Art in England

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Upon a story of a love affair in the painter's early life, we are
inclined to lay no great stress. There is no evidence that it affected
his after-life, or that any excuse can be found in it for the faults of
his character. Speaking of his own love of money, he would sometimes say
apologetically, 'Dad never praised me for anything but saving a
halfpenny.' A disappointment in love is more likely to make a man a
profligate than a miser; if it affects him at all seriously, it will
more likely produce a reckless waste than a sordid passion for
money-making. The painter was prospering. He taught in schools, first
charging five shillings a lesson, then raising his terms to ten
shillings, next charging a guinea. What system of painting did he teach,
this suspicious jealous man, who always worked with locked doors--who
would never permit another even to see him draw--who seemed to hold (but
it was a then prevalent belief with his profession) that art was
producible by some occult process--was a mystery and a secret, like a
conjurer's trick? He founded his style very much on that of his friend
and contemporary Girtin, the water-colour painter. Both delighted in a
golden yellowness of tone which it is probable Girtin had originated.
Turner's regard and reverence for him and his works seem to have been
very great. He always spoke kindly of him as 'poor Tom!' Of one of his
drawings in the British Museum, Turner said, 'I never in my whole life
could make a drawing like that; I would at any time have given one of my
little fingers to have made such a one.' At another time he said, 'If
Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved!' Girtin died in 1802; in
the same year Turner was made a Royal Academician; he had been two years
before admitted to the honours of Associateship. The influence of Girtin
upon English art has hardly been sufficiently recognised. Mr. Ruskin has
had too little to say on behalf of one to whom it is evident that Turner
owed very much.

Turner's rapid advance in his profession may be traced in his frequent
change of residence. In 1796 he had quitted his father's house in Hand
Court, to occupy rooms at No. 26 Maiden Lane. In 1800 he was at No. 64
Harley Street. The following year he had moved to No. 75 Norton Street.
In 1804 he was back again in Harley Street. In 1808 he was Professor of
Perspective, of Harley Street, and of West End, Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
He moved to Queen Anne Street in 1812, and that continued to be his
address in the Academy catalogues up to the time of his death. But from
the year 1814 to 1826 he was also the tenant of a house at Twickenham,
which he first called 'Solus,' and afterwards 'Sandycombe' Lodge. He
died in December 1851, at a small house near Cremorne Gardens, Chelsea.
This he first tenanted probably about the year 1845.

A few continental visits, and tours in England, Scotland, and Wales, all
undertaken apparently with professional objects,--incessant squabblings
with his engravers, the most wearisome haggling with picture-dealers,
genuine hard work, and the production of very perfect specimens of
landscape art, and the outlines of Turner's life seem to be fairly
sketched. His passion for his profession was intense, yet with it was
the keenest love of its emoluments. His industry was beyond all praise,
his energy indefatigable; he seemed to live perpetually before his
easel, or with his sketch-book in his hands, and yet he had a broker's
view as to the worth of everything he did; he appraised his every
pencil-stroke, with the full determination of having his price for it.
There is hardly a story of his ever giving away a drawing. A lady, in
whose house he was residing, playfully asked him to make a sketch of her
favourite spaniel. 'My dear madam,' said the painter, astounded and
indignant, 'you don't know what you ask!' He once gave three sketches to
aid an amateur artist, and most intimate friend and patron, who had
brought his painting into an embarrassed condition; the sketches showed
him the way out of his difficulty. Undoubtedly this action was very
kind; but in the end the miser prevailed over the gentleman. Turner
growlingly asked for his sketches back again!

The details of his life are not agreeable, and not of much more interest
than the outlines. Mr. Ruskin fixes the following as the main
characteristics of Turner--_uprightness, generosity, tenderness of
heart_ (extreme), _sensuality, obstinacy_ (extreme), _irritability,
infidelity_.' By the light of all these 'Seven Lamps,' few people will
have seen Turner besides Mr. Ruskin. Of the last four characteristics
the painter will be generally found guilty; the first three remain as
yet, at best, not proven. We are not tempted, just now, to account
highly the uprightness of a man who could, and did, defraud the public
by the sale of 'sham proofs' of the engravings of his pictures--of the
generosity which made provision for his own memorial in stone in St.
Paul's, yet left without bread his surviving 'housekeepers' and natural
children--of the tenderness of heart which permitted that his father,
moved from the shop, should play a servant's part in the gallery in
Queen Anne Street, straining canvases, varnishing pictures, and showing
in visitors, with a suspicion that he cooked the dinner even if he did
not take the shillings at the door. 'Look'ee here,' said the poor old
man, who, it is right to state, saw no humiliation in acting lackey to
his prosperous son, 'I have found out a way at last of coming up cheap
from Twickenham, to open my son's gallery. I found out the inn where the
market-gardeners baited their horses; I made friends with one on 'em,
and now, for a glass of gin a day, he brings me up in his cart on the
top of the vegetables!' As a set-off to all this, we have now and then a
spasmodic act of kindness: he rebukes Wilkie for talking about the fine
effect of the snow falling while poor Lawrence's coffin was being
lowered into the grave in the crypt of St. Paul's: he drives away the
boys who injure his blackbirds: he sometimes gives half-a-crown when
others would only offer a penny: and there is a story (very vague
indeed) of his once lending L20,000 without security. But these are but
the halfpennyworth of bread compared to the vast quantity of sack. The
matter seems fairly summed up in the story of the man who said, 'Turner
is not ungenerous; _he once paid the toll over Waterloo Bridge for me_!'

Mr. Ruskin charges Turner's faults upon his contemporaries and the
public who failed to appreciate his genius. But is this for a moment
sustainable? _Was_ he unappreciated? His rise could hardly have been
more rapid. He was a Royal Academician when he was twenty-seven. His
merits were recognised almost immediately upon his becoming an
exhibitor. Anthony Pasquin (Williams), who did not speak well of every
one, loudly commends Turner's genius, and judgment, and originality, in
1797.[24] He was quite early a favourite with the public and the
critics. His prices were always high. Mr. Ruskin has declared in his
_Economy of Art_, that more than one hundred pounds should never be
given for a water-colour drawing, nor more than five hundred for an
oil-painting. But the sums Turner received were greatly in excess of
these limits. For the 'Rise and Fall of Carthage' he was offered L5000.
There is no evidence of his complaining of want of recognition by the
public. He was dissatisfied, it is true, at the time of Shee's death,
that he had not been made President; but this, as he well knew, was a
matter that rested entirely with the Academy. 'What has the Academy done
for me?' he would ask petulantly; 'they knighted Calcott, why don't they
knight me?' This involved no charge against his critics. He was passed
over for the same reason that Paley was neglected; because, as the
courtly phrase went, he was not a 'producible man.' In fine, though he
began with nothing, a barber's son in Hand Court, Maiden Lane, he died
worth L140,000, and was buried in St. Paul's! This hardly looks like
want of appreciation.

[24] It may be noted, however, that in 'The Georgian Era' (1834) occurs
the following passage:--'Some have gone the length of saying that in
marine views Turner has wrested the palm from all competitors; but with
this, few, surely, will agree who have seen the sea pieces of Powell, an
artist who, though but recently deceased, has had no biographer to
commemorate his poverty or his genius.' The works of Powell, however
admirable, are not likely now to be preferred to Turner's. 'The Georgian
Era' is not a work of much repute.

It has been the fashion to talk as though Mr. Ruskin had _discovered_
Turner. Nothing can be further from the fact. Turner had been an
exhibitor for more than fifty years when Mr. Ruskin commenced to write
about his pictures. He had reached the _Rock Limpet_ stage of his
career. He could then produce little beyond frantic whirls of colour,
and there was a not unnatural tendency to smile at these achievements in
the galleries, and the Hanging Committee were often puzzled to know
whether they had or not hung the pictures upside down. All that Mr.
Ruskin could do, and he did it superbly, was to bring people to think
less of what Turner then was, and more of what he had been. It is all
very well to denounce severely those who smiled at, or the critics who
said they could not comprehend, the later Turners. It is presumable that
pictures are sent to exhibitions to be applauded or condemned, as the
world may judge. Mr. Thackeray may be rated for his confession, in a
magazine article of the day, that he did not understand the _Rock
Limpet_, though he added a kindly longing 'for the old day, before Mr.
Turner had lighted on the "Fallacies," and could see like other
people.'[25] But was Mr. Ruskin in any better plight? Was _he_ any
nearer the painter's meaning? Hear his own story:--

'He (Turner) tried hard one day, for a quarter of an hour, to make me
guess what he was doing in the picture of "Napoleon" before it had been
exhibited, giving me hint after hint in a rough way. But I could not
guess, and he wouldn't tell me!' It is hard after this to censure so
amiable a jester as the late Mr. a'Beckett, for burlesquing the strange
picture called 'Hurrah for the whaler _Erebus_--another fish!' in the
words proposed to be substituted--'Hallo, there--the oil and
vinegar--another lobster salad!'[26]

[25] 'What can I say of the Napoleon of Mr. Turner? called (with
frightful satire) "The Exile and the _Rock Limpet_." He stands in the
midst of a scarlet tornado looking at least forty feet high. "Ah!" says
the mysterious poet from whom Mr. Turner loves to quote--

"Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like
The soldier's nightly bivouac, alone
Amidst a sea of blood.......
......_but you can join your comrades!_"

FALLACIES OF HOPE.

'These remarkable lines entirely explain the meaning of the picture;
another piece is described by lines from the same poem, in a metre more
regular--

"The midnight torch gleamed o'er the steamer's side,
And _merit's corse_ was yielded to the tide."

(This was the burial of Wilkie at sea: now in the National Gallery.)

'When the pictures are re-hung, as sometimes I believe is the case, it
might, perhaps, be as well to turn these upside down and see how they
would look _then_. The Campo Santo of Venice, when examined closely, is
scarcely less mysterious; at a little distance, however, it is a most
brilliant, airy, and beautiful picture. O for the old days before Mr.
Turner had lighted on "The Fallacies" and could see like other
people!'--_An Exhibition Gossip_, by Michael Angelo Titmarsh,
_Ainsworth's Magazine_,1843.

[26] _The Almanack of the Month_, 1846--in which see also a comical
drawing, by Mr. Richard Doyle, of 'Turner painting one of his pictures,'
and the accompanying letterpress:--'Considerable discussion has arisen
as to the mode in which Turner goes to work to paint his pictures. Some
think he mixes a few colours on his canvas instead of on his palette,
and sends the result to be exhibited. Another ingenious theory is that
he puts a canvas in a sort of pillory, and pelts it with eggs and other
missiles, when appending to the mess some outrageous title, he has it
hung in a good position at the Academy. Our own idea is, that he chooses
four or five good places in which he hangs up some regularly framed
squares of blank canvas; a day or so before the opening of the
Exhibition, we believe he goes down to the Academy with a quantity of
colours and a nine pound brush, with which he dabs away for a few
minutes, and his work is finished,' etc. etc.

'Cut off in great part,' says Mr. Ruskin, 'from all society, first by
labour and last by sickness, hunted to his grave by the malignities of
small critics and the jealousies of hopeless rivalry, he died in the
house of a stranger.' As Mr. Leslie, his fellow-academician, remarks
upon this passage truly enough, 'This was Turner's own fault. No
death-bed could be more surrounded by attentive friends than his might
have been, had he chosen to let his friends know where he lived.' But he
seldom answered letters; his place of residence was a profound mystery
to all; and he was living under an assumed name. To the Chelsea
street-boys he was known as 'Puggy Booth,' and by his neighbours he was
deemed to be an old admiral in reduced circumstances. His house in Queen
Anne Street was closed, terribly out of repair--black with dirt. After
much knocking at the door it was opened, if at all, by an old woman, her
face half-concealed, owing to some cancerous disfigurement; she had
kept the visitor waiting while she assumed a large apron--hung always
behind the door on a peg, handy for the purpose,--which hid the grimy
and tattered state of her dress. The drawing-room was tenanted by
half-a-dozen Manx cats. In the other rooms, rats and mice made havoc
with hoarded drawings and engravings. Many of the pictures in the
gallery were warped and cracked, and mildewed by neglect and damp. At
Sandycombe Lodge, a few of the academicians, including Mr. Mulready, had
once been regaled with tea; and Mr. Pye, the engraver, had been treated
to cheese and porter; but of the hospitalities of Queen Anne Street
there are no records. Rogers, poet and satirist, expressed his wonder at
a beautiful table adorning the painter's parlour. 'But how much more
wonderful it would be,' he went on, 'to see any of his friends sitting
round it!' And there is the story of the visitor who praised the wine of
which he had had two glasses, a year intervening between them. 'It ought
to be good,' said Turner; 'it's the _same bottle_ you tasted before!'
True or false, and their accuracy has been much questioned, that such
stories could be repeated at all, says quite enough for the kind of life
led by the painter at his gallery. And what claims upon society had the
man who chose to conduct himself towards it after this manner?

Yet it is curious to note that Turner was in many ways fitted to be
socially successful. He had very considerable humour, and highly
appreciated the jests of others, even when they were directed against
himself. He sat for a long time shaking with laughter, on a high seat at
the Academy, one varnishing day, when Mulready had said 'that his cows
were like the dough pigs, with currant eyes, in the bakers' shops.' He
was gay and playful at times, and shone in careless conversation.
Personally he was not less liked than as a painter he was respected by
his fellow-academicians; and yet, from some mental warp, he closed his
doors against the world, shunned his friends, preferred to live
miserably and obscurely, hoarding his money, and treasuring his works.
It is difficult to believe that he was not afflicted, late in life, with
some morbid affection of mind that amounted almost to insanity, not
alleviated by a manner of life that was far from regular, and habits
that were anything but temperate. The more he avoided refined society,
the more he found pleasure in dissipation of the lowest kind.
'Melancholy' Burton derived relief and amusement listening to the
ribaldry of the bargemen. Turner found these and other solaces, it would
seem, in his occasional mysterious absences from home, and indecorous
sojournings at Wapping and elsewhere.

It is with a sense of relief we turn from the contemplation of the
imperfect man to consider the nearly perfect artist. The meanness, the
squalor, the degradation of his _morale_ and life are not discernible in
his works. The affluence of beauty of some of these is indeed
marvellous. But this fallen man had extraordinary gifts as a painter,
and these he heightened and intensified by labour and industry the most
ceaseless. It would be difficult to conceive any one endowed with a
keener sensibility to colour, or with a more devotional love for its
glories; it would be equally hard to estimate the enhancement of the
worth of English art effected by the colour of Turner. It should be
remembered that he appeared at a time when coldness of tone was almost a
fashion in painting. The chilliness of the shadows of Lawrence and his
followers was remarkable. Turner raised the chord of colour a whole
octave, if it is permissible to say so, illustrating one art by the
terms of another. Mr. Ruskin ascribes to him the discovery of the
_scarlet shadow_. It was in truth less a new discovery than the
re-awakening of an old one. The early masters were well aware of the
value of warmth in this respect. Wilkie comments in his journal on the
great picture of Correggio: 'And here I observe _hot shadows_ prevail,
_not cold_, as some of us would have it. This he has to a fault, making
parts of his figures look like red chalk drawings, but the sunny and
dazzling effect of the whole may be attributed to this artifice.'[27] If
we look for a prevalent tone in Turner's pictures--though a prevalent
tone is always a vice in a painter, nature being without bias in the
question of hue--we shall find it to be _yellow_, which he himself
declared to be his favourite colour, and which occasioned those jokes
about the 'mustard-pot' as a source of inspiration, to which
art-students were at one time addicted. But, indeed, Turner's sense of
all colour was very limitless. A Mrs. Austin once said to him, 'I find,
Mr. Turner, that, in copying one of your works, touches of blue, red,
and yellow appear all through the work.' He answered: 'Well, don't you
see that yourself in nature, because, if you don't, Heaven help you!'
Mr. Ruskin writes: 'Other painters had rendered the golden tones and
blue tones of the sky; Titian especially the latter in perfection. But
none had dared to paint--none seem to have seen--the scarlet and
purple.' In representing the glare of sunlight, Turner surpassed even
Claude. Cuyp hardly attempted this feat, his suns generally gleaming
through a mist; though Turner standing before a splendid example of
Cuyp, exclaimed: 'I would give a thousand pounds to have painted that'
In atmospheric perspective he was perfect; but in linear faulty and ill
grounded, although he had held the appointment of Professor of
Perspective at the Academy for some years. The drawbacks to his pictures
consist in their frequent sacrifice of truth to effect. From this cause
he constantly failed to satisfy critics who were well acquainted with
the scenes and subjects he attempted to represent. A tar said of his
_Battle of Trafalgar_ at Greenwich: 'What a Trafalgar! it's a d----d
deal more like a brick-field!' while Sir Thomas Hardy used to call it a
'street scene,' as the ships had more the effect of houses than
men-of-war. Of the wreck of the _Minotaur_, Admiral Bowles complained
'that no ship or boat could live in such a sea.'

[27] In a letter to Phillips he adds, 'No one knew the value of this
treatment better than Turner.'

To Turner's credit must be placed many acts of consideration for, and
kindness towards, his brother artists. He has been known to displace one
of his own pictures to make room for the work of a promising beginner.
His love for art is the real redeeming point in his history. He was
devoted to the Academy, which had recognised his genius at an early
date, and was wholly conservative in his opinion upon all academic
questions. Yet his zeal did not blind him. Haydon, whose life had been a
gallant though almost fruitless struggle against the despotic
exclusiveness of the Academy, drew back, we are told, in the midst of
his exultation at a brief victory gained over his opponents, and said
calmly: 'But Turner behaved well, and did me justice.'

Turner's biographer, with a scrupulousness that looks a little like
timidity, has abstained steadily from all demur to the _dicta_ of Mr.
Ruskin. Mr. Thornbury's volumes represent rather elaborations than
contradictions of the Ruskin opinions, just as what are known as
'variations' in music are rather amplifications of, than departures
from, the original theme. But we are by no means sure that Mr. Thornbury
has strengthened the case in the painter's favour. We believe that, at
the bar, the junior counsel has been sometimes found to injure the
effect of his chief's advocacy, by entering into and disclosing matters
of detail which had been purposely left untouched by him. Something of
the same sort has happened in the present instance. Mr. Ruskin bade us
worship his hero, classically screened in a cloud. Mr. Thornbury unveils
the idol, and the too apparent deformity disclosed renders adoration no
longer possible. Mr. Ruskin's five volumes of _Modern Painters_ will
therefore probably still be considered to comprise the true 'Turneriad.'
A more imposing monument to Turner's memory than is afforded by this
book, with all its defects, can hardly be. For something like a quarter
of a century Mr. Ruskin employed himself in examining and lauding the
achievements of Turner. He did not complete his self-imposed task until
the great painter had been dead some ten years.

It is really curious to go back to the beginning of this remarkable
work.

In 1843 appeared the first volume of '_Modern Painters: their
Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient
Masters_. By a Graduate of Oxford.' A further volume was issued three
years afterwards, to accompany an extended and amended edition of the
first. A ten years' pause, and third and fourth portions were given to
the world. Then came 1860, and the final volume. Not, as the author
avowed, that his subject was concluded, for 'he had been led by it into
fields of infinite inquiry, where it was only possible to break off
with such imperfect results as may at any given moment have been
attained.' He stopped because he must stop at some time or other. The
future art-writings of Mr. Ruskin will no longer bear the collective
title of _Modern Painters_. Perhaps that is all that the 'finis' at the
end of the fifth volume really amounts to.

In his fifth volume, Mr. Ruskin has narrated the history of the birth
and growth of his book. He has ascribed to himself from his earliest
years, 'the gift of taking pleasure in landscape.' This, he says, 'I
assuredly possess in a greater degree than most men, it having been the
ruling passion of my life, and the reason for the choice of its field of
labour.' Certain articles in a review condemnatory of the pictures of
Turner offended keenly so ardent an admirer of the king of landscape
painters. Mr. Ruskin addressed a letter to the editor of the review,
'reprobating the matter and style of those critiques, and pointing out
their dangerous tendency;' for 'he knew it to be demonstrable that
Turner was right and true, and that his critics were wrong, false, and
base.' The letter grew to be a book; the defence expanded into an
attack. What began as a few comments upon a particular branch of
painting ended in being the most elaborate English dissertation upon
art, in its widest and weightiest significance. The title originally
selected for the book was _Turner and the Ancients_; and it was not then
proposed to refer in it to any other modern painter than Turner. But the
design enlarged,--'The title was changed, and notes on other living
painters inserted in the first volume, in deference to the advice of
friends; probably wise, for unless the change had been made, the book
might never have been read at all.' So writes the author in his last
pages; and returning to his first love, it is hard to say whether from
fickleness or from constancy he adds, 'So far as I am concerned, I
regretted the change then, and regret it still.'

To this book, then, commenced almost without a plan, time subsequently
gave form and pattern. At a certain period of his labour Mr. Ruskin
paused to map out the future of his work, to define the limits of his
undertaking. But in examining the concluding volume it will be seen that
the waywardness of the beginning characterizes also the end. Time has
taken away its gift; the scheme has fallen through; the book ends; but
the design it had gathered to itself as it advanced, which had budded
out from it unexpectedly as it were, remains in a large measure
uncompleted. Over the boundaries he had himself imposed, his eloquent
diffuseness long since surged: the book doubled its promised length; and
now the author stays his hand, turns from his toil, and leaves
unfinished and shapeless the long-expected 'section on the sea,' holding
out but vague promise of his ever being able to accomplish, even in a
separate work, his intentions in regard to that portion of his project.

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