A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Clara Erskine Clement Waters (the best books of all time txt) 📗

During two or three years only, out of the thirty in which he held the professorship, did he deliver lectures. He spoke in a deep and mumbling voice, was confused and tedious in manner, and frequently became hopelessly entangled in blind mazes of obscure words. Sometimes when he had written out his lectures he was unable to read them. Once, after fumbling in his pockets, he exclaimed: “Gentlemen, I’ve been and left my lecture in the hackney-coach.” Still he was interested in this work, and Ruskin says: “The zealous care with which Turner endeavored to do his duty is proved by a large existing series of drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely colored, all by his own hand, of the most difficult perspective subjects—illustrating not only directions of light, but effects of light, with a care and completion which would put the work of any ordinary teacher to utter shame.” During this year he took a house at Hammersmith, Upper Mall, the garden of which ran down to the Thames, but still retained his residence in Harley Street. In 1812 he first occupied the house No. 47 Queen Anne Street, and this house he retained for forty years. It was dull, dingy, unpainted, weather-beaten, sooty, with unwashed windows and shaky doors, and seemed the very abode of poverty, and yet when Turner died his estate was sworn as under one hundred and forty thousand pounds—seven hundred thousand dollars. When Turner’s father died in 1830 he was succeeded by a withered and sluttish old woman named Danby. The whole house was dreary, dirty, damp, and full of litter. The master had a fancy for tailless—Manx—cats, and these made their beds everywhere without disturbance. In the gallery were thirty thousand fine proofs of engravings piled up and rotting. His studio had a fair north light from two windows, and was surrounded by water-color drawings. His sherry-bottle was kept in an old second-hand buffet.

About 1813 or 1814 Turner purchased a place at Twickenham; he rebuilt the house, and called it Solus Lodge. The rooms were small, and contained models of rigged ships which he used in his marine views; in his jungle-like garden he grew aquatic plants which he often copied in foregrounds. He kept a boat for fishing and marine sketching; also a gig and an old cropped-eared horse, with which he made sketching excursions. He made at this time the acquaintance of Rev. Mr. Trimmer, the rector of the church at Heston, who was a lover of art, and often took journeys with Turner. While visiting at the rectory Turner regularly attended church in proper form; and finally he wrote a note to Mr. Trimmer, alluding to his affection for one of the rector’s kinswomen, and suggesting: “If Miss —— would but waive bashfulness, or in other words make an offer instead of expecting one, the same [Lodge] might change occupiers.” But Turner was doomed to disappointment, and never made another attempt at matrimony. In 1814 Turner commenced his contributions of drawings to illustrate “Cook’s Southern Coast,” and continued this congenial work for twelve years, making forty drawings at the rate of about twenty guineas each; the drawings were returned to the artist after being engraved. In 1815 he exhibited the “Dido Building Carthage,” and in 1817 a companion picture, the “Decline of the Carthaginian Empire,” and for these two pictures the artist refused five thousand pounds, having secretly willed them to the National Gallery.

Ruskin divides Turner’s art life into three periods: that of study, from 1800 to 1820; that of working out art theories toward an ideal, from 1820 to 1835; and that of recording his own impressions of nature, from 1835 to 1845, preceded by a period of development, and followed by a period of decline, from 1845 to 1850. Besides his pictures painted on private commission, Turner exhibited two hundred and seventy-five pictures at the Academy. The “Rivers of England” was published in 1824, with sixteen engravings after Turner; another series contained six illustrations of the “Ports of England”—second-class cities. In 1826 the “Provincial Antiquities of Scotland” was published, with thirteen illustrations by Turner. The same year he sold his house at Twickenham, because, he said, “Dad” was always working in the garden, and catching abominable colds. In 1827 Turner commenced the “England and Wales” on his own account, and continued it for eleven years. It consisted of a hundred plates, illustrating ports, castles, abbeys, cathedrals, palaces, coast views, and lakes. In 1828 Turner went to Rome by way of Nismes, Avignon, Marseilles, Nice, and Genoa; and this year painted his “Ulysses Dividing Polyphemus,” of which Thornbury says: “For color, for life and shade, for composition, this seems to me to be the most wonderful and admirable of Turner’s realisms.” Ruskin calls it his central picture, illustrating his perfect power.

Of Turner’s wonderful versatility, Ruskin says: “There is architecture, including a large number of formal ‘gentlemen’s seats;’ then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind, including nearly all farming operations, plowing, harrowing, hedging and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else; there are all kinds of town life, court-yards of inns, starting of mail coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, and elections; then all kinds of inner domestic life, interiors of rooms, studies of costumes, of still-life and heraldry, including multitudes of symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local incident—every kind of boat, and the methods of fishing for particular fish being specifically drawn—round the whole coast of England; pilchard-fishing at St. Ives, whiting-fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne, and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of the vessels, and many marine battle-pieces; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealized into compositions, others of definite localities, together with classical compositions; Romes and Carthages, and such others by the myriad, with mythological, historical, or allegorical figures; nymphs, monsters, and spectres, heroes and divinities.... Throughout the whole period with which we are at present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely infinite—a sympathy so all-embracing that I know nothing but that of Shakespeare comparable with it. A soldier’s wife resting by the roadside is not beneath it; Rizpah watching the dead bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as that it will not interest his whole mind and carry his whole heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment whether the next he will be in laughter or tears.”

In 1832 Turner made a will in which he bequeathed the bulk of his estate for the founding of an institution “for the Maintenance and Support of Poor and Decayed Male Artists being born in England and of English parents only, and of lawful issue.” It was to be called “Turner’s Gift,” and for the next twenty years the artist pinched, and economized to increase the fund for his noble purpose. At this time he was entering upon his third manner—that of his highest excellence, when he “went to the cataract for its iris, and the conflagration for its flames; asked of the sky its intensest azure, of the sun its clearest gold.” It is remarked by Ruskin, who has made most profound study of Turner’s works, that he had an underlying meaning or moral in his groups of foreign pictures; in Carthage, he illustrated the danger of the pursuit of wealth; in Rome, the fate of unbridled ambition; and in Venice, the vanity of pleasure and luxury. The Venetian pictures began in 1833, with a painting of the Doge’s Palace, Dogana, Campanile, and Bridge of Sighs; and with these were exhibited “Van Tromp Returning from Battle,” the “Rotterdam Ferry-boat,” and the “Mouth of the Seine.” In 1830 or 1831 he made, on commission from the publisher Cadell, twenty-four sketches to illustrate Walter Scott’s poems—published in 1834—and while doing this he was entertained royally at Abbotsford, and made excursions with Scott and Lockhart to Dryburgh Abbey and other points of interest. He went as far north as the Isle of Skye, where he drew Loch Corriskin, and nearly lost his life by a fall. About this time he made a series of illustrations for Scott’s “Life of Napoleon.” Turner spent some time in Edinburgh, frequently sketching with Thomson, a clergyman and local artist, who was preferred by some of the Scotch amateurs to Turner. He one day called at Thomson’s house to examine his paintings, but instead of expected praises he merely remarked, “You beat me in frames.” Turner made thirty-three illustrations for Rogers’s “Poems” (Fig. 75), and seventeen for an extended edition of Byron. He was in the habit at this time of frequently walking to Cowley Hall, the residence of a Mr. Rose, where he was kindly welcomed. He was there called “Old Pogey.” One day Mrs. Rose asked him to paint her favorite spaniel; in amazement he cried, “My dear madam, you do not know what you ask;” and always after this the lady went by the title of “My dear madam.” Mr. Rose tells how he and Turner sat up one night until two o’clock drinking cognac and water, and talking of their travels. When Mrs. Rose and a lady, a friend, visited Turner in a house in Harley Street, in mid-winter, they were entertained with wine and biscuits in a cold room, without a fire, where they saw seven tailless cats, which Turner said were brought from the Isle of Man.