The Water-Colours of Joseph Mallord William Turner
9781465652287
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I AM particularly glad to write a foreword to this collection of reproductions of water-colours by J. M. W. Turner, as they are perhaps the best renderings of the beautiful originals that I have yet seen. The more reproductions we can have of the master’s drawings the more will it be possible to study properly his great message, and the more will his genius be recognised. I would like to see everyone of his nineteen thousand water-colour sketches and lead-pencil drawings reproduced, so that we could all hold them in our hands and carry them about with us; for in them there is an unfailing beauty of composition, and a glorious truth of effect and of detail, by which Turner managed to make complete pictures out of even the fewest touches. No one realises Turner’s full genius till he studies these drawings, often made in the very presence of nature. They teach us to look at her with a new and seeing eye. Their absolute truth has hardly yet been fully recognised. I have had the fortune to carry reproductions of these drawings with me in Wharfedale and in Venice, and I have compared them touch for touch with nature. Often and often have I been able to see the meaning of what appears a careless scratch or even an accidental wriggle, only when the actual scene was before me. They are mostly drawn from one exact spot, as may be seen by the crossing of the branches of the trees, although these are now so many years older, and the folding of the hills. It was in the seventies that I first made these comparisons in Wharfedale and I still remember my delight at recognising the gnarled markings on three ash trees a little below Bolton Abbey; the angle of their growth forming a rough letter N was identical although they were mere saplings in Turner’s drawing, and even the broken bank of the river was still the same, all the winter floods of variable Wharfe not having washed away nature’s truth to Turner’s drawing. My experiences in Venice are similar. With the reproduction in my hand I could say that Turner drew a particular scene from a particular flagstone on the quay, or piazza. The lines of the houses on both sides of the canal cut one another in the exact way they did in Turner’s sketches only from one particular spot, but from there the whole scene was complete exactly. Many subjects were sketched from the middle of the canal and owing to the movement of the water it was not easy to compare exactly the reproductions with the scenes in nature. Curiously nearly all these scenes from the canal were taken from the traghettos, or ferries, of which there are several up and down the Grand Canal, where gondolas wait for hire, tied to their posts, somewhat as cabs stand in their ranks in our streets. It is possible that Turner in his economy made use of these waiting gondolas by giving the gondolier a palanca for permission to sit in a gondola whilst it was thus at rest. It was an ideal place for working from in his day, for no “penny steamboats” then splashed up and down the canal making things rock in their wake, but peace reigned in the reflections of the palaces.
