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THE TURNER BEQUEST.
After five years, the public is actually permitted to have under its eyes a portion of the Turner bequest—a small portion, it is true, but still something. Twenty of the oil-pictures, ranging in date from 1797 to 1844, have been hung in Marlborough House in a room of the suite allotted to the Vernon Gallery, and were first seen by the general public on Monday. Crowds, of various classes, thronged the room, peering and poking in the attempt to get a look at the pictures, which is in many cases about as easy a task as the squaring of the circle. A more deplorable hole than this room for the exhibition of pictures could not be devised by ingenuity. On a bright summer's day its light would be twilight ; on these wintry afternoons it is nearly darkness, conveniently varied by the window-glare striking on the paint, and extinguishing every vestige of form upon the canvass. With all its drawbacks, how- ever, the collection excited a real heartiness and animation in the visit- ors, and as much apparent pleasure as we ever witnessed in picture-seers. The occasion seemed to be in some sort felt as a national one.
In fact, the Turner bequest is one of the most noticeable national events in the art-history of this or any people. That wonderful painter, —now, after much misunderstanding, cavilling, and obloquy, the un- disputed king of British landscape-painting, and, save in the eyes of a small circle of dilettanti, of all landscape-painting whatsoever—has en- dowed the nation with such a monument of his genius as is scarcely to be found elsewhere in the ease of any painter of past or present time. The Louvre has nothing to show of any single individual approaching the Turner collection in extent and completeness ; and not Venice her- self possesses a vaster.record of her great son Tintoret, than we, when the collection shall be brought together in its entirety, will have of Turner. We spoke lately of the great number of finished water- colour pictures, and the enormous quantities of sketches and studies, which the collection comprehends. The oil-pictures are now talked of as numbering one hundred, and they amount, we believe, at any rate to something not very far short of that sum. These alone exhibit his mind and his practice from their earliest efforts to their latest develop- ment and achievement, presenting such a history of things seen and done as must fairly astonish even the most indifferent spectator, while in many they quicken admiration into fervour. The Turner collection, when once it forms a part of our permanent National Gallery, will raise that gallery to a par of importance with others wherewith it has hitherto pretended to no competition, and will be one of the things which men come from afar to see. It will be a reproach to our gratitude and our public spirit if we do not soon comply with the poor condition upon which the bequest was made—that the works should be worthily housed and displayed within a lapse of ten years from the painter's death. The scanty instalment of the collection as yet opened to public view already presents something of a compendium of the man's artistic life, from the dark neutral-tinted experiments of his youth, to what he worked up to, from grade to grade the fiery splendours immediately preceding his decline. We proceed to indicate briefly a few of the points of interest in each ; repeating, however, that it is impossible, whe- ther for writer or for reader, to study them adequately in their present dungeon. Moonlight ; a study at Millbank : 1797.—A queer-looking little pic- ture, which may remind one at the first glance of the vulgar moonlights vamped up and hawked about by the poorest of painters. The colour looks slaty ; the surface smooth-laid like japanning. On the darkness of the sky the full white moon is stamped like a new shilling, with a tingle star beside her. Look closer, however, and you will find strange Points and indications of light piercing here and there through the gloom, with a curious air of suddenness and evanescence. Even this is not a juvenile work, it having been painted when Turner was not far from thirty years of age. View in Wales : about 1800.—Still very dark and simple, with a cer- tain richness nevertheless coexisting with the negativeness of its colour. View on Clapham Common : about 1802.—The slightest perhaps of all the collection : rather a study than a picture. The tree-form, though generalized, has grandeur and freedom. Shipwreck : 1805.—One of the noblest pictures belonging to this period of Turner's art, marking equal intensity of purpose and self-com- mand. The sea is one great splashing, whelming swell and heave, from one end of the picture to the other, with its dreadful hollow in the midst; the sky all lowing and rayless. In the distance, the shattered Ishii) lies on her beam-ends; the crew crowding the rigging in desperate effort. Three boats have put off, attempting to save the remaining lives; in the midmost one, the women huddle and shiver. All the figures in this Picture are well worth examining, to see how far it is from being the whole truth that Turner's human beings are sticks and shrimps. The paramount feeling of the scene is rendered throughout, and even with great truth, force, and competence, in the individual figures. Every one does and thinks what he would be thinking and doing. In the right- hand boat, amid the sturdy nnshrinkiug energy of the crew, is a pale wasted-looking man, blanching before grim fate : he seems an invalid passenger. The splendid massiveness and vigour of the painting, taken as painting merely, is in harmony with the spirit of the time, and helps to impress it ; the great yellow sail of the near boat coming sharp in a single broad space, with its wind-hollowed curve against the black of sea and sky. Greenwich Hospital : 1809.—Here again the deer, as also the cattle in the next subject, are firmly painted and characterized. Within its limits of colour, russet and subdued, this seems to be a very perfect picture, though formal in its first impression, with foliage elegant to loveliness. Abingdon, Berkshire : about 1810.—The first among these pictures in which Turner's love of mist declares itself. A warm pale evening haze fills the whole middle space with breathing change and softness; while, for all this, extreme solidity marks the work. The mist is not more shift- ing than that which lies behind it is positive ; obscured, indeed, for the time, but as much there and as safe as ever.
Cottage Destroyed by an Avalanche : about 1812.—The avalanche, its own mass shaken and shattered, has crushed down in its fall a frag- ment of rock with the pines still rooted in it, which lies wedged edge- ways into the icy block, and, under both, the cottage is formless ruin. A grey picture, with the naked grandeur of literality about it. Bligh Sand, near Sheerness, Fishing-boats trawling: 1815.—Next to the Shipwreck, the most important work here of the painter's earlier style, and even superior to that for richness and beauty of colour. All is subdued, but with a rich glow sunk in its darkness. Obscure formless clouds advance from the left over the golden white of the central sky; the iron blue sea falls calmly but heavily on the wetted beach, its surface flapped and skimmed by sea-mews. All full of dim suspense, and ren- dered with perfect power.
The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire : 1817.—Here Turner has set himw'lf not exactly to imitate Claude, but to contend with him on his own ground. The attempt is fatal. Sincerity of aim is over- whelmed by laborious preparation, and by the display of artistic resource for an artificial object; freedom of thought and of action is lost in a vain emulation; and vitality is gone. This famous work has many splen- dours, but no calmness or simplicity. It is done with heat and strain, and has no healthy influence for either painter or beholder. The Bay of Balte : 1823.—With much less appearance of effort, this has the same look of being a subject taken up for fame and not for love. It appears also less complete according to its own standard; and, spite of infinite knowledge and beauty of detail, falls dead upon the feelings. The foreground is red, hot, and even crude-looking, until one examines it in its separate parts. There is a wonderful serpent gliding out to the right, and a delicious white rabbit which will soon be going down the slow length of the serpent's body, poor thing, gulp by gulp. But the truth about this picture, and others of its class, is that they have so little hold upon one's sympathies that one is not tempted to go into the de- tails, save here and there two or three which catch the eye, though one knows that the trouble would be repaid.
View of Orvieto : 1830.—A smaller work, appearing to belong much to the same category ; very characteristic of this phase of Turner's art, but not beyond its average, and on the whole one of the least enticing pictures in the collection. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ; Italy : 1832.—In many respects, a glorious piece of colour ; glowing, mysterious, and iris-hued; penetrated with light and tender heat, and all jewel-like in its richness. The hill- distance of the left, streamed into by the sunlight, and the wooded river- shore, have beauty as pure and as gorgeous as can well be imagined. The foreground, however, is rather vague and unsatisfying ; and the whole picture, 'in something the same manner as the Babe, fails to interest you, or cloys you with claims on the interest—you scarcely know which.
Apollo and Daphne (1837), Phryne going to the Bath as Venus (1838), and Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus (1839), belong to the painter's most prismatic mode of colour. The Phryne particularly blushes like a rose, and quivers all over with palpitating colour, like a bed of flowers; while the Agrippina is steeped in a golden orange, which seems to burn into it and out of it again. We dwell less on these pic- tures, however, and on those which remain, because most of them are known individually, and all appertain to the period verging upon or actually distinguished by Turner's latest system ; a system which is regarded on the one hand as the grave of all that was valuable in his art, on the other as its culmination and its crown. For our own part, we side with the latter opinion : the last work of the present series, the Approach to Venice, of 1844—being still within the sphere of his mature, fearless, and perfected power, shortly afterwards eclipsed, yet even to the last not so utterly eclipsed but that he deserved less abuse for his final failures than he got for the triumphs immediately preceding. Of these remaining works, the mightiest—and the mightiest therefore in the whole series—is the " Fighting Temeraire" tugged to her last berth (1839). We do not say it is faultless, for the flame-scarlet of the molten clouds is in some respects, we think, opaque and failing ; but for ma- jesty there is nothing to be set beside it out of Turner's own works, and few even of them. Two Venice subjects—The Bridge of Sighs (1840), and the "Sun of Venice" going to Sea (1843), with the Burial of Wilkie(1842)—complete the score. For loveliness, grace, and enchant- ment, the Veniees surpass all else. A more exquisite piece of twilight softness and luminousness than the Bridge of Sighs, with the glow of daylight still lingering, spiritualized by the evening dimness, could not, we believe, proceed from the hand of man ; the opening of blue through the bridge's arch being of itself a fragment of the most absolute and pure beauty within the limits of attainment or even of conception.
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