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CONTENTS
HOW TO USE
INTRODUCTION
Where to go
Author picks
When to go
Things not to miss
Itineraries
Wildlife
BASICS
Getting there
Getting around
Accommodation
Food and drink
Health
The media
Holidays and festivals
National parks and reserves
Outdoor activities
Travelling with children
Studying and volunteering
Travel essentials
THE GUIDE
San José
The Valle Central and the highlands
Limón Province and the Caribbean coast
The Zona Norte
Guanacaste
The Central Pacific and southern Nicoya
The Zona Sur
CONTEXTS
History
Landscape and habitat
Conservation and tourism
Books
Spanish
Glossary
MAPS AND SMALL PRINT
HOW TO USE THIS ROUGH
GUIDE EBOOK
This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and
easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most
of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a
great travel companion when you’re on the road.

From the table of contents, you can click straight to the main
sections of the ebook. Start with the Introduction, which gives you a
flavour of Costa Rica, with details of what to see, what not to miss,
itineraries and more - everything you need to get started. This is
followed by Basics, with pre-departure tips and practical information,
such as flight details and health advice. The guide chapters offer
comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the whole of the country,
including area highlights and full-colour maps featuring all the sights
and listings. Finally, Contexts fills you in on history, landscape and
literature and includes a handy Language section.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed
in the dedicated map section, accessible from the table of contents.
Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to
see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. There are also
thumbnails below more detailed maps – in these cases, you can opt
to “zoom left/top” or “zoom right/bottom” or view the full map. The
screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing
enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates,
too.

Throughout the guide, we’ve flagged up our favourite places – a

perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric café, a special restaurant – with
the “author pick” icon . You can select your own favourites and
create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues
and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible
access to everything you’ll need for your time away.
INTRODUCTION TO COSTA
RICA
Democratic and prosperous, Costa Rica is Central America’s
biggest tourist destination. The draw is not ancient
Mesoamerican ruins or Spanish colonial history, but nature;
the country is one of the most biodiverse areas on the
planet, an ecological treasure-trove whose wide range of
habitats – lush rainforests and untouched beaches,
steaming volcanoes and dense mangrove swamps –
supports an incredible variety of wildlife, from those
loveable sloths and tiny, fluorescent green frogs to brightly
plumed macaws and toucans. And it’s also peaceful; with its
long democratic tradition Costa Rica is an oasis of political
stability.
zoom left zoom right
FACT FILE
The Republic of Costa Rica lies on the Central American
isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, consisting of
a mountainous backbone – known as the Continental
Divide, which rises to 3820m at the summit of Cerro Chirripó,
its highest point – flanked by low-lying coastal strips. The
country’s area of 51,100 square kilometres (which includes
the 24 square kilometres of Isla del Coco, 535km southwest of
the mainland) makes it slightly larger than the Netherlands,
slightly smaller than West Virginia.
Costa Rica’s population is largely of Spanish extraction,
though there’s a substantial community of English-speaking
Costa Ricans of African origin along the Caribbean coast, as
well as 64,000 indigenous people. Costa Rica is a young
country: out of its population of 4.8 million, around a quarter
are aged under 15; men currently enjoy a life expectancy of
77, women 82.
The country’s main exports are coffee and bananas,
though in recent years income from these products has been
overtaken by that from tourism. Despite widespread poverty
(around twenty percent of the population), the free and
compulsory primary education system means that the country
boasts a literacy rate of 96 percent, the best in Central
America.
Costa Rica’s wildlife is mindboggling: the country is home to
around 250 species of mammal (including ten percent of the
world’s bat population); over 400 varieties of reptile and
amphibian; nearly 900 species of bird; and a staggering
250,000 types of insect, including a quarter of the world’s
known butterflies.
Though this idyllic image might not do justice to the full complexities
of contemporary Costa Rican society, it’s true that the country’s
complete absence of military forces (the army was abolished in
1948) stands in sharp contrast to the brutal internal conflicts that
have ravaged its neighbours. This reputation for peacefulness has
been an important factor in the spectacular growth of Costa Rica’s
tourist industry – almost three million people visit the country
annually, mainly from North America. Most of all, though, it is Costa
Rica’s outstanding natural beauty, and the wildlife that accompanies
it, that has made it one of the world’s prime ecotourism
destinations, with visitors flocking here to hike trails through ancient
rainforest, peer into active volcanoes or explore the Americas’ last
vestiges of high-altitude cloudforest, home to jaguars, spider
monkeys and resplendent quetzals.
Admittedly, tourism has made Costa Rica less of an “authentic”
experience than many travellers would like: some towns seemingly
exist purely to provide visitors with a place to sleep and a tour to
take, while previously remote spots are being bought up by foreign
entrepreneurs. And as more hotels open, malls go up and potholed
tracks get tarmacked over, there’s no doubt that Costa Rica is
experiencing a significant social change, with the darker side of
outside involvement in the country – sex tourism, conflicts between
foreign property-owners and poorer locals and, in particular, drug
trafficking – all on the increase.
Costa Rica’s economy is the most diversified in Central America,
and has become even more so since the country finally entered into
the then-controversial Central American Free Trade Agreement
(CAFTA) in 2009, enhancing its economic ties with the US in the
process. Computer processors and medical supplies now sit
alongside coffee and bananas as key exports, although the country’s
revenue from tourism still outstrips everything else. It is thanks to
this money, in particular, that Costa Ricans – or Ticos, as they are
generally known – now enjoy the highest rates of literacy, health
care, education and life expectancy on the isthmus. That said, Costa
Rica is certainly not the wealthy, globalized country that it’s often
portrayed to be – a significant percentage of people still live below
the poverty line. While it is modernizing fast, its character continues
to be rooted in distinct local cultures, from the Afro-Caribbean
province of Limón, with its Creole cuisine, games and patois, to the
traditional ladino values embodied by the sabanero, or cowboys, of
Guanacaste. Above all, the country still has the highest rural
population density in Latin America, and society continues to revolve
around the twin axes of countryside and family: wherever you go,
you’re sure to be left with mental snapshots of rural life, whether it
be horsemen trotting by on dirt roads, coffee-plantation day-
labourers setting off to work in the mists of the highlands or
avocado-pickers cycling home at sunset.

BIODIVERSITY UNDER PROTECTION

Despite its small size, Costa Rica possesses over five percent of the
world’s total biodiversity, around 165 times the amount of life
forms it might otherwise be expected to support. This is in part
due to its position as a transition zone between temperate North
and tropical South America, and also thanks to its complex system
of interlocking microclimates, created by differences in
topography and altitude. This biological abundance is now
safeguarded by one of the world’s most enlightened and dedicated
conservation programmes – about 25 percent of Costa Rica’s land
is protected, most of it through the country’s extensive network of
national parks and wildlife refuges.
Costa Rica’s national parks range from the tropical jungle
lowlands of Corcovado on the Osa Peninsula to the grassy volcanic
uplands of Rincón de la Vieja in Guanacaste, an impressive and
varied range of terrain that has enhanced the country’s popularity
with ecotourists. Outside the park system, however, land is assailed
by deforestation – ironically, there are now no more significant
patches of forest left anywhere in the country outside of protected
areas.
VOLCÁN IRAZÚ
Where to go
Although almost everyone passes through it, hardly anyone falls in
love with San José, Costa Rica’s capital. Though often dismissed as
an ugly urban sprawl, “Chepe” enjoys a dramatic setting amid
jagged mountain peaks and is home to the country’s finest
museums, as well as some excellent cafés and restaurants, a lively
university district and a burgeoning arts scene. The surrounding
Valle Central, Costa Rica’s agricultural heartland and coffee-
growing region, supports the vast majority of the country’s
population and features several of its most impressive volcanoes,
including steaming Volcán Poás and Volcán Irazú, its deep-green
crater lake set in a strange lunar landscape high above the regional
capital of Cartago.
While nowhere in the country is further than nine hours’ drive from
San José, the far north and the far south are less visited than other
regions. The broad alluvial plains of the Zona Norte are dominated
by the now-dormant cone of Volcán Arenal, which looms large over
the friendly tourist hangout of La Fortuna, while the dense rainforest
of the Sarapiquí region harbours monkeys, poison-dart frogs and
countless species of bird, including the endangered great green
macaw. Up by the border with Nicaragua, the seasonal wetlands of
the Refugio Nacional de Vida Silvestre Caño Negro provide a haven
for water birds, along with gangs of basking caimans.
In the northwest, cowboy culture dominates the cattle-ranching
province of Guanacaste, with exuberant ragtag rodeos and large
cattle haciendas occupying the hot, baked landscape that surrounds
the attractive regional capital of Liberia. The province’s beaches are
some of the best – and, in parts, most developed – in the country,
with Sámara and Nosara, on the Nicoya Peninsula, providing picture-
postcard scenery and superb sunsets.
Further down the Pacific coast, the surf-oriented sands of
Montezuma and Santa Teresa/Mal País, on the southern Nicoya
Peninsula, draw travellers looking to kick back for a few days (or
weeks), while popular Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica’s
smallest national park, also enjoys a sublime ocean setting and has
equally tempting beaches. Further inland, nestled in the cool
highlands of the Tilarán Cordillera, Monteverde has become the
country’s number-one tourist attraction, pulling in the visitors who
flock here to walk through some of the most enchanting cloudforest
in the Americas.
Limón Province, on the Caribbean coast, is markedly different to
the rest of the country. It’s home to the descendants of the Afro-
Caribbeans who came to Costa Rica at the end of the nineteenth
century to work on the San José–Limón railroad – their language
(Creole English), religion (Protestantism) and West Indian traditions
remain relatively intact to this day. The reason most visitors venture
here, however, is for Parque Nacional Tortuguero, and the three
species of marine turtle that lay their eggs on its beaches each year.
Travellers looking to venture off the beaten track will be happiest in
the rugged Zona Sur, home to Cerro Chirripó, the highest point in
the country, and, further south on the outstretched feeler of the Osa
Peninsula, Parque Nacional Corcovado, which protects the last
significant area of tropical wet forest on the Pacific coast of the
isthmus. Corcovado is probably the best destination in the country
for walkers – and also one of the few places where you have a
fighting chance of seeing some of the more exotic wildlife for which
Costa Rica is famed, such as the scarlet macaw.
RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE
Costa Rica is set in one of the most geologically active areas on
Earth. Ringed by the convergence of five major tectonic plates, it
sits on the western edge of the Caribbean Plate, at the point where
it slides beneath the Cocos Plate; this subduction (where one plate
sinks into the Earth’s mantle) formed a chain of volcanoes that
stretches 1500km from Guatemala to northern Panama. Costa Rica
itself is home to some 112 volcanoes, though only five (including
the major visitor attractions of Volcán Poás and Volcán Irazú) are
considered active – Volcán Arenal, for so long the most active
volcano in the country, has been in a resting phase since July
2010.
The ongoing friction between the Caribbean and Cocos plates
causes around 1500 earthquakes in Costa Rica each year,
although only a small proportion of these are actually felt and
fewer still are strong enough to cause significant damage – the
worst incident in recent times was the earthquake that struck near
Cinchona, 50km north of San José, in January 2009, when forty
people were killed.
RAINFOREST IN PARQUE NACIONAL VOLCÁN ARENAL
When to go
Although Costa Rica lies between eight and eleven degrees north of
the equator, temperatures, governed by the vastly varying altitudes,
are by no means universally high, and can plummet to below
freezing at higher altitudes. Local microclimates predominate and
make weather unpredictable, though to an extent you can depend
upon the two-season rule. In the dry season (roughly mid-Nov to
April), most areas are just that: dry all day, with occasional northern
winds blowing in during January or February and cooling things off;
otherwise, you can depend on sunshine and warm temperatures. In
the wet season (roughly May to mid-Nov), you’ll have sunny
mornings and afternoon rains. The rains are heaviest in September
and October and, although they can be fierce, will impede you from
travelling only in the more remote areas of the country – the Nicoya
Peninsula and Zona Sur especially – where dirt roads become
impassable to all but the sturdiest 4WDs.
Costa Rica is generally booked solid during the peak season, the
North American winter months, when bargains are few and far
between. The crowds peter out after Easter, but return again to an
extent in July and August. Travellers who prefer to play it by ear are
much better off coming during the low or rainy season
(euphemistically called the “green season”), when many hotels offer
discounts. The months of November, April (after Easter) and May are
the best times to visit, when the rains have either just started or
just died off, and the country is refreshed, green and relatively
untouristy.
< Back to Introduction
FROM LEFT SEA-KAYAKING, REFUGIO DE VIDA SILVESTRE CURÚ; EATING AT A
SODA; BIRDWATCHING, PARQUE NACIONAL PALO VERDE

AUTHOR PICKS
Our authors have tramped around towns and trekked through
jungles, rafted down rivers and paddled up canals, and consumed
more coffee than is probably good for them. Here are a few of their
favourite things…
Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles In a country not
necessarily known for its architectural heritage, Cartago’s showpiece
church is a stunner, with a gilded interior to match.
Time with the OTS Spend a few days with the Organization of
Tropical Studies at their biological stations in La Selva or Palo Verde
and you’ll see why their guides are rated some of the best in the
country.
Little-known beaches Escape the crowds at the gorgeous
beaches of Playa Junquillal in Guanacaste and Ojochal’s Playa
Tortuga on the southern Pacific coast.
Sodas Basic, cheap and unfailingly friendly, Costa Rica’s ubiquitous
sodas are a great place to tuck into a plate of gallo pinto or a
traditional casado. Try La Casona Típica in San José, Soda Luz in
Orosí or Johanna in Golfito.
Off-the-beaten-track reserves The most famous national parks
can get crowded in peak season, so try Parque Nacional Juan Castro
Blanco, take a multiday hike in the Bosque Eterno de los Niños or
visit Parque Nacional Los Quetzales, home of the iconic resplendent
quetzal.
Kayaking around Curú There are few more enjoyable ways of
watching wildlife than paddling a kayak through the limpid waters of
the southern Nicoya Peninsula, camping on beaches and spotting
monkeys, sloths and seabirds along the way.
Traditional cafés San José’s traditional cafés are wonderfully
atmospheric places for people-watching and sampling Costa Rican
coffee. Try the elegant Alma de Café inside the Teatro Nacional,
rustic Café Rojo or colonial-style Café Hacienda Real in Escazú.

Our author recommendations don’t end here. We’ve flagged up our

favourite places – a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric café, a
special restaurant – throughout the Guide, highlighted with the
symbol.

< Back to Introduction

23 THINGS NOT TO MISS
It’s not possible to see everything that Costa Rica has to
offer in one trip – and we don’t suggest you try. What
follows is a selective and subjective taste of the country’s
highlights: stunning national parks, brooding volcanoes,
gorgeous beaches and exhilarating outdoor activities. All
highlights have a reference to take you straight into the
Guide, where you can find out more.
1 Trekking in Parque Nacional Corcovado Straddling the Osa
Peninsula in the far south of the country, this biologically rich,
coastal rainforest is one of Costa Rica’s finest destinations for
walking and wildlife-spotting.
2 Teatro Nacional, San José Central America’s grandest theatre,
extravagantly done out in gold and marble and built in imitation of
the Palais Garnier in Paris.
3 Turtle-watching View some of the thousands of turtles –
leatherback, hawksbill, olive ridley and green – that come ashore to
lay their eggs each year, and, if you’re lucky, watch their hatchlings’
perilous journeys back to sea.
4 Volcán Arenal The lava may have stopped spewing, but Arenal is
still a magnificent sight, and the surrounding area is one giant
adventure playground – soak in volcanic hot springs, zipwire through
the forest canopy or sign up for any number of other outdoor
activities.
5 Parque Nacional Santa Rosa This magnificent park protects a
rare stretch of dry tropical rainforest – and the wildlife that calls it
home.
6 Indigenous Costa Rica Learn how the Maleku use medicinal
plants, shop for crafts at a women’s co-operative in the Gulf of
Nicoya or take a walking tour with the Bribrí – just some of the ways
of gaining a better insight into Costa Rica’s remaining indigenous
communities.
7 Museo de Oro Precolombino One of the country’s best
museums, with a dazzling display that features more than 1500 pre-
Columbian gold pieces.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 In 1826 he commenced what was to have been his magnum opus in line
engraving—his “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” In this ill-fated
work, which was from first to last commercially a failure, he proposed to
depict every feature of English and Welsh scenery—cathedral cities, country
towns, ancient castles, ruined abbeys, rivers, mountains, moors, lakes and
sea-coast; every hour of day—dawn, midday, sunset, twilight, moonlight;
every kind of weather and atmosphere. The hundred or more drawings which
he made for the work are mostly elaborately finished and of high character.
Some are perhaps over-elaborated; in some the figures are carelessly and at
times disagreeably drawn; but for imaginative, poetical treatment, masterly
composition, and exquisite colour, the best are unsurpassed. I have ventured
to say elsewhere, that in my opinion there are at least a dozen drawings in
the “England and Wales” series any one of which would alone have been
sufficient to have placed its author in the highest rank of landscape art. Two
of the series are represented here—Mr. Schwann’s beautiful Launceston
(Plate XV.) is the earlier (1827); the striking and very attractive Cowes (Plate
XVIII.), belonging to Mr. Yates, is a few years later. Turner was paid at the
rate of sixty to seventy guineas apiece—to-day they are worth from one
thousand to two thousand five hundred guineas each.
A new phase in his water-colour art of 1830-1836 calls for notice, viz., his
numerous small drawings for vignette illustrations, the first and the most
important of which were for the far-famed plates of Rogers’s “Poems” and
“Italy.” The drawings for these are markedly different from any of his
previous work, and many of them strike what I cannot but regard as an
unpleasant note. Marvels of execution, delicate, highly imaginative, and
poetical in feeling as they are, they are often strangely forced and
extravagant in colour. And this applies to nearly all his drawings for
vignettes. Probably his reason for thus falsifying his colour was connected
with the form of engraving, as at the same time he was producing some of
his finest and sanest work for the “England and Wales,” “Turner’s Annual
Tours” (now better known as the “Rivers of France”) and other engravings
of ordinary (not vignette) shape. Whatever may have been his motive, it
appears to me that owing to this unnatural colouring, the exquisitely
engraved vignettes themselves are in many cases finer than the drawings for
them.
Many, however, of the small drawings of this time are superb, including
several of those on grey paper. In the “Rivers of France” series, Jumièges,
Caudebec, Saint Denis, Rouen from St. Catherine’s Hill, and The Light
Towers of the Hêve (all in the National Gallery), are masterpieces, as are also
many of the illustrations to “Scott’s Poetical and Prose Works.” In Turner’s
later years he frequently did not sell his drawings for engravings, but lent
them to the publishers, charging usually five to seven guineas apiece. He
kept many in his possession up to his death, as he did nearly the whole of his
sketches. One day he brought the sixty drawings for the “Rivers of France”
to Ruskin, rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them to him for twenty-five
guineas apiece. To Ruskin’s grief he could not induce his father to spend the
money. In later years he tells us he had to pay £1,000 for the seventeen
which he gave to Oxford!
A long succession of books were illustrated by Turner between 1830 and
1836, containing in all nearly three hundred and fifty plates, mostly of small
size. When it is remembered that he also closely supervised the smallest
details in the engraving of each one, and that at the same time he was
engaged on a number of oil pictures of the highest importance many of
which were finished and exhibited, and others left in various stages of
completion (including most of those recently added to the Tate Gallery), it
may be doubted if such a volume of work was ever before produced in six
years by any painter. With 1838, however, his work for the engravers
practically came to an end. He was now a rich man and able to refuse
tempting offers for the pictures which he had determined to leave to the
nation; as for example his Old Téméraire, which a wealthy Midland
manufacturer is said to have offered to cover with sovereigns.
From 1838 to 1845, when his health began to fail, he spent an increasing
time each year on the Continent, and it was during this period that his water-
colour art passed into what many regard as its highest, as it was its latest
phase. I refer especially to the magnificent Sketches of this time, the large
majority of which are in the National Gallery. He revisited Venice, which
had cast her enchantment on him in earlier years, and he returned again and
again to the Lake of Lucerne, which, after Yorkshire, was probably, up to the
last, of all places in the world the dearest to his heart. It would be difficult to
say how many times he drew the town, the lake, the mountains, and
especially the Righi. There are the Red Righi, the Blue Righi, the Dark Righi,
the Pale Righi, and a hundred other versions—each different, each a ‘vision
of delight.’ He made drawings also in many neighbouring parts of
Switzerland, Piedmont, and Savoy.
 The sketches and drawings of this period have all the old delicacy,
combined with a greater breadth of treatment, and an amazing wealth and
range of colour. Sixty years’ experience had given Turner’s hand—which up
to the very last retained its extraordinary delicacy and certainty—a
marvellous cunning. In many cases the drawings were swiftly painted, in
others carefully stippled in details; usually with a dry brush worked over
body-colour. Sir Hickman Bacon’s beautiful Swiss Lake (Plate XXII.),
Lausanne (Plate XXV.), The Seelisberg, Moonlight (Plate XXVIII.), Mr.
Ralph Brocklebank’s highly finished Schaffhausen (Plate XXIX.), and Tell’s
Chapel, Fluelen (Plate XXX.)—which Ruskin believed to be Turner’s last
sketch on the Continent—along with most of the reproductions from the
National Gallery, are examples of this time.
This last phase of Turner’s art was, however, at the time neither
understood nor appreciated, probably owing largely to the new development
which had recently taken place in his oil pictures. In these he had set
himself, in his old age, the last and hardest tasks of his life—the painting of
pure light, of swift movement, of the tumultuous, elemental forces of Nature.
Some of the Venice subjects, the marvellous Snow Storm at Sea, and the
Rain, Steam and Speed, were entirely misunderstood and ridiculed.
“Blackwood’s Magazine” led the attack, and “Punch” and Thackeray added
their satire. No doubt several of his late oil pictures were far-fetched in
subject, fantastic in treatment, and eccentric in colour. Probably, also, no one
knew better than he that he had not reached the goal of his ambition; but he
also knew that his critics understood his aims as little as they did the
difficulties which he had to encounter in striving to reach them, and the old
man felt the attacks keenly. Ruskin tells us that he came one evening to his
father’s house in Denmark Hill, after an especially bitter onslaught on the
Snow Storm at Sea—Vessel in Distress off Harwich, of 1842, which the
critics had described as “soapsuds and whitewash.” Ruskin heard him, sitting
in his chair by the fire, muttering to himself at intervals “Soapsuds and
whitewash,” again and again and again. “At last,” he says, “I went to him
asking, ‘Why he minded what they said?’ Then he burst out ‘Soapsuds and
whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like. I
wish they’d been in it.’” As a matter of fact, Turner had actually been on
board the boat at the time lashed to the mast, at the risk of his life.
Nor has the work of his later years always been understood in our days.
Not many years ago a distinguished German oculist read a paper at the
Royal Institution which was afterwards published in which he endeavoured
to prove that what he considered eccentricities of colour in Turner’s later oil
pictures were due—not to his attempts to paint the unpaintable—but to a
senile affection of his eyes, which caused an unnatural distortion of his
vision to yellow in everything. But Professor Liebreich can hardly have been
aware that although the oil pictures upon which he rested his theory, being
mainly attempts to depict objects or scenery seen in full sunlight, necessarily
tended towards yellow as their prevailing colour, yet at the very same time,
and up to his death, Turner was daily producing the sanest, most delicate,
most refined water-colour drawings in the palest as well as the deepest tones
of every colour on his palette! All the Swiss, Venetian and other sketches of
1838 to 1845, which are the crowning glory of the Water-Colour Rooms in
Trafalgar Square, were executed during the period when, according to
Professor Liebreich, Turner’s sight was permanently and hopelessly
affected! No doubt he recognised that water-colour was unsuited as a
medium for his new aim at painting pure light, and confined himself
accordingly, for such subjects, to oil painting.
The attacks of the critics, however, had had their effect on the public, and
Turner in his later years began to find difficulty in selling even his drawings.
Ruskin, in his “Notes on his Drawings Exhibited at the Fine Arts Society,
1878,” tells with inimitable charm and pathos how the old painter, returning
in the winter of 1842 from a tour in Switzerland, brought back with him a
series of important sketches, fourteen of which he placed, as was his custom,
in the hands of Griffiths, his agent, with a view to the latter’s obtaining
commissions for finished drawings of each. Although the price asked for a
large finished drawing was only eighty guineas, and notwithstanding the
great beauty of the sketches, nine commissions only could be obtained.
Ruskin, his father, Munro of Novar, and Bicknell of Herne Hill, all chose
one or more, but other former patrons saw in them what they regarded as a
new style, and declined them. Thirty years after, Ruskin—with pride for
Turner’s sake, he tells us—sold his Lucerne Town for a thousand guineas; it
has since changed hands at two thousand. The Lake of Constance, which at
the time no one would buy, was given to Griffiths in lieu of his commission;
it fetched two thousand three hundred guineas at Christie’s in 1907! After
1845 Turner’s health gradually failed; he continued to work at his oil
paintings up to his death in 1851, but, so far as is known, he executed
comparatively few water-colour sketches or drawings during his last years.
 Little has hitherto been said as to Turner’s technique in water-colour
although the subject is one of great interest, but, unfortunately, my point of
view is solely that of a student, and technique can only be adequately dealt
with by an artist. Much valuable information, however, on the question will
be found in Redgrave’s “Century of Painters,” Vol. I., and in Roget’s
“History of the Old Water-Colour Society.” From the first he was a great
innovator, choosing his materials and often inventing his methods without
regard to custom, precedent, or anything but the attainment of the precise
effect which he desired at the time. Signs of scraping, spongeing, the use of
blotting-paper, etc., are constantly to be seen in his drawings. In some,
including one in my own possession, the marks of his thumb are distinctly
visible in places. But the result always justified the means employed! With
his oil pictures, especially those painted after 1830, his experiments, as we
know, were often disastrous in their ultimate effects, but it is extremely rare
to find any of his water-colours which have suffered in the smallest degree
when they have been properly kept. But alas, as has already been pointed
out, only too many, and amongst those some of the finest, have been, and
still are being, irretrievably damaged and changed by continual exposure to
light, both in Public Galleries and on the walls of their owners.

In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured to avoid adding to the already

sufficient volume of ‘æsthetic criticism’ of Turner’s art, and I shall confine
myself now to the briefest summary of what seem to me the distinctive
features of his work in water-colour.
What first strikes one in his drawings, apart from their technical skill, is
their individuality; they always stand out amongst the work of other artists,
however great. The chief cause of this is hard to define, but I should say that
it is that they almost invariably possess a certain quality of imaginativeness,
of what is termed ‘poetry.’ No matter how simple was his subject, he
instinctively saw it from its most beautiful, its most romantic side. If it had
little or no beauty or romance of its own, he would still throw an indefinable
charm round it by some gleam of light, some veiling mist, some far-away
distance, some alluring sense of mystery, of ‘infinity.’ And Turner was a true
poet, although he had little enough of the look or the manners of one.
Throughout his life he was a reader and a voluminous writer of poetry, but
his want of education debarred him from ever expressing himself coherently
in verse. The same cause, together with his lack of a sense of humour,
interfered also with the perfect expression of his art, especially in his
classical and religious pictures, and prevented him from seeing what was
incongruous or at times unpleasing in them. But only a poet deep-down
could have won as he did from Nature her most intimate secrets; could so
have caught and so inimitably have portrayed her every mood and charm.
And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur of
Nature—a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as Shelley’s—which is
perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring attractiveness of Turner’s work.
Without it, he would never have toiled as he did all his life, from dawn to
dark, year in and year out, observing and recording in those nineteen
thousand studies every kind of natural scenery, every changing contour of
mist and cloud, every differing form and structure of tree, every movement
or reflection in water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.
Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be
seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always
explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic, yet
it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or perfect design do
not by themselves attain. By the modern school of landscapists this would
probably be regarded as a defect or even a heresy. Pictorial art, they say,
should not be ‘literary,’ should not be intellectual. But to me it seems that the
work of the highest artists—of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein,
Rembrandt, for example—almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well
as to the senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or
unintentionally, speaks to mind. As has been well said apropos of Ruskin’s
writings on Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the
painter himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry
more readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be
limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony between
the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite range of
significance and supports an infinite variety of interpretations.”
After Turner had attained manhood—say from 1807 onwards—his
creative power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more
evident in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter,
more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative,
topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his drawings,
notably in his Liber Studiorum (1807-1819). Leaving aside actual landscapes
such as Solway Moss, Ben Arthur, etc., his creative, imaginative power is
seen in such subjects as Æsacus and Hesperie, Peat Bog, Procris and
Cephalus, The Lost Sailor and other plates of the Liber. It also appears from
time to time in later drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the
astonishing theory that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end
of his life he was not a “creative” artist, merely an illustrator, and this idea
has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German
writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The painter of
The Frosty Morning, and Crossing the Brook (National Gallery); of The
Guardship at the Nore (Lady Wantage); of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (National Gallery); of The Shipwreck
(National Gallery), and a dozen other great Sea Pictures, not a “creative”
artist? The draughtsman of Chryses (Mrs. T. Ashton), The Land’s End
(“Southern Coast”), The Longships Lighthouse (“England and Wales”), The
Alps at Daybreak and The Vision of Columbus (“Rogers’s Poems”), The
Plains of Troy (“Byron’s Poems”), The Mustering of the Warrior Angels
(“Milton’s Poems”)? If these, and scores of others which might be added, are
not examples of “creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found?
Is Martin’s Plains of Heaven to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such
thing as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need
arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?
Of Turner’s technical skill in water-colour, there is no need to speak; his
command of his material was absolute and has never been equalled. And his
sense of design, of balance, of rhythm—of what is termed “style”—was
always present. He had caught it at the outset of his career from his close
study of Richard Wilson, who had inherited it as a tradition from Caspar
Poussin, Claude, and the painters of the seventeenth century. Rarely is there
anything tentative about his drawings. They are decisive—the design was
almost invariably seen by him as a whole, from the beginning. Often his
work did not please him, and if it was finished it was discarded; if
unfinished, it was carried no further—as may be seen in several of the
drawings recently (1908) exhibited at the National Gallery, and a good many
of the oil pictures at the Tate Gallery. He was also emphatically a great
colourist—one of the greatest; during the latter half of his life he thought in
colour, and composed in colour, and it was with him an integral part of every
design. That is why his drawings can never be adequately reproduced by
ordinary photography. During middle life, as has been pointed out, his colour
at times became forced and florid, but it was never more pure, never more
beautiful, never more noble, than in his latest sketches.
At times, no doubt, Turner’s water-colours, especially those executed
between 1820 and 1836, have a tendency to undue complexity of design, and
to overcrowding both of subject and lights. Possibly to some extent this was
due to the prevailing standard of English art and English taste at that time.
Then, perhaps even more than now, high finish was too often unduly insisted
on. But you will never find too high finish or overcrowding in the drawings
which he made for himself! His figures, also, were frequently unsatisfactory.
It was not that he could not draw them—at first they were dainty and careful,
as may be seen in the two early drawings, Plates I. and III. But in his later
years he seemed to regard figures simply as points of light, colour or
composition—they were always effective as such—and he often treated
them carelessly—sometimes even coarsely—to the detriment of some of his
otherwise most beautiful works.

Turner is often claimed by the militant school of landscapists of to-day as

one of the first and greatest ‘impressionists.’ In a certain sense no doubt this
is true, but his ‘impressionism,’ it seems to me, was wholly different in
nature from theirs.
During his life, as we have seen, he made thousands of sketches, some
slight, some elaborate, of places, scenery, and natural effects—shorthand
memoranda,’ so to speak—many of which may certainly be called
‘impressionist.’ But all these were founded on, or were intended to add to,
his accurate, minute and exhaustive study of natural forms, and a
draughtsmanship which has probably never been equalled by any other
landscape painter.
Then, as is notorious, he frequently altered certain features of landscapes
or buildings to suit the requirements of his pictures—their symmetry, their
accent, their colour-scheme—or in order to convey some suggestion as to
their meaning. In a letter still preserved, he declares himself opposed to
literalism in landscape—“mere map-making” he terms it. And when for any
reason he thus altered the actual features of a scene, he still almost always
contrived to preserve the impression of it as a whole—usually under its best
aspect, at its choicest moment. In this sense also he was an ‘impressionist.’
 Again, when towards the close of his life he began to attempt the
representation (mainly in oil colour) of pure sunlight—as in his latest Venice
pictures; or of form in swiftest movement—as in Rain, Speed and Steam; or
of the mighty contending forces of Nature—as in his Snow Storm off
Harwich, he painted such subjects in the only method by which they could
be intelligibly rendered. In the same way Whistler, in his Nocturnes,
demonstrated for the first time in Western art, the beauty of prosaic and even
ugly objects, seen in dim light. Both perforce adopted the ‘impressionist’
method, because it was the only effective, indeed the only possible one.
But to me it appears that there is all the difference in the world between
these phases of ‘impressionist’ art and the principles of the modern
landscape school, whose works a brilliant set of writers in the press of to-day
are continually calling upon us to admire. The advanced ‘impressionists’
both in France and in England seem to go out of their way to represent the
ordinary aspects of nature with a manifest determination to avoid any but
the vaguest rendering of form, no matter how clearly defined in such
circumstances those forms may seem to ordinary Philistine vision. They also
ordinarily abjure as ‘literary’ any kind of appeal to the intellectual faculties,
and apparently confine their aim to the production of a more or less startling,
but generally cleverly managed patterning of light, shade, and colour,
obtained usually by means of masses of coarse, solid, and often ragged
pigment, carefully arranged so that the effect intended may be found, like a
fire-plug, at a certain exact, calculated spot. Surely Turner’s ‘impressionism’
was far removed from this? Surely it is hard that he should be charged with
being the precursor of the landscape school to which I have alluded,
whatever may be its merits?

Possibly it is too soon as yet to predict what will be Turner’s ultimate

place in art. Like every really great artist (I use the word in its widest sense)
he will be judged, not by his defects or his mistakes—even if they be many
and palpable—but by the heights to which he attained, and the mark which
he has left for others to follow. For myself, I believe that if his water-colours
are allowed to remain unfaded for future generations, they, along with his
best oil pictures, will be counted worthy to entitle him to a place amongst the
greatest painters of all centuries and all schools.
W. G. RAWLINSON.
 [In common with the Editor of The Studio, I desire to acknowledge my
deep obligations to the various owners of valuable drawings by Turner,
who have kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. There were,
however, others which I should like to have seen represented, but as these
were not available, the Editor desired to replace them with examples from
my own collection. This must explain what will otherwise seem the
undue proportion of the latter.—W. G. R.]
THE TURNER DRAWINGS IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY,
LONDON. BY A. J. FINBERG.

T HE usual way of painting a landscape nowadays is for the artist to take

his easel and canvas out into the fields, and to work as far as possible
with the scene he is representing before his eyes. The scene, with the
artist’s chosen effect, is of course constantly changing, so the artist can work
only for a short time each day. The effect itself will probably last for a period
varying from a couple of minutes to about half an hour, according to
circumstances; but the painter may be usefully employed in getting his work
into condition for about an hour before the effect is due, and he may work on
for perhaps another hour while the effect is still fresh in his memory. As one
sitting of this kind will not enable the artist to carry his work far, it is
necessary that he should return day after day to the scene; and if he is
determined to paint it entirely on the spot, he must be prepared to devote
some months at least to the work.
The habit of painting and finishing pictures entirely out of doors was, I
believe, introduced by the Pre-Raphaelites during the fifties, but before this,
Constable and other artists had worked largely from rather elaborate colour
studies made out of doors. Turner did not work at all in this way. All his
pictures were painted in the studio, and generally from very slight pencil
sketches. So far as I know he never made even a slight colour study from
nature for any of his pictures.
As the methods of work employed by the great artists are of very great
interest, I think it will be worth while to take one of his wellknown works
and to trace its evolution somewhat in detail. The beautiful drawing of
Norham Castle, reproduced here (Plate XIV.), will do very well for this
purpose.
This drawing was made to be engraved in a series known as the “Rivers of
England.” Charles Turner’s really fine mezzotint of it was published in 1824,
so the drawing must have been made at least a year or two before this date.
The pencil sketch on which it was based was made some quarter of a century
earlier—to be quite accurate, in the summer or autumn of 1797.
At that time Turner was a young man of twenty-two, but he had already
made his mark as one of the best topographical and antiquarian draughtsmen
of the day. He had been a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy for eight
years, and publishers and amateurs were beginning to compete for his
productions. It was his habit every summer to map out for himself a lengthy
sketching tour, his aim being to accumulate in his portfolio a pencil drawing
made by himself of every building or natural feature that he might be called
upon to illustrate. These subjects were dictated by the taste of the time,
which generally ran towards the ruined abbeys and castles of the middle
ages. As Turner’s subject-matter was prescribed for him in this way, he did
not, like the modern artist, have to waste any time looking for promising
subjects. He had merely to study the numerous guide-books that were even
then in existence, to make out a list of the more important castles, abbeys,
and Gothic buildings, and to hurry from one to the other as fast as the
coaches or his own sturdy legs could carry him. The methodical and stolidly
business-like manner in which he set about and carried through this part of
his work is calculated to shock the gushing and casual temperament of the
artist of to-day.
Turner’s programme in 1797 was an extensive one, and, what is much
more remarkable, he carried it out. He seems to have taken the coach into
Derbyshire, as he had already appropriated everything of interest in the
Midland counties. He carried two sketch books with him, each bound
handsomely in calf, the smaller with four heavy brass clasps, the larger with
seven. The pages in the smaller book measure about 10½ by 8¼ inches,
those of the larger about 14½ by 10½. Both these books are now in the
National Gallery collection, and will shortly, I hope, be made accessible to
students and the general public.
The campaign opens with two drawings of, I think, Wingfield Manor, then
comes a church with a tall spire on a hill which I cannot identify; then we
have one drawing of Rotherham Bridge with the chapel on it, then one of
Conisborough Castle, single views of the exterior and interior of Doncaster
Church, three different views of the ruins of Pontefract Church, and then
two neat drawings of the Chantry on the Bridge at Wakefield. It is not till he
gets to Kirkstall Abbey that the artist seems to pause in his breathless rush to
the North. There are no less than nine drawings of this subject, all made
from different points of view; one of these leaves containing the sketch of
the Crypt—from which Sir John Soane’s impressive water-colour was made
—contains just a fragment of colour, and has been for many years among the
drawings exhibited on the ground floor of the National Gallery. In this way
we can follow Turner to Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountains and Easby
Abbeys, Richmond, Barnard Castle, Egglestone Abbey and Durham, and
then along the coast to Warkworth, Alnwick, Dunstanborough, Bamborough
and Holy Island. Judging from the drawings, I think it probable that Turner
spent the best part of a day at Holy Island, but he got to Berwick in time to
draw a general view of the town and bridge, and to make a slight sketch with
his limited gamut of colours—black, blue, and yellow only—of the evening
effect. The next morning he was up in time to see the sun rise from behind
the towers of Norham Castle, and to trace a slight and hurried pencil outline
of the main features of the scene. There is only this one sketch of the subject,
and it does not contain the slightest suggestion of light and shade or of
effect. But there were Kelso and Melrose and Dryburgh and Jedburgh
Abbeys close by waiting to be drawn, and Turner evidently felt he must
hurry on. Having drawn these ruins in his neat and precise way he turned
south and struck into Cumberland. In the larger sketch book a drawing
inscribed Keswick follows immediately after one of the views of Melrose
Abbey. Then comes Cockermouth Castle, the Borrowdale, Buttermere, St.
John’s Vale, Grasmere, Rydal, Langdale, and Ulleswater with Helvellyn in
the distance. Then follow in rapid succession Ambleside Mill, Windermere,
Coniston, Furness Abbey, Lancaster, and after a single drawing of Bolton
Abbey we find ourselves in York, where the Cathedral and the ruins of St.
Mary’s Abbey and Bootham Bar must have detained the artist for perhaps
two or three days. The tour, however, is not yet at an end, for the Hon. Mr.
Lascelles (who became Earl of Harewood in 1820) wants some drawings of
Harewood House and of the ruins of Harewood Castle, and Mr. Hewlett
wants some subjects to engrave in his forthcoming “Views in the County of
Lincoln.” It is, therefore, through Howden, Louth, Boston, Sleaford, and
Peterborough that Turner makes his way back to London. He must have been
back by September, for among the drawings exhibited at the Royal Academy
in the following May was one described as “A Study in September of the
Fern House, Mr. Lock’s Park, Mickleham, Surrey.” He can, therefore, hardly
have been away much more than three months, if so long, but his strenuous
vacation had yielded an abundant crop of useful material.
It must have been October before Turner was fairly back in his studio in
Hand Court, Maiden Lane, and had settled down to work up this material.
By the following April he had four important oil paintings and six water-
colours ready for the Exhibition. One of these oil paintings (the
Dunstanborough Castle) now hangs in the Melbourne National Gallery, to
which it was presented by the late Duke of Westminster; two others
(Winesdale, Yorkshire—an Autumnal Morning and Morning amongst the
Coniston Fells) hang in the little Octagon room in Trafalgar Square, and the
fourth is on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. This is the
Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromack Water, a really fine painting, though
it has darkened considerably. As the first important oil painting in which
Turner’s genius was clearly manifested, I should rejoice to see it hanging in
Trafalgar Square. The pencil drawing on which it was based contains some
work in water-colour, possibly made direct from nature, but the details and
general effect have been entirely recast in the finished work. Among the
water-colours were the gloomy and superb Kirkstall Abbey, now in the
Soane Museum, to which I have already referred, and the drawing of
Norham Castle, with which we are now more particularly concerned.
The drawing exhibited in 1798 is not the one here reproduced. The
exhibited drawing is probably the one now in the possession of Mr. Laundy
Walters. A photographic reproduction of it was published in Sir Walter
Armstrong’s “Turner” (p. 34), and it is worth pausing a moment to compare
this with the original pencil sketch and to consider in exactly what relation
these two drawings stand to each other.
The usual way of describing the process by which a slight sketch from
nature is converted into a finished drawing is to say that the artist copied his
sketch as far as it went and then relied upon his memory for the further
elaboration that was required. An artist’s memory is assumed to consist of
images of the scenes he has witnessed, which he has some mysterious power
of storing somewhere in his mind, something like, I suppose, the
undeveloped exposures in a Kodak. According to this theory we should have
to assume that the particular sight of the sun rising behind Norham Towers
which had greeted Turner on the morning he hurried from Berwick to Kelso
had been treasured up in the inner recesses of his consciousness, and then
some months afterwards, when the appropriate moment came, he had only to
select this particular image from among the millions of other images in the
same mysterious storehouse, to develop it and copy it on to his canvas. I
need hardly add that this desperate theory is quite fanciful and absurd, and in
flat contradiction to the teachings of modern psychology.
A description that would not be open to such objections would run
something like this: When we are dealing with the processes of artistic
creation we have to assume an intelligent human agent, and analogies drawn
from purely mechanical sources can only mislead us. We must not assume
that an artist’s senses and intellect work like the mechanism of a camera, or
in any other abnormal way, unless we have some strong evidence to support
us. And we must also remember that a visual image is a useful abstraction in
psychology, but in the conscious life of an intelligent human being it is
merely an element within the ordinary life of thought and feeling. Let us
therefore assume that Turner not only made no effort to retain the exact
visual impression of the scene in question, but that he did not even attempt
to separate this impression from the general whole of thought and feeling in
which it was experienced. The particular matter of sense-perception would
then become incorporated in the general idea or the object—in the ordinary
way in which sense qualities are preserved in ideas. When Turner therefore
sat down to make his picture, what he would have prominently and clearly
before his mind would be a general idea of Norham Castle as a ruined border
fortress, a scene of many a bloody fray and of much bygone splendour and
suffering. In short, his idea would be what the art-criticism of the Henley
type used to describe contemptuously as “literary”; that is, it was steeped in
the colours of the historical imagination, and was practically the same as that
which a man like Sir Walter Scott or any cultivated person of the present
time would associate with the same object. Instead, therefore, of having a
single image before his mind which he had merely to copy, Turner started
with a complex idea, which might, indeed, have been expressed more or less
adequately in the terms of some other art, but which he chose on this
occasion to express in pictorial terms.
In this way we can understand why Turner did, as a matter of fact,
frequently and constantly attempt to express his ideas in the form of verbal
poetry, and why, in the drawing we are now considering, he felt himself
justified not only in filling out his sketch with details that were neither there
nor in the real scene, but also in taking considerable liberties with the facts
contained in the sketch, altering them and falsifying them in ways that could
not be defended if his aim had been to reproduce the actual scene itself. The
colouring too of Mr. Walter’s drawing owes much more to Turner’s study of
Wilson’s pictures than to his visual memory of natural scenes; that is to say,
the colour is used as an instrument of expression,—as a means to bring the
imagination and feelings of the spectator into harmony with the artist’s ideas,
as well as to indicate in the clearest possible manner that it was not the
artist’s intention to represent the actual scene in its prosaic details.
This picture, with the others exhibited in 1798, settled the question for
Turner’s brother artists and for himself that he was a genuinely imaginative
artist and not a merely clever topographical draughtsman. The following
year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, at the early age of
twenty-four, and throughout his long life he always regarded himself as
entitled to take any liberties with actual topographical facts that the
expression of his ideas demanded.
The success of the first Norham Castle drawing induced Turner to repeat
the subject several times. The late Mrs. Thwaites had another water-colour
of it in her collection, there are at least three unfinished versions in the
National Gallery, and I have seen a version of it in oil. The subject was
engraved in the “Liber” from what purported to be the picture in the
possession of the Hon. Mr. Lascelles, but really from a fresh design made by
the artist. Then Turner painted the subject again for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley,
and again, about 1822 or 1823, he made the drawing for the “Rivers of
England” series, here reproduced. What is so interesting in all this is that the
details in each of these versions are different, yet they all seem to have been
based on the same pencil sketch. The relative size of the castle varies in each
drawing, as well as the details of its embrasures and crumbling masonry; the
character of the river banks also varies. In the earlier versions the right bank
is steep and rocky, as suiting the solemn and gloomy effect of the subject; in
the latest version, where the humble pastoral life of the present is thrown
more into prominence, this bank becomes flat and peopled with fishermen,
their boats and cows.
In one of the many anecdotes told of Turner he is represented as saying to
an artist who had complained of the disappointment he had experienced on
revisiting a certain place, “Don’t you know you must paint your
impressions”—or words to that effect. I don’t know how true the story is—
and I may confess that I have almost got into the habit of disbelieving all the
stories told about Turner—but whether true or not this particular anecdote is
certainly well invented. Turner knew quite well how large a part his
subjective feelings and ideas played in all his work, and it made him shy of
revisiting places that had once impressed him. But when he spoke of his
“impressions” we must be careful not to suppose that he could have used the
expression in the way it is often used now. He did not abstract his particular
visual impressions from the emotional and ideational context in which they
were experienced. In so far as Impressionism means this kind of abstraction,
Turner was never an impressionist. And as his first ideas of places were
steeped in the colouring of his own subjective life, so his ideas were ever
taking on different hues as his temper and character changed. In this way he
could use the same sketch again and again and always get different effects
from it; the sensuous datum was merely a point of departure for each fresh
improvisation, a form into which he could pour his meditations, but a
flexible, plastic form which readily took the shape of its spiritual content.
These considerations may help us to understand what is apt at first to
strike the student of Turner’s drawings and sketches as strange and
incomprehensible. Turner was always sketching from nature, and often
making drawings that contain an amazing wealth of detail and definition, yet
the usefulness of his sketches seemed to vary in inverse ratio to their
definition and to the time spent upon them. The beautiful drawings never
seemed to lead to anything, all the pictures being painted by preference from
the slightest and vaguest sketches. Thus the sketch book which contains the
sketch of Norham Castle is filled with over ninety drawings, most of them
full of detail and delightfully precise and graceful in handling. Turner made
good use of most of this material, but the most prolific “breeding” subject—
to use one of Richard Wilson’s expressions—was unquestionably the hurried
scribble of Norham, which was so slight as not to indicate even the general
shape of the ruined tower with precision, and which left the number of
windows or embrasures entirely undetermined. But when we see how Turner
used his sketches we can easily understand that this absence of definition
must often have been a positive advantage to him when he came to paint his
pictures. There was less “to put him out,” fewer obstacles in the way of his
subjective utterance, the form was more fluid and tractable to his immediate
purpose. The more detailed studies were of course not wasted, for the
knowledge they gave him enabled him to fill out the slightest hints of his
“breeding” subjects with an inexhaustible wealth of plausible detail.
The National Gallery collection contains just on three hundred of Turner’s
sketch books, and practically the whole of his work done immediately in the
presence of nature. This data enables us to speak with absolute authority
upon the difficult question as to the relation between Turner’s art and nature.
They prove that he very seldom, if ever, painted a picture simply “out of his
head.” In everything he did—even, I believe, in the case of what have been
called his classical nonsense pictures—there was a nucleus of immediately
perceived fact. This sensuous basis is seldom, if ever, absent from his work,
but it is invariably overlaid and distorted by the purely subjective forces of
the artist’s personality, which appropriate the data of sense, and mould them
into any shape they choose. It is impossible, especially since “Modern
Painters” was written, to overlook the important part played by natural fact
in all of Turner’s creations, but it is just as important not to overlook the
equally obvious and certain truth that Turner never uses nature simply for its
own sake, but only as a means of expression. The methods employed in the
particular case we have just studied are, with few exceptions, the methods
which he adopted during the whole of his career.
Yet Turner did undoubtedly upon occasion paint in oil directly from
nature. An instance of this kind is described by Sir Charles Eastlake in
“Thornbury” (p. 153, 3rd edition). Eastlake met Turner during his second
visit to Devonshire, probably in the summer of 1813, and accompanied him
to a cottage near Calstock, the residence of Eastlake’s aunt, where they
stayed for a few days. Another artist was with them, a Mr. Ambrose Johns, of
Plymouth. It was during their rambles in the neighbourhood of Calstock that
Turner gathered the material for his picture of “Crossing the Brook.”
Eastlake says that “Turner made his sketches in pencil and by stealth,” that is
to say, he did not like to have people looking over his shoulder while he was
at work. The sketch book Turner used on this occasion is with the others in
the National Gallery. But after the three artists had returned to Plymouth, “in
the neighbourhood of which he (Turner) remained some weeks, Mr. Johns
fitted up a small portable painting-box, containing some prepared paper for
oil sketches, as well as the other necessary materials. When Turner halted at
a scene and seemed inclined to sketch it, Johns produced the inviting box,
and the great artist, finding everything ready to his hand, immediately began
to work. As he sometimes wanted assistance in the use of the box, the
presence of Johns was indispensable, and after a few days he made his oil
sketches freely in our presence. Johns accompanied him always; I was only
with them occasionally. Turner seemed pleased when the rapidity with which
those sketches were done was talked of; for, departing from his habitual
reserve in the instance of his pencil sketches, he made no difficulty of
showing them. On one occasion, when, on his return after a sketching
ramble to a country residence belonging to my father, near Plympton, the
day’s work was shown, he himself remarked that one of the sketches (and
perhaps the best) was done in less than half an hour.” “On my enquiring
afterwards,” Sir Charles Eastlake adds, “what had become of those sketches,
Turner replied that they were worthless, in consequence, as he supposed, of
some defect in the preparation of the paper; all the grey tints, he observed,
had nearly disappeared. Although I did not implicitly rely on that statement,
I do not remember to have seen any of them afterwards.”
There are about a dozen small oil sketches of Devonshire subjects in the
National Gallery, which are doubtless part of those made under the
circumstances described by Sir Charles Eastlake. They are made on a
brownish millboard, prepared with a thin coating of paint and size. On the
back of one of them there happens to be some lettering showing that Johns
had laid violent hands on the covers of some parts of William Young Ottley’s
“British Gallery of Pictures,” then being issued serially. Several of these
paintings have long been hung among the exhibited drawings; e.g., Nos. 746,
750, 754, 758, and one, No. 849, which has somehow got the obviously
incorrect title of Bridge over River Lugwy, Capel Curig. These paintings
have undoubtedly sunk very much into the absorbent millboard, thus proving
that Turner’s remark to Eastlake about the disappearance of the grey tints—
which he “did not implicitly rely on”—was justified. But otherwise the work
is in good condition, and I have very little doubt that when Mr. Buttery
comes to take them in hand, he will be able to bring them back to something
like their original freshness. The chief point of interest with regard to them,
from our present point of view, is the curious fact that Turner does not seem
to have made the slightest use of them in any of the Devonshire pictures he
painted on his return. He evidently found his tiny little pencil sketches much
more suggestive and adaptable to his purposes. Even the large oil picture of
Crossing the Brook is based entirely on his slight and rapidly made little
pencil notes. Another point of interest is that even when painting in oil face
to face with nature he did not merely copy what he had in front of him. As
our illustration shows, these sketches are as carefully composed as his
pictures. They are indeed only technically sketches from nature; in reality
they are designs for pictures or pictures in miniature, though they happen to
have been painted out of doors. Even in working direct from nature Turner
remained firmly entrenched in his artistic position as the master of nature.
He still retained his power of selection, taking what suited his purpose,
ignoring the rest, and supplementing from the stores of his own knowledge
what for his purpose were the defects of the momentary image before his
eyes.
The fact that Turner always worked in this way makes it exceedingly
difficult to separate his sketches from nature from the studies or designs for
his pictures. Throughout his sketch books and amongst his loose drawings
there are a large number of sketches in colour, and one’s first impulse is to
assume that these were made immediately from nature. But careful
observation shows that Turner was in the constant habit of working over his
pencil sketches in colour when away from the scenes he had depicted. In this
way the beautiful little sketch of “Edinburgh from St. Margaret’s Loch,” here
reproduced (Plate VI.), is much more probably the draft of a picture the artist
had in his mind’s eye than a study from nature. But the point whether such a
drawing was made “on the spot” or not is relatively unimportant; what is
more important is to realise how very small a part the merely imitative or
representative study of the colour and tone (as opposed to form) of nature
played in Turner’s work. His colour is never merely descriptive. The whole
bent of his mind is so essentially pictorial that, whether he works face to face
with nature or from what is loosely called “memory,” his slightest sketch as
well as his most elaborate work is always an attempt to express a subjective
conception, and never a merely literal transcript of what is given in sense-
perception.
Perhaps the most important group of drawings in the national collection
are those which Turner made during the last ten years of his working life,
i.e., between 1835 and 1845. These drawings were not made for sale or for
exhibition, hence Mr. Ruskin’s description of them as “delight drawings,”
because they were done entirely for the artist’s own pleasure and delight.
Several of them are reproduced in this volume, among them the beautiful
sketch of “Lucerne” (Plate XXI.) realized for Mr. Ruskin in 1842, the almost
equally fine “Bellinzona, from the road to Locarno” (Plate XXIV.), and
“Zurich” (Plate XXVII.).
These inimitable and delightful sketches have been very widely admired,
as they deserve to be, but they have also been praised, somewhat perversely
as it seems to me, for their truth and accuracy of representation. As Mr.
Ruskin has pointed out, these sketches “are not, strictly speaking, sketches
from nature; but plans or designs of pictures which Turner, if he had had
time, would have made of each place. They indicate, therefore, a perfectly
formed conception of the finished picture; and they are of exactly the same
value as memoranda would be, if made by Turner’s own hand, of pictures of
his not in our possession. They are just to be regarded as quick descriptions
or reminiscences of noble pictures.” Mr. Ruskin is also unquestionably
correct when he adds “that nothing but the pencilling in them was done on
the spot, and not always that. Turner used to walk about a town with a roll of
thin paper in his pocket, and make a few scratches upon a sheet or two of it,
which were so much shorthand indication of all he wished to remember.
When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed the pencilling rapidly,
and added as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture”
(“Ruskin on Pictures,” pp. 86-7).
It is not my intention now to dwell upon the beauty of these incomparable
drawings, on their passionate intensity and emotional sincerity, their nervous
eloquence and elusive suggestiveness. The point I wish to insist on at present
is that they must not be regarded as attempts to reproduce or imitate the
merely superficial qualities of physical nature, as attempts to give an
accurate representation of effects of air or light, or of the shapes and forms
of mountain, water or cloud. The artist is not immersed in the definite
character of physical objects. He seems to feel that as a spiritual and self-
conscious being he is something higher than the merely natural, and it is as
modes of expression of human freedom and self-consciousness that these
lyrical fragments must be regarded.
The colour and tone of Turner’s work must therefore be taken as strictly
ideal, that is, as a medium of subjective expression, as a mode of spiritual
manifestation, and not as an attempt to represent the merely abstract qualities
of sense-perception. And what is true of Turner’s colour and tone is also true
of his form. I doubt if he ever made a tolerably careful and elaborate
drawing of a natural scene from the beginning to the end of his long career—
nearly all his elaborate drawings being of architectural subjects. But instead
of the prosaic and plodding drawings that other artists make (see, for
example, the elaborate pencil studies of trees by Constable in the Victoria
and Albert Museum), we find hundreds and hundreds of nervous, eager
pencil sketches. When we come to study these ravishing sketches with care
we make the astonishing discovery that the bugbear of the drawing school,
the prosaic accumulation of particular physical facts known in art academies
as “nature,” is simply a hideous abstraction of the theoretical mind. Nature,
in this sense of the word, never existed for Turner. The world he saw around
him was replete with intelligence, was permeated with spirit; where other
artists see only the bare, unrelated physical fact and sensuous surface, his
mind is already busy with the inner and invisible significance, and his
cunning hand is instantly shaping forth a pictorial embodiment of his own
insight and passionate convictions.
On the whole, then, this was Turner’s consistent attitude towards nature,
though of course, in his earlier years, his sketches were comparatively less
swift and eloquent than they afterwards became. And there was indeed a
short period during which the merely physical fact was forced into undue
prominence. This period culminated in the first visit to Italy in 1819-1820.
Here the novelty of the scenery and buildings stimulated the thirst for
detailed observation which had been gradually growing on Turner during the
previous six or seven years. But in England the very quickness and strength
of his intuitions had always prevented the desire for precise observation
from gaining the upper hand. In Italy his powers of intuition were useless.
He was disoriented. Everything disconcerted and thwarted him. His rapid
glance no longer penetrated to the inner essence of the scenes around him.
He did not understand the people and their ways, and their relation to their
surroundings. For a time he seemed to become less certain than usual of his
artistic mission. But he set to work with his usual pluck and energy to
assimilate his strange surroundings by tireless observation of the outside.
The result was a vast accumulation of disorganized or of only partially
organized impressions.
It is conceded on all hands that Turner’s artistic work went all to pieces as
a result of his Italian experiences. The Bay of Baiæ contains faults altogether
new in his completed works. Even the feeblest of his earlier works had been
animated by some central idea or emotion, to which all the parts were
subordinated, and which infused into them whatever of life or significance
they possessed. In the Bay of Baiæ the artist has an unusual quantity of
material on his hands, but he can neither find nor invent a pictorial idea to
give coherence to his disconnected observations. The picture is made up of
bits of visual experiences elaborately dovetailed into one another, but which
absolutely refuse to combine into any kind of conceptual unity.
Yet if we confine our attention to the merely formal and abstract side of
art, there is assuredly much to move us even to enthusiastic admiration
among the immense quantity of sketches accumulated during this Italian
visit. The very fact that Turner’s inspiration was checked prevented his
sketches from possessing their wonted rudimentary or forward-pointing
character. Instead of being hasty drafts of the pictures that thronged instantly
into his mind upon contact with the scenes of his native land, they became
more like the drawings which less completely equipped creative artists are in
the habit of making; they became “studies” in the modern use of the term.
The conditions of their production gave full play to Turner’s marvellous
powers of draughtsmanship and formal design. Before drawings like Rome
from Monte Mario who can help waxing enthusiastic over the exquisitely
deft and graceful play of hand, the subtle observation and the almost
superhuman mastery of the design? No wonder Mr. Ruskin has declared that
“no drawings in the world are to be named with these ... as lessons in
landscape drawing” (“Ruskin on Pictures,” p. 157). But before assenting
wholly to this dictum we must remember that, in spite of all their
attractiveness, Turner found these drawings worse than useless for his
general artistic purposes, and that only bad and foolish pictures came from
them; and the more carefully we study the matter the more clearly do we see
that nothing but bad and foolish pictures could come from work in which the
spirit of curiosity and of cold and accurate observation is predominant.
We have fixed our attention thus far upon the sketches and drawings made
from nature in the National Gallery collection, to the exclusion of the
finished water-colours. This may seem all the more inexcusable, as I have
preferred to treat these sketches rather with regard to their bearing upon the
artist’s finished work—as stages in the development of the complete work of
art—than as independent productions which can be accepted entirely for
their own sake. But in a short paper like the present it is impossible to do
justice to all the sides of such an important collection as the Drawings of the
Turner Bequest. Numerically, the finished drawings form only a small
fraction of the whole collection—about two hundred out of a total of over
20,000 drawings. Among them are about two-thirds of the “Rivers of
France” drawings, and most of the “Ports” and “Rivers of England,” and
Rogers’s “Vignettes.” These drawings were engraved during Turner’s
lifetime and under his active superintendence; they are, therefore, amongst
the best known of his works. The whole of the finished drawings have,
moreover, been constantly on exhibition for more than fifty years. There
remains, therefore, little either of praise or blame to be said of them that has
not already been said many times. While, on the other hand, the studies and
sketches are only now on the point of being made accessible to the public.
 The practically complete series of Turner’s sketches and studies from
nature seems to call for comprehensive treatment. Their careful study throws
a wholly new and unexpected light upon the fundamental and essential
qualities of Turner’s attitude towards nature, and therefore upon the essential
character and limitations of his art. Or where the light is not altogether
unexpected—as it would not be perhaps in the case of a diligent and
methodical student of Turner’s completed works—the sketches amplify and
illustrate in an abundant and forcible way what before could only have been
surmised. I propose, therefore, to devote the remainder of my limited space
to an attempt to indicate as briefly as possible the main features of Turner’s
conception of nature, as it is revealed in his sketches, and to point out its
importance both for the proper understanding of his finished work and for its
bearing upon some adverse criticisms that have been brought against his
work.
In my opening remarks I ventured to contrast Turner’s attitude towards
nature with the attitude of the majority of contemporary artists. My intention
in thus opposing these two different methods of work was not to suggest that
one of them was either right or wrong in itself, or that one way was
necessarily better or worse than the other. My intention was exactly the
opposite. There is not one type of art production to which all artists must
conform, and two totally different methods of procedure may each be
positively right and equally valid. I will even go farther than this and confess
that I regard the present-day method of working from nature as the only right
and proper way of attaining the results that are aimed at. But it is the result,
the purpose of the artist, that justifies the means, and this applies with just as
much force to Turner’s way of working as to the modern way. To condemn
Turner’s procedure, therefore, simply because it differs from that now in
vogue, would be as unwise and unfair as to condemn the modern way
because it differed from his. Different conceptions of the aim and scope of
art involve different attitudes towards nature, and necessitate different
methods of study.
Let us begin with the current conception—the conception of the landscape
artist of to-day and of the public for which he works. The aim of this art is
what is called “naturalness,” that is, the picture should be made to look as
much like nature as possible. The standard of excellence here is just the
ordinary common appearance of physical reality. A picture that looks like
nature is good, and one that looks “unnatural” is therefore bad. This kind of
art is capable of giving a great deal of innocent pleasure to people who like
to be reminded of scenes they love or are interested in. But it has its limits. It
cannot go beyond the bare physical world. And it is bound to treat even this
limited area of experience from a strictly limited point of view. It is bound to
take the physical world as something which exists in entire independence of
the spectator, as something which is indeed given in sense-perception, but
which the spectator emphatically finds and does not make. Now so far as we
take nature in this sense we have to do with an external power which is
utterly indifferent to our merely human aims and purposes, and the artist can
only look upon himself as a passive recipient, a tabula rasa, on which
external nature is reflected. This is the standpoint of the prosaic intelligence,
the level upon which much of the ordinary reflection and discussion of the
day moves.
But man is not really a passive mirror in which a foreign nature is
reflected, nor is he satisfied merely to submit himself to natural influences
and vicissitudes. Man is never really satisfied to take the world as he finds it,
but sets to work to transform it into what he feels it ought to be. The social
and political world, with its realms of morality, art and religion, came into
existence as a protest against the merely natural. In this world, created and
sustained by human intelligence and will, the physical world is not abolished
or destroyed, but it is transformed into a more or less willing accomplice of a
strange and higher power. It is in this new form which nature assumes under
the sway of intelligence and will that we find it in Turner’s works.[B] In his
presence the external world loses its stubborn indifference to human aims
and becomes saturated with purely human aspiration and emotion. Its
colours and shapes cease to belong to the merely physical world. They
become instead the garment in which the inward spiritual nature of the artist
robes itself. Nature in this new aspect is no longer a merely hostile and
mechanical system of laws; a soul has been breathed into it which we
recognize as identical with our own.
Now it is evident that these two kinds of art, the passive and the active,
with their totally dissimilar aims, cannot and ought not to represent nature in
the same way. The art which uses nature as a medium for the expression of
ideas and feelings cannot attain its object by representing physical objects in
the simple and direct way appropriate to the art which aims merely at
naturalness. The artist’s intention must make itself manifest even in the
manner in which he represents physical objects,—indeed, he has no other
way of expressing his ideas. The active or creative artist will therefore make
it clear that he has broken entirely with the disconnected, accidental and
prosaic look of everyday existence which it is the one aim of the passive
artist to retain.
From this point of view the charges that are often brought against Turner,
that his colour is forced and unnatural, will leave us cold and indifferent. To
make such an objection is merely a proof of mental confusion. The creative
artist must break with the prosaic vision of nature, if only to make it evident
that his objects are not there for their own sake and for their immediate
effect, but to call forth a response and echo in the mind of the observer.
Turner’s colour—“dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere”—is one of his
most potent instruments of expression, and must be judged as we judge, let
us say, the verbal magic of Shelley’s verse, as a work of free beauty,
fashioned in response to the deepest and truest cravings of man’s nature.
That Turner’s art moves mainly among the highest interests of man’s
spiritual nature accounts to some extent for the pre-eminent position he now
occupies among modern artists. It is always as an artist conscious of man’s
high destiny that he claims to be judged, and though he often stumbled and
his hand faltered, he never once sank to the level of the passive and prosaic
imitator of nature’s finitude. This is not the place to inquire minutely into
Turner’s failings and shortcomings, nor to study their connection with the
innumerable masterpieces in which he dared and sometimes attained the
very highest of which art is capable. An adequate discussion of the subtle
inter-connection of Turner’s triumphs and failings would involve the raising
of questions of which English criticism seems to prefer to remain in happy
ignorance. I cannot therefore attempt to justify my conviction that he is not
only the greatest artist our nation has yet produced, but also one of the
greatest of modern artists, a man we must rank with Rembrandt and Jean
François Millet. But this at least will be generally conceded, that he fully
deserves that consideration and sympathy, which the ready instinct of
mankind reserves for those who devote themselves without stint and without
measure to the highest and most difficult tasks.
A. J. FINBERG.
 Plate I
THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE, LAMBETH
FIRST EXHIBITED DRAWING. R.A. 1790. SIZE 15″ × 10½″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.
 Plate II
THE MOUTH OF THE AVON.
CIRCA 1792. SIZE 11¼″ × 8¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.
 Plate III
PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL FROM THE NORTH
CIRCA 1794. SIZE 7″ × 4¼″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.
 Plate IV
THE PENT, DOVER
CIRCA 1794. SIZE 10¼″ × 8″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.
 Plate V
DISTANT VIEW OF LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL
CIRCA 1798. SIZE 30½″ × 19¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.
 Plate VI
EDINBURGH: FROM ST. MARGARET’S LOCH
CIRCA 1801. SIZE 7¾″ × 5″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
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