Turner's Sketches and DrawingsFinberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
History
Turner's Sketches and Drawings
Finberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
Turner, J. M. W. (Joseph Mallord William), 1775-1851
From this point of view I think it is easy to see that such a result is
attainable in no other way than that which Turner has followed. No
actual scene could ever possess quite the same close-knit logical
coherence, the same absolute absence of irrelevance, as we find in
Turner’s finished drawing; so that the most faithful and loving and
skilful reproduction of the most carefully selected aspect of actuality
would never give us the same kind of outer and inner unity that Turner
has achieved by his method of amplifying, modifying, and interpreting
his slight pencil sketches. Only in this way can the active forces of
interpretation or assimilation, by which the artist as well as the
meanest of us fills out the incoming suggestions of the given, achieve
adequate expression. A psychologist might perhaps describe the
difference between a faithful transcription of an actual scene and such
an effort of the creative imagination as we have just been studying, by
saying that the one is a representation of the incoming or given ideas
or sensations, while Turner’s picture represents these same ideas or
sensations after they have been thoroughly ‘apperceived’ by the masses
of ideas stored in the artist’s mind. If we adopt such a description, we
must not forget to add that Turner has used his knowledge of the
mechanism of the pictorial language to set out his total idea for us in
the clearest and pleasantest way.
As with the Heysham sketch, so with the Hornby.[28] I need perhaps
hardly call attention to the deliberate heightening of Hornby Castle,
and to the way the back of the nearer hill in front of it has been
humped in the finished design. This deliberate falsification (as it must
seem to the literalist) is paralleled by the treatment of the foreground
tree, whose individuality is destroyed, and whose place is taken by a
mere alien grown in the fertile climate of the artist’s imagination. I
have no doubt that if Turner could have got the same effect without
making these alterations he would not have made them. But it is obvious
that he could not. From his point of view such alterations are merely
grammatical devices by which he throws the required emphasis on
qualities which hills and trees do undeniably possess, but which were
somewhat slurred over in nature’s momentary presentment of the case. And
if we think about the matter calmly, we see that we cannot expect any
object to enter into new relations without undergoing some kind of
modification; I mean that we cannot expect physical facts to be taken up
into the intelligible world and used as factors in the expression of
ideas and emotions without requiring some kind of modification.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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