ART.
THE TURNER DRAWINGS.
[CONCLUDING NOTICE.]
" THE Sixth Group, 'Meditation, England Passing Away,' "—it is thus that Mr. Ruskin heads his sixth group of Turner drawings, the one which we have first to consider this week, in completion of our remarks upon this Gallery. Perhaps it will be as well to re- mind our readers that, agreeing as we do with Mr. Ruskin's description and explanation of Turner's work and meaning, we necessarily make our remarks from that point of view. It is quite impossible, in a newspaper notice like the present, to enter upon the debatable question of how far an artist's work is affected by his feelings and principles ; but we may briefly sug- gest that, in the present instance, where a landscape painter only was concerned, there might very well be induced a feeling of bitterness and grief, as the artist saw year after year the most beautiful scenes of his childhood neglected or destroyed. Ye have become so inured of late years to the stagnant filth which pollutes every stream in the manufacturing districts, to the thick smoke which hangs over our fairest valleys, to the black ashes and refuse which overspread our fields, and the foul gases which choke our breath,—we have, so to speak, taken all these to our heart of hearts, and cherished them with such loving care, that we can hardly understand the effect which such a change gradu- ally overspreading England might have had upon a great artist. And so if it seems to some, as very likely it will seem, that it is a fanciful grief which possessed Turner in his later days, or which is here attributed to him, we would suggest that we can hardly tell whether, under the same conditions, we should not have suffered the same pain. There are people even now who hear with distaste so intense as to almost amount to pain of Thirlmere being spoiled to supply Manchester with water, and who would wish to see Helvellyn and Scawfell kept free from factory chimneys. And so Mr. Ruskin says that the following seven drawings of Turner's represent his central power and "dominant feelings in middle life towards his native country," and calls atten- tion to the fact that in each of them the subject is castle or abbey, those buildings in fact least in accordance with the spirit of modern times. What will be noticed briefly in this group will be the full development of power visible in the execution of the drawings. In them there is none of the experimental effects of colour, no display of power, reckless in its wanton extravagance, as in " Richmond Bridge " or in " Dudley Castle," no re- striction, as, for instance, in the Yorkshire series, to any one key of colour, but in all there is the calm concentration of skill which only comes to the master, and that for some brief period of his life. The first of these drawings (No. 38) is " Salisbury," the town and cathedral in the distance ; the second, " Langhorne Castle, coast of South Wales," a very grand drawing, the sea being especially fine. The third is " Carnarvon Castle," and in some respects this is the finest of the series, notably in colour ; but the drawing which appears to us to eclipse all others of this period is No. 44, " Bolton Abbey," a portion of which is en- graved in the " Modern Painters," under the name of the " Shores of Wharfe." In that book those who-are curious in such matters may learn whether Turner could or could not draw rocks, and the illustration in outline of the cliff in this drawing will, we should think, convince the most sceptical. For three things this picture is, as far as our experience goes, unrivalled in water- colour art ; these are, the thawing of the cliffs, with their scattered foliage, that of the tree-trunks, and the drawing of the water. In these points the drawing is unsurpassable.
The seventh group need not detain us long. It is entirely com- posed of vignette illustrations to Scott, Byron, and Rogers's poems, all of the highest finish, and most of them partaking of a kind of forced prettiness, which is the nearest Turner ever reached to vulgar, common-place work. In the catalogue, Mr. Ruskin 're- marks, what was no doubt the case, that the illustration to Rogers's " Italy," "being simply his own reminiscences of the Alps and the Campagna, were given in right sympathy with the poem they illustrate," but that the illustrations to Scott and Byron were much more laboured, and are all more or less artificial. This proceeded, no doubt, in a great measure, from the subjects being of places quite unfamiliar to him. The finest of them is, no doubt, No. 49, " the Plains of Troy, a broad expanse of country under a stormy sunset, some belated travellers and a dying horse in the foreground. The whole is on the most minute scale con- ceivable."
The eighth group, "By the Riversides," consists of five small drawings on grey paper of various river subjects, " Bale,"
" Dinant," " On the Rhine," &c. We have no space- to go into the subject, but it may be here noticed how entirely different are these grey - paper drawings from, the ordinary ones on untinted paper. In none of them, we- believe, is there any use of transparent colour, but they are worked throughout with pure body-colour. Beautiful though these tinted-paper drawings are, they yet lack, in our eyes, the- special characteristic of Turner's work, and indeed are necessarily so deficient ; the exquisite delicacy of transparent colour, when managed with consummate art like his, one tint being blended into another while still moist, gives to the work a delicacy of gradation and a variety which it is practically impossible to- obtain by any other method. And there is one other technical point in which these tinted drawings differ from those on white paper, and that is that there is possible in them more of the peculiar taking-out of the lights which mark Turner's best water- colour work. An examination of nearly every one of the trans- parent drawings will show the many differing manners in which he was accustomed to supply the use of body-colour ; even in. the early drawings, he had reached a point of perfection in this matter which had been unknown before his time. We cannot stay to analyse further the difference between these two methods, but may remark, in conclusion, that in the transparent works: light is the foundation of the work, and in Turner's method' always shows throughout the picture that such is the case. In- the body-colour drawings, light is super-imposed upon a founda- tion of shade, the grey paper being often the darkest thing in the drawing. It is thus evident that for striking effects of light and shade the latter is most fitted, the former chiefly for effects- of light and ordinary landscape.
We now come to the last group of drawings, those num- bered 61 to 71, and left undescribed in our catalogue, through- Mr. Ruskin's illness, though we believe that they have recently been annotated upon in an epilogue to the later edition of the Catalogue. Of these ten works, executed by Turner when at the- height of his marvellous powers of colour, we shall only be able to speak briefly and in general terms. Minute description of even one work would lead us too far from the purpose of a notice like the present, but we may refer those of our readers who care to pursue the matter further to the fourth volume of Mr. Ruskin's " Modern Painters," and to the " Elements of Drawing," by the- same author, in which he will find full description and analysis of at least two of the works. To these two, " The Pass of Faido " and " Coblentz," we shall confine our remarks, as they are per- fectly typical of Turner's finest work, at the last moment before its decline commenced. Both are specimens of that peculiar genius of Turner which has laid him open to so much miscon- struction, and even in some cases so much contempt, for they have for their object less to give the actual details of the particular scene depicted, than to give the impression which the scene would have produced upon the mind of the spectator, or did produce upon the mind of the artist. With regard to the " Pass of Faido," this is so perfectly expressed by Mr. Ruskin, that we prefer to- quote his words, to giving our readers any explanation of our own, which would be but a poor paraphrase of them :—" There- is nothing in this scene, taken by itself, particularly interesting or impressive. The mountains are not elevated, nor particularly fine in form, and the heaps of stones which encumber the Ticino present nothing notable to the ordinary eye. But in reality the place- is approached through one of the narrowest and most sublime ravines in the Alps, and after the traveller during the earlier part of the day has been familiarised with the aspect of the highest peaks of the Mont St. Gothard. Hence it speaks quite another language to him from that in which it would address itself to an unprepared spectator ; the confused stones, which by. themselves would be almost without any claim upon his thoughts,_ become the exponents of the fury of the river, by which he has journeyed all day long ; the defile beyond, not in itself narrow or terrible, is regarded nevertheless with awe, because it is imagined to resemble the gorge that has just been traversed above ; and though no very elevated mountains immediately overhang it, the scene is felt to belong to, and arise in its essential characters out of, the strength of those mightier mountains in the unseen North.' Any topographical delineation of the facts, therefore, must be wholly incapable of arousing in the mind of the beholder those sensations which would be caused by the facts themselves, seen in their natural relation to others. And the aim of the great in- ventive landscape-painter must be to give the far higher and. deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts, and to reach a representation which, though it Amy be
totally useless to engineers or geographers, and when tried by yule and measure* totally unlike the place, shall yet be capable of producing on the far-away beholder's mind precisely the im- pression which the reality would have produced, and putting his heart into the same state in which it would have been, had he verily descended into the valleys from the gorges of Airolo.
This is, shortly put, the secret of the whole of Turner's imaginative work, and it is easy to see why on so many people that work produces a painful effect. For if a man has wandered amongst the Alps, and never felt in his heart the sublimity of peak and glacier and the cloud-robes which veil their forms, but consulting his Murray and his Baedeker, has noted this pass to be so many feet wide, and that mountain so many feet high— and how many travellers of this kind there are, we know too well—then how can he delight in a representation which is governed by an impression which he has never felt, would in like circumstances never feel ? He simply notes that this mountain is more to the right than it should be in relation to this stream and that wood, and so goes away disgusted, jumping to the conclusion that the artist has wantonly or carelessly misrepresented nature, merely for the sake of making a pretty picture.
Look at the " Coblentz " in this gallery ; all of us who have ever travelled up the Rhine--and who has not, in these days of Gaze and .Cook?—know that the castle does not overhang the bridge, as it does here, but stands more to the left, and nearer to the beholder. But though Turner wanted the bridge and town to be the chief elements in his picture, and so took them from the best point of 'view, he nevertheless felt that Coblentz without Ehrenbreitstein 'would be similar to Hamlet with the character of the Prince of Denmark left out, and altered its position to bripg it into the picture. And we do not think that any one can look at this work, and fail to see bow the grim old castle on the height, looking down upon the peaceful city bathed in sunlight, and the fisher- men and boatmen engaged in their ordinary labour on the river, enhances by contrast the peace of the scene, is, in fact, the great point of the picture, to which, as has been shown in Mr. Ruskin's analysis of it, everything in the composition leads.
Now, if Turner on visiting Coblentz had simply desired to make a pretty picture, and so altered the position of castle and bridge, he would, we hold, have not been justified, but according to our theory, what really happened was this. Turner, seeing. Coblentz at sunset, was struck by the powerful combination of perfect peace, and the possibility of almost perfect war, in the threatening presence of one of the strongest fortresses in the world ; and so in his picture he deliberately set himself to record this impression, the one truth which the scene had taught him. When we first saw Coblentz ourselves, we clearly remember the contrast of the grim fortifications, with the vine-covered hills out of which they rise, and so enter entirely into the spirit in which Turner has -treated his subject.
This is, as far as we can tell, the true explanation of Turner's grand imaginative landscapes, though it requires far more space than we can give for its full elucidation. Fortunately it has been done for us by the proprietor of the drawings we have been noticing, who has made it his life's work to understand them, and cause others to do so. Anything that we can write on this sub- ject seems unworthy presumption, after his words. It may be that the last public act of Mr. Ruskin is the exhibition of these draw- ings, and to many of us there seems a pathetic significance that as his first fame was gained by defending Turner, so his last words lave been written in illustration of the same artist's work.
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