To the Editor of “The Daily Telegraph.”
Sir: I am very heartily glad to see the subject of Turner’s drawings brought more definitely before the public in your remarks on the recent debate[103] in Parliament. It is indeed highly desirable that these drawings should be made more accessible, and I will answer your reference to me by putting you in possession of all the facts which it is needful that the public should know or take into consideration respecting them, in either judging what has been hitherto done by those entrusted with their care, or taking measures for obtaining greater freedom in their use. Their use, I say, as distinguished from the mere pleasure of seeing them. This pleasure, to the general public, is very small indeed. You appear not to be aware that three hundred of the finest examples, including all the originals of the Liber Studiorum, were framed by myself, especially for the public, in the year 1858, and have been exhibited every day, and all day long, ever since in London. But the public never stops a moment in the room at Kensington where they hang; and the damp, filth, and gas (under the former management of that institution)[104] soiled their frames and warped the drawings, “by friend remembered not.”
You have been also misinformed in supposing that “for some years these aquarelles were unreservedly shown, and in all the fulness of daylight.” Only the “Seine” series (rivers of France), the rivers of England, the harbors of England, and the Rogers’ vignettes (about a hundred drawings in all), were exhibited in the dark under-room of Marlborough House, and a few larger and smaller examples scattered up and down in the room of the National Gallery, including Fort Bard, Edinburgh, and Ivy Bridge.[105] These drawings are all finished, most of them have been engraved; they were shown as the choicest of the collection, and there is no question but that they should always be perfectly accessible to the public. There are no other finished drawings in the vast mass of the remaining material for exhibition and means of education. But these are all the drawings which Turner made during his lifetime, in color, chalk, pencil, and ink, for his own study or delight; that is to say, pencil sketches to be counted by the thousand (how many thousands I cannot safely so much as guess), and assuredly upwards of two thousand colored studies, many of exquisite beauty; and all instructive as no other water-color work ever was before, or has been since; besides the ink and chalk studies for all his great Academy pictures.[106]
There are in this accumulation of drawings means of education in the noblest principles of elementary art and in the most accomplished science of color for every drawing-school in England, were they properly distributed. Besides these, there are the three hundred chosen drawings already named, now at Kensington, and about two hundred more of equal value, now in the lower rooms of the National Gallery, which the Trustees permitted me to choose out of the mass, and frame for general service.
They are framed as I frame exercise-drawings at Oxford, for my own schools. They are, when in use, perfectly secure from dust and all other sources of injury; slide, when done with, into portable cabinets; are never exposed to light, but when they are being really looked at; and can be examined at his ease, measured, turned in whatever light he likes, by every student or amateur who takes the smallest interest in them. But it is necessary, for this mode of exhibition, that there should be trustworthy persons in charge of the drawings, as of the MSS. in the British Museum, and that there should be attendants in observation, as in the Print Room of the Museum, that glasses may not be broken, or drawings taken out of the frames.
Thus taken care of, and thus shown, the drawings may be a quite priceless possession to the people of England for the next five centuries; whereas those exhibited in the Manchester Exhibition were virtually destroyed in that single summer.[107] There is not one of them but is the mere wreck of what it was. I do not choose to name destroyed drawings in the possession of others; but I will name the vignette of the Plains of Troy in my own, which had half the sky baked out of it in that fatal year, and the three drawings of Richmond (Yorkshire), Egglestone Abbey, and Langharne Castle,[108] which have had by former exposure to light their rose-colors entirely destroyed, and half of their blues, leaving nothing safe but the brown.
I do not think it necessary to repeat my former statements respecting the injurious power of light on certain pigments rapidly, and on all eventually. The respective keepers of the Print Room and of the Manuscripts in the British Museum are the proper persons to be consulted on that matter, their experience being far larger than mine, and over longer epochs. I will, however, myself undertake to show from my own collection a water-color of the eleventh century absolutely as fresh as when it was laid—having been guarded from light; and water-color burnt by sunlight into a mere dirty stain on the paper, in a year, with the matched piece from which it was cut beside it.
The public may, therefore, at their pleasure treat their Turner drawings as a large exhibition of fireworks, see them explode, clap their hands, and have done with them; or they may treat them as an exhaustless library of noble learning. To this end, they need, first, space and proper light—north light, as clear of smoke as possible, and large windows; and then proper attendance—that is to say, well-paid librarians and servants.
The space will of course be difficult to obtain, for while the British public of the upper classes are always ready to pay any money whatever for space to please their pride in their own dining-rooms and ball-rooms, they would not, most of them, give five shillings a year to get a good room in the National Gallery to show the national drawings in. As to the room in which it is at present proposed to place them in the new building, they might just as well, for any good that will ever be got out of them there, be exhibited in a railway tunnel.
And the attendants will also be difficult to obtain. For—and this is the final fact to which I beg your notice—these drawings now in question were, as I above stated, framed by me in 1858. They have been perfectly “accessible” ever since, and are so now, as easily as any works[109] in the shops of Regent Street are accessible over the counter, if you have got a shopman to hand them to you. And the British public have been whining and growling about their exclusion from the sight of these drawings for the last eighteen years, simply because, while they are willing to pay for any quantity of sentinels to stand in boxes about town and country, for any quantity of flunkeys to stand on boards for additional weight to carriage horses, and for any quantity of footmen to pour out their wine and chop up their meat for them, they would not for all these eighteen years pay so much as a single attendant to hand them the Turner drawings across the National Gallery table; but only what was needful to obtain for two days in the week the withdrawal from his other duties in the Gallery of the old servant of Mr. Samuel Rogers.