But before night fell, in the interval between 1840 and 1845, Turner painted a few pictures of remarkable beauty both in colour and sentiment—pictures which no other artist could have painted, and which we doubt if he could himself have painted before—pictures generally attempting to realize his later ideal of Venice, which even now, in their wrecked beauty, fascinate all who have patience to look at them, and watch the apparent chaos of yellow and white and purple and grey gradually clear into a vision of ghost-like palaces rising like a dream, from the golden sea. Besides these he painted at least three others of unique power: one a record of what few other men could have had the courage to study or the power to paint; one showing the passion of despair at the loss of an old comrade; and another the boldest attempt to represent abstract ideas in landscape that was ever made. We allude to the Snowstorm; Peace, Burial at Sea; and Rain, Steam, and Speed.
Mr. Hamerton says, in connection with the first of these:—
“Let it not be supposed that these works of Turner’s decline, however they may have exercised the wit of critics, and excited the amusement of visitors to the Exhibition, were ever anything less than serious performances for him. The Snowstorm, for example (1842), afforded the critics a precious opportunity for the exercise of their art. They called it soapsuds and whitewash, the real subject being a steamer in a storm off a harbour’s mouth making signals, and going by the lead. In this instance, nothing could be more serious than Turner’s intention, which was to render a storm as he had himself seen it one night when the ‘Ariel’ left Harwich. Like Joseph Vernet, who, when in a tempest off the island of Sardinia, had himself fastened to the mast to watch the effects, Turner on this occasion, ‘got the sailors to lash himself to the mast to observe it,’ and remained in that position for four hours. He did not expect to escape, but had a curious sort of conscientious feeling, that it was his duty to record his impression if he survived.”[45]
Of the second, which was painted to commemorate Wilkie’s funeral, it is related that Stanfield complained of the blackness of the sails, and that Turner answered, “If I could find anything blacker than black I’d use it.”[46]
The history of his late Swiss sketches and the drawings he made from them has been recently told by Mr. Ruskin in his valuable and interesting notes to his collection of Turner’s drawings exhibited last year (1878), and these notes and the almost equally interesting notes of the Rev. W. Kingsley, contained between the same covers, testify not only to the supreme beauty of his later work, but also to the nobler motive which inspired its production, viz. the desire to “record” as far as he could what he had seen after “fifty years’ observation.” The days of strife and emulation were over, and a humbler, sweeter spirit made him “put forth his full strength to depict nature as he saw it with all his knowledge and experience.” Characteristically, as all through his life, this better spirit showed itself rather in his water-colours made for private persons, than in those oils which he exhibited for the judgment of the public.
We wish we had space here for Mr. Ruskin’s splendid description of Turner’s picture of Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—a work which seems to us to illustrate what we have said of his manner of decline in a remarkable way. There is no doubt about its splendour of colour, the grandeur of its sea, and the force with which its sentiment of horror and wrong and death is conveyed; but it shows a childishness, a want of mental faculties of the simplest kind, which is all the more extraordinary when brought in contrast with such gigantic pictorial power. The sharks are quite unnecessary, the bodies in the water are too many, the absurdity of the chains appearing above it is too gross; the horror is overdone and melodramatic, or, in a word, one of his finest pictorial conceptions is spoilt for want of a little common sense, of a little power to place himself in relation to his fellows and see how it would appear to them. Again, we cannot help wishing that he had had a friend at his elbow like Stanfield, who would have saved him from the laughter of small critics. He was not fit to manage such a work on such a subject by himself.
In his picture of War—the Exile and the Rock-limpet, with its extract from the “Fallacies of Hope”—
“Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like
A soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone
Amidst a sea of blood . . . .
. . . But can you join your comrades?”
we see the same mental helplessness. It verges on the sublime, it verges on the ridiculous. We should be sorry to call it either; but it is childish—not with the grand simplicity of Blake, but with the confused complicity of Turner. Mr. Ruskin says that Turner tried in vain to make him understand the full meaning of this work, and we are not surprised.
Such pictures as these had occurred now and then all through his career—pictures in which the means employed were utterly inadequate to express the sentiment duly, such as the Waterloo,—pictures in which the accumulation of ideas was confused and excessive, as the Phryne going to the Bath as Venus, Demosthenes taunted by Æschines; and he had shown some hazy symbolism in connection with shell-fish in these verses:—