Fresh Paint
IN art, as in everything else, things must pass for what they are worth. A feeble picture by Orcagna is none the less feeble because five hundred years old. I cannot admire his “Coronation of the Virgin,” wherein he sets the angels to playing bagpipes. Even the Scotch Highlander expects to put down his squealing instrument this side of heaven. There is no power in the centuries to consecrate a failure. Time has a scythe, but no trowel. Age, in the abstract, excites not my veneration. I must first know whether it is an old saint or an old sinner. The worst characteristic about some things is their longevity. A newly-laid egg, boiled just two minutes and a half by the watch, and placed on the table beside a clean napkin, is a
IS Z 385 luxury to bless the palate withal; but some of us remember that once in our boarding-house at school, we chanced at the morning meal to crack the shell of a Pre-Raphaelite and, without “returning thanks,” precipitately forsook the table. Antiquity may be bad or good.
As with physical vision, so in mental optics there are far-sighted men who cannot see things close by, while a quarter of a mile away they can tell the time of day from the dial on a church steeple. The sulphurous smell in Church’s “Cotopaxi” makes them cough and sneeze, though, at the peril of unhinging their necks from the spinal column, they will stand for hours, looking straight up at a homely Madonna by some ancient Italian, plastered on the rotunda of a Brussels cathedral. Having no sympathy with those who expend so much good-humor on the old masters that they have nothing left for moderns, I shall speak of recent pictures, at the risk of rubbing against fresk paint.
Americans, more than any other people, want to see the paintings of Joseph William Turner. John Ruskin has devoted more than half of his working life making that painter more famous. But Ruskin’s art - criticisms have nowhere been read as in the United States, for the reason that TJie Modern Painter’s is published in a very cheap American edition, while the English publishers of that book present it only in expensive type and with costly illustrations, thus keeping it beyond the reach of the masses. Though Turner lies beside Joshua Reynolds in the Cathedral of St. Paul, and his pictures have become the inheritance of the British nation, London knows little more of him than does New York.
But nine out of ten of our friends returning from the National Gallery of England express sore disappointment with Turner’s paintings. They think it strange that his canvas should excite the great intellect of John Ruskin for fifteen years into a seeming frenzy of admiration, so that he can write or speak of nothing else — enduring, in behalf of his favorite artist, all acerbity and flagellation, the masters of British and foreign schools bedaubing the brilliant writer with such surplus of paint as they could spare from their own palettes, and pursuing the twain with such ferocity, that, though the first has hidden from his foes behind the marble of the tomb, and his defender has, in ruined health, retired to Denmark Hill, nevertheless the curses need some cooling yet.
Our first glance at these pictures, covering the four walls of two rooms in the gallery, struck us back with violent disappointment. On our last look, on the last day of our visit, we felt an overcoming sadness that probably we never again should find such supernatural power in an artist. We say supernatural, for if we believe that Jeremiah and David and John had more than human power to write, I know not why it would be wrong to suppose that Paul Veronese, and Giotto, and Rembrandt, and West, and William Turner were divinely inspired to paint. In the one case, it was parchment; in the other, canvas. Here it was ink; there it was colors. Now a pen; then a pencil. Was it not the same power which handed Raphael’s “Transfiguration” across four centuries that has conveyed to this present time the New Testament? I never felt so deeply the suffering- of the Saviour, when reading the description in Luke and John, as when standing in the cathedral at Antwerp. Looking at the “Crucifixion,” by Rubens, I was beaten down and crushed In soul, and, able to look no more, I staggered out, faint, and sick, and exhausted, the sweat dropping from every pore.
I will not advocate the supernal inspiration of any of these men, ancient or modern; but must say that the paintings of William Turner exerted over me an Influence different from anything I have experienced. The change between my first and last look of this British artist is to be explained by the change of stand-point. No paintings in the world are so dependent upon the position occupied by the spectator. Gazed at from ordinary distances, they are insipid, meaningless, exaggerated. You feel as if they had not been done with a pencil, but a broom. It seems that each one of them must have taken two quarts of stuff to make it as thick as that. You* almost expect the colors to drip off — you feel like taking your handkerchief and sopping up the excess. But, standing close up to the opposite wall, you see a marked improvement; yet, even then, the space between you and the picture is too small. You need to pass through into the next room, and then, looking through the doorway, fasten your eye on the painting. Six paces off, and Turner’s “Decline of Carthage “is a vexation; but twenty- two paces off, with an eye-glass, and Turner’s “Decline of Carthage” is a rapture. From the last stand - point, looking at “The Spithead,” we felt like dividing our life into two portions — that which had occurred before we saw Turner, and that which might occur afterward.
This master shifted his style four times. No one mood lasted him long. So many a man looks back, and finds that his life has been a series of fits. Perhaps very young in literature, he had a fit Tupperian. Passing on a few years, and he was taken with a fit Byronian. Getting into calmer waters of life, he was attacked with a fit metaphysical. As might be expected, from being out so much in the fog, he took a violent fit Carlylean. Then, at the close of life, he reviewed his intellectual gyrations; and, disgusted with his ramblings, he had a fit of common sense, which was such a sudden change from anything preceding that it killed him. It is easy to trace Turner through a variety of artistic spasms, but he is always entertaining.
We cannot forget his “Caligula’s Palace:” the magnificence of destruction; the ages of the past looking through the ruined porticos and shivering on the top of the broken marble; the bridge, in its leap across the bay, struck with a death of desolation that leaves it a skeleton in the way; children playing in the foreground, their diminutiveness and simplicity, by the contrast, piling up the height of the towers, and the gorgeous pretension of the imperial domain; the sun rising just high enough to show that carved pillars of stone belonging to a kingly fool are but dust when the “Rock of Acres” crashes aorainst them.
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Who can forget the light that Turner pours on Venice, the Campanile of San Marco, the Dogana — light falling with the positiveness of a pebble, but the diffusiveness of a liquid — light that does not strike on the water and stop there, but becomes transfused and intermixed — nay, which, by matchless chemistry of color, becomes a part of the wave, so that you cannot say which is light and which is water: gondolas variegated, dropping all their hues into the wave — gondola above, gondola beneath, and moving keel to keel. Light, though so subtle that it flies from other touch, Turner picked up, nor let it slip through his fingers till it touched the canvas. John Martin, the Northumberland painter, tried to catch the light, but instead thereof caught the fire that burns up many of his fine pictures. Turner’s light is neither a hot element to consume nor a lifeless thinof that mioht be called a mere pallor on the cheek of the darkness, but so natural you hardly know whether it drops from the sky-window into the gallery, or was kindled by the hand which for twenty years has been mouldering in the crypt of Saint Paul Cathedral.
What water Turner painted! The waves of the sea knew him. No man could pour such moonlight upon the Thames as he; or could SO well run the hands of the sea up and down the sides of a stranded ship; or could so sadden the Hellespont with the farewell of Leander; or toss up the water in a squall so natural that you know the man in the fishing-smack must be surprised at the suddenness; or so infuriate the Channel at Calais that you wish you did not, on your way home, have to cross it; or could have dropped a castleshadow so softly and yet so deep into a stream. The wave of William Turner was not, as in many pictures, merely wet whitewash, but a mingling of brightness and gloom, crystal and azure, smoothed down as a calm morning tramples it, or flung up just as the winds do it.
Then, all this thrown into a perspective so marked, that, seeing it for the first time, you feel that you never before knew what perspective was. You can hardly believe that the scene he sketches is on the dead level of the wall. You get on the bank of his river in “Prince’s Holiday,” and follow it back through its windings, miles away, and after you think you will be compelled to stop, you see it still beyond, and when you can no more keep the bank, you see in still greater distance what you say may be cloud, and may be water, but you cannot decide. Turner can put more miles within a square foot than any one we know of. There are always back-doors opening beyond. But his foreshortening is quite as rare. Often his fishermen and warriors and kings are not between the frame of the picture, but between you and the canvas. You almost feel their breath on your cheek, and stand back to give them room to angle, or fight, or die.
After exploring miles of pictures, the two on secular themes that hang in my memory, higher than all, deeper than all, brighter than all, are Turner’s “Parting of Hero and Leander;” and Turner’s “Palace and Bridge of Caligula.” And there they will hang forever.
Yet his rivals and enemies hounded him to death. Unable longer to endure the face of a public which had so grievously maltreated him, with a broken heart he went out from his elegant parlors on Queen Anne Street, to die in a mean house In Chelsea. After he was lifeless, the world gathered up his body, played a grand march over it, and gave it honored sepulture. Why did they not do justice to him while living? What are monuments worth to a dead man? Why give stones when they asked for bread? Why crack and crush the jewel, and then be so very careful about the casket? Away with this oft-repeated graveyard farce! Do not twist into wreaths for the tomb the flowers with which you ought to have crowned the heated brow of a living painter.