TURNER'S " SOUTHERN COAST."* MESSRS. VIRTUE have taken in hand
the republication of certain of those works of picturesque topography for which Turner made drawings, and of which the original plates have come into their possession. The plates, of course, are not what they once were; but those who wish to possess those works, and cannot afford, say, £90 for a first-rate set of proofs, will no doubt be glad to have a reasonably good set of im- pressions at a reasonable price. The Seine and the Loire and the Richmandshire have already appeared, and are now followed by the Southern Coast, which, in the original order of production, fell between the other two. The present edition omits the drawings by other artists than Turner which appeared in the original work, and the letter- press to that, written by Mr. W. Combe, author of Dr. Syntax, is superseded by short notes about the various places. It appears that Turner himself was anxious to write the descriptions, and did send in a specimen. This was as difficult to construe as his famous lectures on perspective, and Mr. Combe, to whom the manuscript was entrusted for correction, wrote to the publisher to say that Mr. Turner's account was the most extraordinary composition he had ever read. "It is impossible," he adds, "for me to correct it, for in some parts I do not understand it." He did his best, but was interrupted by a note from the publisher requesting him " not to insert a syllable of Mr. Turner's writing." Turner seems, baulked in prose, to have wreaked himself on verse; and one of his longest excursions that way is descriptive of the Southern Coast scenes. For instance, here is the drawing of Poole :—
"A sandy heath, whose deep-worn road Sustains the groaning waggon's ponderous load; This branches southwards at the point of Thule, Forms the harbour of the town of Poole."
The correspondence referred to above, is given by Mr. Huish in his introduction to the present issue, with other facts about the business arrangements between Turner and his publishers.
The original promoters were the brothers Cooke, who also engraved the greater number of the plates. The Cookes were not among the best line-engravers after Turner, and in his next large undertaking of the kind, the England and Wales, while he employed Miller, Wallis, and Goodall, who engraved one or two of the plates for this volume, he entrusted none of the plates to the Cookes. The Southern Coast, like the Liber Studiorum„ which was partly a contemporary in issue, came out irregularly in parts. The issue began in 1814, and was not complete till 1826, the publication changing hands in the interval.
Mr. Huish also recalls the fact that it was while. Turner was making the drawings for this series that Mr. Cyrus Redding met him. Readers of Thornbury's scrap-book on the life of Turner will remember that some of its most vivid pages are the notes Redding put together of his observation of Turner's ways and methods. There is, for instance, that description of the boating-party in rough weather, when almost everybody else was incapable, but Turner sat imper- turbable, with the waves breaking over him and the wind
• The Southern Coast of England. Illustrated by 40 Line-Engravings, after Drawings by J. M. W. Turner, B.A. With an Introduction by Marcus B. Huish, LL.B. London : Virtue and Co. 1892.
tearing at his paper, making what seemed to be written notes- rather than a sketch. The sketches, Redding tells us, were generally a set of summary scratches that would have borne little meaning to any one but the author,—" a kind of short- hand, which he deciphered in his studio." The well-known Crossing the Brook. and St. Hawes, in the National Gallery, are among the few large pictures he made from materials. collected on this expedition.
In reviewing the reissue of the Richmondshire, we drew attention to the limits imposed on an artist by this- kind of work. The necessity for making in each case a recognisable view of a place that local pride or tourist curiosity can identify, is a serious handicap ; the scene that to an artist would be of pictorial importance, may have no traditional or other claim to be written about or visited; and:• of purely picturesque material, it is rather the sudden and unusual that is popular than the strictly beautiful. Turner,. it is true, had elaborated a most cunning armoury of devices for getting the better of a bad subject ; he made accomplices of sun and clouds, and seized on all the accidental element of foreground objects and figures to make his uncompromising subject play hide-and-seek in the general pictorial tangle. But it is a method that has its limits ; and often, as one admires particular bits of by-play, one becomes all the more keenly aware of the discomfortable struggle the painter playing topographer has been reduced to. It is• like some singer who is down on the programme to render " Home, Sweet Home " to a mixed audience. There is the gallery, eager to have its heart warmed by the subject, and its sense of recognition tickled by a melody it has heard before ; but there also are the stalls, to be appeased by some display of art,—hence trills and excursions disguising a threadbare theme.. So does Turner affect to play " Home, Sweet Home" about this country, while all the while appealing, by roulade and varia- tion, to other than the topographic sense, and with fluctuating; success. These considerations still hold of the Southern Coast, as they did of inland subjects, but not so strongly, because in a coast-scene the accidental element is so much more freely present. There is always the variable sea to play with; and with less challenge than a grove of trees, the floating masses and lines of shipping can be scattered and collected to hide an obtrusive mistake in the town, or disguise an indiscretion in the configuration of the coast. In the Southern Coast, Turner has redressed the carelessness of Nature with very varying. success : sometimes he seems to have been quite paralysed, as- in the Weymouth, where it is difficult to understand what he would be at with a collection of objects that is certainly not a picture ; but, on the other hand, in the Mount Edgcu,mbe he has one of those naturally fine dispositions of coast heaped up behind his sea, which he knows how to enrich in effect by boats wallowing half-buried in a coil of waves, contrasted? with a steady-riding three-decker. This is the kind of subject one imagines him working out, commission or no commission.. Of others, one prefers to doubt.
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