Plate XXIX. The Salute, Venice (1838) Tate Gallery
'Phryne Going to the Public Bath as Venus—Demosthenes taunted by Aeschines,' I have not seen. It is one of the Turners that were withdrawn from the walls of the National Gallery. Mr. Wyllie describes this procession of dancing girls, madly throwing a white Cupid into the air and pirouetting, as woven into a bewildering maze of light and colour.
'Drawing is neglected, and the most audacious expedients resorted to, increasing the brilliancy and the movement of the throng. Some of the faces are white with vermilion shadows. The head of Demosthenes is twisted out of all likeness to human form. In fact everything is sacrificed to colour.'
Never has Turner been so wilful as he is now at the age of sixty-three. Think of it—sixty-three, and wilder, more revolutionary, more indifferent to convention than a hot-headed youth of twenty-three. 'He paints white sails or buildings up against a sunset, which is a thing impossible.' He disregards drawing and form, and squeezes features 'together into one corner of a face, slanting diagonally across it like handwriting' ... True.
But the magician conquered, not through these wildnesses, but in spite of them. Even when most extravagant, there is enough of the essential Turner to make the picture great. His dreams were too vast for the poor tools at his command; he tripped over his tools, he tripped up over nature; but he did what no other man has ever been able to do. And he could still be magnificently sane when he painted something that his eyes had seen, not something that his chaotic fancy had imagined. The year following the 'Phryne,' he exhibited one of his sanest, and probably his most popular picture—'The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken up,' the last picture of his 'at which no stone was thrown.' And he gave to it a true and trite tag of poetry, which I take the liberty of writing as prose, that the curious reader may amuse himself by trying to recast the line into poetry: 'The flag which braved the battle and the breeze no longer owns her.' The first nine words may be by some esteemed poet: none but Turner would have written the last four words as a line of verse.
[CHAPTER XLV]
1839: AGED SIXTY-FOUR