[CHAPTER XIV]
TURNER
I wonder which of you, if seeing this picture for the first time, will realize that you are looking at the old familiar Thames? It would seem rather to be some place unknown except in dreams, some phantasy of the human spirit that we ourselves could never hope to see. And yet, in fact, this is what Turner actually did see one evening as he was sailing down the Thames to Greenwich with a party of friends. Suddenly there loomed up before his eyes the great hull of the Temeraire, famous in the fight against the fleet of Napoleon at Trafalgar, and so full of memories of glorious battle, that it was always spoken of by sailors as the Fighting Temeraire. At last, its work over as a battleship, or even as a training-ship for cadets, dragged by a doughty little steam-tug, it was headed for its last resting-place in the Thames, to be broken up for old timber. As the Temeraire hove in sight through the mist, a fellow-painter said to Turner: 'Ah, what a subject for a picture!' and so indeed it proved. The veteran ship, for Turner, had a pathos like the passing of a veteran warrior to his grave.
THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE
From the picture by Turner, in the National Gallery, London
Turner loved the sea, and was very sensitive to its associations with the toils and triumphs of mankind. Born beside the Thames, he grew up among boats and fraternized with sailors all his life. It was impossible for him to be the beholder of such a scene as the Temeraire's approach to her last moorings, save as a poet-painter; and stirred to the putting forth of all his powers, this Fighting Temeraire is his surpassing poem.
It was in 1775, while Reynolds was at the height of his fame, that Turner saw the light, born of obscure parents in an obscure house, but with a gift of vision that compelled him to the palette and the pencil his whole life long. Yet, when he was apprenticed to an architect to learn architectural drawing, he had to be dismissed after two periods of probation because of his absolute inability to learn the theory of perspective or even the elements of geometry. But the time was not far off when he was to become in his turn Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.
The popular distaste, or unborn taste, for landscape, which had prevented Gainsborough from following his natural bent, was changing at last. The end of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a return to nature in art as well as in poetry. Some artists in the eastern counties, older than Turner, were already spending their lives in the not too lucrative painting of landscape. These men took for their masters the seventeenth-century painters of Holland. Old Crome, so called to distinguish him from his son, founded his art upon that of Hobbema, and came so close to him in his early years that it is difficult to distinguish their pictures. In the works of this 'Norwich School' the wide horizons of the Dutch artists often occur. But there is a brighter colour, a fresher green, recalling England rather than Holland. Turner never felt the influence of the Dutch painters so strongly as these artists did. Like Gainsborough, and many another artist before him and since, Turner was to be dominated by the necessity of making a living. At the end of the century a demand arose for 'Topographical Collections,' of views of places, selected and arranged according to their neighbourhood. These were not necessarily fine works of art, but they were required to be faithful records of places. Topographical paintings, drawings, and prints took the place now filled by the photograph and the postcard. Turner found employment enough making water-colour sketches to be engraved for such topographical publications. But sketches that might be mere hack-work became under his fingers magically lovely. We may follow him to many a corner of England, Wales, and Scotland, sketching architecture, mountain, moor, mists, and lakes. His earliest sketches are rather stiff and precise. But he developed with rapidity, and soon painted them in tones of blue and grey, so soft that the stars and the horizons merge into one lovely indefiniteness. Not till much later is there a touch of brighter colour in them such as fires the 'Temeraire,' but in all there is the same spirit of poetry. Turner longed to be a poet, although he could hardly write a correct sentence even in prose. But he was a poet in his outlook upon life; he seldom painted a scene exactly as he saw it, but transfused it by an imaginative touch into what on rare occasions, with perfect conjuncture of mist and weather, it might possibly become. He gave extra height to church spires, or made precipices steeper than they were, thus to render the impression of the place more explicit than by strict copying of the facts. Yet he could be minutely accurate in his rendering of all effects of sky, cloud, and atmosphere when he chose.
Other landscape painters have generally succeeded best with some particular aspect of nature, and have confined themselves to that. Cuyp excelled in painting the golden haze of sunshine, and Constable in effects of storm and rain. But Turner attempted all. Sunset, sunrise, moonlight, morning, sea, storm, sunshine: the whole pageantry of the sky. He never made a repetition of the golden hazes of Cuyp, who in his particular field stands alone; but it was a small field compared with that of Turner, who held the mirror up to Nature in her every mood.