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
In the ‘Ewenny’ drawing we are brought into contact with objects which
have not yet been severed from the emotional colouring of immediate
experience. Instead of a series of abstract spatial determinations,
appealing only to the abstract understanding, we now have a presentation
fraught with the infinite suggestiveness of living, sensible experience.
Each object represented is now no longer held over against the self as
something alien, something indifferent to and independent of humanity,
like the laws of the physical sciences; each object has now become
merely a moment in the affective life of an individual. It therefore
touches our own feelings, challenges our hopes and fears, appeals
intimately to our sympathies with the contagion of the emotions of an
actual companion. We cannot remain indifferent to such an appeal if we
would. Unless our nerves tingle as the eye plunges from the familiar
objects of the foreground into the gloom beyond, the picture has not
begun to exist for us. But immediately it touches our inner life into
responsive activity the picture becomes transformed from so much
indifferent paper and pigment into an aspect of our own affective life.
We have caught the contagion of the artist’s emotional experience, in
which the objects of his representation were submerged.
I am far from wishing to suggest that the distinction between the two
kinds of art which I have endeavoured to indicate is either very obvious
or easy to grasp. But it is, I am convinced, a very real and a very
weighty distinction, and as such is worthy of the most careful study.
But, however carefully we study the matter, and however profoundly
convinced we may be that the distinction is firmly grounded in the
essential nature of art itself, yet we can never hope to describe it in
the precise terms of the exact sciences. We can never hope to understand
the exact nature of the ties which bind the expressive symbols of
Romantic art to the echoes they awaken with mathematical certainty in
the breast of each individual. The problem of the relation between
thought and feeling still agitates the rival schools of philosophy, and
this is not the place to discuss such matters. What is immediately
important
[Illustration: _PLATE X_
CONWAY FALLS, NEAR BETTWYS-Y-COED
WATER COLOUR, ABOUT 1798]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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