But for the assurance of the present Mr. Trimmer, of Heston, that this attachment of Turner to Miss Trimmer was undoubted, and that this letter has always been considered in the family as a declaration thereof, we should have thought that the offer he wanted was one for Sandycombe Lodge and not for his hand. It is, however, past doubt that Turner was violently smitten, and though forty years old, felt it much.
The above letter was the only one known to have been written by Turner to his friend the Vicar of Heston, and it is quite untrue, as asserted by Thornbury, that the Vicar’s letters were burnt in sackfuls by his son. His large correspondence was patiently gone through—a task which took some years. Thornbury was probably thinking of the destruction of the celebrated Mrs. Trimmer’s correspondence by her daughter, in which it is true that sackfuls of interesting letters perished.
CHAPTER VII.
ITALY AND FRANCE.
1820 TO 1840.
THE life of Turner the man, that is, what we know of it, during these twenty years, may be written almost in a page—the history of his art might be made to fill many volumes. During this period he exhibited nearly eighty pictures at the Royal Academy, and about five hundred engravings were published from his drawings. If he had been famous before, he was something else, if not something more than famous now; he was “the fashion.” It was on this ground that Sir Walter Scott, who would have preferred Thomson of Duddingstone to illustrate his ‘Provincial Antiquities’ (published in 1826), agreed to the employment of Turner, who afterwards (in 1834) furnished a beautiful series of sixty-five vignettes for Cadell’s edition of Sir Walter’s prose and poetical works.
In 1819 Turner paid his first visit to Italy, which had a marked influence on his style. From this time forward his works become remarkable for their colour. Down to this time he had painted principally in browns, blues, and greys, employing red and yellow very sparingly, but he had been gradually warming his scale almost from the beginning. From the wash of sepia and Prussian blue, he had slowly proceeded in the direction of golden and reddish brown, and had produced both drawings and pictures with wonderful effects of mist and sunlight, but he had scarcely gone beyond the sober colouring of Vandevelde and Ruysdael till he began his great pictures in rivalry with Claude. In them may be seen perhaps the dawn of the new power in his art. In the Exhibition of 1815 were two prophecies of his new style, in which he was to transcend all former efforts in the painting of distance and in colour. These were Crossing the Brook, with its magical distance, and Dido building Carthage, with its blazing sky and brilliant feathery clouds. The first is the purest and most beautiful of all his oil pictures of the loveliness of English scenery, the most simple in its motive, the most tranquil in its sentiment, the perfect expression of his enjoyment of the exquisite scenery in the neighbourhood of Plymouth. The latter with all its faults was the finest of the kind he ever painted, and his greatest effect in the way of colour before his visit to Italy. In his other Carthage picture of this period, The Decline (exhibited 1817), the “brown demon,” as Mr. Ruskin calls it, was in full force, and his pictures of Dido and Æneas (1814), The Temple of Jupiter (1817), and Apuleia and Apuleius, are cold and heavy in comparison. Indeed, from 1815 to 1823 his power, judged by his exhibited pictures, seemed to be flagging. Whether his second disappointment in love had anything to do with this we have no means of judging, but if it disturbed for a time his power of painting for fame, it certainly had no ill effect either as to the quantity or quality of his water-colours for the engravers.
His most worthy and beautiful work of these years is to be found not in his oil pictures but in his drawings for Dr. Whitaker’s ‘History of Richmondshire’ (published 1823) and the ‘Rivers of England’ (1824). Both series were engraved in line in a manner worthy of the artist. One of the former, the Hornby Castle, a little faded perhaps, but still exquisite in its harmonies of blue and amber, is to be seen at South Kensington. Three more were lately exhibited by Mr. Ruskin—Heysham Village, Egglestone Abbey, and Richmond. Of this series Mr. Ruskin says, “The foliage is rich and marvellous in composition, the effects of mist more varied and true” (than in the Hakewill drawings), “the rock and hill drawing insuperable, the skies exquisite in complex form.” The engravings probably owed much to Turner’s own supervision, and many of them, such as Egglestone Abbey, by T. Higham, and Wycliffe, by John Pye, Middiman’s Moss Dale Fall, and Radcliffe’s Hornby Castle, were perfect translations of the originals, showing an advance in the art of engraving as great as that which Turner had made in water-colour drawing. Except in the heightened scale of colour there is little in this series to show the influence of Italy, their temper is that of Crossing the Brook, and the foliage and scenery that of England. Nor do we find anything but England in the ‘Rivers.’ Nothing can be more purely English than the exquisite drawing of Totnes on the Dart (of which we give a woodcut). The original is one of the treasures of the National Gallery, and is marvellous for the minuteness of its finish and the breadth and truth of its effect. The tiny group of poplars in the middle distance are painted with such dexterity that the impression of multitudinous leafage is perfectly conveyed, and the stillness of clear smooth water filled with innumerable variegated reflections, the beautiful distance with castle, church, and town, and the group of gulls in the foreground, make a picture of placid beauty in which there is no straining for effect, no mannerism, nothing to remind you of the artist. It is only in the touches of red in the fore of the river (touches unaccounted for by anything in the drawing) that you discern him at last, and find that you are looking not at nature but “a Turner.” If you are inclined to be angry with these touches, cover them with the hand and find out how much of the charm is lost.
