Nor has the work of his later years always been understood in our days. Not many years ago a distinguished German oculist read a paper at the Royal Institution which was afterwards published in which he endeavoured to prove that what he considered eccentricities of colour in Turner’s later oil pictures were due—not to his attempts to paint the unpaintable—but to a senile affection of his eyes, which caused an unnatural distortion of his vision to yellow in everything. But Professor Liebreich can hardly have been aware that although the oil pictures upon which he rested his theory, being mainly attempts to depict objects or scenery seen in full sunlight, necessarily tended towards yellow as their prevailing colour, yet at the very same time, and up to his death, Turner was daily producing the sanest, most delicate, most refined water-colour drawings in the palest as well as the deepest tones of every colour on his palette! All the Swiss, Venetian and other sketches of 1838 to 1845, which are the crowning glory of the Water-Colour Rooms in Trafalgar Square, were executed during the period when, according to Professor Liebreich, Turner’s sight was permanently and hopelessly affected! No doubt he recognised that water-colour was unsuited as a medium for his new aim at painting pure light, and confined himself accordingly, for such subjects, to oil painting.
The attacks of the critics, however, had had their effect on the public, and Turner in his later years began to find difficulty in selling even his drawings. Ruskin, in his “Notes on his Drawings Exhibited at the Fine Arts Society, 1878,” tells with inimitable charm and pathos how the old painter, returning in the winter of 1842 from a tour in Switzerland, brought back with him a series of important sketches, fourteen of which he placed, as was his custom, in the hands of Griffiths, his agent, with a view to the latter’s obtaining commissions for finished drawings of each. Although the price asked for a large finished drawing was only eighty guineas, and notwithstanding the great beauty of the sketches, nine commissions only could be obtained. Ruskin, his father, Munro of Novar, and Bicknell of Herne Hill, all chose one or more, but other former patrons saw in them what they regarded as a new style, and declined them. Thirty years after, Ruskin—with pride for Turner’s sake, he tells us—sold his Lucerne Town for a thousand guineas; it has since changed hands at two thousand. The Lake of Constance, which at the time no one would buy, was given to Griffiths in lieu of his commission; it fetched two thousand three hundred guineas at Christie’s in 1907! After 1845 Turner’s health gradually failed; he continued to work at his oil paintings up to his death in 1851, but, so far as is known, he executed comparatively few water-colour sketches or drawings during his last years.
Little has hitherto been said as to Turner’s technique in water-colour although the subject is one of great interest, but, unfortunately, my point of view is solely that of a student, and technique can only be adequately dealt with by an artist. Much valuable information, however, on the question will be found in Redgrave’s “Century of Painters,” Vol. I., and in Roget’s “History of the Old Water-Colour Society.” From the first he was a great innovator, choosing his materials and often inventing his methods without regard to custom, precedent, or anything but the attainment of the precise effect which he desired at the time. Signs of scraping, spongeing, the use of blotting-paper, etc., are constantly to be seen in his drawings. In some, including one in my own possession, the marks of his thumb are distinctly visible in places. But the result always justified the means employed! With his oil pictures, especially those painted after 1830, his experiments, as we know, were often disastrous in their ultimate effects, but it is extremely rare to find any of his water-colours which have suffered in the smallest degree when they have been properly kept. But alas, as has already been pointed out, only too many, and amongst those some of the finest, have been, and still are being, irretrievably damaged and changed by continual exposure to light, both in Public Galleries and on the walls of their owners.
In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured to avoid adding to the already sufficient volume of ‘æsthetic criticism’ of Turner’s art, and I shall confine myself now to the briefest summary of what seem to me the distinctive features of his work in water-colour.
What first strikes one in his drawings, apart from their technical skill, is their individuality; they always stand out amongst the work of other artists, however great. The chief cause of this is hard to define, but I should say that it is that they almost invariably possess a certain quality of imaginativeness, of what is termed ‘poetry.’ No matter how simple was his subject, he instinctively saw it from its most beautiful, its most romantic side. If it had little or no beauty or romance of its own, he would still throw an indefinable charm round it by some gleam of light, some veiling mist, some far-away distance, some alluring sense of mystery, of ‘infinity.’ And Turner was a true poet, although he had little enough of the look or the manners of one. Throughout his life he was a reader and a voluminous writer of poetry, but his want of education debarred him from ever expressing himself coherently in verse. The same cause, together with his lack of a sense of humour, interfered also with the perfect expression of his art, especially in his classical and religious pictures, and prevented him from seeing what was incongruous or at times unpleasing in them. But only a poet deep-down could have won as he did from Nature her most intimate secrets; could so have caught and so inimitably have portrayed her every mood and charm.
And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur of Nature—a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as Shelley’s—which is perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring attractiveness of Turner’s work. Without it, he would never have toiled as he did all his life, from dawn to dark, year in and year out, observing and recording in those nineteen thousand studies every kind of natural scenery, every changing contour of mist and cloud, every differing form and structure of tree, every movement or reflection in water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.
Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic, yet it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or perfect design do not by themselves attain. By the modern school of landscapists this would probably be regarded as a defect or even a heresy. Pictorial art, they say, should not be ‘literary,’ should not be intellectual. But to me it seems that the work of the highest artists—of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Rembrandt, for example—almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well as to the senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or unintentionally, speaks to mind. As has been well said apropos of Ruskin’s writings on Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the painter himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry more readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony between the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite range of significance and supports an infinite variety of interpretations.”
After Turner had attained manhood—say from 1807 onwards—his creative power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more evident in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter, more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative, topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his drawings, notably in his Liber Studiorum (1807-1819). Leaving aside actual landscapes such as Solway Moss, Ben Arthur, etc., his creative, imaginative power is seen in such subjects as Æsacus and Hesperie, Peat Bog, Procris and Cephalus, The Lost Sailor and other plates of the Liber. It also appears from time to time in later drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the astonishing theory that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end of his life he was not a “creative” artist, merely an illustrator, and this idea has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The painter of The Frosty Morning, and Crossing the Brook (National Gallery); of The Guardship at the Nore (Lady Wantage); of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (National Gallery); of The Shipwreck (National Gallery), and a dozen other great Sea Pictures, not a “creative” artist? The draughtsman of Chryses (Mrs. T. Ashton), The Land’s End (“Southern Coast”), The Longships Lighthouse (“England and Wales”), The Alps at Daybreak and The Vision of Columbus (“Rogers’s Poems”), The Plains of Troy (“Byron’s Poems”), The Mustering of the Warrior Angels (“Milton’s Poems”)? If these, and scores of others which might be added, are not examples of “creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found? Is Martin’s Plains of Heaven to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such thing as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?
Of Turner’s technical skill in water-colour, there is no need to speak; his command of his material was absolute and has never been equalled. And his sense of design, of balance, of rhythm—of what is termed “style”—was always present. He had caught it at the outset of his career from his close study of Richard Wilson, who had inherited it as a tradition from Caspar Poussin, Claude, and the painters of the seventeenth century. Rarely is there anything tentative about his drawings. They are decisive—the design was almost invariably seen by him as a whole, from the beginning. Often his work did not please him, and if it was finished it was discarded; if unfinished, it was carried no further—as may be seen in several of the drawings recently (1908) exhibited at the National Gallery, and a good many of the oil pictures at the Tate Gallery. He was also emphatically a great colourist—one of the greatest; during the latter half of his life he thought in colour, and composed in colour, and it was with him an integral part of every design. That is why his drawings can never be adequately reproduced by ordinary photography. During middle life, as has been pointed out, his colour at times became forced and florid, but it was never more pure, never more beautiful, never more noble, than in his latest sketches.
At times, no doubt, Turner’s water-colours, especially those executed between 1820 and 1836, have a tendency to undue complexity of design, and to overcrowding both of subject and lights. Possibly to some extent this was due to the prevailing standard of English art and English taste at that time. Then, perhaps even more than now, high finish was too often unduly insisted on. But you will never find too high finish or overcrowding in the drawings which he made for himself! His figures, also, were frequently unsatisfactory. It was not that he could not draw them—at first they were dainty and careful, as may be seen in the two early drawings, Plates I. and III. But in his later years he seemed to regard figures simply as points of light, colour or composition—they were always effective as such—and he often treated them carelessly—sometimes even coarsely—to the detriment of some of his otherwise most beautiful works.