There is a room of his early water-colours with two exquisite interpretations of 'Norham Castle'; there is a room of the sepia drawings for the Liber Studiorum, with a case in the middle containing twenty-one supreme water-colours, dominated, at the end of the case, by the 'Venetian Fishing Boat'—a fairy thing flashing green, blue, and gold; and elsewhere there is a range of his water-colours, each a treasure; but I think my choice would fall upon 'Sunshine on the Sea,' everything omitted except—sunshine upon the sea.
On the ground floor, approached by a staircase (on the stair walls hang three of his colossal failures, 'Waterloo,' 'The Deluge,' and 'Pilate'—do not look at them!—), are four more rooms. One contains seventeen 'beginnings' of oil pictures, painted about 1807, never exhibited before in public, but probably shown in his studio in Queen Anne Street in 1808, to tempt patrons to commission 'finished' pictures from them. Times have changed. We value beginnings now. Another ground-floor room is hung with large 'unfinished' early water-colours, including a lovely beginning in a rosy flush, of 'Coniston Old Man,' and an atmospheric filmy blue 'Valley with Mountains.'
Plate XLVIII. Venetian Fishing Boat. Water Colour (1839) Tate Gallery
An adjoining room contains the oils on thin veneer, painted between 1805 and 1810, and first exhibited in 1908. My choice would be 'Tree Tops and Sky.' And the last room of all, a light, cheerful apartment, as it should be, includes his last four pictures, painted the year before he died, and other magnificent failures and experiments. Here is a picture of the period when he was haunted by the idea of Whalers in Arctic seas; and when he muddled off a final beauty in despair of Venice at sunset with a blue sky and ragged clouds; and when he tried to see 'The Angel Standing in the Sun,' driving Death before him, Turner then being seventy-one; and other dreams by this amazing man, whose art vision endured, not only to the end, but became more ethereal and dehumanised and seer-like as his physical frame shrank and tottered.
All that is over. The immortal part of him remains, and this is the year of his final triumph, long delayed. He who loved fame and praise, and spent much of his life pitting himself against his contemporaries and predecessors, would chuckle to know that his works in the new Catalogue of the Tate Gallery extend to 144 pages, while all the other artists represented have but 264 pages between them.
It was almost a shock to return from these golden lower rooms to the two large galleries on the main floor, adorned with the rich red silk brocade, that dazzles and distresses. I cannot like these red, flaming walls, but there is no doubt that the pictures look finer than they did in Trafalgar Square. Indeed, we seem to see some of them for the first time. I never realised before what a stupendous work is the 'Snowstorm—Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, Making Signals.' One could spend an hour studying the swirl of the waves and the whirl of the storm, the movement of those deep water waves, and the lights that gleam in and through them. Incline your head a little to the right, and there is 'A Ship Aground,' with the tugging movement of shallow water, the reflections and the gleams portrayed with equal skill. Then turn your eyes still further to the right, and there is 'Rain, Steam, and Speed' and the 'Burial of Wilkie.' For some reason or another—the red walls, or the wonderful lighting of the gallery, or the flame of Turner that in this year of his triumph spiritualises our perceptions—these pictures seem to have taken on more delicate delicacies of eolour, new intricacies of vision.
And what about the 'Interior at Petworth,' that Mr. MacColl has bravely hung in the place of honour in the gallery where 'The Evening Star' and 'The Fighting Téméraire' dispute for our allegiance? The 'Interior at Petworth' is a puzzle to almost everybody. I watched a nice father and his nice little daughter, who had been talkative before most of the Turners, stand in front of this orgy of colour—dumb. Then the little girl said: 'Daddy, what does it mean?' And he after a long pause and another long look said, very seriously, as if he were a little ashamed: 'I don't know what it means, my dear.'