Turner, then, was intermittently a highly popular artist—by the 1840s he was probably the world’s best-known figure in art. That was, as David said, an amazing thing to happen to a “mere landscape painter.” But Turner was also violently attacked. One might say that the savage assaults on his late work, where light and color are supreme, and mere objects are often barely discernible, were the first castigations of “modern art,” anticipating by a generation the rage which greeted Édouard Manet. The attacks continued after Turner’s death, the most celebrated being Mark Twain’s comparison of The Slave Ship to “a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes”—followed by much other similar abuse.18 In the 1840s Turner needed Ruskin’s defense, though he was ambivalent about it: “He sees more in my pictures than I ever painted.” But Ruskin refused to praise Turner’s last four paintings: The Departure of the Fleet and three depictions of scenes taken from Virgil’s Aeneid. Ruskin said they were of “wholly inferior value.” Turner’s best biographer, Finberg, described them as “too feeble to give offence.” All of them ended in the Tate, which destroyed Aeneas Relating His Story to Dido. But today they are much admired.19
Turner aroused mixed reactions among his contemporaries. J. W. Archer summed him up as “So much natural goodness mixed with so much bad breeding.” It was Turner’s manner that prevented him from becoming president of the Royal Academy, a position he coveted (he was made vice president, though). Mary Lloyd, another observer, noted: “His face was full of feeling, and tears readily came to his eyes when he heard a sad story.” There are many anecdotes of his sharpness, rudeness, covetousness, and concern for his trade secrets. If an artist looked too closely at his work, he snarled: “I paint my pictures to be looked at, not smelt.” He raged with fury if asked to comment on, or as he thought authenticate, an old painting of his: “You have no right to tax my memory with what I might have done one hundred and fifty years ago.” When owners brought an unsigned work of his to show him, they were rebuked—“I won’t look at it! I won’t look at it!”—and he would leave the room.20
Yet Turner not only taught painting at the Royal Academy; he also (from time to time) gave advice. “First of all, respect your paper!” “Keep your corners quiet.” “Centre your interest.” He advised all artists to buy materials, especially paints and brushes, of the very best quality. He used his own first earnings to buy good paints and top-quality paper. He kept in close touch with suppliers of art materials, and jumped at the opportunity to experiment with a new pigment. Between 1802 and 1840, the following new pigments became available: cobalt blue, chrome yellow, pale lemon chrome, chrome orange, emerald green, synthetic ultramarine, Chinese white, veridian, barium chromate, and chrome scarlet. It can be shown that in most cases Turner was an earlier user of the novelties.21 Before using oils regularly he had been a watercolorist for ten years, and this practical training gave him great respect for the power, quality, and subtlety of pigments.
Turner was an astonishingly fast worker, like Hals and Fragonard before him, and Sargent after him. We have an eyewitness account of a big Turner watercolor from Walter Fawkes’s daughter-in-law:
One day at breakfast when Turner was staying with Fawkes in 1818, Fawkes said to him: “I want you to make me a drawing of the ordinary dimensions that will give some idea of the size of a man of war.” The idea hit Turner’s fancy, for with a chuckle he said to Walter’s eldest son, then a boy about fifteen, “Come along, Hawkey, and we will see what we can do for papa.” The boy sat by his side the whole morning and witnessed the evolution of “A First Rate Taking in Stores.” His description of the way Turner went to work was very extraordinary. He began by pouring wet paint onto the paper until it was saturated. He tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy, and the whole thing was chaos—but gradually, as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutiae, came into being, and by lunchtime the drawing was taken down in triumph.”
Turner was not only a fast but a ruthless painter. He applied, repeatedly, over a sketch scumbles, glazing, and impasto. He completely redid some of his paintings on the Academy’s walls, on varnishing day. His Regulus, painted in Rome in 1828, had its lighting scheme completely transformed by Turner as it hung on a wall of the British Institute in London, while a a wide-eyed Sir John Gilbert watched:
He was absorbed in his work, did not look about him, but kept on scumbling a lot of white into his picture—nearly all over it. The picture was a mess of red and yellow in all varieties. Every object was in this fiery state. He had a large palette, nothing on it but a huge lump of flake white: he had two or three biggish hog-tools to work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows and every part of the surface…. The picture gradually became wonderfully effective, just the effect of brilliant sunshine absorbing everything, and throwing a misty haze over every object. Standing sideways at the canvas, I saw that the sun was a lump of white, standing out like the boss of a shield.22
Turner’s creative working methods are, alas, a reminder that painting is to some extent an ephemeral art. Few great masterpieces are as good today as when first painted. (Vermeer’s are a possible exception.) The skies of Claude, which dazzled his contemporaries and were still astonishing in the late eighteenth century, have lost much of their lustre 200 years later. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, warned his readers that Turner’s highest quality was transitory. He said that Turner painted works for “immediate delight,” and had “no thought for the future.” “No picture of Turner’s,” Ruskin added, “is seen to perfection a month after it is painted…. How are we enough to regret that so great a painter should not leave a single work by which in succeeding ages he might be entirely estimated.”23 Ruskin called this process of deterioration “sinking in,” and cited Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Italy (1832) as an example of decay, “now a mere wreck.” Other examples of deterioration are Waves Breaking against the Wind (1835), Chichester Canal(1828), Benedetto Looking towards Fusina (1843), and Landscape: Christ and the Woman of Samaria (1842). Joyce Townsend, who has made a study of decay in Turner, thinks that the works which were not finished by Turner and so were unvarnished and were not fiddled about by him on the walls of the Royal Academy are the ones most likely to have retained their original appearance. She gives three examples of well-preserved works: The Arch of Constantine (1835), Venice from the Canale della Giudecca di S. M. della Salute (1840), and Peace—Burial at Sea (1842). Some of the earliest works have lasted best, such as Morning among the Coniston Fells (1798), which is still perfect.24 Another example of a well-preserved painting is Lifeboat and Manby Apparatus Going Off to a Stranded Vessel Making Signals (Blue Light) of Distress (1831), a daring piece of work that Turner was wise enough to leave alone. Sometimes, however, the deterioration was not his fault. In his great Richmond View and Bridge, the reds have faded. A new red, recommended to him by the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, proved feeble over time. And in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century Turner’s work suffered grievously at the hands of “restorers.” Thus Frosty Morning, by all accounts one of his most astonishing works when first painted, had most of its top surface removed, and now looks dull. Still, Turner himself was careless. He said he kept most of his unsold works or those he did not wish to part with “down below.” That meant a cellar. It was damp, which led to spotting, and liable to floods in heavy rain. (The Tate too, inexcusably, allowed the floods in 1928 to reach its Turners.) In Turner’s studio, mold grew on egg-based primings, and there were other horrors.25 It is hard to say which has damaged Turner’s oeuvre most: his methods of work, his carelessness in storage, or the brutalities of twentieth-century British restorers.
Along with his astonishing creative virtues, Turner had one appalling weakness: he could not draw, or paint, the human form. His staffage is always feeble, sometimes embarrassingly so. It is true that Turner shared this incapacity with his great hero Claude. But the latter was painfully aware of his defect and did everything in his power to cor
rect it—though to no avail. Turner was not conscious of how bad his figures were; at any rate, he said nothing on the subject and certainly took no steps to put things right by attending life classes (as a younger contemporary, Edward Lear, did, saying his figures were not good enough, though they were a world above Turner’s). It is odd that Turner did not seek to acquire the astonishing skill of Canaletto (whom he admired and in some respects learned from), a master of townscape who devised a remarkably quick and successful—if a little formulaic, not to say mechanical—method of doing the figures with which his canvases teem. Despite his debility, Turner put in bad staffage when it was not really necessary to have any. When he made a figure prominent—for instance, in his study of Bonaparte on a lonely beach with a howling dog—the result is disastrous.
WHEN WE SWITCH FROM TURNER to his older contemporary Hokusai Katsushika (1760–1849), who was born a generation earlier but survived to within a year or two of Turner’s death, we find an instructive comparison and contrast. The two men were creativity personified, in quantity, quality, and every other respect. Turner transformed landscape, during his lifetime, into the greatest of all visual arts, and left the world of painting permanently changed—indeed, artists all over the world are still learning from him (if they have the sense and sensitivity). Hokusai, in effect, created Japanese landscape painting from nothing, but he also portrayed Japanese life in the first half of the nineteenth century with dazzling graphic skill and an encyclopedic completeness that have never been equaled anywhere, throwing in Japan’s flora and fauna for good measure. Both men were born into artisanal poverty (Hokusai was the adopted son of a mirror maker). Neither had artistic forebears. Each learned to draw at the earliest possible age, about three, and contrived to do so incessantly, throughout a long, industrious life. Neither did anything else or wished to do anything else.
Both men were born in a capital city and were streetwise. But Turner’s London was the wealthiest city in the world, and he succeeded there early, becoming and remaining rich. By contrast, Hokusai’s Tokyo (then called Edo) was a huddled collection of villages just entering a period of intermediate technology. When Hokusai was five, the first large group of colored prints was published there, and it soon became possible for gifted, hardworking draftsmen to earn a living in the nascent publishing industry. Like Dürer, Hokusai began with woodblocks, but unlike Dürer he did not come from the wealthy bourgeoisie; he had no useful connections, no well-endowed wife. He worked fanatically hard all his life and made only a bare living. Whatever he did manage to save went to pay the gambling debts of a reckless son and a still worse grandson. During the “Tenpo crisis” of 1836–1838 (when Edo emptied as a result of plague and agricultural depression), he was reduced to hawking his wares in the street. There was a restless rootlessness to him, reflected in the fact that he changed his name, or rather the signature on his works, more than fifty times, more often than any other Japanese artist; and in the fact that during his life he lived at ninety-three different addresses.26 The names he used included Fusenko, meaning “he who does only one thing without being influenced by others”; “The Crazy Old Man of Katsushika”; and “Manji, the Old Man Mad about Drawing.” After he fell into a ditch, as a result of a loud clap of thunder, he signed himself “Thunder” for a time.
Like Dürer, whom he resembled in many ways, he was a combination of proper pride in his skills and modesty, fired by the determination to improve himself and do better. This comes out strongly in a letter to his publisher, accompanying a self-portrait at age eighty-three, with a curious snatch of autobiography:
From the age of six, I could draw forms and objects. By 50 I had turned out an infinite number of drawings. But I am not happy about anything I did before 70. Only at 73 did I begin to understand the true form and nature of birds, fish and plants. By 80 I had made a lot of progress. At 90 I will begin to get to the root of it all. By 100 I will have reached a Superior State in art, undefinable, and by 110, every dot and line will be living. I challenge those who live as long as me to see if I keep my word.27
Hokusai’s curriculum vitae, so far as we know it, tells a somewhat different story.28 When Hokusai, having learned woodcutting, began regular employment in the studio of Katsukawa, Shunshō, prints of actors (in which his master specialized) and courtesans, known as “beauties,” were almost the only salable images. They dominated Hokusai’s early work, and he became adept at them. But technology was changing and taste expanding. Western prints were creeping in, carried by Dutch traders. In 1783 the first copperplate etchings were made in Japan. From his earliest years as a trained printmaker, Hokusai strove to expand the subject matter of Japanese art. As he put it later, he “studied all schools.” But as art rose to its feet, the state, dominated by the authoritarian shogunate, put on the shackles. In 1791 censorship seals became obligatory on all prints, and state interference intensified throughout Hokusai’s lifetime until, in 1842, a full system of control was imposed and many types of prints (including “actors,” alleged to be satirical and subversive) were banned.
Print censorship was inextricably involved with government supervision of books, and illustrations for books formed Hokusai’s main output throughout his life. He did the pictures and decorations in 267 books (some multivolume), plus five published posthumously.29 Hokusai liked this work, particularly when he was in complete charge, but he was always keen on new experiences and pushing the frontiers. In 1804 he engaged publicly in what we would now call “performance art.” Before a crowd of gawking citizens, he strode over 350 square meters of paper, painting with a bamboo broom dipped in a pail of ink. The result was erected, upright, in a bamboo frame and revealed to be a gigantic image of Daruma, patriarch of Zen Buddhism. The exploit won Hokusai the title kigin, “eccentric artist.” Hokusai, like Turner, was not averse to being thought eccentric: it gave him greater freedom of action. Indeed, like Salvator Rosa before him, and Whistler, Dalí, and Warhol after him, he deliberately courted publicity and thrived on it. It enabled him to push forward into new territory.
In England, cheap published books of travel inspired by a search for the “picturesque,” and illustrated with prints which could be hand-colored, had become a leading form of literature since the 1760s, providing well-paid work for writers and artists alike. As we have noted, Turner benefited from this long-sustained fashion, especially when it spread to European subject matter. Illustrated topographical books began to appear in France, then in Germany. The fashion infected Japan, too. Shortly after 1800 the first landscapes were integrated into illustrations for popular novels. Hokusai seized eagerly on this development. Indeed, he gradually created the language of the Japanese landscape, partly following or adapting western models, partly inventing the visual vocabulary himself. Up to his day, Japanese artists had never drawn clouds, only mists. Hokusai brought in cloud formations, following western patterns, and combined clouds and mists. He also learned from western prints how to convey perspective in depth, how to capitalize on shading, and how to draw shadows. He also used western products, such as Prussian blue paint, which came as a godsend to him. He exercised extraordinary skill in adapting, rather than copying, western methods, and effected a synthesis of east and west that made his work attractive both to Europeans and to Americans, as well as to Japanese.30
Hokusai’s efforts to create a Japanese taste for landscape began to take effect early in the 1830s when his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (actually forty-eight prints) was published to great success. These were the first large-scale landscapes in the history of Japanese prints. He followed them with Going the Rounds of the Waterfalls in All Provinces (1832), which was an original idea of his own, since his method of drawing waterfalls owed nothing to the west.31 These topographic works were followed by Large Flowers, then Small Flowers, and then more topography: Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands (1832) and Remarkable Views of the Bridges of All Provinces (1834). Hokusai had a lifelong passion for bridges and drew them with wonderful skill and from
a stunning variety of angles. In 1835 came One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. Hokusai also invented seascapes, and in 1833 produced One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean. His Giant Wave, which he produced in a variety of forms, became his most famous image, indeed one of the most famous in all art, alongside Dürer’s Rhinoceros, Rembrandt’s Elephant, and The Scream by Edvard Munch. It, too, was an amalgam of western and Japanese pictorial idioms.32 Hokusai was also producing illustrated books of poems, and many of his works have poetic images, for instance the beautiful Snow, Moon, and Flowers of 1833. Like Turner, Hokusai saw landscape in terms of poetry, both classical and modern.
While these works were appearing, Hokusai was also engaged in a formidable undertaking: teaching ordinary middle-class or lower-middle-class Japanese to draw. His instructional drawings, of which fifteen volumes eventually appeared, are known as Manga, “random sketches.” Volume 1 was printed in 1812, when Hokusai was fifty-two, and seems to have been put together from his sketches by his pupils, of whom we know the names of fifteen.33 It averaged ten images per page, woodcuts printed in light and dark, shades of ink with pale rose tints. It concentrated on the human figure, was cheaply priced, and proved remarkably popular. So Hokusai, and his assistants, worked hard on the series. Volumes 2 and 3 appeared in 1815; 4 and 5 in 1816; 6, 7, 8, and 9 in 1817; and 10 in 1819. Thereafter the pace slackened: Volumes 11 and 12 had to wait till 1834; Volume 13 came posthumously the year after Hokusai died; and 14 (1875) and 15 (1878) were probably not mainly or at all by Hokusai.34
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