artist may have taken out from the house when he was watching the sunset and making some of his notes of the "effects." The effect here depicted is that of "the moment before the sun sinks, when his light turns pure rose-colour, and when this light falls upon a zenith covered with countless cloud-forms of inconceivable delicacy, threads and flakes of vapour, which would in common daylight be pure snow-white, and which give therefore fair field to the tone of light. There is then no limit to the multitude, and no check to the intensity, of the hues assumed. The whole sky, from the zenith to the horizon, becomes one molten mantling sea of colour and fire; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into unsullied shadowless crimson, and purple, and scarlet, and colours for which there are no words in language and no ideas in the mind. . . . There is no connection, and no one link of association or resemblance, between those skies and the work of any mortal hand but Turner's" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 7). 485. ABINGDON, BERKSHIRE. Painted about 1810. "A very beautiful example of the painter's most skilful work in his first period: the main lesson to be derived from it being the dignity of the simplest objects, when truly painted, under partial concealment by aerial effects. They must be truly painted, observe, first; the forms given must be studied with exquisite care, but veiled as far as is needful to give them largeness and mystery. To so singular an extent will the forms of things come out gradually through the mist as you look long at Turner's effects of this kind, that many of his admirers have thought that he painted the whole scene first, with all its details, and then threw the mist over it. But it is not so; and all efforts to copy Turner on such a plan will end in total discomfiture. . . . The misty appearance is given by resolvedly confusing, altering, or denying the form at the moment of painting it; and the virtue of the work is in the painter's having perfectly clear and sharp conception of all that he chooses to confuse, alter, or deny: so that his very confusion becomes suggestive, his alteration decorative, and his denial affirmative and it is because there is an idea with and in-not under-every touch, that we find the objects rising into existence as we gaze" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, pp. 27, 28). 511. VIEW OF ORVIETO. Painted at Rome in 1829, and exhibited at the Academy next year. "Once a very lovely picture, and still perfect in many parts: the tree, perhaps, the best bit of foliage painting in the rooms" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, p. 47). The picture brings out admirably, too, the chief characteristic of Orvieto, namely its situation on a sheer rock. "On the road from Siena to Rome is the town of Orvieto. . . . None who see it from a distance can fail to be struck with its imposing aspect, as it rises from the level plain upon that mass of rock among the Apennines. Orvieto is built upon the first of those huge volcanic blocks which are found like fossils embedded in the more recent geological formations of central Italy. . . . Their advanced guard, Orvieto, stands up definite and solid, an almost perfect cube, with walls precipitous to north and south and east, but slightly sloping to the westward. At its foot rolls the Paglia, one of those barren streams which swell in winter with the snows and rains of the Apennines, but which in summer time shrink up and leave bare beds of sand and pestilential cane - brakes to stretch irregularly round their dwindled waters. The weary flatness and utter desolation of this valley present a sinister contrast to the broad line of the Apennines, swelling tier on tier from their oak-girted basements, set with villages and towers, up to the snow and cloud that crown the topmost crags. The time to see this landscape is at sunrise; and the traveller should take his stand upon the rising ground over which the Roman road is carried from the town-the point, in fact, which Turner has selected for his vague and misty sketch in our Gallery" (J. A. Symonds: Sketches in Italy). 491. HARVEST DINNER, KINGSTON BANK. The Thames at Kingston, reapers at their dinner. Painted about 1809. It is noticeable as showing the breadth of Turner's sympathies that he painted not only shipwrecks and fires at sea, but canal boats and river barges. "A certain class of entirely tame subjects were treated by him even with increased affection after he had seen the full manifestation of sublimity. He had always a great regard for canal boats, and instead of sacrificing these old, and one would have thought unentertaining, friends to the deities of storm, he seems to have returned with a lulling pleasure from the foam and danger of the beach to the sedgy bank and stealthy barge of the lowland river. Thenceforward his work which introduces shipping is divided into two classes; one embodying the poetry of silence and calmness, the other of turbulence and wrath" (Harbours of England, p. 24). 496. BLIGH SAND, NEAR SHEERNESS. Painted in 1809, but not exhibited till 1815, when Turner refused to sell it to his old detractor, Sir George Beaumont. "It is a fine picture of its class; and has more glow in its light, and more true gloom in its dark, than the great sea-pieces we have already seen (XXII. 472 and 476, pp. 595, 597). But the subject is wholly devoid of interest: the fishing-boats are too far off to show their picturesque details; the sea is too low to be sublime, and too dark to be beautiful; and the shore is as dull as sand can be" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, p. 30). 538. RAIN, STEAM, AND SPEED. Exhibited at the Academy in 1844. A picture of great interest, as being not only (what Mr. Monkhouse calls it) "the boldest attempt to represent abstract ideas in landscape that ever was made," but also the first and greatest attempt to elicit beauty out of a railway-train. "The Great Western Railway" was Turner's sub-title, and the bridge is perhaps a recollection of Maidenhead. Notice the devices which the artist employs to aid his representation of speed— the puffs of steam gradually diminishing as they recede, and the little hare running at full speed before the engine. The “driving” rain contributes too, to the effect—as also does the contrast with the little boat on the river. By way of letting us into "the very pulse of the machine," Turner makes his engine open in front-which is certainly an eccentric proceeding in a train going at full speed. Six years before this picture was painted, a train had beaten record by making the journey from Birmingham to London at an average speed of twenty miles an hour; but the train here represented is a goods train. " 1 Mr. Frith (i. 120) thus describes the Duke of Wellington before this picture : Unperceived, I watched the duke's puzzled expression as he read the quotation from the Fallacies of Hope.' He then looked steadily at the picture, and with a muttered 'Ah! poetry!' walked on." But there was no quotation from the " Fallacies of Hope," so that the poetry the duke saw with puzzled disgust was all in the picture. ་ 484. ST. MAWES, FALMOUTH HARBOUR. Painted about 1809. 489. COTTAGE DESTROYED BY AN AVALANCHE. "If the reader will look back for a moment to the 'Abingdon' (485, p. 643), with its respectable country house, safe and slow carrier's waggon, decent church spire, and nearly motionless river, and then return to this avalanche, he will see the range of Turner's sympathy, from the quietest to the wildest of subjects. We saw how he sympathised with the anger and energy of waves: here we have him in sympathy with anger and energy of stones. No one ever before had conceived a stone in flight, and this, as far as I am aware, is the first effort of painting to give inhabitants of the lowlands any idea of the terrific forces to which Alpine scenery owes a great part of its character, and most of its forms. Such things happen oftener and in quieter places than travellers suppose. The last time I walked up the Gorge de Gotteron, near Fribourg, I found a cottage which I had left safe two years before, reduced to just such a heap of splinters as this, by some two or three tons of sandstone which had fallen on it from the cliff. There is nothing exaggerated in the picture; its only fault, indeed, is that the avalanche is not vaporous enough. In reality, the smoke of snow rises before an avalanche of any size, towards the lower part of its fall, like the smoke from a broadside of a ship of the line" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, p. 29). Painted in 1829 and unfinished; similar to one of the pictures painted by Turner for the Carved Room at Petworth. "Full of light, and yet solemn, calm, and almost plaintive. There is even gentle movement in it, for the smooth waters glide along and carry us with them into the picture. We all know that the sun does not go out like a candle, yet the old way of painting it was nearly this. But here the sun, though partly sunk behind the hill in the distance, seems by its intensity to be in front of it, and to burn a fiery gap and hollow in it. I daresay you have often noticed this effect in nature. . . . Nothing could be simpler than the composition: a river in perspective, a long horizon, and an old ship; yes, that old ship fills it with human interest; now no longer buffeted by the waves, this perilous adventurer, this hero of many battles with the winds, rests for a while by a green bank that is fringed with summer trees and long rushes; its little pennant droops listlessly from its tall masts, that rise into the gentle breath of evening, and sink down reflected roots in the living waters" (G. A. Storey, A.R.A., in Thornbury, ii, 12). 463. ÆNEAS WITH THE SIBYL: LAKE AVERNUS. An early work, painted about 1800, in imitation of Wilson (see XVII. 304, p. 432). The cave in which the Sibyl dwelt is in a subterranean passage, near the Lake Avernus, and close to the shores of the Bay of Baiæ. She was Æneas's guide to the lower world, and bade him pluck the golden bough from the tree sacred to Proserpine Go, search the grove, and raise your longing eyes If your descent approving fates allow, Your hand with ease will crop the willing bough. RING'S Æneid, bk. vi. RETURNING FROM 544 VENICE. MORNING: THE BALL. Exhibited in 1846, and now much injured, but still capable of fascinating those who have patience to watch the apparent chaos gradually clear into dream-like palaces rising "as from the stroke of the enchanter's wand." "Dream-like and dim, but glorious, the unnumbered palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow sea-pale ranks of motionless flames—their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager firetheir gray domes looming vast and dark, like eclipsed worlds -their sculptured arabesques and purple marble fading farther and fainter, league beyond league, lost in the light of distance. Detail after detail, thought beyond thought, you find and feel them through the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed; secret in fulness, confused in symmetry, as nature herself is to the bewildered and foiled glance, giving out of that indistinctness, and through that confusion, the perpetual newness of the infinite and the beautiful" (Modern Painters, first edition, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 10). This ghost-like Venice, as Turner's later pictures thus show it, is exactly the Venice described by Byron |