Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

I recollect Mr Rawlinson saying to me, not many months ago—in speaking of the little publications of the “Copper-plate Magazine” and of such-like small and early work—that Turner was never properly engraved till he was engraved by James Basire; and I think, upon the whole, that this is true. At a later period, Turner himself protested that he was never properly, at all events never quite perfectly, engraved, till he was engraved by John Pye—but then that was for a quite different order of work from that which occupied him in the first years of his skilled and accomplished practice. What Mr Rawlinson meant was, that whereas the engraver—tasteful and in a measure delicate, yet slight and wanting wholly in subtlety of realisation and treatment—who did the little prints in the “Copper-plate Magazine,” such as the Carlisle and the Wakefield, failed to translate into his art all the really translatable qualities of the immature yet interesting work to which he addressed himself, Basire, in the brilliant and solid prints which served as head-pieces to the “Oxford Almanacks,” from 1799 to 1811, did the most thorough justice to their mainly architectural themes. It was in the year in which Basire finished—and Turner’s art, by this time, had, of course, greatly changed—that there was executed by John Pye the very work (Pope’s Villa) which extorted from Turner what it may be was his first warm tribute of admiration to anybody who translated him. But four years before this, Turner, with Charles Turner, the engraver in mezzotint, had begun the publication of the immortal series of “Liber Studiorum.”

The set of prints which Turner issued as his “Liber Studiorum”—with an allusion, tolerably evident, to the “Liber Veritatis” of Claude—is but one series of several with which the English master of Landscape occupied himself during the fifty years, or more, of his working life. But it is the first series that was conceived by him; and it is, in the best sense, the most ambitious; and it remains the noblest and the most representative. In its actual execution Turner had a greater hand—an incomparably greater hand—than in that of any of its successors; and its scheme permitted a variety, an effective suddenness of transition, denied to the artist when, in later years, he was depicting that portion of the county of Yorks which is known as Richmondshire, or the “Southern Coast,” or the “Rivers of France,” or the “Ports of England,” or even all the places which it pleased him to choose for one of the most elaborate of his publications, “The Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” A long tether was allowed him, unquestionably, in some of these sets; but in the “Liber”—as it is called, briefly and affectionately, by collector and student—there was no question of tether at all. In it, a subject from Classical Mythology might stand side by side with a subject drawn from English barton and hedgerow—I am, as it were, naming Procris and Cephalus, Æsacus and Hesperie, the exquisite though homely Straw Yard, the entirely prosaic Farm Yard with a Cock. The interior of a London church, with its Georgian altar and its pews cosily curtained for the most respectable of bourgeois, might be presented in near neighbourhood to some study which Turner had recorded of the eternal hills, or of a great storm that gathered, rolled over, and passed away from Solway Moss.

Turner: The Straw Yard.

I have used the word “study,” since it is Turner’s own. But each plate in “Liber Studiorum” is much more than a study. It is a finished composition. Turner spared neither time nor pains—though in this case, as in others, he was careful, where that was possible, to spare money—in making his work all that the wisest lover of his genius might expect it to be. Whatever rivalry there was with the “Liber Veritatis” of Claude—the later portions of which were issuing from the house of Boydell at the very moment that Turner was planning the “Liber”—the rivalry was conducted upon no equal terms. I say nothing in depreciation of Claude’s “Liber Veritatis.” In it, one of the greatest practitioners of mezzotint engraving—Richard Earlom—reproduced, with learned simplicity, Claude’s masterly memoranda—the sometimes slender yet always stately drawings in the preparation of which Nature had counted for something, and Art had counted for more. Claude’s bistre sketches, by their dignity and style—even the hurried visitor to Chatsworth may know that—are akin to the landscapes of Rembrandt, to the studies of Titian. But the artist of the “Liber Veritatis” worked in haste, worked purposely in slightness, and more than one generation separated him from the engraver who was to execute the plates. Turner worked with elaboration, and worked at leisure, and he etched upon the plates, himself, the leading lines of his composition, and he was in contact with the engravers, and his directions to these accomplished craftsmen were rightly fastidious and endlessly minute.

Claude too was an etcher, yet it is not in the “Liber Veritatis”—it is in the rare and early States of his Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing, of his Cowherd (“Le Bouvier”), of his Cattle in Stormy Weather—that (as a previous chapter has insisted) we are to find proof of his skilled familiarity with that means of expression which Turner employed as the basis of his work in the “Liber.” Claude, when he etched, etched for Etching’s sake, and used with pleasure and with ease the resources of the etcher’s art. Turner restricted Etching within narrower limits. When one remembers the circumstance that, having etched the outlines, on the plate, he took a dozen or a score, perhaps, of impressions from it before he caused the work in mezzotint to be added, it is difficult to assert that he did not attach a certain value to the etched outlines. And indeed they are of extraordinary significance and strength: they show economy of labour, certainty of vision and of hand. It is very well that they, as well as the finished plates, should be collected. But, in his pleasure in possessing himself of these rare, noble things, the collector must not allow himself to forget that they were essentially a preparation and a sustenance for that which was to follow—for that admirable mezzotint on which the subtlest lights and shadows of the picture, its infinite and indescribably delicate gradations, were intended to depend.

Of this Mezzotint it is time to speak. Its employment, though it proved—as I think I have implied already—wonderfully conducive to the quality of the “Liber” plates, was not resolved upon at first. The process of aquatint, in which much work was done about that time—in which, only a very few years before “Liber” began, Turner’s friend, Thomas Girtin, had produced some broadly-treated views of Paris—had, at first, been thought of. Negotiations were opened with Lewis, and he executed in aquatint one of the plates, which Turner did indeed eventually use, but which he was careful not to use in the earliest numbers of the publication. The superiority of Mezzotint he recognised quite clearly. He employed the best mezzotinters. He busied himself to instruct them as to the effects that he desired. He learnt the art himself, and himself mezzotinted, with great exquisiteness, ten out of the seventy-one plates. He worked, in later stages, upon all the rest of them; obtaining generally the most refined beauty, but working in such a fashion as to exhaust the plate with extravagant swiftness. Then he touched and retouched, almost as Mr Whistler has touched and retouched the plates of his Venetian etchings. So delicate, so evanescent, rarity is not an aim, but a need, with them.

The publication of the “Liber”—the great undertaking of the early middle period of Turner’s art—began in 1807, and its issue was arrested in the year 1819. It was never completed—seventy-one finished plates were given to the world out of the hundred that were meant to be. But Turner had by that time proceeded far with the remainder, of which twenty plates, more or less finished, testified to a gathering rather than a lessening strength. By the non-publication of these later plates, the collector—if not necessarily the student—is deprived of several of the noblest illustrations of Turner’s genius. Nothing in the whole series shows an elegance more dignified than that which the Stork and Aqueduct displays; the mystery of dawn is magnificent in the Stonehenge; and never was pastoral landscape—the England of field and wood and sloping hillside—more engaging or suggestive than in the Crowhurst.

The mention of these plates—the hint it gives us as to difference of subject and of aim—brings up the question of the various classes of composition into which Turner thought proper to divide his work. His advertisement of the publication affords a proof of how widely representative the work was intended to be; nor indeed, did the execution at all fall short of Turner’s hope in this respect. The work was to be—and we know, now, how fully it became—an illustration of Landscape Composition, classed as follows: “Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.” And further, it is said in the advertisement, “Each number contains five engravings in mezzotint: one subject of each class.” But Turner, in these matters, was extraordinarily unmethodical—I should like to say “muddled.” Each number did contain five engravings, and they were “in mezzotint,” with the preparation in etching; but it was by no means always that there was one subject of each class, for Turner divided the Pastoral into simple and what he described as “elegant” or “epic” Pastoral (Mr Roget thinks that the “E.P.” means “epic”), and the very first number contained a Historical, a Marine, an Architectural subject, but it contained no Mountainous, for the Pastoral was represented in both of its forms (“P.” and “E.P.”).

The actual publication was exceedingly irregular. Sometimes two numbers—or two parts, as we may better call them—were issued at once. Sometimes there would be an interval of several years between the issue of a couple of parts. There is no doubt that as the work progressed Turner felt increasingly the neglect under which it suffered. Gradually he lost interest in its actual issue—but, never for a moment in its excellence.