally eloquent and suggestive, are in any way short of perfection. And no doubt from the strictly aesthetic point of view they are right. ‘The best of this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’ But I think it is clear that considerable experience of the completed works of an artist is necessary before even the privileged spectators can feel perfect confidence in their own interpretation of the artist’s slighter work. When dealing, for example, with some of the sketches and studies for marine subjects, as ‘Fishermen launching a Boat in a rough Sea’ (Plate [XIX.]), or with the marine and pastoral subjects in the Liber, we can interpret them with perfect confidence because, in pictures like ‘The Guard Ship at the Nore,’ ‘Windsor,’ and ‘Frosty Morning,’ the artist has shown us exactly the kind of completion his sketches point to. But with the latest sketches (Faïdo, Lucerne, etc.), we are on a different footing. A few only of these sketches were carried farther, and I believe I am right in saying that according to the consensus of educated opinion the subjects lost rather than gained by elaboration. I believe this opinion to be correct, and I would suggest that the explanation is not entirely to be found in the waning powers of the artist. Some mental and emotional contents are incapable of definite embodiment. The vague yearning and enigmatical unrest which form the most prominent elements in these designs are probably of that kind. Contents of such a nature that they are only partially amenable to artistic treatment are therefore more adequately treated in the less explicit forms of art. Such cases as these impress on us the importance of not confusing that mechanical kind of realisation which is known in artistic circles as ‘finishing’ or ‘high finishing’ with the demands for ideal determination. The ideal towards which all works of art

PLATE LXXXVII

LUCERNE: EVENING

WATER COLOUR. 1844

aspire is that of making the connection universally valid between the sign and the state of consciousness which is its meaning, i.e. to exclude all kinds of accidental and not strictly necessary emotional effects. But this demand is only a formal one. Where a certain ambiguity of interpretation forms a necessary factor in the meaning of the work, the demand for definition is obviously limited. The form, on a final analysis, must be determined by the content, and not vice versâ.

In conclusion, I will only say that I am well aware of the inadequacy of these remarks, but that I cannot regard this as the proper place to amplify or develop them. I have said enough, I hope, to draw attention to the point of view which the novel character of our subject-matter has forced upon us. In dealing with the completed work of art, as art criticism mainly does, it is comparatively easy to rest satisfied with a mere analysis of external shape, or a simple description of the machinery or anatomy of pictorial art; to treat works of art, in short, as the dried specimens of the botanist’s herbarium. But when we come to study the rudimentary forms of artistic expression,—an artist’s sketches and studies—we begin to discover the shortcomings of the merely statical or morphological point of view. Works of art, we find, are something more than the fossil remains or dead bodies of artistic activity. They are factors in the living process by which the artist’s thought and emotion are kindled afresh in the bosom of the spectator. Instead, therefore, of merely describing the anatomy of the dead specimen, we have had to address ourselves to the much harder task of attempting to comprehend the living activity of art. The old static or morphological point of view had to give place to a dynamic or physiological system of interpretation. The emphasis was placed on function rather than on structure. The new ideal of art criticism which has thus been forced upon me is a synthetic view of function and form, the interpretation of function in relation to structure. Art criticism would thus become a science which treats of the mode of action of works of art and of the function of their parts. It would be concerned entirely with the positive facts of art as an active method of communication, and it would seek only for verifiable generalisations—for a classified and unified account of the phenomena of artistic activity.