W. Cosmo Monkhouse

THE was now sixty-five years old, and his decline as an artist was to be expected from failing health and stress of years. For little less than half a century he had worked harder and produced more than any other artist of whom we have any record. Nor would he rest now, although his failing powers of body and mind required stimulants to support their energy.

Mr. Wilkie Collins informed Mr. Thornbury that, when a boy—

“He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers seeing Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at the Academy lunch) seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush and now receded from. Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat, and old age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every pin’s head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale.”

We have spoken of Turner as declining as an artist, but we are not sure that he did so till about 1845, when, Mr. Ruskin says, “his health, and with it in great degree his mind, failed suddenly.” Down to this time his decay seems to us to have been more physical than artistic, but with the physical weakness there had been, we think, for some time a deterioration of the non-artistic part of his mind. His decay, though so unlike the decay of others, appears to us to have nothing inexplicable about it if we consider him as a man who had never had any sympathy with the current opinions and culture of his fellows, and who, by some strange defect in his organization, was unable to think without the use of his eyes. That his eyesight failed there is no doubt, but that it did not fail in the one most essential point for a painter, viz., perception of colour, is, we think, proved by his latest sketches in water-colour, which show none of that apparently morbid love of yellow which appears in his later oil pictures, and testify to that perfect perception of the relations and harmonies of different hues which can only belong to a healthy sight. Instead of declining, this faculty of colour seems to have increased in perfection almost to the last. If we compare the sketch in the National Gallery of a scene on the Lake of Zug, done between 1840 and 1845, with one of the ‘Rivers of England’ Dartmouth, two drawings wonderfully alike in composition and in general scheme of colour, no difference in this faculty can be observed; the later drawing is only a few notes higher in the scale. As Mr. Ruskin says, “The work of the first five years of this decade is in many respects supremely and with reviving power, beautiful.”

But still the decline of his non-artistic mind, never very powerful, had been going on for years, or at least such reasoning power as he possessed had exercised less and less control over the imperious will of his genius, which impelled him to pursue his efforts to paint the unpaintable. He had begun by imitation, he had gone on by rivalry, he had achieved a style of his own by which he had upset all preconceived notions of landscape painting, and had triumphed in establishing the superiority of pictures painted in a light key, but he was not content. His progress had always been towards light even from the earliest days, when he worked in monochrome. Sunlight was his discovery, he had found its presence in shadow, he had studied its complicated reflections, before he commenced to work in colour. From monochrome he had adopted the low scale of the old masters, but into it he carried his light; the brown clouds, and shadows, and mists, had the sun behind them as it were in veiled splendour. Then it came out and flooded his drawings and his canvasses with a glory unseen before in art. But he must go on—refine upon this—having eclipsed all others, he must now eclipse himself. His gold must turn to yellow, and yellow almost into white, before his genius could be satisfied with its efforts to express pure sunlight.

So he went on to his goal, becoming less “understanded of the people” each year, painting pictures more near to the truth of nature in sun and clouds, and less true in everything else. But it was about the everything else that the people most cared. They did not care for sunlight which blinded them, and to which the truth of figure, and sea, and grass, and stone, had to be sacrificed. They liked pictures which could give them calm enjoyment, records of what they had seen or could imagine, not of what Turner only had seen, and what seemed to them extravagant falsity.

Such, roughly put, was the condition of things when a champion arose to scatter Turner’s enemies to the four winds. He, Mr. Ruskin (1836), an undergraduate at Oxford, of the age of seventeen, was one not of “the people,” but of those comparatively few lovers of art and colour who saw and appreciated the artistic motives of Turner, and who reverenced, as a revelation of hitherto unrecorded, if not undiscovered, beauties of nature, those pictures at which the world scoffed. We cannot here enter further into the discussion involved, but the attitude of the two parties, the one represented by “Blackwood’s Magazine,” and the other by “Modern Painters,” can be judged by the following extracts. The noble enthusiasm aroused by the treatment of Juliet and her Nurse by the critics, had suggested a letter in 1836, which gradually increased into a volume, not published till 1843, and in the meantime the undergraduate had gained the Newdegate, and earned the right to call himself “A Graduate of Oxford” on his title-page.

This is what Maga said in August, 1835, of Turner’s picture of Venice, from the porch of Madonna della Salute, a picture in his earlier Venetian style:—

“Venice, well I have seen Venice. Venice the magnificent, glorious, queenly, even in her decay—with her rich coloured buildings, speaking of days gone by, reflected in the green water. What is Venice in this picture? A flimsy, whitewashed meagre assemblage of architecture, starting off ghostlike into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the picture). Not Venice, but the boat is the attractive object, and what is to make this rich? Nothing but some green and red, and yellow tinsel, which is so flimsy that it is now cracking..... The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the boats, with their red worsted masts, are as gewgaw as a child’s toy, which he may have cracked to see what it was made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its character.”

VENICE. THE DOGANA. In the National Gallery.
VENICE. THE DOGANA.
In the National Gallery.

This is what the Graduate of Oxford says, after stating his dissatisfaction with the Venices of Canaletti, Prout, and Stanfield:—

“But let us take with Turner, the last and greatest step of all—thank Heaven we are in sunshine again—and what sunshine! Not the lurid, gloomy, plaguelike oppression of Canaletti, but white flushing fulness of dazzling light, which the waves drink and the clouds breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of joy. That sky—it is a very visible infinity—liquid, measureless, unfathomable, panting and melting through the chasms in the long fields of snow-white flaked, slow-moving vapour, that guide the eye along the multitudinous waves down to the islanded rest of the Euganean hills. Do we dream, or does the white forked sail drift nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue sea between us with the fulness of its wings? It pauses now; but the quivering of its bright reflection troubles the shadows of the sea, those azure fathomless depths of crystal mystery, on which the swiftness of the poised gondola floats double, its black beak lifted like the crest of a dark ocean bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from the kindling surface, and its bent oar breaking the radiant water into a dust of gold. Dreamlike and dim, but glorious, the unnumbered palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow sea—pale ranks of motionless flame—their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager fire—their grey domes looming vast and dark, like eclipsed worlds—their sculptured arabesques and purple marble fading farther and fainter, league beyond league, lost in the light of distance. Detail after detail, thought beyond thought, you find and feel them through the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed; secret in fulness, confused in symmetry, as nature herself is to the bewildered and foiled glance, giving out of that indistinctness, and through that confusion, the perpetual newness of the infinite and the beautiful.

“Yes, Mr. Turner, we are in Venice now.”

Unfortunately the brave young champion was too late, the eloquent voice that could translate into such glowing words the dumb poetry of Turner’s pictures had scarcely made the air of England thrill with its musical enthusiasm when black night fell upon the artist. The sudden snapping of some vital chord, of which that same Graduate of Oxford only last year pathetically wrote, took place, and the glorious sun of his genius disappeared without any twilight; he was dead as an artist, and dying as a man. Neither his work nor his life could be defended any more. But the voice that was raised so late in his honour did not die, its vibrations have lasted from that day to this; and if the champion himself seems to be in some need of a defender now, if mouths that once were full of his praise are silent or raised only for the most part to depreciate, it is only what came to Turner and what comes to all who use their imagination too freely to enforce their convictions. A time must come when the spirit of analysis will eat into the most brilliant rhetoric; the false and true, which combine to make the most beautiful fabric of words, cannot wear equally well. To us it is always painful to differ from Mr. Ruskin, to whom we owe the grasp of so many noble truths, the memories of so many delightful hours; and if a time has come when our faith in his dogmas is not absolute, and we feel that he has misled us and others now and again, we cannot close reference to him and his works in this little book without testifying to the great and noble spirit which pervades his work, and recording our admiration of a life devoted to the service of art and man and God with a passionate purity as rare as it is beautiful.

VENICE, FROM THE CANAL OF THE GIUDECEA. Exhibited in 1840. South Kensington Museum.
VENICE, FROM THE CANAL OF THE GIUDECEA.
Exhibited in 1840. South Kensington Museum.

But before night fell, in the interval between 1840 and 1845, Turner painted a few pictures of remarkable beauty both in colour and sentiment—pictures which no other artist could have painted, and which we doubt if he could himself have painted before—pictures generally attempting to realize his later ideal of Venice, which even now, in their wrecked beauty, fascinate all who have patience to look at them, and watch the apparent chaos of yellow and white and purple and grey gradually clear into a vision of ghost-like palaces rising like a dream, from the golden sea. Besides these he painted at least three others of unique power: one a record of what few other men could have had the courage to study or the power to paint; one showing the passion of despair at the loss of an old comrade; and another the boldest attempt to represent abstract ideas in landscape that was ever made. We allude to the Snowstorm; Peace, Burial at Sea; and Rain, Steam, and Speed.

Mr. Hamerton says, in connection with the first of these:—

“Let it not be supposed that these works of Turner’s decline, however they may have exercised the wit of critics, and excited the amusement of visitors to the Exhibition, were ever anything less than serious performances for him. The Snowstorm, for example (1842), afforded the critics a precious opportunity for the exercise of their art. They called it soapsuds and whitewash, the real subject being a steamer in a storm off a harbour’s mouth making signals, and going by the lead. In this instance, nothing could be more serious than Turner’s intention, which was to render a storm as he had himself seen it one night when the ‘Ariel’ left Harwich. Like Joseph Vernet, who, when in a tempest off the island of Sardinia, had himself fastened to the mast to watch the effects, Turner on this occasion, ‘got the sailors to lash himself to the mast to observe it,’ and remained in that position for four hours. He did not expect to escape, but had a curious sort of conscientious feeling, that it was his duty to record his impression if he survived.”[45]

Of the second, which was painted to commemorate Wilkie’s funeral, it is related that Stanfield complained of the blackness of the sails, and that Turner answered, “If I could find anything blacker than black I’d use it.”[46]

The history of his late Swiss sketches and the drawings he made from them has been recently told by Mr. Ruskin in his valuable and interesting notes to his collection of Turner’s drawings exhibited last year (1878), and these notes and the almost equally interesting notes of the Rev. W. Kingsley, contained between the same covers, testify not only to the supreme beauty of his later work, but also to the nobler motive which inspired its production, viz. the desire to “record” as far as he could what he had seen after “fifty years’ observation.” The days of strife and emulation were over, and a humbler, sweeter spirit made him “put forth his full strength to depict nature as he saw it with all his knowledge and experience.” Characteristically, as all through his life, this better spirit showed itself rather in his water-colours made for private persons, than in those oils which he exhibited for the judgment of the public.

We wish we had space here for Mr. Ruskin’s splendid description of Turner’s picture of Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—a work which seems to us to illustrate what we have said of his manner of decline in a remarkable way. There is no doubt about its splendour of colour, the grandeur of its sea, and the force with which its sentiment of horror and wrong and death is conveyed; but it shows a childishness, a want of mental faculties of the simplest kind, which is all the more extraordinary when brought in contrast with such gigantic pictorial power. The sharks are quite unnecessary, the bodies in the water are too many, the absurdity of the chains appearing above it is too gross; the horror is overdone and melodramatic, or, in a word, one of his finest pictorial conceptions is spoilt for want of a little common sense, of a little power to place himself in relation to his fellows and see how it would appear to them. Again, we cannot help wishing that he had had a friend at his elbow like Stanfield, who would have saved him from the laughter of small critics. He was not fit to manage such a work on such a subject by himself.

In his picture of War—the Exile and the Rock-limpet, with its extract from the “Fallacies of Hope”—

we see the same mental helplessness. It verges on the sublime, it verges on the ridiculous. We should be sorry to call it either; but it is childish—not with the grand simplicity of Blake, but with the confused complicity of Turner. Mr. Ruskin says that Turner tried in vain to make him understand the full meaning of this work, and we are not surprised.

Such pictures as these had occurred now and then all through his career—pictures in which the means employed were utterly inadequate to express the sentiment duly, such as the Waterloo,—pictures in which the accumulation of ideas was confused and excessive, as the Phryne going to the Bath as Venus, Demosthenes taunted by Æschines; and he had shown some hazy symbolism in connection with shell-fish in these verses:—

THE SLAVE SHIP. In the possession of Miss Alice Hooper, of Boston, U.S.
THE SLAVE SHIP.
In the possession of Miss Alice Hooper, of Boston, U.S.

But now these “failures,” for failures they were, however fine the art qualities they possessed, became chronic, and the rule rather than the exception; and this is to us the greatest tragedy in the whole of his career—the spectacle of a great painter, the very slave of his genius, compelled to paint this and paint that at its bidding without being able to distinguish between what was great and what was little, what sublime and what ridiculous, almost as mighty as Milton and Shelley one moment, and as poor as Blackmore or Robert Montgomery the next. He appears to us in these last days like a great ship, rudderless, but still grand and with all sails set, at the mercy of the wind, which played with it a little while and then cast it on the rocks.

Rudderless, masterless, was he also as a man. We are very loth to believe the terrible picture of moral degradation supplied by the “best authority” to Mr. Thornbury, and quoted in the first chapter of this volume; but there is no doubt that he lived by no means a reputable life in his old age. As to how he met with Mrs. Booth, at whose little house by the side of the Thames, near Cremorne, he lived for some time before his death, we have not cared to inquire, nor do we intend to repeat the usual stories about it; nor will we venture an opinion as to how often he took too much to drink or what was his favourite stimulant, or what other excesses he committed. His whole faculties had been absorbed in his art; and when this failed him—when he became broken in health and failing in sight—he had no store of wise reflection to employ his mind, no harmless pursuits to follow, no refined tastes to amuse him, nor, as far as we know, had he any hope of any future rectification of the unevennesses of this world. Some of his friends he had lost by death, many were still living and ready to cheer his last years if he would have had them, but he would not. His secretiveness and love of solitude clung to him to the last.

He did not, however, lose his love of art and his desire of acquiring knowledge relating to it. It was in these last years, 1847-49, that he paid several visits to the studio of Mr. Mayall, the celebrated photographic artist, passing himself off as a Master in Chancery, and taking very great interest in the development of the new process which had not then got beyond the daguerreotype. To the interesting account of these visits printed by Mr. Thornbury,[47] we are enabled by Mr. Mayall’s kindness to add that at a time when his finances were at a very low ebb in consequence of litigation about patent rights, Turner unasked, brought him a roll of bank-notes, to the amount of £300, and gave it him on the understanding that he was to repay him if he could. This, Mr. Mayall was able to do very soon, but that does not lessen the generosity of Turner’s act.

Notwithstanding, however, such bright glimpses as this, his last years must have been sad and dull, and his greatest source of happiness was probably the knowledge that whatever critics might say of his later works, there were a few men like Mr. Munro, Mr. Griffiths, the Ruskins, father and son, who appreciated them, and that his earlier pictures not only kept up their fame but rose in price. Though in decline, his fame was as great as almost he could have wished. Two offers of £100,000 he is said to have refused for the contents of Queen Anne Street; £5,000 for his two Carthages. The greatest of all his triumphs was perhaps when he was waited upon by Mr. Griffiths, with an offer from a distinguished Committee, among whom were Sir Robert Peel, Lord Hardinge, and others, to buy these pictures for the nation. This is the greatest instance of his self-sacrifice, which is well attested; for he refused to part with them because he had willed them to the nation. He might have got the money and his wish also, but he refused. The recollection of this, though it occurred some years before he died, should have afforded him some pleasant reflections.

It had been long known that Turner had another home than that in Queen Anne Street, and he had shown considerable ingenuity in concealing it, for he used to go out of an evening to dinner with his friends when he so willed, and met them at the Academy and other places. Almost to the last he could be merry and sociable at such gatherings, and there is a very pleasant account of a dinner in 1850 at David Roberts’ house, given in a note to Ballantyne’s life of that artist, at which Turner was. It is a memorandum by an artist from the country, and describes Turner’s manner as—

Turner not only kept his secret from his friends, but from Mrs. Danby, who, says Mr. Thornbury—

So died the great solitary genius, Turner, the first of all men to endeavour to paint the full power of the sun, the greatest imagination that ever sought expression in landscape, the greatest pictorial interpreter of the elemental forces of nature, that ever lived. His life, and character, and art, complex as they were in their manifestation, were as simple in motive as those of the most ordinary man. Art, fame, and money were what he strived for from the beginning to the end of his days, and those days were embittered at the end by fallacies of hope with regard to all three. Critics laughed at him, he was given no social honour, (neither knighted nor made President of the Royal Academy), and his money was useless. For the meanness and isolation of his existence he had no one to thank but himself, but this was also, as we hope we have shown in the course of these pages, the natural result of the motives of his life.

THE ROOM IN WHICH TURNER DIED.
THE ROOM IN WHICH TURNER DIED.

The nobleness of his life consisted in his devotion to landscape art, and this should cover many sins. He found it sunk very low: he left it raised to a height which it had never attained before. That he could have done this by painting falsely is absurd. The falsity of his works is just of that kind which comes from almost infinite knowledge of truth. He knew little else but art and nature, and he knew these by heart. He could make nature, and this confidence in his creative power led him sometimes into strange errors, which no one else could have made, such as putting the sun and moon in impossible positions in the same picture, and making boats sail in opposite directions before the wind; but how much more truth of natural phenomena has he not given even in such pictures than can be found in any literal transcript of nature! His colour appears to many to be untrue; but this is greatly due to his clinging from first to last to one central truth—the sun. It was that which gave the pitch to his light, and his colour too, as in nature. To that great light all must be subservient; it is not the local colour of an object in the foreground, or the strength of shade of a particular cave, that controls the chiaroscuro and colouring of nature, but the sun. So all things were sacrificed to this; the green must go from the grass, and the shadows must become scarlet, rather than this truth should be lost. His preference for harmonies of blue, red, and yellow, to the exclusion of green, never giving, as Mr. Leslie pointed out, the “verdure” of England, is remarkable; he is the only artist we know who, instead of the usual “bit of red,” to correct the green of a landscape, introduces a bit of “green” (generally harsh crude green), to correct its too great redness. (See, for instance, the apron of the woman in the left-hand corner of his drawing of Rouen Cathedral for the “Rivers of France.”) His constant fault, and, as we think, an inexcusable one, is the careless drawing of his figures. It is not an excuse to say that they must not be painted so as to draw attention from the landscape; first, because Turner in his earlier pictures showed that he could introduce well-finished figures without doing this; and secondly, because Turner’s figures in his later pictures do this by their badness. This carelessness gradually grew on him, because he would not take pains with them. He could draw very small figures very well, giving more spirit and essence than any other artist, in a touch. He could indicate a shamble, a strut, a march, lassitude, confidence, any physical or mental quality of a figure as easily as he could a bough or a cloud; but when he had to draw a figure to which time must be given, to perfect a definite, complex, organized form, he scamped it. His indication of the spirit of animals is often wonderful, as in the deer in Arundel Park, and the dogs in Troyes.

Of Turner’s mind and character apart from his art not much can be said in praise. The former we have already said so much about that we need only say here that although not of a very high order, except in sensibility and perception, he showed now and then capacities which might have been turned to good account by more generous training. Although his jokes were mainly practical, or of that kind which is understood by the term “waggery;” a few good things which he said have been reported, such for instance as that “indistinctness was his forte;” and though his poetry is generally miserable, it here and there contains a fine expression. It is remarkable, however, how both his wit, and what is good in his poetry, are connected with his art. He never said a thing worth recording about anything else, and the few good bits in his poetry are all reflections of a pictorial image. The utter helplessness of his mind, when he tried to put his reasoning into words, is shown by Mr. Hamerton, in one wonderful extract. (See his “Life of Turner,” p. 143.) We do not wonder that his attempts at teaching (though he is said at one time in his youth to have got as much as a guinea a lesson) and his lectures as a professor of perspective were failures.

As to his character, it was mainly negative, on all points except art and money. The best part of it was the tenderness of his heart; but though we have no doubt about this fact, or that he could occasionally in his later years be generous even in money,[49] this does not raise our opinion of him much, for he had more than he wished to spend. If he was remarkable for kind and generous impulses, he was still more remarkable for the success with which he, in general, controlled them. We cannot dispute Mr. Ruskin’s assertion that he never “failed in an undertaken trust,” but we have yet to learn that he ever undertook one.

If it be really true that, unasked and without any question of repayment, he gave a sum of many thousand pounds on more than one occasion to the son of one of his friends and patrons, such an act deserves more accurate record and complete proof. The money was repaid in both cases, it is said.

He showed his best disposition in his kindness to children and animals, and his fellow-artists. Of the last he always spoke kindly, and to young or old was ever just and kind and patient. Poor Haydon said that he “did him justice;” he assisted many a young man with a useful hint, and once took down one of his pictures at the Academy to find a place for one of an unknown man. He took great interest in the founding of the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, and meant his accumulated wealth to be spent in a home for decayed artists.

There is no doubt that long before he died he felt the uselessness of wealth and a desire to dispose of his own in a good way. The only proof we have of his notions of a good way is his will, and that, as we have already said, is not an unselfish document, and the codicils which he added to it from 1831 to 1849 do not show any increase of unselfishness. On the contrary, he revoked his legacies to his uncles and cousins, and left his finished pictures to form a Turner Gallery, and money to found a Turner medal and a monument to himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The will and its codicils were so confused that all the legal ability of England was unable to decide what Turner really wanted to be done with his money, and after years of miserable litigation, during which a large portion of it was wasted in legal expenses, a compromise was effected, in which the wishes of the parties to the suits and others concerned, including the nation and the Royal Academy, were consulted rather than the wishes of the testator: his desire to found a charity for decayed artists, the only thing upon which his mind seems to have been fixed from first to last in these puzzled documents, was over—thrown, and his next of kin, the only persons mentioned in his will whom he certainly did not mean to get a farthing, got the bulk of the property (excepting the pictures). We have no doubt it was quite right; we are very glad the nation got all the pictures and drawings, finished and unfinished, and the Royal Academy £20,000; that there are a Turner medal and a Turner Gallery, and we think that the next of kin should have had a great deal of his money: but surely the greatest fallacy of all Turner’s hope was that his will would be construed according to his intentions.

Two of his wishes with regard to himself were, however, fully carried out—his desire to be buried in St. Paul’s and the expenditure of £1,000 on his monument. His funeral was conducted with considerable pomp and ceremony, his “gifted talents,” to use his own words, “acknowledged by the many,” and many of his fellow-artists and admirers followed him to the grave; nor amongst the crowd were wanting a few old friends who in their hearts still cherished him as “dear old Turner.”

“DATUR BORA QUIETI.”
“DATUR BORA QUIETI.”

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