[CHAPTER XXVII]
1820: AGED FORTY-FIVE
RETURN FROM ITALY: HE BEGINS TO SIGHT HIS MYSTICAL VISIONS
Visitors to the Royal Academy of 1820 saw that the great man had been in Rome. How like Turner it was to call a picture 'Rome from the Vatican: Raeffaelle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia.' He loved to introduce a painter whom he admired into a picture—Raphael, Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Van Goyen, Watteau and the rest. This Raphael-Roman picture was one of Turner's failures, and like other failures it is no longer exhibited in the National Collection. What a contrast it is to such an essential Turner as the atmospheric 'Lancaster Sands' in the Farnley Hall collection, produced about this time. Another, a later version now in the Salting Collection at the British Museum, showing the sun setting behind the Cumberland Hills, and the stage coach, carts and figures hurrying to escape the rising tide, was engraved for the England and Wales series and published in 1828.
Here we stand at a halting-place in Turner's career. He has trained himself; he has fought his rivals, and, perhaps with the exception of Claude, has beaten them all on their own ground. He has expressed himself in the luminous atmosphere of 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour'; in the hoar-frost sparkle of 'The Frosty Morning'; in the cool blues and greys of 'Crossing the Brook,' and in the splendour of 'Dido Building Carthage.' In water-colour he has advanced from the formalism of the early tinted drawings to the restrained beauty of the Southern Coast and the accomplishment of the Richmondshire series. And he has been to Italy: his eyes are dazzled. Colour is to be his master, but after a few years he is to become almost impatient of local colour and form, and to lose form and local colour in the radiance of suffused light. He is to paint the aspect, not the object. I turn once more to the Inventory and under the rubric 1820 dealing with 'Colour Beginnings,' find this comment by Mr. Finberg:—
'As a rule these studies are of a highly abstract character, i.e., they deal only with the composition of fundamental colour masses—the ground tones, as it were, of a picture, which in the final result are largely concealed under the subsequent embroidery of secondary incidents and motives.'
In these 'Colour Beginnings' 'projects for designs which may or may not have been carried out,' Turner seems to be beginning to sight his mystical visions. The very titles of some are eloquent 'Moonlight Among Ruins,' 'Hulks on Tamar, Twilight,' 'The Rainbow,' 'Lighthouse against a Stormy Sky.' Eloquent, too, are three slight water-colours, showing only faint indications of the difference between sky and land.