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The nature of our subject-matter—The difference between sketches and finished works—The character of our subject-matter, as embryonic forms of artistic expression, prescribes the method of study we must adopt—Our method is broadly chronological—But to follow Turner’s work year by year in detail would carry us beyond the limits of our present undertaking—I have, therefore, broken up Turner’s career into eight stages or phases of development.

THE object of the following pages is to re-study the character of Turner’s art in the light of his sketch-books and drawings from nature.

During Turner’s lifetime his rooted objection to part with any of his sketches, studies, or notes often formed the subject of ill-natured comment. Yet we owe it to this peculiarity that the drawings and sketches included in the Turner Bequest at the National Gallery comprise practically the whole of the great landscape painter’s work done direct from nature. The collection is, therefore, of very great psychological interest. It shows clearly upon what basis of immediately presentative elements the airy splendour of Turner’s richly imaginative art was built: and amongst the twenty odd thousand sheets of drawings in all stages of elaboration, the embryonic forms of most of the painter’s masterpieces can be easily traced.

A careful examination of the drawings shows that Turner’s objection to part with his sketches and notes was not the outcome of a blind and deeply ingrained passion for accumulation, but that it was the necessary result of the painter’s clearly defined conception of the radical difference between the raw material of the painter’s art, and its fully articulated products—the difference between mere sketches and studies and fugitive memoranda, and the fully elaborated works of art to which such preliminaries are subservient, but with which they should never be confused. From Turner’s point of view the properly finished pictures were all that the public had a right to see or possess; the notes and studies were meant only for his own eye. Even in his later years, when he consented to exhibit what he expressly called a ‘record’ of a scene he had witnessed, he grumbled when it was admired and treated as a picture, although in this case the ‘record’ was not a hurried memorandum, but a fully elaborated attempt ‘to show what such a scene was like.’[1]

The method of our study must be determined by the general character of our subject-matter. Our main business is with fragmentary records, hurried memoranda, half-formed thoughts, and tentative designs. We must not and cannot treat these dependent and embryonic fragments as independent entities; we cannot pick and choose amongst them, or love or dislike them entirely for their own sakes, as we can with complete works of art which contain within themselves the grounds of their own justification or insufficiency. To grasp the significance of our sketches and studies we must study the goal towards which they are striving. We must not be content to admire even the most beautiful of these sketches entirely for its own sake, but must study them for the sake of their connection with the works which they were instrumental in producing.

These considerations have also weighed with me in the selection of the numerous illustrations with which the publishers have generously enriched this volume. On the whole I have chosen the illustrations rather for the light they throw on Turner’s conception of art and methods of work than for their own individual attractiveness; but the glamour of execution is so invariably present in all that came from Turner’s hand, that few of these drawings will be found which do not possess a very powerful aesthetic appeal of their own.

In dealing with Turner’s work from the point of view I have indicated, we are forced to touch upon problems which the prudent art critic is apt to avoid. In studying the relation between the preliminary sketches and studies and the finished works into which they were developed, we find ourselves plunged into the midst of some of the most baffling difficulties of psychology and aesthetic. In attempting even to describe the relation between the more rudimentary and the more fully articulated processes of artistic expression, we are forced, whether we like it or not, to face the problems of the relation between form and content, between treatment and subject, between portrayal and portrayed; and we cannot go far without finding ourselves obliged to reconsider the common-sense ideas of Truth, Nature, and Art. We cannot avoid such problems if we would. If I face them, therefore, instead of emulating the discretion of my elders, it is, I am sure, from no ingrained love of abstractions, but rather from an overpowering interest in all the concrete forms of pictorial art.

The separation of aesthetic from art-criticism which is so much favoured at present, though it eases the labour of thought both to the art-critic and to his readers, seems to me otherwise inexcusable and fraught with serious artistic and intellectual dangers. Art-criticism cut adrift from general principles cannot help degenerating into a blatant form of self-assertion or an immoral form of practical casuistry—a finding of good reasons for anything you have a mind to; and aesthetic, divorced from all living contact with the concrete phenomena of art, is one of the dullest as well as the most useless of studies. But this is not the place to set forth in detail or defend my conception of the function and methods of art-criticism. I will merely say that I regard it as a form of rational investigation of the phenomena of pictorial art; it has no immediate practical aim; and it does not propose to prolong or intensify the enjoyment which works of art provide.

We find then that we cannot study Turner’s sketches in isolation from his finished works. But to follow his completed work year by year in detail would obviously carry us beyond the limits of our present undertaking. I have, therefore, broken up Turner’s career into eight facets or aspects. In the first chapter I deal with his seven years’ apprenticeship, from 1787 to 1793, using his sketches to throw light on his youthful aims and methods. The second chapter, covering the years 1793 to 1797, deals with the work of the topographical draughtsman. I then study the gloomy and romantic side of Turner’s art, when he was mainly under the influence of Richard Wilson and of the churchyard and charnel-house sentiment of Edward Young and Joseph Warton. The fourth chapter is devoted to Turner’s early sea-pieces, and the next to his work as a painter of what his contemporaries called ‘Simple Nature.’ This phase of Turner’s art is difficult to describe in a few words. One way would be to call it a phase of Wordsworthian naturalism, but it must be remembered that it was not an echo or a by-product of Wordsworth’s poetry, but an independent and simultaneous embodiment in another form of art of sentiments common both to Wordsworth and to Turner. Pictures like Turner’s ‘Frosty Morning’ and ‘Windsor’ were as new, as unprecedented, as Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems. This side of Turner’s art shows him as the founder of a genuinely national school of homely realism, as the head of the Norwich school and the master of David Cox, De Wint, Callcott, and the rest.

The sixth chapter deals with the designs engraved in the Liber Studiorum, and the sketches on which they were based. The seventh is devoted mainly to the work engraved in the Southern Coast, Richmondshire, Scott’s Antiquities, the Rivers and Ports, and the England and Wales series, the work by which the artist is perhaps best known. My eighth chapter treats of the period when signs of mental decay began to be apparent. These years saw the production of what have been called the first Impressionistic pictures. Then, by way of bringing to a head some of the observations on the nature of artistic expression which our investigations have forced upon our notice, I have added a final chapter dealing mainly with the relation between Art and Nature. The subject-matter of this chapter is not so attractive as that of the others, but I do not think it right to omit it.

This selection of the facets of Turner’s dazzling and complex genius is necessarily arbitrary and incomplete. The aspects I have chosen to throw into relief can make no pretence to be exhaustive. They must be taken as a poor but necessary device for the introduction of a kind of superficial order into our present task—as a concession to the weakness and limitations of the powers of the student, rather than as a successful summary of the multifarious forms into which one of the most prolific and many-sided creative activities of modern art has poured itself. And the threads of this living activity which I have sought to isolate, never existed in isolation. Turner was not at one period of his life a romantic and at another a pseudo-classic or Academic painter, a sea-painter at one time, and a painter of ‘simple Nature’ at another. Turner was always a sea-painter and a topographer, a romantic, a pseudo-classic, and an impressionist, as well as a master of homely realism. While he was painting ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ he had the ‘View of High Street, Oxford’ on his easel; the ‘Abingdon’ and the ‘Apollo’ were painted at the same time as were the ‘Frosty Morning’ and the ‘Dido and Aeneas.’ He could paint a huge dull empty canvas like ‘Thomson’s Lyre’ when his muse was putting forth its lustiest and most vigorous shoots; he could give us ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ when his powers seemed stifled amid the fumes of early Victorian sentimentality. His genius is hot and cold like Love itself, a fine and subtle spirit that eludes the snares of our plodding faculties. But unless we desire merely to bedazzle and intoxicate our senses, we cannot afford to dispense with the poor crutches upon which our pedestrian intellect must stumble.