Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/691

Rh was not very successful. He soon quarrelled with his engraver, F. C. Lewis, on the ground that he had raised his charges from five guineas a plate to eight. He then employed Charles Turner, who agreed to do fifty plates at the latter sum, but, after finishing twenty, he too wished to raise his price, and, as a matter of course, this led to another quarrel. Reynolds, Dunkarton, Lupton, Say, Dawe, and other engravers were afterwards employed Turner himself etching and mezzo-tinting some of the plates. Each part of the Liber contained five plates, the -subjects, divided into "historical," "pastoral," "marine," &c., embracing the whole range of landscape art. Seventy-one plates in all were published (including one as a gift of the artist to his subscribers); ten other plates—more or less completed—intended for the fifteenth and sixteenth numbers were never published, the work being stopped for want of encouragement. Absence of method and business habits may account for this. Turner is said to have got up the numbers in his own house with the help of a female servant. The plates, which cost the subscribers only five shillings apiece, were so little esteemed that in the early quarter of the 19th century they were sometimes used for lighting fires. So much has fashion, or public taste, changed since then that a fine proof of a single plate has sold for £210. The merit of the plates is un equal; some—for example, Solway Moss, Inverary Pier, Hind Head Hill, Ben Arthur, Rizpah, Junction of the Severn and Wye, and Peat Bog—are of great beauty, while a few are comparatively tame and uninteresting. Among the unpublished plates Stonehenge at Daybreak and Sheep Washing, Windsor Castle take a high place. The Liber shows strong traces of the influence of Cozens and Girtin, and, as a matter of course, of Claude. In most of the designs the predominant feeling is serious; in not a few, gloomy, or even tragic. A good deal has been written about Turner's intention, and the "lessons" of the Liber Studiorum. Probably his only intention in the beginning was to show what he could do, to display his art, to rival Claude, perhaps to educate public taste, and at the same time make money. If lessons were intended they might have been better conveyed by words. "Silent always with a bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning,"—such is Mr Ruskin's explanation; but surely Turner had little reason for either silence or contempt because the public failed to see in landscape art the means of teaching it great moral lessons. The seventy plates of the Liber contain an almost complete epitome of Turner's art. Already in this work are seen strong indications of one of his most remark able characteristics a knowledge of the principles of structure in natural objects: mountains and rocks are drawn, not with topographical accuracy, but with what appears like an intuitive feeling for geological formation; and trees have also the same expression of life and growth in the drawing of stems and branches. This instinctive feeling in Turner for the principles of organic structure is treated of at considerable length in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, and Turner is there contrasted with Claude, Poussin, and some of the Dutch masters, greatly to their disadvantage.

After 1797 Turner was little concerned with mere topographical facts: his pictures might be like the places re presented or not; much depended on the mental impression produced by the scene. He preferred to deal with the spirit, rather than with the local details of places. A curious example of the reasonableness accompanying his exercise of the imaginative faculty is to be found in his creations of creatures he had never seen, as, for example, the dragon in the Garden of the Hesperides and the python in the Apollo, exhibited in 1811. Both these monsters are imagined with such vividness and reality, and the sense of power and movement is so completely expressed, that the spectator never once thinks of them as otherwise than representations of actual facts in natural history. It needs but a little comparison to discover how far Turner surpassed all his contemporaries, as well as all who preceded him, in these respects. The imaginative faculty he possessed was of the highest order, and it was further aided by a memory of the most retentive and unerring kind. A good illustration of this may be seen at Farnley Hall in a drawing of a Man-of-War taking in Stores. Some one, who had never seen a first-rate, expressed a wish to know what it looked like. Turner took a blank sheet of paper one morning after breakfast, outlined the ship, and finished the drawing in three hours, Fawkes sitting beside him from the first stroke to the last. The size of this drawing is about 16 in. by 11 in. Mr Ruskin thus describes it;

"The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one half of the picture to the right, her bows toward the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed, two other ships of the line in the middle distance drawn with equal precision, a noble breezy sea, full of delicate drawing in its waves, a store ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky, all drawn from memory, down to the smallest rope, in a drawing-room of a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire."

About the year 1811 Turner paid his first visit to Devonshire, the county to which his family belonged, and a curious glimpse of his simple manner of life is given by Redding, who accompanied him on some of his excursions. On one occasion they spent a night together in a small road-side inn, Turner having a great desire to see the country around at sunrise.

"Turner was content with bread and cheese and beer, tolerably good, for dinner and supper in one. In the little sanded room we conversed by the light of an attenuated candle and some aid from the moon until nearly midnight, when Turner laid his head upon the table and was soon fast asleep. Three or four hours rest was thus obtained, and we went out as soon as the sun was up to explore the surrounding neighbourhood. It was in that early morning Turner made a sketch of the picture Crossing the Brook." In another excursion to Borough Island, "the morning was squally and the sea rolled boisterously into the Sound. Off Stakes Point it became stormy; our Dutch boat rode bravely over the furrows. Two of the party were ill. Turner was all the while quiet, watching the troubled scene. Bolt Head, to seaward, against which the waves broke with fury, seemed to absorb his entire notice, and he scarcely spoke a syllable. While the fish were getting ready Turner mounted nearly to the highest point of the island rock, and seemed writing rather than drawing. The wind was almost too violent for either purpose."

This and similar incidents show how careless of comfort Turner was, and how devoted to his art. The tumult and discomfort by which he was surrounded could not distract his powers of observation; and some thirty years later there is still evidence of the same kind. In the catalogue of the exhibition of 1842 one of his pictures bears the following title, "Snow-Storm: steam-boat off a harbour's mouth making signals in shallow water, and going by the lead. The author was in that storm the night the 'Ariel' left Harwich."

From 1813 till 1826, in addition to his Harley Street residence, Turner had a country house at Twickenham. He kept a boat on the river, also a pony and gig, in which he used to drive about the neighbouring country on sketching expeditions. The pony, for which Turner had a great love, appears in his well-known Frosty Morning in the National Gallery. He appears to have had a great

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