Plate XXXVI. The Seelisberg—Moonlight. Water colour (about1843) In the collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq. (Size, 11 x 9)
Neither that wonderful book, nor any other book, could serve Turner. Only he himself could have produced that fantasy, exquisite and intelligible, called 'The Seelisberg: Moonlight,' or the study, purple, gold and blue, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of a lake, perhaps Brienz, enclosed by snowy peaks, with the wraith of a castle in the foreground, and the moon in the blue sky. He went his own way, and perhaps on the very day that he should have been reading the glowing periods of Modern Painters, hailing him as a sort of superman, he was the chief actor in that scene on board the old Margate steamer, watching the effect of the sun, and the boiling foam in the wake of the boat, and at luncheon-time eating shrimps out of an immense silk handkerchief laid across his knees. And while he was eating shrimps and watching the movement of the water, those who had reached the end of the first volume of Modern Painters were perhaps reading with shining eyes and lifted hearts the concluding passage about 'the great artist whose works have formed the chief subject of this treatise':—
'In all that he says, we believe: in all that he does, we trust.... He stands upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the universe of God, and forward over the generations of men. Let every work of his hand be a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each exertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy; adoration to the Deity, revelation to mankind.'
That is Ruskin at his finest: here is Turner at his—well, as Turner.
A Mr. Hammersley, who visited him about this time in Queen Anne Street, described how he heard the shambling, slippered footstep coming down the stairs, the cold, cheerless room, the gallery, even less tidy and more forlorn, all confusion, mouldiness and wretched litter; most of the pictures covered with uncleanly sheets, and the man! 'his loose dress, his ragged hair, his indifferent quiet—all indeed that went to make his physique and some of his mind, but above all I saw, felt (and feel still) his penetrating gray eye.'
[CHAPTER L]
1844: AGED SIXTY-NINE