Turner’s Predecessors
But the wonderful array of Turner’s works was far from exhausting the interest of this memorable exhibition. Grouped round the Turners were about thirty drawings by his predecessors, i.e. English water-colour painters who were born before him, and about seventy drawings by his contemporaries, i.e. artists who were born at or about the same time as Turner, or whose period of work coincided with his lifetime. There were also some drawings by later artists. I propose to speak of the former group in this chapter.
Perhaps the earliest topographical drawings in the exhibition were the two views of Bath, made in 1777, by Thomas Malton, the younger (1748-1804)—the West Front, Town Hall (51) and Pulteney Bridge (55). Though cold and precise these drawings have very great charm, and they are crowded with topographical and antiquarian interest. But they belong to an undeveloped stage of the art of water-colour painting. The details of architecture are drawn carefully and accurately, the figures are life-like though rather stiff, and the indications of light and shade explain the shapes of the buildings and knit the whole composition together. But the drawings do not go beyond this. The few pale washes of colour diversify the surface, but do not suggest either colour or atmosphere. Every object, the roadway, figures, buildings and the sky, has the same texture, which makes the general effect monotonous and abstract.
Though Paul Sandby (1725-1809) was born before the younger Malton, his drawing of The Swan Inn, Edmonton (Plate XXV) is, I fancy, some ten or perhaps twenty years later in point of execution than these Bath drawings; Sandby’s style, however, was always less abstract than Malton’s. Compared with the Bath views this drawing by Sandby is like a window opened on nature; it is flooded with light, the warm sunshine plays on and through the trees, lighting up the road, the figures and the whole scene. Yet Sandby’s care for detail is as great as Malton’s. Each house, each garden, each tree has its individual character fully recorded with unflagging industry and spirit. The spectator’s interest is awakened by the variety of shapes, colours and incidents, and sustained by the artist’s evident alertness and thorough enjoyment of the spectacle. Sandby was one of the first English artists to rob topographical delineation of its abstractness and impersonality. He throws the charm of his genial personality over the scene. And though his work is always alert, interesting and full of charm, this Edmonton drawing is, I think, one of the most delightful of his works that I have seen.
The best drawing by Edward Dayes (1763-1804) in the exhibition was probably the view of Norwich Cathedral (Plate XXVI), which is dated 1793. Dayes, for all his cleverness and skill, was not as likeable a man as Sandby. He seems to have been deficient in geniality, generosity and sympathy. These defects of character show in his work. He often seems bored and ill at ease with his subjects; he was seldom if ever capable of taking the delight and interest in a scene which Sandby took in his Edmonton drawing. There is a certain coldness, not only of colour and effect, but of interest in this Norwich Cathedral drawing. It is nevertheless a clever piece of work, and though perhaps not so truthful and accurate as Malton’s views of Bath, it shows much greater technical skill than they possess.
Turner, I believe, got his first lessons in perspective from Malton’s father’s “Treatise,” and both Sandby and Dayes had a great deal of influence on his early work. Some of the earliest drawings by Turner in existence were copied or adapted from Sandby’s drawings or engravings, and for a short period, about the years 1794 and 1795, his style, handling, and colour were so closely modelled on Dayes’s work that many drawings by the elder artist are mistaken for Turner’s. Indeed, some of Dayes’s best drawings in public and private collections are wrongly attributed to Turner. This is no small compliment to Dayes, and it probably accounts for the want of proper appreciation from which he now suffers.
Of the connection between Turner and the greatest of his predecessors, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799 (?)), it is difficult to speak with much certainty. Nearly all recent writers on Turner say that he was greatly influenced by Cozens’s work; but I have failed to discover any certain evidence of this influence in his early work, unless it be in choosing the same subject—Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps—for one of his oil paintings that Cozens had chosen for one of his water-colours. The dominant influence in Turner’s early work, as I have already pointed out, is Richard Wilson rather than John R. Cozens.
But Cozens’s work was greatly admired by some of Turner’s early patrons, especially by Dr. Monro, and tradition says that Dr. Monro induced Turner to copy many of the drawings by Cozens which he possessed. I have found it hard to discover evidence in support of this tradition. I do not remember to have seen a copy of any of Cozens’s works which was unmistakably done entirely by Turner; in the drawings of this kind traditionally attributed to Turner, at least the pencil outlines are nearly always clearly recognizable as by Girtin. Even if we accept these copies as Turner’s, they show that he possessed, at that time, very little appreciation of the higher beauties of Cozens’s work. No attempt is made in them to reproduce either the general effect or the light and shade of the originals; they rob Cozens’s work of its grandeur and austerity, and substitute for these qualities mere prettiness and conventionality.
Indeed it is incorrect to call these drawings copies; they are nothing more than exercises in laying washes and inventing systems of light and shade, based upon Cozens’s work. Their mode of production and purpose may be thus described: the outlines were first drawn in pencil with bold, firm strokes, by a careless and free hand, which bears remarkable resemblances to that of Girtin. These outlines must have been done direct from Cozens’s drawings, but what was done afterwards seems to have been done without reference of any kind to them. These outlines were then given to another artist, who clothed them according to his own fancy with a commonplace arrangement of light and shade. That these exercises in blue and grey tinting and the arrangement of light and shade were done by Turner we cannot know for certain, but the tradition that they were, seems too insistent to be ignored. Though the characteristic beauties of Cozens’s work counted for little or nothing in these academical exercises, yet they show that Turner was brought early into contact with the work of the first great master of English water-colour painting, and so far as this work exercised any influence on him it must have been to his advantage.
Cozens was represented in Messrs. Agnew’s exhibition by no less than nine drawings. The largest and most important was the Lake Albano (44), with the Castel Gandolfo in the middle distance. An excellent reproduction in colour of this impressive drawing was published in “The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours” (The Studio, 1918). Cozens was the first English artist to suggest in his drawings something of the grandeur and beauty of the Alps. A Swiss Valley (Plate XXVII) is one of his finest drawings of this kind. It owes much of its dramatic effect to its magnificently designed sky, which is as daring as it is original. The scene represented is probably in the Splügen Pass. Less moving, less dramatic, are the two Roman views. In the Farnesina Gardens (Plate XXVIII) is a pensive sylvan scene of great elegance and charm. The Villa Negroni (Plate XXIX) is a wonderfully fascinating and original design with its noble group of pines and cypresses silhouetted against the sky. In the foreground we get the brow of the hill on which the trees are standing, with sheep feeding near an ancient statue; the ruins on the left, in the middle distance in the plain below, are fragments of the Claudian Aqueduct, those on the right are some of the Neronian arches. The Villa Negroni was situated near the Porta S. Giovanni. It has now ceased to exist and its place has been taken by the Casino Massini.
It is interesting to compare Cozens’s view of Lake Nemi (Plate XXX) with Turner’s two drawings of the same subject, one made nearly twenty years later from Hakewill’s sketch, the other drawn from his own impressions fifty years later. The earlier view, like the Cozens, shows the town of Gensano on a hill in the middle distance, with Monte Circello and the Mediterranean in the distance. There is less exaggeration in Cozens’s drawing than in the Turners, and a certain gauntness and strangeness repels one at the first glance as much as Turner’s charm and glow of colour attract. Yet when one gets over the first feeling of strangeness in this drawing, as well as in all of his works, it exerts a very potent charm over the imagination. His drawings are unequal, but when he is at his best, as in the Lake Albano and the Villa Negroni, they possess a haunting beauty which almost overawes the spirit. Such works “draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full vitality and music.”