st sympathy, let
them look at the drawings of John Lewis.
These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner,
in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, to
be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, what
with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy
drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never
seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him
almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which
had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with
white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities,
and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost
entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London,
and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of
Parliament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether
unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career.
In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into
Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seen
the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which
could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself, bears
date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fond
memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies and
drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with his
fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,
counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six
compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche, and
Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem
to have made very profound impressions on him.
He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed
the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
number of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of them
on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
shall henceforth call his Third period.
The perfect repose of his youth had returned to
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