fins Arts.
THE TURNER BEQUEST.
e very point of rightness for figure-painting in landscape is hit. Look at the fish-wives with their skate in the foreground ; the huddling crowd up the pier bearing up against the wind; the straining, tugging, holloaing, roaring boatmen, with what a will they do their rugged work,—those nearer in- shore and out of the turmoil comparatively listless and at ease ; and, even on the English deck, remote and confused, how truly the painter has given the drenched drooping look of passengers, roused from the long tossing and sea-sickness, bothered with baggage-cares and a score of nuisances, and trooping up to land !
Between this great picture and the next lies the whole gap of years front 1803 to 1840. The "Bacchus and .Ariadne " we should class among the failures of Turner's later period. The figures, borrowed and redistributed from the Titian in the National Gallery, are as slovenly and worthless as those a the "Calais Pier" are admirable; and a litter of vases and other "rattletraps of mythology" (as Blake christened the things) encumbers an uninteresting foreground. However, the endless recession and the blaze of the sky are Turner still. Above this is hung "The Exile and the Rock Limpet" of 1842—Napoleon musing on the shore of St Helena. Why this should be hung strictly out of sight, yielding the pas to a work every way its inferior, we cannot understand. There are few Turners which those would more gladly study who have learned since 1842 to understand him better than they did then : but that is wholly out of the question for the present. The sky looks glorious ; burning with red, glowing with inexplicable opal hues, and sinking far off into dusk. Napoleon seems odd and thy-like; but the essence of the subject is finely told by the sentinel standing erect behind him hie his shadow. There could be no difficulty, and every advantage, in inverting the position of these two works.
In 1846 Turner was himself no longer. The last two pictures of the six belong to this year—" The Angel Standing in the Sun," and "17n- dine giving the Ring to Masaniello," (whatever that mav mean). Neither of these works is visible ; a fact vexatious, but probably not worth any serious regret. In the first we trace nothing calling for remark. The second, unintelligible if not absurd as it is in subject, and eccentric (to
Once more—nor yet for the last time—we have to chronicle the exhi- bition in Marlborough House of an instalment of the Turner pictures. Six additional works have been hung; bringing the amount, for the present, up to thirty-four--in themselves a collection and a host.
Passing the earliest in date,—a small dark sketch of a "Sea-piece," dating about 1802,"—we come to the "Calais Pier" of 1803, Fish- ing-boats preparing for Sea, the English Packet arriving." And truly this is something to pause before; one of the most magnificent works of Turner's earlier period, crowded with life, purpose, truth, and the most wonderful power in execution. In this respect, it closely cvresponds with the Shipwreck" already hanging in the gallery and, if yielding to that in interest of subject and consequent hill upon the feelings and the imagination, it fully rivals or even surpasses it in mastery of art. The grizzled waves clash and shatter, bursting through the rents of the pier's woodwork, saturating its footway, and making its dead planks shine out in brilliant warm brown through the glistening wet; the louring sky, murky almost to blackness over the further sea, tears here and there to show a space of blue; the sails of the fishing craft flap unmanageably in the veering breeze; and the union jack of the British vessel streams shoreward far ahead. It is remarkable that, in this work of Turner, the arch master of sky-painting, the sky is the unsatisfactory part. Admirable in the inventive and representative truth of what it aims at expressing, it is neve 'eless a failure in painting; the dark clouds wrong in texture, like cloth flannel, and the blue rents
between them particularly dead in colour. or the colour of the pic- ture generally, although there is no attempt •t for the attainment of those brilliant and magical effects which make er's later works a new starting-point for art, it is beyond improvem so far as it goes; firm, deep, and splendid, to the uttermost But ne r in colour, nor in sea, nor in the moving vessels, does the distinctive cellence of the work so supremely reside as in the human life of it:
say the least) in treatment, has a left-hand depth of blue shy closing over the flare of sunset, which is assuredly impressive, and which we imagine to be really fine and grand in many respects.
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