The evening of his life was to last nine years, and Turner found his own way of escape from being bothered.
[CHAPTER XLIX]
1843: AGED SIXTY-EIGHT
VISIONS OF VENICE AND THE FIRST VOLUME OF 'MODERN PAINTERS'
The two pictures of Venice exhibited in 1843, so changed, so faded, are in their way among the loveliest things Turner ever painted. 'San Benedetto, Looking Towards Fusina,' was formerly known as 'The Approach to Venice,' and I wish that title could have been retained, as one always thinks of it as 'The Approach to Venice,' and always in connection with the companion picture, 'The "Sun of Venice" Going to Sea,' with the name of this immortalised, fishing-boat 'Sol di Venezia' conspicuous on the sail. These two fading visions of Venice are indescribable, although everybody attempts to describe them. An eloquent passage may be found in the essay M. de la Sizeranne wrote for The Studio on 'The Genius of Turner,' from which the following is an extract:—
'Nothing will be found more beautiful than the "Approach" itself. No robe from Tintoretto's brush will be found to possess the splendour of the gondolas conveying us. No Titian—that of the mountains of Cadore, the presence of which we divine, no nimbus about the head of a saint, will equal that sun, no purple these skies, no prayer the infinite sweetness of the dream experienced during those brief, delicious moments. Nothing will be found to compare with the distant vision of that city which, on the horizon, seems to be too beautiful ever to be reached, and appears to recede from the traveller's barque—
Ainsi que Dèle sur le mer,
gilded like youth, silent as dreams, and like happiness unattainable.'
Earlier in the Essay this sensitive writer says:—
'Turner was the first of the Impressionists, and after a lapse of eighty years he remains the greatest, at least in the styles he has treated. That Impressionism came from England is proved by the letters of Delacroix, and demonstrated by M. Paul Signac in his pamphlet on "Neo-Impressionism." ... Turner is the father of the Impressionists. Their discoveries are his. He first saw that Nature is composed in a like degree of colours and of lines, and, in his evolution, the rigid and settled lines of his early method gradually melt away and vanish in the colours. He sought to paint the atmosphere, the envelopment of coloured objects seen at a distance, rather than the things enveloped: and he quickly realised that the atmosphere could not be expressed, except through the infinite parcelling out of things which Claude Lorrain drew in a solid grouping and painting en bloc. He shredded the clouds. He took the massive and admirable masses, the cumuli of Ruysdael, of Hobbema, of Van de Velde, picked the threads out of them, and converted them into a myriad-shaded charpie, which he entrusted to the winds of heaven.'