'His exaggerations, when it suited his purpose, were wonderful; lifting up, for instance, by two or three stories, the steeple, or rather the stunted cone of a village church. I never failed to roast him on the habit. He took my remarks in very good part, sometimes indeed in great glee, never attempting to defend himself otherwise than by rolling back the war into the enemy's camp. In my account of the famous Gilles de Retz, I had attempted to identify that prototype of "Blue Beard" with the hero of the nursery story, by absurdly insisting that his beard was so intensely black that it seemed to have a shade of blue. This tickled the great painter hugely; and his only reply to my bantering was, his little sharp eyes glistening the while, "Blue Beard! Blue Beard! Black Beard!"'
There were sixty drawings in this wonderful series, most of which are in the Turner Gallery. He did not sell these water-colours, preferring to lend them to the publishers for engraving purposes for which he charged from five to seven guineas each. Ruskin tells how one day Turner brought to him the sixty drawings for The Rivers of France rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them for twenty-five guineas each. Ruskin, to his grief, could not persuade his father to spend the money. In later years he had to pay a thousand pounds for the seventeen which he gave to Oxford. To look through this series is to be again impressed by the range of Turner's genius. Which is the most beautiful? I know not. Sometimes one, sometimes another—the blue mystery of 'The Light Towers of Hève,' the huddled splendour of 'Sunset in the Port of Havre,' the wild translucent sweep of the tidal wave in 'Quellebœuf,' the quiet splendour, infinity on a few inches of paper, of 'The Seine between Tancarville and Quellebœuf,' the poetry of 'Caudebec,' the fantasy of 'Jumiéges,' the charm of 'The Post Road from Vernon to Nantes,' the mystery of 'St. Denis.' Invited to pick one, I should hardly know which to choose. What a parcel of dreams for Turner to bring to Ruskin rolled in dirty brown paper. And while Turner the poet was preparing to realise these dreams, Turner the man was casting his acquisitive eye on former works of his own that came into the market. When Dr. Munro died in 1833, Turner attended the sale of his pictures, and acquired a great many of his own early works; no doubt he bought others too, as among the doubtful drawings catalogued at the end of the Inventory, are many by different hands. Turner informed the auctioneer that some of the drawings attributed to him were not his. That must have been an interesting spectacle. For Turner, when he had a grievance, did not conceal it.
[CHAPTER XL]
1834: AGED FIFTY-NINE
SOME OLD STORIES AND SOME AGELESS COLOUR STUDIES
Turner, in his sixtieth year, is on the threshold of the period when colour and light were more and more to obsess him to the exclusion of form and detail. In the Inventory, there are books labelled simply 'Colour Studies,' and among the water-colours connected with his 'Meuse-Moselle-Rhine' tour are some bearing such suggestive titles as 'Crimson Ruins,' 'Vermilion Towers,' 'Tower in Sunbeam,' 'Blue Hills,' 'Ruins with Rainbow.' In the 'Colour Studies' Sketch-Book there are nearly fifty pages described merely as 'Colour Sketches'; and on the last page are several lines of illegible verse. Also, after a sketch of a 'Ruined Castle on a Rock' a recipe 'said to be an infallible cure for the bite of a mad dog.'
In the 'Oxford and Bruges' Sketch-Book he breaks into this:—
'Old Tom, of Christ Church, Oxford. What? is it you Old Tom that keep this row every night? What? is it right that you should summon us to bed at nine continually all the year round? Is it fair that you, Tom, should thus deal with us every night?'