Page 53 - Studio International - June 1966

extreme sense of insecurity, which in turn brought about the political side, the views of his friend Fawkes, an ex-
his hoarding attitude to money. More, it underlay his treme radical, helped to bring his doubts and fears to a
obsession with the convulsive aspects of 'the face of head—while in the perspective lectures he was preparing
nature' (a typical phrase of eighteenth-century poetry we see that he hoped to work out his own ideas and put
after Thomson). His rejection of all forms of static design them effectively forward. However, his lack of any con-
and his deepening concern for the processes of nature ventional education made it difficult for him to construct
was something that went very deep down in him; but a logical system of argument. His discursive mind insisted
it was certainly driven remorselessly on by a fascination on shooting off all the while at new tangents; and if we
for upheaval, storm, cataclysm, which in the last resort add his mumbling and plebeian delivery, we can under-
cannot be separated from his family-experiences—even stand why his lectures were a total failure as far as the
if it must not be reduced to them. It is noteworthy that public was concerned. He grew convinced that it was no
his passionate interest in nature, in movement, with all use trying to communicate his ideas in ordinary ways;
that it implied aesthetically, made critics continually he retreated back on reliance on the aesthetic effect of
refer to him as mad. He must have found this quip es- his work, with the cryptic additions of verse-passages.
pecially hard to bear, and we can understand why he was But in order to get fully inside his mind, we need to add
observed with tears in his eyes as he read reviews. his broodings on the main eighteenth-century poets,
The price he paid for his continual drive into unknown whom he must have read from an early age. Thomson's
dimensions was a dogging anxiety and sense of uncer- Seasons and Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination he must
tainty. The clues to his personality are above all to be have known almost by heart. Here for clues we have the
found in the 1808-12 sketchbooks with their poems and quotations he put under his pictures, the quotations and
other scribbles. We see that he was unhappy in love, and references in lectures and marginal notes to books, the
felt crushed and outcast as a result of the bitter campaign allusions in his own verse. Thomson was his first and
led against him by the connoisseurs. He had lost all the dearest love. He gained from him the conviction of
certainties with which he began, doubting the role of nature as made up of dynamic processes; and all his life
Britain and moving to the position that unrealized con- passages from the Seasons were closely linked with paint-
flicts undermined men's heroic endeavours; and he was ings of crucial importance in his development. Akenside
desperately seeking to clarify his mind on aesthetic issues strongly affected his whole theory of art's function. In
and achieve the power of defiantly standing alone. On estimating the forces that drove Turner on his adven-

J. M. W. Turner Above
J. M. W. Turner
Pencil sketch c. 1794, possibly Turner's mother
Colour Structure
Watercolour Copyright: The British Museum

Opposite
J. M. W. Turner Right
From The Almanac of the Month, June, 1846
Yacht approaching the Coast 1840-45
Copyright: British Museum
Oil on canvas 40+ x 56 in. Tate Gallery