[CHAPTER XII]
1805: AGED THIRTY
HE PAINTS 'THE SHIPWRECK' FOR FAME, AND BEGINS A SERIES OF 'DELIGHT STUDIES' FOR LOVE
In the chronology of Turner's art life, the year 1805 may be summed up in the words 'He painted "The Shipwreck."' That, probably, was the art event of the year to him, but I like to think of 1805 as the beginning of the period when his passion for colour and atmosphere began to find expression in 'delight studies,' as they may be called. I borrow the pretty word from Ruskin, who called some of the most beautiful of the water-colours 'delight drawings.' He also called some of the large pseudo-classical works 'nonsense pictures.'
Between 1805 and 1810 Turner painted the twelve landscapes in oil on thin veneer, found in one of the store-rooms of the National Gallery, wrapped in brown paper, first exhibited in 1908, and now hanging in Room XIII. of the new Turner Gallery. They formed, with forty early water-colours, the second instalment of rediscovered Turners. How well I remember that day! How well I recall the delight of seeing for the first time the 'Windsor Castle from the River,' and the 'Tree-tops and Sky.' These were his between-whiles work; impulses of observation thrown off while he was producing his mammoth pictures, the magnificent as well as the 'nonsense' ones, painted to astonish the public, and to show his superiority over all rivals alive or dead. But the essential Turner was all the while expressing himself in such 'delight studies'—'unfinished,' merely because he had said all he had to say, scanned frowningly by his judges and deposited in the cellars of the National Gallery as not of sufficient importance for exhibition.
And 'The Shipwreck,' which was the first of Turner's oil-pictures to be engraved in mezzotint, what of 'The Shipwreck'? Surely there is no need to describe it again. Dark, powerful, splendidly impossible, it is in the same category as 'Calais Pier.' Gaze at it and wonder, say for the hundredth time, that the crowded boat in the centre could never live for an instant in that terrific sea, that clouds do not throw such inky shadows, and so on, and so on. Ruskin found in it 'delicate and mysterious grey, instead of the ponderous black'; he also remarked, which is obvious, that 'nobody is wet.' True, Turner did not mean to be realistic when he painted 'The Shipwreck.' Perhaps it needs a painter, who has struggled with sea subjects, to perceive beneath the absurdities the strength and knowledge that are the foundation of this work. Mr. Wyllie wrote:—
'I am never tired of looking at this wonderful composition, and the more I study it the more I find to wonder at and admire. The masterly way in which knowledge and artifice are woven together, the endless modulations of light merging into shadow, the variety of the tones, each little fleck of foam or swirl of inky water seeming to play its part in the building up of the harmonious whole. The swing and action of the figures, too, are also among the marvels of this sombre record of man's battle with the might of the remorseless elements.'
Evidently 'The Shipwreck' did not please Sir John Fleming Leicester, afterwards Lord de Tabley, its purchaser in 1806 from Turner's studio where it was exhibited, as much as it pleases Mr. Wyllie to-day. Lord de Tabley exchanged his purchase for 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour,' and 'The Shipwreck' went to form one of the mass of hoarded pictures in Queen Anne Street, that eventually became the property of the nation, with the 'delight studies,' the nineteen thousand 'pieces of paper,' and the rest, making altogether the largest amount of work produced, single-handed, by any artist since the world began.