“Turner appears here in his original splendour and to his greatest advantage. Those who only know the artist of late and from his academical works will hardly believe the grandeur, simplicity and beauty that pervade his best works in this collection.... The earlier works of Turner before he visited Rome and those he has done since for this collection are like works of a different artist. The former, natural, simple and effective; the latter, artificial, glaring and affected.”
From 1820 until about 1840, apart from his sketches, Turner’s work in water-colour was almost entirely for engraving. This entailed a great demand on his time, as he invariably also supervised the execution of each engraving. Proof after proof had to be submitted to him, to be returned by him again and again, touched, scraped, and drawn upon for correction, before he would pass it. As he had an intimate knowledge of the engravers’ technical processes and always took pains to explain to them his reasons for the alterations which he required, he gradually educated them to understand his aims and methods, and so stimulated their ambition, that the best of their plates mark probably the highest point which landscape engraving in line has ever touched. I refer especially to those of “The Southern Coast,” Rogers’s “Poems” and “Italy,” “Byron’s Works,” “Scott’s Poetical and Prose Works,” and “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.”
In 1824 we find Turner at work on the well-known “Rivers of England,” the drawings for which, along with its companion series “The Ports of England,” have for so many years—too many, alas, for their welfare—been exposed for long periods and daily copied at the National Gallery. These show a richer and more elaborate colour-scheme, as compared with the simpler work of the “Yorkshire” period. An example, the Norham Castle (No. XIV.), is given here. Both series were well reproduced in mezzotint on steel, which metal had just begun to supersede copper for engraving.
In 1826 he commenced what was to have been his magnum opus in line engraving—his “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” In this ill-fated work, which was from first to last commercially a failure, he proposed to depict every feature of English and Welsh scenery—cathedral cities, country towns, ancient castles, ruined abbeys, rivers, mountains, moors, lakes and sea-coast; every hour of day—dawn, midday, sunset, twilight, moonlight; every kind of weather and atmosphere. The hundred or more drawings which he made for the work are mostly elaborately finished and of high character. Some are perhaps over-elaborated; in some the figures are carelessly and at times disagreeably drawn; but for imaginative, poetical treatment, masterly composition, and exquisite colour, the best are unsurpassed. I have ventured to say elsewhere, that in my opinion there are at least a dozen drawings in the “England and Wales” series any one of which would alone have been sufficient to have placed its author in the highest rank of landscape art. Two of the series are represented here—Mr. Schwann’s beautiful Launceston ([Plate XV.]) is the earlier (1827); the striking and very attractive Cowes ([Plate XVIII.]), belonging to Mr. Yates, is a few years later. Turner was paid at the rate of sixty to seventy guineas apiece—to-day they are worth from one thousand to two thousand five hundred guineas each.
A new phase in his water-colour art of 1830-1836 calls for notice, viz., his numerous small drawings for vignette illustrations, the first and the most important of which were for the far-famed plates of Rogers’s “Poems” and “Italy.” The drawings for these are markedly different from any of his previous work, and many of them strike what I cannot but regard as an unpleasant note. Marvels of execution, delicate, highly imaginative, and poetical in feeling as they are, they are often strangely forced and extravagant in colour. And this applies to nearly all his drawings for vignettes. Probably his reason for thus falsifying his colour was connected with the form of engraving, as at the same time he was producing some of his finest and sanest work for the “England and Wales,” “Turner’s Annual Tours” (now better known as the “Rivers of France”) and other engravings of ordinary (not vignette) shape. Whatever may have been his motive, it appears to me that owing to this unnatural colouring, the exquisitely engraved vignettes themselves are in many cases finer than the drawings for them.
Many, however, of the small drawings of this time are superb, including several of those on grey paper. In the “Rivers of France” series, Jumièges, Caudebec, Saint Denis, Rouen from St. Catherine’s Hill, and The Light Towers of the Hêve (all in the National Gallery), are masterpieces, as are also many of the illustrations to “Scott’s Poetical and Prose Works.” In Turner’s later years he frequently did not sell his drawings for engravings, but lent them to the publishers, charging usually five to seven guineas apiece. He kept many in his possession up to his death, as he did nearly the whole of his sketches. One day he brought the sixty drawings for the “Rivers of France” to Ruskin, rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them to him for twenty-five guineas apiece. To Ruskin’s grief he could not induce his father to spend the money. In later years he tells us he had to pay £1,000 for the seventeen which he gave to Oxford!
A long succession of books were illustrated by Turner between 1830 and 1836, containing in all nearly three hundred and fifty plates, mostly of small size. When it is remembered that he also closely supervised the smallest details in the engraving of each one, and that at the same time he was engaged on a number of oil pictures of the highest importance many of which were finished and exhibited, and others left in various stages of completion (including most of those recently added to the Tate Gallery), it may be doubted if such a volume of work was ever before produced in six years by any painter. With 1838, however, his work for the engravers practically came to an end. He was now a rich man and able to refuse tempting offers for the pictures which he had determined to leave to the nation; as for example his Old Téméraire, which a wealthy Midland manufacturer is said to have offered to cover with sovereigns.
From 1838 to 1845, when his health began to fail, he spent an increasing time each year on the Continent, and it was during this period that his water-colour art passed into what many regard as its highest, as it was its latest phase. I refer especially to the magnificent Sketches of this time, the large majority of which are in the National Gallery. He revisited Venice, which had cast her enchantment on him in earlier years, and he returned again and again to the Lake of Lucerne, which, after Yorkshire, was probably, up to the last, of all places in the world the dearest to his heart. It would be difficult to say how many times he drew the town, the lake, the mountains, and especially the Righi. There are the Red Righi, the Blue Righi, the Dark Righi, the Pale Righi, and a hundred other versions—each different, each a ‘vision of delight.’ He made drawings also in many neighbouring parts of Switzerland, Piedmont, and Savoy.
The sketches and drawings of this period have all the old delicacy, combined with a greater breadth of treatment, and an amazing wealth and range of colour. Sixty years’ experience had given Turner’s hand—which up to the very last retained its extraordinary delicacy and certainty—a marvellous cunning. In many cases the drawings were swiftly painted, in others carefully stippled in details; usually with a dry brush worked over body-colour. Sir Hickman Bacon’s beautiful Swiss Lake ([Plate XXII.]), Lausanne ([Plate XXV.]), The Seelisberg, Moonlight ([Plate XXVIII.]), Mr. Ralph Brocklebank’s highly finished Schaffhausen ([Plate XXIX.]), and Tell’s Chapel, Fluelen ([Plate XXX.])—which Ruskin believed to be Turner’s last sketch on the Continent—along with most of the reproductions from the National Gallery, are examples of this time.
This last phase of Turner’s art was, however, at the time neither understood nor appreciated, probably owing largely to the new development which had recently taken place in his oil pictures. In these he had set himself, in his old age, the last and hardest tasks of his life—the painting of pure light, of swift movement, of the tumultuous, elemental forces of Nature. Some of the Venice subjects, the marvellous Snow Storm at Sea, and the Rain, Steam and Speed, were entirely misunderstood and ridiculed. “Blackwood’s Magazine” led the attack, and “Punch” and Thackeray added their satire. No doubt several of his late oil pictures were far-fetched in subject, fantastic in treatment, and eccentric in colour. Probably, also, no one knew better than he that he had not reached the goal of his ambition; but he also knew that his critics understood his aims as little as they did the difficulties which he had to encounter in striving to reach them, and the old man felt the attacks keenly. Ruskin tells us that he came one evening to his father’s house in Denmark Hill, after an especially bitter onslaught on the Snow Storm at Sea—Vessel in Distress off Harwich, of 1842, which the critics had described as “soapsuds and whitewash.” Ruskin heard him, sitting in his chair by the fire, muttering to himself at intervals “Soapsuds and whitewash,” again and again and again. “At last,” he says, “I went to him asking, ‘Why he minded what they said?’ Then he burst out ‘Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like. I wish they’d been in it.’” As a matter of fact, Turner had actually been on board the boat at the time lashed to the mast, at the risk of his life.