ENGLISH SCHOOL: TURNER

“Leave him still loftier than the world suspects Living and dying.”

Turner was the son of a barber, and he was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in 1775; he died in 1851. “The Sun is God” were Turner’s last words, and they gave the keynote of his life-work. It was devoted to the painting of light, the problem that had baffled so many held him by its marvellous intricacies, its reflections and gradations. If we look at the glorious pictures in the two rooms called the Turner Gallery, you will see that all have the same aim—all strive to render the subtleties and the splendours of light.

I will not worry you about the first and second period of Turner’s art, for both served this one dominant object. Others had tried to paint light. De Hoogh had striven for it, and filled with it his Dutch interiors; Claude Lorraine had made the sun rise and set in a glow of gold; Rembrandt had been the great magician, using shadow to bring out its glory. Turner came, and, setting aside shadow, made light the supreme ruler in landscape. If you will examine these pictures carefully, you will see that Turner little by little laid aside the old conventional treatment of bringing out light by the contrast of deepening shadows, that little by little delicate grey replaced the dark bituminous spaces, and light reigned supreme.

I think that in “The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl” (505) his triumph was assured. The lovely sunshine of Italy is over the scene of ruin: no shadows compete with its charm. Still it is a desolate picture. The sub-title, “Apollo and the Sibyl,” makes us understand its desolation, for Apollo had loved the Sibyl in her youth, and had granted her prayer to live as many years as there were grains of sand in the handful of earth she held. But he had not given her perpetual youth, and we see her in this picture a haggard figure, the type, says Ruskin, “of the ruined beauty of Italy.”

Another picture characteristic of the splendour of sky, the magnificence of line, the pathos of past achievements, is “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her Last Berth” (524). It is a very affecting picture. After her long day’s fight is done, the vessel is gliding home to her rest. The sky is illuminated with the variegated rays of the setting sun, the sea is a road of light over which the magnificent veteran ship is being tugged. All the feeling of England is in that picture—infinite love and gratitude for Nelson, tenderness for the noble vessels that helped him in his struggle with the enemy. All heaven is a blaze of gold and scarlet, all the sea is a pathway of glory for the grand old vessel to traverse.

“THE ‘FIGHTING TEMERAIRE’ TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH TO BE BROKEN UP” (524)

BY J. M. W. TURNER, R.A.

page 198 ]

“Captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done. The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won. The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.”

“Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus” (508) is another picture we must look at. Every intricacy of crimson light fires the restless waves. From a luminous centre emerges a tangle of flaming clouds, reflected in the sea below. It is sunrise, and Ulysses is putting off from the island. We see the monster sprawling on the top of a cliff, while close to shore are the remains of the fire in which the olive staff was burnt, with which Ulysses and his followers put out Polyphemus’s one eye.

We can but notice some of the noble pictures in this Gallery, and in Room XIX. Here are the three pictures (370, 534, 535) of Venice, a pearly white city rising out of the sea, dream-like, dimly radiant, a ghostly town seen in a golden light. There is “The Garden of the Hesperides” (477), a picture full of meaning. The three fair daughters of Hesperus are singing about the golden tree, and the Goddess of Discord has come to choose the apple which Paris is to present to the most beautiful of the goddesses. From that choice is to arise the war of Troy. It is a characteristic picture.

“The Death of Nelson” (480) represents the hero towards whom all England’s eyes were straining, having just received his death-wound. It is a magnificent picture, worthy of its great theme.

You must look at the superb, but much impaired, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (516), a picture that represents all the outdoor life, the feasting and dancing of Italy, bathed in the luminous atmosphere peculiar to that country. “Crossing the Brook” (497) Ruskin describes as glorious in composition, and perfect in all that is most desirable and most ennobling in art. Then let us look at “Peace: The Burial at Sea of the Body of Sir David Wilkie” (528), a tribute paid by the great English painter to the great Scotch painter, “Train, Steam, and Speed” (538), a wonderful attempt to represent the dash and wonder of a train going at full speed. These are but a few, a very few of the pictures in this Gallery.

Turner belongs to no school; he expresses himself and himself alone. He was in love with the sun, possessed by that love of light which it became his aim to express in art. You must study his pictures again and again; you must return to them until the passion of his soul becomes the passion of your own.