J. M. W. TURNER.THE OLD TÉMÉRAIRE.

But we must not forget that Michel and Huet showed the way. Rousseau and his followers left them far behind, as Columbus threw into oblivion all who had discovered America before him, or Gutenberg all who had previously printed books. The step on which these initiators had stood was more or less that of Andreas Achenbach and Blechen. They are good and able painters, but they still kept the Flemish and Dutch masters too much in their memory. It is easy to detect in them reminiscences of Ruysdael and Hobbema and the studies of gallery pictures grown dim with age. They still coloured objects brown, and made spring as mournful as winter, and morning as gloomy as evening; they had yet no sense that morning means the awakening of life, the youth of the sun, the springtide of the day. They still composed their pictures and finished and rounded them off for pictorial effect. The next necessary step was no longer to look at Ruysdael and Cuyp, but at nature—to lay more emphasis on sincerity of impression, and therefore the less upon pictorial finish and rounded expression—to paint nature, not in the style of galleries, but in its freshness and bloom. And the impulse to this last step, which brought French landscape painting to its highest perfection, was given by England.

L’Art.
TURNER.DIDO BUILDING CARTHAGE.

The most highly gifted work produced in this province between the years 1800 and 1830 is of English origin. At the time when landscape painting was in France and Germany confined in a strait-waistcoat by Classicism, the English went quietly forward in the path trodden by Gainsborough in the eighteenth century. In these years England produced an artist who stands apart from all others as a peculiar and inimitable phenomenon in the history of landscape painting, and at the same time it produced a school of landscape which not only fertilised France, but founded generally the modern conception of colour.

That phenomenon is Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great pyrotechnist, one of the most individual and intellectual landscape painters of all time. What a singular personality! And how vexatious he is to all who merely care about correctness in art! Such persons divide the life of Turner into two halves, one in which he was reasonable and one in which he was a fool. They grant him a certain talent during the first fifteen years of his activity, but from the moment when he is complete master of his instrument, from the moment when the painter begins in glowing enthusiasm to embody his personal ideal, they would banish him from the kingdom of art, and lock him up in a madhouse. When in the forties the Munich Pinakothek was offered a picture by Turner, glowing with colour, people, accustomed to the contours of Cornelius, knew no better than to laugh at it superciliously. It is said that in his last days he sent a landscape to an exhibition. The committee, unable to discover which was the top or which the bottom, hung it upside-down. Later, when Turner came into the exhibition and the mistake was about to be rectified, he said: “No, let it alone; it really looks better as it is.” One frequently reads that Turner suffered from a sort of colour-blindness, and as late as 1872 Liebreich wrote an article printed in Macmillan, which gave a medical explanation of the alleged morbid affection of the great landscape painter’s eyes. Only thus could the German account for his pictures, which are impressionist, although they were painted about the middle of the century. The golden dreams of Turner were held to be eccentricities of vision, since no one was capable of following this painter of momentary impressions in his majesty of sentiment, and the impressiveness and poetry of his method of expression.

S. Low & Co.
TURNER.JUMIÈGES.

L’Art.
TURNER.LANDSCAPE WITH THE SUN RISING IN A MIST.
S. Low & Co.
TURNER.VENICE.

In reality Turner was the same from the beginning. He circled round the fire like a moth, and craved, like Goethe, for more light; he wanted to achieve the impossible and paint the sun. To attain his object nothing was too difficult for him. He restrained himself for a long time; placed himself amongst the followers of the painter of light par excellence; studied, analysed, and copied Claude Lorrain; completely adopted his style, and painted pictures which threw Claude into eclipse by their magnificence and luminous power of colour. The painting of “Dido building Carthage” is perhaps the most characteristic of this phase of his art. One feels that the masses of architecture are merely there for the sake of the painter; the tree in the foreground has only been planted in this particular way so that the background may recede into farther distance. The colour is splendid, though still heavy. By the union of the principles of classic drawing with an entirely modern feeling for atmosphere something chaotic and confused is frequently introduced into the compositions of these years. But at the hour when it was said to him, “You are the real Claude Lorrain,” he answered, “Now I am going to leave school and begin to be Turner.” Henceforth he no longer needs Claude’s framework of trees to throw the light beaming into the corners of his pictures. At first he busied himself with the atmospheric phenomena of the land of mist. Then when the everlasting grey became too splenetic for him he repaired to the relaxing, luxuriant sensuousness of Southern seas, and sought the full embodiment of his dreams of light in the land of the sun. It is impossible in words to give a representation of the essence of Turner; even copies merely excite false conceptions. “Rockets shot up, shocks of cannon thundered, balls of light mounted, crackers meandered through the air and burst, wheels hissed, each one separately, then in pairs, then altogether, and even more turbulently one after the other and together.” Thus has Goethe described a display of fireworks in The Elective Affinities, and this passage perhaps conveys most readily the impression of Turner’s pictures. To collect into a small space the greatest possible quantity of light, he makes the perspective wide and deep and the sky boundless, and uses the sea to reflect the brilliancy. He wanted to be able to render the liquid, shining depths of the sky without employing the earth as an object of comparison, and these studies which have merely the sky as their object are perhaps his most astonishing works. Everywhere, to the border of the picture, there is light. And he has painted all the gradations of light, from the silvery morning twilight to the golden splendour of the evening red. Volcanoes hiss and explode and vomit forth streams of lava, which set the trembling air aglow, and blind the eyes with flaring colours. The glowing ball of the sun rises behind the mist, and transforms the whole ether into fine golden vapour; and vessels sail through the luminous haze. In reality one cannot venture on more than a swift glance into blinding masses of light, but the impression remained in the painter’s memory. He painted what he saw, and knew how to make his effect convincing. And at the same time his composition became ever freer and easier, the work of his brush ever more fragrant and unfettered, the colouring and total sentiment of the picture ever more imaginative and like those of a fairy-tale. His world is a land of sun, where the reality of things vanishes, and the light shed between the eye and the objects of vision is the only thing that lives. At one time he took to painting human energy struggling with the phenomena of nature, as in “Storm at Sea,” “Fire at Sea,” and “Rain, Steam, and Speed”; at another he painted poetic revels of colour born altogether from the imagination, like the “Sun of Venice.” He is the greatest creator in colour, the boldest poet amongst the landscape painters of all time! In him England’s painting has put forth its greatest might, just as in Byron and Shelley, those two great powers, the English imagination unrolled its standard of war most proudly and brilliantly. There is only one Turner, and Ruskin is his prophet.