Plate XLIX. A Ship Aground (1830) Tate Gallery
How I longed to say to them: 'Friends, Turner didn't mean you to know what his "Interior at Petworth" means. He didn't mean you to see it. It's like this. He was a great artist, almost miraculous, with extraordinary faculties and power of work, and an ambition, that was almost a mania, to excel all other painters, living and dead, and to make the public of his day realise what a mighty man he was. So he painted his big exhibition pictures, every inch finished, understandable by everybody, classical, pastoral, homely, heroic—"The Bay of Baiæ," "Crossing the Brook," the "Frosty Morning," and "The Fighting Téméraire"; but that was only half his life. He was mad about drawing and painting; he never rested; he was always making experiments, trying to capture the fleeting loveliness of dawn or sunset, the pomp of high noon, and the splendour of colour in hot sunshine that to some artists is as intoxicating as wine. He never meant such experiments, done to relieve his surcharged soul, to be seen; he never exhibited them. It is we, valuing every scrap from Turner's hand, who are responsible for their exhibition; it is we who have brought to the light of day these attempts of the wizard, the old man mad about art, to force painting to realise what others would have thought to be unrealisable. They are wonderful. Folk will come from the end of the world to see them.
'Friends, how that room at Petworth came to be in that awful disarray I know not. It looks like a nightmare spring-cleaning, with no witness of the fury but the streaming sun. Turner looked on the sight—that's certain; was intoxicated by the orgy of colour, painted it in one swift hour, and having cased his soul, hid his colour-cry, as men hide their love poems in youth.'
Thus would I have spoken to that nice father and nice child; but while I was rehearsing my remarks, they had moved on. I sought them, and found the twain in one of the lower rooms where some of the early water-colours are displayed, 'unfinished,' because they were painted for love, not for exhibition, and love had said in them all that love can say.
I found the father and child standing just where I would like them to have been—before those two exquisite drawings hanging by the window, looking, not like paint, but like vapours of iridescent colour—the rosy flush of 'Coniston Old Man,' and the filmy blue of 'Valley with Mountains.'
Father and child were silent, but there was something in their eyes more eloquent than words. Then her hand stole into his and was clutched tight. My eyes moistened too. For I was looking upon the visible signs of invisible things. Love made those drawings, and the watchers were quickened by their loveliness. The father's grasp grew tighter on the small hand as she blinked away the mist in her eyes.
I should like to have explained, to that nice father and child, the Sketch-Books, the unseen part of Turner's prodigious achievement, the studies direct from Nature for his own use, records as he called them. Throughout his life his procedure seems to have been always the same—the sketch or the mere note direct from Nature, on which later, sometimes years later, he based an oil picture, or a water-colour for the engravers.
He could always, when he had once 'wrenched himself free from the trammels of topography and antiquarianism,' make a vital sketch from Nature, but it took him years to master oil-painting. The dark, heavy, early 'Buttermere Lake' was made from 'a pale and delicately charming water-colour.' There is not an artist who would not be delighted to study, in the Sketch-Books, the slight vital suggestions and to compare them with the finished works—the beginning and the end of his Hornby, Heysham, Watchet, Boscastle, Bolton; to look at the vigorous studies from which the 'Bridgewater Sea Piece,' and 'The Shipwreck' were made, and to swoop down upon that astonishing foreshadowing of Impressionism, 'Men Chatting Round the Fireplace at Petworth,' made during the visit to Petworth when he was fifty-five, from which his dream, world-well-lost period dated: Turner the visionary, who, like Wordsworth at the end, passed into regions where feeling is almost too mystical, too rarefied for expression, and indeed can only be expressed by allusion and suggestion.