If only Agrippina, with the ashes of her husband and the bodies of her suite were absent, what a lovely vision this would be with the rosy bridge, the yellow fairy-like building, and the full moon riding in the evening sky. Yet why ask to have the figures taken away? They are Turner; it is all Turner, a glorious Turner, still in the hour of his splendour, and quite careless of the fact that it was at Brindisium, not Rome, that Agrippina landed. Northcote, who had a dark subject picture hanging above 'Ancient Rome,' said, 'You might as well have opened a window under my picture.' Turner was always opening a window to a poet's land, which, if it has no earthly habitation, exists, eternally, in that place where all beautiful things dwell—the imagination. The Sketch-Books of this period are as crowded with drawings as the court of Agrippina with figures. In the 'Venice' Book of 1839 against a water-colour entitled by Ruskin 'Venice: Sunset sketch with turned edge,' he has appended this note: 'Preserve this drawing exactly as it is, as evidence of the way he worked; the turned edge of the paper painted upon.'
The 'Venetian Fishing Boat' also shows the 'way he worked,' when working for his own pleasure, not for exhibition—green water, violet hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny sail—lovely.
On a packet which contained a number of drawings in a Sketch-Book, now labelled 'Miscellaneous,' Ruskin inscribed the following: 'Thirty-four pieces of paper, some double. Pencil Outline. Rubbish; only worth looking at for references. It contains many late scrawls of German scenery. Studies of Germany, etc.'
What may have seemed rubbish to Ruskin, pencil scrawls, etc., may have been of vital importance to Turner. How these Sketch-Books evoke the man and the moment. In one of them is 'A Study for a Sea-Piece,' scrawled on a visiting-card, above the name of Mr. J. M. W. Turner, 47 Queen Anne Street, Harley Street. The number of studies of the sea he made during his life certainly exceeded the number of visiting-cards he used.
[CHAPTER XLVI]
1840: AGED SIXTY-FIVE
A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE TERRIFIC 'SLAVE SHIP' AND THE MILD 'NEW MOON'
What a contrast is the cracked and faded picture 'The New Moon' in the National Collection, also called 'I've lost my boat, you shan't have your hoop,' with its sunset sky and young moon, the reflections still beautiful in the wet sand, to the terrific and impossible 'Slave Ship,' now in America, with its sharks, its huddle of bodies manacled and writhing in the water, and the iron chains floating on the surface, as if they were corks. As Monkhouse justly observes, one of Turner's finest conceptions is spoilt for the want of a little commonsense.