CHAPTER IV.
YORKSHIRE AND THE YOUNG ACADEMICIAN.
1797 TO 1807.
FHE the facts of the foregoing chapter it may be fairly presumed that although Turner’s election as Associate in 1799 followed quickly after his fine display of pictures from the northern counties in 1798, he was before this a marked man, whose superiority over all then living landscape painters was visible to critics and lovers of art, and could not have been disguised from the eyes of the artists of the Royal Academy. It did not require a genius like that of Turner to distance competitors on the Academy walls in those days. England was almost at its lowest point both in literature and art. The great men of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Swift, Fielding, Sterne and Richardson, had long been dead, and of the later brilliant, but small circle of artists and men of letters of which Dr. Johnson was the centre (Goldsmith and Burke, Garrick and Reynolds, Hume and Gibbon), Reynolds only was left, and he was moribund. Of other artists with any title to fame there was none left but De Loutherbourg and Morland; Hogarth had died in 1764, Wilson in 1782, Gainsborough in 1788. The new generation of men of genius were born; some were growing up, some in their cradles. A few had already shown signs. Wordsworth and Coleridge had just put forth their “Lyrical Ballads” at Bristol, Burns was famous in Scotland, Charles Lamb had written “Rosamund Gray,” but Scott the “Great Unknown,” was as yet “unknown” only, though five years older than Turner; Byron had not gone to Harrow, and the united ages of Keats and Shelley did not amount to ten years; the only living poets of deserved repute were Cowper and Crabbe. Della Crusca in poetry, and West in art, were the bright particular stars of this gloomy period. The landscape painters who were Academicians were such men as Sir William Beechey, Sir Francis Bourgeois, Garvey, Farington, and Paul Sandby, and among the Associates, Turner had no more important rival than Philip Reinagle. Girtin and De Loutherbourg alone of all the then exhibitors were anything like a match for him, and Girtin spoilt (till 1801) any chance he might otherwise have had of Academic honours by not exhibiting pictures in oil; he died in 1802, leaving Turner undisputed master of the field. It is not greatly therefore to be wondered at that Turner was elected Associate in 1799, and a full Academician in 1802. It was, however, much to the credit of the Academy that they recognized his talent so soon and welcomed him as an honour to their body, instead of keeping him out from jealous motives. Turner never forgot what he owed to the Academy, and whether it taught him nothing, as Mr. Ruskin says, or a great deal, as Mr. Hamerton thinks, does not much matter—it taught him all it knew, and gave him ungrudgingly every honour in its gift. But its claims on his gratitude did not stop here, for it was his school in more than one branch of learning; from its catalogues he derived the subjects of most of his pictures, they directed him to the poems which set flame to his imagination, and helped (unfortunately), with their queer spelling and grammar and truncated quotations, to form what literary style he had; but the greatest boon which the Academy afforded was the opportunity of fame, a field for that ambition which was one of the ruling powers of his nature.
But his tour in the North in 1797 was before his days of Academic rivalries and glories. He was only two-and-twenty, and seems to have been actuated by no motive but to paint as well and truly as he could the beautiful scenery through which he passed. The effect upon him of the fells and vales of Yorkshire and Cumberland seems to have been much the same as that of Scotland upon Landseer; it braced all his powers, developed manhood of art, turned him from a toilsome student into a triumphant master. Mr. Ruskin writes more eloquently than truly about this first visit. “For the first time the silence of nature around him, her freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to him. Peace at last, and freedom at last, and loveliness at last; it is here then, among the deserted vales—not among men; those pale, poverty-struck, or cruel faces—that multitudinous marred humanity—are not the only things which God has made.” These are fine words, but what a picture, if true! Can this young man who has travelled through all these many counties in England and Wales, which we have already enumerated, never have known the “silence of nature,” or “freedom,” or “peace,” or “loveliness?” Can his experience of mankind, of Dr. Monro, of Girtin, of Mr. Hardwick, of Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mr. Henderson, have left upon him such an impression of the failure of God’s handiwork in making men, that a mountain seems to him in comparison as a revelation of unexpected success? If Turner had been cooped in a garret of the foulest alley in London since his birth, and had only escaped now and then from the hardest drudgery to read the works of Mr. Carlyle, this picture might be near the truth, but we doubt even then if it could escape the charge of being over-coloured.
Whether Turner had any special object in this journey to the North in 1797 is not clear, but it is at least probable that Girtin’s success at the Exhibition of this year with his drawings from Yorkshire and Scotland may have influenced him, and that he may have already received a commission from Dr. Whitaker to make drawings for the “Parish of Whalley,” published three years afterwards. He must at all events have had much leisure from other employment in order to produce the important pictures in oil and water-colour which he exhibited the next year. Of these we only know Morning on the Coniston Fells and Buttermere Lake, now in the National Gallery. Another, whether water or oils we do not know, was Norham Castle on the Tweed—Summer’s Morn, the first of several pictures of the same subject, which was a favourite of his for a good reason. Many years after (probably about 1824 or 1825), when making sketches for “Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland, with descriptive illustrations by Sir Walter Scott, 1826,” he took off his hat to Norham Castle, and Cadell the publisher, who was with him, expressed surprise. “Oh,” was the reply, “I made a drawing or painting of Norham several years since. It took; and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute.” If the Castle was treated in the same way in this first as in the subsequent pictures of Norham, with the hill and ruin in the middle distance set against a brightly illumined sky, the effect was sufficiently new and striking to make the reputation of any painter in those days. It was an effect which as far as we know had never been attempted before, this casting of the whole shadow of hill and castle straight at the spectator, so that, in spite of the bright reflections in the watery foreground, he seems to be within it, and to see through the soft shadowy air, the solemn bulk of mound and ruin, with their outlines blurred with light, grand and indistinct against the burning sky.
The pictures of 1797-99 confirmed beyond any doubt that a great artist had arisen, who was not only a painter but a poet—a poet, not so much of the pathos of ruin, though so many of his pictures had ruins in them, nor of the chequered fate of mankind, though there is something of the “Fallacies of Hope” indicated in the quotations to his pictures—as of the mystery and beauty of light, of the power of nature, her inexhaustible variety and energy, her infinite complexity and fulness. No one can look upon his splendid drawing of Warkworth Castle, exhibited in 1799, and now at South Kensington, with its rich glow of sunset and transparent shadow, and its wonderful masses of clouds, without feeling that such work as this was a revelation in those days. Sparing and not very pleasant in colour, it is yet in this respect a great advance upon the former work of others and of his own; such colour as there is penetrates the shade and is complete in harmony and tone, while the sky has no blank space and is part of the picture, the vivifying uniting power of the composition, with more interest and feeling in one roll of its truly-studied masses of cloud-form than could be found in the whole of any sky of his contemporaries.
Altogether it is difficult to over-estimate the influence of this first journey to the North upon Turner’s mind and art, although he had almost perfected his skill and shown unmistakable signs of genius before. But these tours had other gifts not less important, though in a different way, for his introductions to Dr. Whitaker, the local historian, to Mr. Basire, the engraver, to Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, to Lord Harewood, and to Sir John Leicester (afterwards (1826) Lord de Tabley), through Mr. Lister-Parker of Browsholme Hall, his guardian, may all be said to have resulted from this tour.
Dr. Whitaker was the vicar of the parish of Whalley, and was writing a book upon it in the manner of those days, giving descriptions of the local antiquities, the churches, the ruins, the crosses, and an account of the county families, with their pedigrees and engravings of their ancestral seats. Not only each county, but almost every parish had such a historian in those days, and although the spirit of these works is archaeological rather than artistic, engaged with genealogy rather than history, and with pride of family and county rather than of the people and nation, they did a great deal of valuable work. Dr. Whitaker’s work is no exception to this rule, and he was in many ways a typical writer of the kind, for he himself, though he “chose” the Church as his profession, was a man of property and county importance. Valuable as artists were in those days to the writers of these works, they were yet considered of very secondary rank. They were indeed not called “artists” but “draftsmen,” and notwithstanding that Dr. Whitaker recognized Turner’s genius, he did not think it necessary in this “Parish of Whalley” to mention in the preface the existence of such a person, although the names of all the gentlemen of the county who had furnished him with drawings or information are carefully acknowledged therein; but nothing will show better the relations between the two men than an extract from a letter from the reverend bookmaker to one of his county friends, Mr. Wilson, of Clitheroe, dated Feb. 8th, 1800.
“I have just had a ludicrous dispute to settle between Mr. Townley” (Charles Townley, Esq. of Townley), “myself and Turner, the draftsman. Mr. Townley it seems has found out an old and very bad painting of Gawthorpe at Mr. Shuttleworth’s house in London, as it stood in the last century, with all its contemporary accompaniments of clipped yews, parterres, &c.: this he insisted would be more characteristic than Turner’s own sketch, which he desired him to lay aside, and copy the other. Turner, abhorring the landscape and contemning the execution of it, refused to comply, and wrote to me very tragically on the subject. Next arrived a letter from Mr. Townley, recommending it to me to allow Turner to take his own way, but while he wrote, his mind (which is not unfrequent) veered about, and he concluded with desiring me to urge Turner to the performance of his requisition, as from myself. I have, however, attempted something of a compromise, which I fear will not succeed, as Turner has all the irritability of youthful genius.”[19]
The “compromise” was handing over the task of drawing from the objectionable picture to Mr. J. Basire the engraver.