Turner's Golden Visions

by C. Lewis Hind

THE BOY, HAVING BECOME A MAN, WONDERS AT THE 'INVENTORY' OF THE TURNER BEQUEST DRAWINGS

Not until the Inventory was published was it possible to realise the amount of spade work—loving, minute, unwearying—that Turner did from the age of twelve to the age of seventy-one, spade work that enabled him to will the golden visions of his maturity.

Everybody who has examined the Turner Bequest of water-colours, and sketches in colour and in pencil, numbering over nineteen thousand pieces of paper contained in three hundred Sketch-Books, must agree that 'there is nothing like it anywhere in the world'; and everybody must rejoice that, through the munificence of the late Sir Joseph Duveen, there has now arisen as an annexe to the Tate Gallery the long, long deferred Turner Gallery, a tardy fulfilment of the Wizard's desire, one of the few dispositions, besides his eagerness to found a home for decayed artists, that was clear in his interminable and muddled will and codicils.

The story of the litigation over the will, and of the vicissitudes of the bequest has been often told, and it will have to be told again in its proper place in this book; how the pictures bequeathed by Turner to the nation were gradually selected for exhibition; how in 1857 the number had reached one hundred and five; how in that year Ruskin began to sift and arrange the finished water-colours, the pencil drawings, the colour sketches, and 'unfinished oils'; how he chose what he considered the best of the water-colours for intermittent exhibition; how he rolled up the 'unfinished oils '; how he classified and commented upon the 'nineteen thousand pieces of paper, worm-eaten, mouse-eaten, in various states of fragile decay, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another, many on both sides'; how in 1906 the art world was astonished and delighted by the exhibition at the Tate Gallery of the 'unfinished oils' by Turner, reclaimed from the cellars at Trafalgar Square; and how in 1908 several other 'unfinished' works, described as experiments 'in oil on thin veneer,' and a number of early water-colours and studies were for the first time exposed.

By that time Mr. A. J. Finberg was nearing the end of his vast work of cataloguing the Turner water-colours, and the 'nineteen thousand pieces of paper,' belonging to the nation. The two volumes known as the Inventory are the monument of his labour, which has been thoroughly done, indeed, with an attention to detail that wins the gratitude of all students. Wisely a strictly chronological arrangement was determined upon. The difficulties were immense, owing to the almost entire absence of reliable chronological information as to Turner's movements. He was not the kind of man to babble his plans, and Mr. Finberg admits that some of his judgments as to date and place are tentative; but we now have a guide, trustworthy as extreme care could make it, to the infinite variety of Turner's structural plans, his daily visions, his notes of things seen and quickly recorded, upon which his life-work was based.

The Inventory begins with 1787, when he was twelve; it proceeds, year by year, to almost the end of his life, to 1846, when he was seventy-one. Almost every summer, one might say every summer, with painting materials, knapsack, and umbrella, he was off on his travels through England, Scotland, Wales, or the Continent, and, roughly speaking, to each year there is a sketch-book. Perhaps general-utility book would be the better name, for Turner drew and scribbled anything and everything on the leaves in his almost unintelligible handwriting. Mixed up with his sketches, we read how he got from place to place; of articles of clothing in use and wanted; the numbers of bank-notes; elemental French and German phrases; fragments of poetry, his own and others; extracts from Sir Joshua's Discourses; a cure for the bite of a mad dog; a recipe for surfeit; criticism of pictures, including Rembrandt's 'Mill,' Titian's 'Entombment,' and Rubens's 'Rainbow'; notes on the colours of hills; the names of flowers; descriptions of skies; fragments of letters, such as 'Give my love to Miss Wickham,' and so on, and so on.

Such things are for the general, for anybody and everybody who is interested in the commerce with daily life of a man of genius. For the student of Turner's work, these details of his sketching tours, chronologically arranged, are invaluable.

The boy who loved 'Orvieto,' and who is now a man, having contracted to write a book on 'Turner's Golden Visions,' felt, with this Inventory before him, wherein Turner himself tells in disjointed fragments the autobiography of his working life, that the way to write the book was to take the years in progression, to dwell on each significant epoch and the work it produced, and thus to trace the development of the dumb poet from darkness to light, from the black 'Moonlight at Millbank,' to such an ethereal golden vision as 'Norham Castle at Sunrise.'

He begins at the very beginning with the year 1775, when a son was born to two humble people in a dark court off the Strand, whom they christened Joseph Mallord William Turner.