1 AUGUST 1931, Page 13

Art

TURNER'S EARLY OIL PAINTINGS.

THERE are those to-day who are tempted to decry Turner's greatness as an artist—perhaps because the majority of his works in the possession of the nation are housed at the National Gallery, Millbank. I am always surprised at the numbers of quite intelligent and sympathetic people whose acquaintanceship with Millbank is confined to a childhood memory of the goldfish in the pond or to a later revolt from the " every picture tells a story " school of nineteenth- century painters. Even with Turner, however, the coVe 2tiorui at Milbank are so vast that despite the best will in the world the eye becomes wearied and the interest flags. Again, no one knows a great deal about the man. I have heard an unofficial lecturer explain as she—it was a she—rushed a group of bewildered sightseers through galleries VI and VII : All these paintings are by Turner. He was the son of a grocer and never could go out in society. That's why he had time to paint all these pictures. We are now coming to the Sargeants." The present exhibition is an attempt to show and hang chronologically the best of Turner's work from 1796-1815, and to give people some opportunity of seeing for themselves the development of this great landscape painter from his earliest recorded oil painting Fishermen al Sea to the splendid Crossing the Brook, which normally hangs at Trafalgar Square. The seventy paintings which have been brought together should be sufficient to impress most people—even those who have never doubted it—with the magnificence of Turner'.; art. Many great works from private and public collectk n have been gathered together through the generosity of owners and trustees, and even of the paintings by Turner which belong to the Nation some are here which have not been seen in London for the last fifty or sixty years. Of course a number of paintings of this period are unavoidably absent : some could not be traced and some could not be lent. Still the body of work here collected is enough to make one stand and marvel.

Fishermen at Sea was painted when Turner was twenty-one years old and Crossing the Brook, that miracle of colour and recession which Sir George Beaumont called " all pea-green insipidity," twenty years later. What an amazing perform- ance for a boy that first picture is ! It lacks, it is true, the sense of that perfect marriage between sea and sky which we find in the Turner of later years and yet what an accom- plishment it is I A year later he painted Moonlight, a Study at Millbank, which was thought to be his first exhibited oil painting, until in June of this year Mr. A. J. Finberg established its right to precedence in the Burlington of that month. Mr. Finberg, I may mention in passing, has written an excellent and restrained introduction to the catalogue as well as placing his great knowledge of Turner at the disposal of the officials responsible for the organization of the exhibition.

DAVID FINCIIAM.