In the 'Medway' Sketch-Book of the previous year on a drawing of 'Scenes on Medway' are these notes on Clouds in his own handwriting:—'Cold,' 'Warm,' 'Yellow Clouds,' 'Rain with ... Colour along its edge,' 'Rain in Shade.'
No labour either with pen or pencil was too arduous to hinder him from noting down his impressions of the effects of nature from hour to hour and day to day. And always every year there is some work that starts out and affects us by its beauty. With this year I associate the imposing 'Norham Castle' in the National Collection engraved for River Scenery in 1824. The tyranny of the foreground still holds him—cows, boats, shed, outbuildings; but this foreground is less insistent than usual. How beautiful is the blue-grey ruin rising up against the pale sunset sky; how limpid is the water, with its reflection of castle and sail rippling on the quiet surface.
This 'Norham Castle' is one of his 'delight pictures,' but the more arduous work of the Wizard in 1822 was meditating upon and painting the 'Bay of Baiæ,' with which he proposed to startle the world at the next Royal Academy exhibition.
[CHAPTER XXIX]
1823: AGED FORTY-EIGHT
'THE BAY OF BAIÆ': A CRITIC IS CRITICAL, AND A PAINTER IS ENTHUSIASTIC
'Waft me to sunny Baiæ's shore' wrote Turner in the Fallacies of Hope, one of the simple lines, a line that it was quite permissible to print in the catalogue of the Academy of 1823 against his much discussed, much criticised, and much loved 'Bay of Baiæ.' The picture indeed wafts us to Baiæ, one of the most beautiful spots in Italy, and we are content with its beauty if we neglect the pines, their heavy shadows, and the figures of Apollo and the Cumæan Sibyl posing in the shade. But could anything be lovelier than the blue sea rippling on the yellow sand, the subtle hills and the fairy building, a kind of Claude 'Enchanted Castle' that has passed into a golden dream.
Turner, as I have said before, has his admirers and detractors, and those who adore part of his achievement and are critical of the rest; few, if any, admire him all in all. Let me here quote two authorities on 'The Bay of Baiæ'—Mr. Finberg, a critic who has devoted years of his life to Turner, and Mr. Wyllie, a painter who has written an admirable book on the master. The reader can decide which form of criticism or commentary he prefers: the cold objectivity of the critic or the glowing subjectivity of the painter. Here is Mr. Finberg on 'The Bay of Baiæ,' extracted from the admirable Extra Number of The Studio on the 'Water Colours of Turner':—