THE WORKS OF TEENER.
Messrs. Hayward, Leggett, and Co., have at their rooms in Cornhill an interesting exhibition of sketches from the works of Turner. The draw- ings have been made in water-colour for the purpose of engraving, it. having been found impossible to obtain for the engraver all the pictures needed for a representative volume of Turner's works ; and capitally executed the drawings are. The collection is formed upon the plan of including specimens of Turner's working at all periods of his life, and in all "manners," to his last unfinished picture. The series even includes, and properly includes a scene in a forge, such as Wilkie might have designed, here painted in a spirit of mingled sarcasm and emulation, by no means successful. Specimens of the engraving are in the room ; they are all in the line manner, and they are finished with an accuracy, a fidelity, and a completeness, that we have seldom seen surpassed.
The volume constitutes a pictorial autobiography of Turner. We see him first studying nature with method and painstaking, now guided by the model of this artist, now of that, but endeavouring to pourtray the natural object with fidelity and distinctness. At this period his hand is, perhaps, somewhat heavy; there is great distinctness and force, but a deficiency of any nice gradation. In "The Rescue," for example,— boats rescuing passengers from a shipwreck off the British coast,—you have the tossing of the waves and the raging of the storm, but the clouds are nearly as solid as •the sea, or the wood-built boats themselves. In middle life Turner had acquired much greater knowledge and more Skilful handling of the material, and he now brought forth an effect of
brilliancy, light, and distance, peculiar to himself. lie did not rest long enough content with this new power, but, seduced by the pleasing be of the drawing itself as an object apart from the nature which it should
have pourtrayed, he began to tint his landscape in colours almost pris- matic, to group his atmospheric effects in artificial combinations, and to depart from nature into what he considered "imagination." The effect tended to deviate from landscape into a style of scene-painting fitted rather for the last fairy scene in a pantomime than for any representation of the world as God has made it. And, towards the last, this over- coloured and fussy style of composition was developed into caricature, of which the picture christened "Juliet" was an example,—excluded, and properly excluded, from this series. In some instances Turner's power of producing a given effect was literally like magic. In the present col- lection, there is a picture of an advancing railway train coming towards you through a sudden shower of drifting rain : the train is obscured by the translucent mist of the weather, but you can trace its speed by the puffs of smoke which it has left behind; and in the foreground you half see the watery sheet of slanting rain as it darts past the sight. " The collection is published at a price which is really a triumph of artistic economy.
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