'You object that the drawings for the Liber Studiorum are not included in my catalogue. They are not so, because I did not consider them as, in a true sense, drawings at all. They are merely washes of colour, laid roughly to guide the mezzotint engraver in his first process; the drawing properly so-called, was all put in by Turner when he etched the plates, or superadded by repeated touchings on the proofs. These brown guides, for they are nothing more, are entirely unlike the painter's usual work, and in every way inferior to it; so that students wishing to understand the composition of the Liber must always work from the plates, and not from these first indications of purpose.'
Little did Turner care that Claude's rough sketches in the Liber Veritatis were mere memoranda of his pictures for the purpose of identification. Turner put his whole heart and soul into the Liber, and also into the business arrangements with the engravers, and with the public; but that was the heart and soul of a tradesman, not of an artist. Yet the artist is very evident in his corrections on the proofs of the Liber, as of all his engraved work. His way may have been rough, ungenerous and grasping, but his corrections were always towards perfection.
Men love the Liber, men whom the modern movement in art does not intrigue. One I know counts 'The Straw Yard' the most desirable of his possessions; another has consoled himself for the rigours of life by acquiring 'Norham Castle,' 'Raglan Castle,' 'Calais Harbour,' 'Aesacus and Hesperie' (engraved by Turner himself), 'The Source of the Arveron,' 'Ben Arthur,' 'The Peat Bog,' 'The Junction of the Wye and the Severn,' and some of the plates that Mr. Frank Short has engraved so beautifully.
At Christie's in the spring of 1910 I saw a private collector acquire a complete set of the seventy-one published plates, all in the first state except the 'Aesacus and Hesperie.' He paid but three hundred and seventy guineas for the set, as the margins were hidden by mounts and frames. Had the engravings been in portfolios, plain to the eye as whole and uncut, he would probably have had to pay double that price.
'The meaning of the entire book,' says Ruskin, 'was symbolised in the frontispiece, which he engraved with his own hand—"Tyre at Sunset, with the Rape of Europa," indicating the symbolism of the decay of Europe by that of Tyre, its beauty passing away into terror and judgment (Europa being the mother of Minos and Rhadamathus).'
Turner's advertisement was simpler:—
'Intended as an illustration of Landscape Composition, classed as follows: Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.'
The letters on the seventy published plates indicate the class to which they belong. Thus E. P. on the 'Woman with Tambourine,' one of the five forming the first part, signifies Elegant Pastoral. The proportions were as follows, Pastoral 14, Elegant Pastoral 14, Mountainous 12, Architectural 11, Marine 11, Historical 8.
