Plate XXVII. Sunrise, With a Boat Between Headlands (about 1835) Tate Gallery
[CHAPTER XLI]
1835: AGED SIXTY
SOME REMARKS ON THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS, AND BLACKWOOD'S ATTACK ON HIS 'VENICE' PICTURE OF THIS YEAR
Ruskin, to whom we owe so much, whose prose delights, consoles, inspires, confuses, bewilders and annoys in turn; who, by his very enthusiasm for Turner, occasionally ill-judged and unfair to other painters, is sometimes of disservice to Turner, has nevertheless constructed an edifice of interpretation, praise and blame that must last as long as the pictures themselves. Certain of Ruskin's phrases are unforgettable; one consists of but two words—'Delight Drawings,' designed to describe the water-colours Turner made during the last ten years of his working life; not done for the engraver or for exhibition, but just for his own pleasure. 'I look upon them,' said Ruskin, 'as more valuable than his finished drawings or his oil pictures, because they are the simple record of his first impressions and first purposes, plans or designs of the pictures which, if he had had time, he would have made of each place.'
Since these words were written, we have learnt to esteem even more highly these 'Delight Drawings,' and to regard them as the final and highest expressions of Turner's genius. With the inward eye I see Turner walking about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, as Ruskin has described, making a few scratches upon a sheet or two, mere shorthand indications of all he wished to remember, then at his inn in the evening completing the pencilling rapidly, and adding 'as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture.'
Thus in the last decade of his life, when he had mastered his craft, turned away from the works of all other painters to the fair face of nature, did Turner produce his 'Delight Drawings.'
Equally quickly, happily and impulsively did he produce the 'unfinished' oils. Could there be a better name for these 'water-colours writ large,' than 'Delight Pictures,' done like the drawings for his own pleasure, in moments of impulse while he was working upon exhibition pictures, much as a man, when writing a history of a county, might break off to record in a hundred words, a 'thing seen,' something of the present, that had spoken to his heart while studying the present manners and customs of the county?