We should like to see Turner’s “tragical” letter, and also his rejected drawing; we should also like to have seen Dr. Whitaker’s face if he had been told that not many years after a book would have been published of drawings by Turner, the draftsman, with “descriptions by the Rev. Dr. Whitaker.”
Of Mr. Fawkes, of whose hall at Farnley Turner made a drawing for the “Parish of Whalley,” but with whom he is said by Thornbury to have become acquainted about 1802, it may be said that he was one of Turner’s longest and staunchest friends. The number of drawings (still at Farnley) which he made when visiting Mr. Fawkes between 1803 and 1820 (including as they do studies of birds shot while he was there, of the outhouses, porches, and gateways on the property, of the old places in the vicinity, and of the rooms in Farnley Hall) attest the frequency of his visits and his affection for the place and its occupants, while the splendid series of drawings in England, Switzerland, Italy, and on the Rhine, and the few precious oil pictures purchased by Mr. Fawkes, show him to have been not only a true friend, but a warm and sympathizing admirer of his genius. He indeed was a friend such as few are permitted to know—one of a goodly number who in Turner’s youth and manhood should have made the world to him specially pleasant and sociable, frank and healthy. If he could not or would not have it so, it was not from insensibility, for his feeling was deep and his heart was sound. “He could not make up his mind to visit Farnley after his old friend’s death,” and he could not speak of the shore of the Wharfe (on which Farnley Hall looks down) “but his voice faltered.” Dayes wrote of him in 1804, “This man must be loved for his works, for his person is not striking, nor his conversation brilliant.” At Farnley, as at Mr. Wells’ cottage, Turner was made at home, but that he did not escape good-humoured ridicule even at Farnley is plain from a caricature by Mr. Fawkes, “which is thought by old friends to be very like. It shows us a little Jewish-nosed man in an ill-cut brown tail coat, striped waistcoat, and enormous frilled shirt, with feet and hands notably small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost level with his waist.”[20] It is evident that at this time, in spite of his clear little blue eyes, and his small hands and feet, his appearance was not one likely to prepossess women, or to inspire consideration among men, and that one of the ills from which his painting room afforded a refuge may have often been a wounded vanity. There can be nothing more constantly galling to a sensitive man of genius than to feel that his appearance does not inspire the respect he feels due to him. If he has eloquence sufficient to command attention, this will not matter so much; but if he has not even that (and Turner had not), his natural refuge is solitude, his one absorbing occupation is his art, his only worldly ambition is to show what is in him, and to compel respect to his genius through his works.
From the time that Turner became an Associate his struggles, if he can ever be said to have had any, were over, and many changes took place in his life and art. He ceased almost entirely from making topographical drawings for the engravers, limiting his efforts to a heading to the “Oxford Almanack,” and a few drawings for “Britannia Depicta,” “Mawman’s Tour,” and some other books, until the commencement of the “Southern Coast” in 1814. He had in effect emancipated himself from “hackwork,” and could turn his attention to more congenial and ambitious labour. The “draftsman” had become the artist, and he showed the improvement in his position by moving from Hand Court, Maiden Lane, to 64, Harley Street.
In future his exhibited pictures show very few “castles” or “abbeys,” unless they are the seats of his distinguished patrons, Mr. Beckford of Fonthill (for whom in 1799 he painted several views of that ill-fated tower, which might have formed a subject for a canto of Turner’s “Fallacies of Hope”), Sir J. L. Leicester, and others. His other castles, Carnarvon, 1800, Pembroke, 1801 and 1806, St. Donat’s, 1801, and Kilchurn, 1802, were all probably compositions in which local fidelity was cared for little in comparison with effects of light and pictorial beauty. How completely he disregarded local fact in the case of Kilchurn has been very completely shown by Mr. Hamerton, and Mr. Ruskin says, “Observe generally, Turner never, after this time, 1800, drew from nature without composing. His lightest pencil sketch was the plan of a picture, his completest study on the spot a part of one.”
Of this period, 1800-1810, Mr. Ruskin says, “His manner is stern, reserved, quiet, grave in colour, forceful in hand. His mind tranquil; fixed in physical study, on mountain subject; in moral study, on the Mythology of Homer, and the Law of the Old Testament.” We wish he had given his reasons for this last astonishing statement. For those who only know the working of Turner’s mind through his pictures, it is bewildering in the extreme, for in these there is no trace that he ever at any time studied the Law of the Old Testament, and the only classical pictures of this period, including the plates in the “Liber,” were Jason and Narcissus and Echo. If we include the pictures of 1811, we get one Homeric subject, Chryses, but that has nothing to do with mythology.
The evidence of Turner’s pictures shows little tranquillity of mind during this period, but, on the contrary, all the restlessness of unsatisfied ambition. As he had already pitted himself against, and beaten all the water-colourists, he now commenced a course of rivalry against all the oil painters past and present, who came anywhere within the reach of his art, which he endeavoured to extend far beyond landscape limits.
His first tilt was probably against De Loutherbourg in 1799 with his Battle of the Nile, at ten o’clock, when the l’Orient blew up, from the station of the gunboats between the battery and Castle of Aboukir; and his Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800), his Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desert by a Whirlwind, and The Tenth plague of Ægypt (1802), probably owed more to De Loutherbourg’s grand but theatrical pictures and Eidophusicon, than to any meditation on the “Law of the Old Testament.”[21] Of Wilson, though dead, and neglected even when alive, he continued in active rivalry as late as 1822, when he proposed to Mr. J. Robinson, of the firm of Hurst and Robinson, to have four of his pictures (three of which were to be painted expressly for the venture) engraved in rivalry with Wilson and Woollett. “Whether we can in the present day,” he writes, “contend with such powerful antagonists as Wilson and Woollett would be at least tried by size, security against risk, and some remuneration for the time of painting. The pictures of ultimate sale I shall be content with; to succeed would perhaps form another epoch in the English school; and if we fall, we fall by contending with giant strength.” It is difficult to make out the meaning of even this short extract from this illiterate composition, but it is quite plain that the open rivalry with Wilson, which commenced about 1800, had not ceased in 1822.
But he did not confine his rivalries to English painters, or to the field of landscape art. His long rivalry with Claude commenced with the “Liber Studiorum” in 1807, that with Vandevelde earlier. His famous Shipwreck (painted 1805) now in the National Gallery, his perhaps finer Wreck of the Minotaur, painted for Lord Yarborough, and his Fishing Boats in a Squall, painted for the Marquis of Stafford, and now in the Ellesmere Gallery, besides a fine sea-piece, painted for the Earl of Egremont, are examples of the latter. The Ellesmere picture was painted in direct rivalry with one of Vandevelde’s on the same subject, and both hang together in the Ellesmere Gallery. Of them John Burnet wrote:—