A description that would not be open to such objections would run something like this: When we are dealing with the processes of artistic creation we have to assume an intelligent human agent, and analogies drawn from purely mechanical sources can only mislead us. We must not assume that an artist’s senses and intellect work like the mechanism of a camera, or in any other abnormal way, unless we have some strong evidence to support us. And we must also remember that a visual image is a useful abstraction in psychology, but in the conscious life of an intelligent human being it is merely an element within the ordinary life of thought and feeling. Let us therefore assume that Turner not only made no effort to retain the exact visual impression of the scene in question, but that he did not even attempt to separate this impression from the general whole of thought and feeling in which it was experienced. The particular matter of sense-perception would then become incorporated in the general idea or the object—in the ordinary way in which sense qualities are preserved in ideas. When Turner therefore sat down to make his picture, what he would have prominently and clearly before his mind would be a general idea of Norham Castle as a ruined border fortress, a scene of many a bloody fray and of much bygone splendour and suffering. In short, his idea would be what the art-criticism of the Henley type used to describe contemptuously as “literary”; that is, it was steeped in the colours of the historical imagination, and was practically the same as that which a man like Sir Walter Scott or any cultivated person of the present time would associate with the same object. Instead, therefore, of having a single image before his mind which he had merely to copy, Turner started with a complex idea, which might, indeed, have been expressed more or less adequately in the terms of some other art, but which he chose on this occasion to express in pictorial terms.
In this way we can understand why Turner did, as a matter of fact, frequently and constantly attempt to express his ideas in the form of verbal poetry, and why, in the drawing we are now considering, he felt himself justified not only in filling out his sketch with details that were neither there nor in the real scene, but also in taking considerable liberties with the facts contained in the sketch, altering them and falsifying them in ways that could not be defended if his aim had been to reproduce the actual scene itself. The colouring too of Mr. Walter’s drawing owes much more to Turner’s study of Wilson’s pictures than to his visual memory of natural scenes; that is to say, the colour is used as an instrument of expression,—as a means to bring the imagination and feelings of the spectator into harmony with the artist’s ideas, as well as to indicate in the clearest possible manner that it was not the artist’s intention to represent the actual scene in its prosaic details.
This picture, with the others exhibited in 1798, settled the question for Turner’s brother artists and for himself that he was a genuinely imaginative artist and not a merely clever topographical draughtsman. The following year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, at the early age of twenty-four, and throughout his long life he always regarded himself as entitled to take any liberties with actual topographical facts that the expression of his ideas demanded.
The success of the first Norham Castle drawing induced Turner to repeat the subject several times. The late Mrs. Thwaites had another water-colour of it in her collection, there are at least three unfinished versions in the National Gallery, and I have seen a version of it in oil. The subject was engraved in the “Liber” from what purported to be the picture in the possession of the Hon. Mr. Lascelles, but really from a fresh design made by the artist. Then Turner painted the subject again for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, and again, about 1822 or 1823, he made the drawing for the “Rivers of England” series, here reproduced. What is so interesting in all this is that the details in each of these versions are different, yet they all seem to have been based on the same pencil sketch. The relative size of the castle varies in each drawing, as well as the details of its embrasures and crumbling masonry; the character of the river banks also varies. In the earlier versions the right bank is steep and rocky, as suiting the solemn and gloomy effect of the subject; in the latest version, where the humble pastoral life of the present is thrown more into prominence, this bank becomes flat and peopled with fishermen, their boats and cows.
In one of the many anecdotes told of Turner he is represented as saying to an artist who had complained of the disappointment he had experienced on revisiting a certain place, “Don’t you know you must paint your impressions”—or words to that effect. I don’t know how true the story is—and I may confess that I have almost got into the habit of disbelieving all the stories told about Turner—but whether true or not this particular anecdote is certainly well invented. Turner knew quite well how large a part his subjective feelings and ideas played in all his work, and it made him shy of revisiting places that had once impressed him. But when he spoke of his “impressions” we must be careful not to suppose that he could have used the expression in the way it is often used now. He did not abstract his particular visual impressions from the emotional and ideational context in which they were experienced. In so far as Impressionism means this kind of abstraction, Turner was never an impressionist. And as his first ideas of places were steeped in the colouring of his own subjective life, so his ideas were ever taking on different hues as his temper and character changed. In this way he could use the same sketch again and again and always get different effects from it; the sensuous datum was merely a point of departure for each fresh improvisation, a form into which he could pour his meditations, but a flexible, plastic form which readily took the shape of its spiritual content.
These considerations may help us to understand what is apt at first to strike the student of Turner’s drawings and sketches as strange and incomprehensible. Turner was always sketching from nature, and often making drawings that contain an amazing wealth of detail and definition, yet the usefulness of his sketches seemed to vary in inverse ratio to their definition and to the time spent upon them. The beautiful drawings never seemed to lead to anything, all the pictures being painted by preference from the slightest and vaguest sketches. Thus the sketch book which contains the sketch of Norham Castle is filled with over ninety drawings, most of them full of detail and delightfully precise and graceful in handling. Turner made good use of most of this material, but the most prolific “breeding” subject—to use one of Richard Wilson’s expressions—was unquestionably the hurried scribble of Norham, which was so slight as not to indicate even the general shape of the ruined tower with precision, and which left the number of windows or embrasures entirely undetermined. But when we see how Turner used his sketches we can easily understand that this absence of definition must often have been a positive advantage to him when he came to paint his pictures. There was less “to put him out,” fewer obstacles in the way of his subjective utterance, the form was more fluid and tractable to his immediate purpose. The more detailed studies were of course not wasted, for the knowledge they gave him enabled him to fill out the slightest hints of his “breeding” subjects with an inexhaustible wealth of plausible detail.
The National Gallery collection contains just on three hundred of Turner’s sketch books, and practically the whole of his work done immediately in the presence of nature. This data enables us to speak with absolute authority upon the difficult question as to the relation between Turner’s art and nature. They prove that he very seldom, if ever, painted a picture simply “out of his head.” In everything he did—even, I believe, in the case of what have been called his classical nonsense pictures—there was a nucleus of immediately perceived fact. This sensuous basis is seldom, if ever, absent from his work, but it is invariably overlaid and distorted by the purely subjective forces of the artist’s personality, which appropriate the data of sense, and mould them into any shape they choose. It is impossible, especially since “Modern Painters” was written, to overlook the important part played by natural fact in all of Turner’s creations, but it is just as important not to overlook the equally obvious and certain truth that Turner never uses nature simply for its own sake, but only as a means of expression. The methods employed in the particular case we have just studied are, with few exceptions, the methods which he adopted during the whole of his career.
Yet Turner did undoubtedly upon occasion paint in oil directly from nature. An instance of this kind is described by Sir Charles Eastlake in “Thornbury” (p. 153, 3rd edition). Eastlake met Turner during his second visit to Devonshire, probably in the summer of 1813, and accompanied him to a cottage near Calstock, the residence of Eastlake’s aunt, where they stayed for a few days. Another artist was with them, a Mr. Ambrose Johns, of Plymouth. It was during their rambles in the neighbourhood of Calstock that Turner gathered the material for his picture of “Crossing the Brook.” Eastlake says that “Turner made his sketches in pencil and by stealth,” that is to say, he did not like to have people looking over his shoulder while he was at work. The sketch book Turner used on this occasion is with the others in the National Gallery. But after the three artists had returned to Plymouth, “in the neighbourhood of which he (Turner) remained some weeks, Mr. Johns fitted up a small portable painting-box, containing some prepared paper for oil sketches, as well as the other necessary materials. When Turner halted at a scene and seemed inclined to sketch it, Johns produced the inviting box, and the great artist, finding everything ready to his hand, immediately began to work. As he sometimes wanted assistance in the use of the box, the presence of Johns was indispensable, and after a few days he made his oil sketches freely in our presence. Johns accompanied him always; I was only with them occasionally. Turner seemed pleased when the rapidity with which those sketches were done was talked of; for, departing from his habitual reserve in the instance of his pencil sketches, he made no difficulty of showing them. On one occasion, when, on his return after a sketching ramble to a country residence belonging to my father, near Plympton, the day’s work was shown, he himself remarked that one of the sketches (and perhaps the best) was done in less than half an hour.” “On my enquiring afterwards,” Sir Charles Eastlake adds, “what had become of those sketches, Turner replied that they were worthless, in consequence, as he supposed, of some defect in the preparation of the paper; all the grey tints, he observed, had nearly disappeared. Although I did not implicitly rely on that statement, I do not remember to have seen any of them afterwards.”
There are about a dozen small oil sketches of Devonshire subjects in the National Gallery, which are doubtless part of those made under the circumstances described by Sir Charles Eastlake. They are made on a brownish millboard, prepared with a thin coating of paint and size. On the back of one of them there happens to be some lettering showing that Johns had laid violent hands on the covers of some parts of William Young Ottley’s “British Gallery of Pictures,” then being issued serially. Several of these paintings have long been hung among the exhibited drawings; e.g., Nos. 746, 750, 754, 758, and one, No. 849, which has somehow got the obviously incorrect title of Bridge over River Lugwy, Capel Curig. These paintings have undoubtedly sunk very much into the absorbent millboard, thus proving that Turner’s remark to Eastlake about the disappearance of the grey tints—which he “did not implicitly rely on”—was justified. But otherwise the work is in good condition, and I have very little doubt that when Mr. Buttery comes to take them in hand, he will be able to bring them back to something like their original freshness. The chief point of interest with regard to them, from our present point of view, is the curious fact that Turner does not seem to have made the slightest use of them in any of the Devonshire pictures he painted on his return. He evidently found his tiny little pencil sketches much more suggestive and adaptable to his purposes. Even the large oil picture of Crossing the Brook is based entirely on his slight and rapidly made little pencil notes. Another point of interest is that even when painting in oil face to face with nature he did not merely copy what he had in front of him. As our illustration shows, these sketches are as carefully composed as his pictures. They are indeed only technically sketches from nature; in reality they are designs for pictures or pictures in miniature, though they happen to have been painted out of doors. Even in working direct from nature Turner remained firmly entrenched in his artistic position as the master of nature. He still retained his power of selection, taking what suited his purpose, ignoring the rest, and supplementing from the stores of his own knowledge what for his purpose were the defects of the momentary image before his eyes.
The fact that Turner always worked in this way makes it exceedingly difficult to separate his sketches from nature from the studies or designs for his pictures. Throughout his sketch books and amongst his loose drawings there are a large number of sketches in colour, and one’s first impulse is to assume that these were made immediately from nature. But careful observation shows that Turner was in the constant habit of working over his pencil sketches in colour when away from the scenes he had depicted. In this way the beautiful little sketch of “Edinburgh from St. Margaret’s Loch,” here reproduced ([Plate VI.]), is much more probably the draft of a picture the artist had in his mind’s eye than a study from nature. But the point whether such a drawing was made “on the spot” or not is relatively unimportant; what is more important is to realise how very small a part the merely imitative or representative study of the colour and tone (as opposed to form) of nature played in Turner’s work. His colour is never merely descriptive. The whole bent of his mind is so essentially pictorial that, whether he works face to face with nature or from what is loosely called “memory,” his slightest sketch as well as his most elaborate work is always an attempt to express a subjective conception, and never a merely literal transcript of what is given in sense-perception.