CHAPTER X.

TURNER IN YORKSHIRE.

THERE was no county in England to which Turner was so much attached as Yorkshire. Here his first great successes were attained, and here he met his kindest patrons. It was here, too, on the wolds and beside the banks of the Wharfe that he first (after Wales) saw really wild scenery.

I do not think his first visit to Yorkshire can be placed earlier than 1797; and in 1798 he exhibited "Autumnal Morning, Winsdale, Yorkshire;" "Refectory of Kirkstall Abbey;" and "Dormitory, Foun tains Abbey."

In 1798 he contributed drawings of Sheffield and Wakefield to Walker's "Itinerant;" and in 1800 he illustrated Whitaker's "Parish of Whalley" with several drawings, among which was one of Farnley. The early Yorkshire drawings that I have seen are very fine, and chiefly in the Girtin manner; the hot and cold colour strongly opposed, but both hot and cold melted into one fine and solemn harmony of tone.

The early oil pictures of Turner, founded on Yorkshire sketches, are, as Mr. Ruskin describes, solemn and simple in subject, gloomy in chiaroscuro,

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and brown in tone. The drawing is manly but careful, the minutiae are often exquisitely delicate. The best of these pictures are generally mere views, or unambitious, quiet, single thoughts, such as the "Calder Bridge," belonging to Mr. Bicknell. Turner had not yet founded his system of colour, and he was feeling his way by a series of experiments.

Turner never sketched much in oil; he always got the colour too brown, as he once told his travelling companion, Mr. Munro. When the executors were examining his boxes after his death, they suddenly came upon several oil sketches. "Now," said Sir Charles Eastlake, "we shall find many more of these, for I remember being with Turner once, in Devonshire, when he made sketches in oil." But no more were found. He generally preferred the pencil-point, writing in here and there the colours and effects.

Mr. Ruskin says, "Turner had in this respect some peculiar views induced by early associations. His first conceptions of mountain scenery seem to have been taken from Yorkshire; and its rounded hills, far-winding rivers, and broken limestone scars, to have formed a type in his mind to which he sought, as far as might be obtained, some correspondent imagery in all other landscapes. Hence he almost always preferred to have a precipice low down on the hill-side, rather than near the top; liked an extent of rounded slope above, and the vertical cliff to water or valley, better than the slope at the bottom and wall at the top; and had his attention early directed to those horizontal, or comparatively horizontal beds of rock which usually form the faces

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THE SLOPING BANK.

of precipices in the Yorkshire dales; not, as in the Matterhorn, merely indicated by veined colouring on the surface of the smooth cliff, but projecting, or mouldering away, in definite succession of ledges, cornices, or steps.

"This decided love of the slope or bank above the wall, rather than below it, is one of Turner's most marked idiosyncrasies, and gives a character to his composition as distinguished from that of other men; perhaps more marked than any which are traceable in other features of it (except, perhaps, in his pearshaped ideal of trees, of which more hereafter). For when mountains are striking to the general eye, they almost always have the high crest or wall of cliff on the top of their slopes, rising from the plains first in mounds of meadow-land, and bosses of rock, and studded softenings of forest; the brown cottages peeping through grove after grove, until just where the deep shade of the pines becomes blue or purple in the haze of height, a red wall of upper precipice rises from the pasture land, and greets the sky with glowing serration.

"Now, although in many of his drawings Turner acknowledges this structure, it seems always to be with some degree of reluctance; whereas he seizes with instant eagerness, and every appearance of contentment, on forms of mountain which are rounded into banks above, and cut into precipices below, as is the case in most elevated tablelands, in the chalk coteaux of the Seine, the basalt borders of the Rhine, and the lower gorges of the Alps;" so that Turner literally humbled the grander Swiss mountains to

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"The

make them resemble the Yorkshire scaurs. simpler a line is, so that it be cunningly buried within its simplicities, the grander it is; and Turner likes to enclose all his broken crags by such a line." This was one of the great man's mannerisms, as also were his elongated figures and oval elms, and his flat-topped pines.

"Nevertheless, I cannot but attribute his somewhat wilful and marked rejection of what sublimity there is in the other form, to the influence of early affections; and sincerely regret that the fascination exercised over him by memory should have led him to pass so much of his life in putting a sublimity not properly belonging to them, into the coteaux of Clairmont and Meauves, and the vine terraces of Bingen and Oberwesel, leaving almost unrecorded the natural sublimity, which he could never have exaggerated, of the pine-fringed mountains of the Isere, and the cloudy diadem of the Mont Vergi.

"In all cases of this kind it is difficult to say how far harm and how far good have resulted from what unquestionably has in it something of both. It is to be regretted that Turner's studies should have been warped by early affection from the Alps to the Rhine; but the fact of his feeling this early affection, and being thus strongly influenced by it through his life, is indicative of that sensibility which was at the root of all his greatness. Other artists are led away by foreign sublimities and distant interests, delighting always in that which is most markedly strange and quaintly contrary to the scenery of their homes. But Turner evidently felt that the claims upon his

regard possessed by those places which first had opened to him the joy and the labour of his life could never be superseded. No Alpine cloud could efface, no Italian sunbeam outshine, the memory of the pleasant dales and days of Rokeby and Bolton; and many a simple promontory dim with southern olive, many a lone cliff that stooped unnoticed over some alien wave, was recorded by him with a love and delicate care that were the shadows of old thoughts and long-lost delights, whose charm yet hung like morning mist above the chanting waves of Wharfe and Greta.

"The first instance, therefore, of Turner's mountain drawing was from those shores of Wharfe, which, I believe, he never could revisit without tears; nay, which, for all the latter part of his life, he never could even speak of but his voice faltered. We will now examine this instance with greater care.

"It is first to be remembered that, in every one of his English or French drawings, Turner's mind was, in two great instincts, at variance with itself. The affections of it clung, as we have just seen, to humble scenery and gentle mildness of pastoral life. But the admiration of it was, more than any other artist's whatsoever, fostered on largeness of scale. With all his heart, he was attached to the narrow meadows and rounded knolls of England; by all his imagination, he was urged to the reverence of endless vales and measureless hills; nor could any scene be too contracted for his love, or too vast for his ambition. Hence, when he returned to English scenery after his first studies in Savoy and Dauphiné, he was continually