Turner's Golden Visions: Book I/II

Hind

Table of Contents

NOTE

PART ONE

CHAPTER I. THE BOY AND GOLDEN ORVIETO

CHAPTER II. THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER'S ART LIFE

CHAPTER III. THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER THE DUMB POET

CHAPTER IV. THE BOY, HAVING BECOME A MAN, WONDERS AT THE 'INVENTORY' OF THE TURNER BEQUEST DRAWINGS

PART TWO

CHAPTER V. 1775: BIRTHPLACE AND PARENTS

CHAPTER VI. 1790: AGED FIFTEEN

CHAPTER VII. 1795: AGED TWENTY

CHAPTER VIII. 1800: AGED TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER IX. 1802: AGED TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER X. 1803: AGED TWENTY-EIGHT

PART THREE

CHAPTER XI. 1804: AGED TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER XII. 1805: AGED THIRTY

CHAPTER XIII. 1806: AGED THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER XIV. 1807: AGED THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER XV. 1808: AGED THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER XVI. 1809: AGED THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER XVII. 1810: AGED THIRTY-FIVE

PART FOUR

CHAPTER XVIII. 1811: AGED THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER XIX. 1812: AGED THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER XX. 1813: AGED THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER XXI. 1814. AGED THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER XXII. 1815: AGED FORTY

CHAPTER XXIII. 1816: AGED FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER XXIV. 1817: AGED FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER XXV. 1818: AGED FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER XXVI. 1819: AGED FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER XXVII. 1820: AGED FORTY-FIVE

PART FIVE

CHAPTER XXVIII. 1822: AGED FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER XXIX. 1823: AGED FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER XXX. 1824: AGED FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER XXXI. 1825: AGED FIFTY

CHAPTER XXXII. 1826: AGED FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER XXXIII. 1827: AGED FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER XXXIV. 1828: AGED FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER XXXV. 1829: AGED FIFTY-FOUR

Plate I. Frontispiece Norham Castle—Sunrise (about 1885) Tate Gallery

-------------------------------

'Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures.'—John Constable on the 1828 Royal Academy Exhibition.

-------------------------------

NOTE

In writing on Turner one must necessarily make levies on the works of other authors. I give hearty acknowledgment to Mr. A. J. Finberg's Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest (printed for His Majesty's Stationery Office), which he himself has used with skill and accomplishment in his Turner's Sketches and Drawings(Methuen & Co.). Among the other books consulted and quoted from are Turner, by Sir Walter Armstrong (Agnew & Sons); Turner, by W. L. Wyllie, A.R.A. (G. Bell & Sons); The Turner Drawings, by E. T. Cook (Pall Mall Press); The Engraved Work of Turner, and Turner's 'Liber Studiorum', by W. G. Rawlinson; the delightful Extra Numbers of The Studio on Turner, and the excellent little book by the late Cosmo Monkhouse. Ruskin, of course, is frequently referred to and quoted, also the inaccurate but indispensable Thornbury, whose Life of Turner all succeeding writers on Turner have borrowed from and upbraided.

C.L.H.

PART ONE

A MEMORY: TELLS OF A BOY WHO LOVED TURNER'S 'VIEW OF ORVIETO'

-------------------------------

CHAPTER I. THE BOY AND GOLDEN ORVIETO

There was a boy who grew up in the seventies of last century when the name of Turner aroused no particular interest or emotion: he was a classic, and he was treated with the incurious veneration that is given to classics. Turner was among the gods, and if a descent to the ground-floor of the National Gallery, where a selection of his water-colours was shown, did startle the wayfarer into amazement at the lyrical loveliness of those visions, compared with the sombre and heavy magnificence of most of the oil pictures, well, they were by Turner, and Turner being a classic, was not a subject for debate. He was with the masters—fit and few—a classic.

I think no one dreamed of the extraordinary revival of interest in Turner and increasing admiration for his genius that was to mark the twentieth century, when the 'unfinished oils' were exhibited, and later when the Turner Gallery at Millbank was opened.

The boy who grew up in the seventies, and to whom, in the first idealism of youth, Turner seemed almost superhuman, has closely followed the public manifestations of interest in the flame and fame of Turner; and now that he is about to write a book on the man of whom M. de la Sizeranne wrote:—'All the torches which have shed a flood of new light on Art, that of Delacroix in 1825, those of the Impressionists in 1870, have in turn been lit at his flame,'—he likes to return in memory to those days in the seventies when Turner first became wonderful, something not quite to be explained, in his life.

The boy was taken periodically, for education and pleasure, to the National Gallery, and as he was led through the various rooms astonishment passed into bewilderment. The mixed art of the world was far too complex for the boy's unfolded mind. The clash of personalities, the astonishing divergencies of the various schools of painting confused and distracted him, and only when he entered the Turner room (now dismantled), and was told, what he had already dimly divined, that the pictures crowded on those four walls were all by one man, did he find rest for his soul. He did not appreciate all the Turners, but he grasped their coherency, and realised what he was told, that they expressed the growth of one mind groping from darkness to light. Yet it seemed strange to the boy that he who painted the dark and material 'Calais Pier' should also have painted the gorgeous fairy tale called 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'; that the calm and contemplative 'Crossing the Brook' should have proceeded from the same brain and hand that willed that wonder of wonders 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' or the fading loveliness of the picture that was then called the 'Approach to Venice.' The boy was not old enough to understand the interest and importance of studying a painter's work chronologically, which would have made it plain to him why a man could paint the 'Calais Pier' at twenty-eight, 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' at sixty-nine, and the sunlight dreams between whiles, in moments of rapturous vision. These problems did not trouble the boy. He was too young to analyse his impressions, and they were all forgotten when he was shown the small picture called 'View of Orvieto.' That remained to him all through boyhood, and through manhood also, essential Turner, essential Italy, a dream Italy, but more real than the reality.

Yet 'Orvieto' painted in Rome in 1829, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830, when the artist was fifty-five, is not one of his great works. And it is not a view of Orvieto, that is, a correct view. Turner was an interpreter of the soul of what he saw, not a reporter of topographical, historical or architectural accuracy. The golden valley bathed in sunlight, the city on the hill swooning in golden mist, and the magical fading away of the uplands into infinity, that is what the boy cared about. All that is pure Turner, the idealist, the visionary, the lover of light and colour and distances and the enchantments of nature. Turner too, but dual-natured Turner, is the inept foreground, a mere contrivance to throw the middle distance back; things pressed into his service that happened to come to hand, the litter of properties, the 'drawing-master tree,' the uncouth figures, the unsubstantial fountain.

Years later the boy visited Orvieto and found the city far less beautiful than Turner's dream. But by that time he had learnt that the true artist is not a copyist of nature, that he states his vision, the effect not the fact. This 'View of Orvieto' remained enshrined in his heart. To him as a boy it was Italy, and Italy never really meant anything else to his young intelligence, just Turner's vision of Orvieto, a golden town on a golden hill under a summer sky; a place where the sun always shines and where there are little white roads leading he cared not whither, because they all led to somewhere in Italy. This is the joy of the artist, a joy that often he never hears of. This is his joy—to touch a young heart to ecstasy, ay! even by a second-rate picture, and to keep in that young heart a vision that the world and time can never destroy, and that a visit to the place cannot dispel. To that boy Turner's 'Orvieto' meant Italy: since he has become a man he has wandered through Italy again and again from end to end, but even now if he wishes to recall Italy, to be kindled by the thought of that word meaning so much to Englishmen, he still turns to Turner's picture. For him it cannot fade: it cannot change.

Plate II. 

View of Orvieto

 (1830) National Gallery

CHAPTER II. THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER'S ART LIFE

From 'Orvieto' as a starting-point, the boy, who is now a man, proceeded in time to explore the art life of Turner, dwelling oftenest on his golden visions, in which this persistent man, eloquent nowhere but in his art, truly found himself. They were the goals of his pilgrimage, but few appreciated them. Among the few was honest, plain-spoken John Constable, who said of Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy of 1828, which were so unlike his own practical art: 'Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and