It is scarcely too much to say that in those days Claude stood between nature and the artist, and that he was as much the standard of landscape art as Pheidias of sculpture. To try to clear away this barrier of progress, as Hogarth had striven years before to abolish the “black masters,” was no ignoble effort, and it was done in a nobler spirit than that of Hogarth, for he did not attempt to depreciate his rival. Yet the nobility of the attempt was not unmixed, for if he did not disparage Claude, he attempted to make himself famous at Claude’s expense. He did not indeed say, as Hogarth would have done, “Claude is bad, I am good;” but he said, “Claude is good, but I am better.” His own experience even from very early days should have told him that, despite the cant of connoisseurs and the strength of old traditions, no purely original work of his had passed unnoticed, and that the truest and noblest way of educating the public taste was by following the bent of his original genius, and leaving the public to draw their own comparisons.
Mr. Wells’s daughter states that not only did the “Liber Studiorum” entirely owe its existence to her father’s persuasion, but the divisions into “Pastoral,” “Elegant Pastoral,” “Marine,” &c., were also suggested by him. Turner determined to print and publish and sell the “Liber” himself, but to employ an engraver. His first choice fell on “Mr. F. C. Lewis, the best aquatint engraver of the day, who at the very time was at work on facsimiles of Claude’s drawings.”[23] With him he soon quarrelled. The terms were, that Turner was to etch and Lewis to aquatint at five guineas a plate. The first plate, Bridge and Goats, was finished and accepted by Turner, though not published till April, 1812; but the second plate Turner gave Lewis the option of etching as well as aquatinting, and he etched it accordingly, and sent a proof to Turner, raising his charge from five guineas to eight, in consideration of the extra work. Turner praised it, but declined to have the plate engraved, on the ground that Lewis had raised his charges. This ended Mr. Lewis’s connection with the “Liber,” and Turner next employed Mr. Charles Turner, the mezzotint engraver, but he had to pay him eight guineas a plate. Charles Turner agreed to engrave fifty plates at this price, but after he had finished twenty, he wished to raise his charge to ten guineas, which led to a quarrel. With reference to these quarrels of Turner with his engravers, Mr. Thornbury says, “The painter who had never had quarter given to him when he was struggling, now in his turn, I grieve to say, gave no quarter,” and “inflexibly exacting as he was, Turner could not understand how an engraver who had contracted to do fifty engravings should try to get off his bargain at the twenty-first.” This, like most of Thornbury’s statements, is utterly untrustworthy. There is no evidence to show that a hard bargain was ever driven with him when he was struggling, there is no word of any dispute with engravers till he began to employ them himself, and as to his “not being able to understand” how any man should endeavour to obtain more than the price contracted for, it was exactly what he tried to do himself, when afterwards employed by Cooke.
The fact is that in all business arrangements Turner’s worse nature, the mean, grasping spirit of the little tradesman, was brought into prominence. In the case of Lewis he was evidently in the wrong, in the case of Charles Turner he was only hard; but in all business transactions he was as a rule ungenerous, and sometimes dishonest. His action towards the public with regard to the “Liber” can be called by no other name. His prices at first were fifteen shillings for prints, and twenty-five shillings for proofs. When the plates got worn (and mezzotint plates are subject to rapid deterioration in the light parts), Turner used to alter them, sometimes changing the effect greatly, as in the Mer de Glace, where he transformed the smooth, snow-covered glacier into spiky ridges of ice, or in the Æsacus and Hesperie, where the effect of sunbeams through the wood was effaced, and the direction in which the head of Hesperie was looking was changed, and the face afterwards concealed. The changes were not always for the worse; the very wear of the plate in some cases, as in that of the Calm, improved the effect, and what we have called his confusion of thought, and what Thornbury has called his “distorted logic,” may have led him to believe that he was not wrong in selling as he did these worn and altered plates as proofs. A kind casuistry may lend us a word less disagreeable than dishonest to such transactions, but when we know that he habitually from the first made no distinction between proofs and prints—that he sold the same things under different names at different prices—every plea breaks down, and we are forced to the conclusion that when he thought he could cheat safely “the pack of geese,”[24] as he thought the public, he did so.
Nor can we acquit Turner of unfairness in issuing the “Liber Studiorum” in competition with the French painter’s “Liber Veritatis,” a book well-known to the public and to him, as the third edition of its plates, engraved by Earlom, was just issued, when the “Liber Studiorum” was begun. He must have known what the public did not probably know—that Claude’s rough sketches were mere memoranda of the effects of his pictures taken by him to identify them, and never meant for publication; whereas his were carefully-finished compositions, into which he threw his whole power. Not only was the publication unfair as regards Claude, but it was misleading to the public as regards himself. The title, “Liber Studiorum,” applies only to some of the prints. A few of the poorer plates, especially the architectural ones, and such simple designs as the Hedging and Ditching, might properly perhaps have been called studies, but even upon these he bestowed a care and a finish that would entitle them to be called pictures, monochrome as they are.
The want of a well-considered plan, and the capricious way in which they were published, contributed to the ill-success of the work; and though we are accustomed to look upon its failure as a severe judgment on the taste of the time, we are not at all sure that it would have succeeded if published in the present day, unless Mr. Ruskin had written the advertisement.
“The meaning of the entire book,” according to that eloquent writer, “was symbolized in the frontispiece,[25] which he engraved with his own hand:[26] Tyre at Sunset, with the Rape of Europa, indicating the symbolism of the decay of Europe by that of Tyre, its beauty passing away into terror and judgment (Europa being the Mother of Minos and Rhadamanthus).”
Turner’s advertisement thus describes the intention of the work:—