THE TURNER PRINTS

Otago Witness, Issue 2409, 3 May 1900, Page 64

THE TURNER PRINTS

Three people out of every four who know at all the work of Turner know it from that representation of it a£ the National Gallery, which it was the ambition of Turner's late years to make important and complete. Complete in a sense it is, for in the National G-a3-lery Turner's labours — the stupendous record of a noble vision of the world — belong to nearly every one of his periods, and are executed in nearly every medium. There ia work in oil?, work in water colours, work in seuia: the tool of the engraver alone is mining, fejpd ad far as subject, is concerned — and as iar as period — Turner may be studied at the National Gallery, from the earliest and soberest of English pastorals to the last pyrotechnics .of Venice. , „''•.!'"• 'But there is" another way "in which' the master may be studied, and that other way allows him to be studied -in many another place. That way is. the, way" of; his prints: *, ; And in years before those years in which he wa%<e*oncerned to stipulate that when' he' should bo gone tliey should hang a couple -of ■, his favourite canvases between a couple of canvases of Cloude, he had been concerned with the provision of such a series of prints by his own hand and the hands of skilled engravers, of whose aid he availed himself and whose talent lip, in-fluercec! and used, as would show to people who could not come to picture galleries, but who mupt study his works in country houses, in provincial towns — in quiet dining parlours, it might be, in Bath or Blocmsbury — what was the range of his achievement ; what he had seen ; what he had portrayed ; what was the spirit an which he had portrayed it. Colour — colour, so great a part of every painter's gift — colour, of course, must go to the wall. It could not be represented directly. Yet even colour should not go to the wall altogether. It should be represented indirectly — degrees and subtleties of light and shade do suggest and indirectly represent colour to the seeing eye.

And the landscape engravings of Turner were to compass a subtlety hitherto unattained. Employed as illustration, they were to gleam upon the page of the printed book ; employed for the decoration of an ampler space, their umber tones, their bistre shadows, and their flashing or restful lights were, not idly altogether, to appire to the place accorded naturally to the achievements of the full palette. Over and above that, remember, they recorded — nay, they emphasised and improved upon — every possible virtue of line that picture or drawing possessed. — Frederick Wedmore, in the Pall Mall Magazine.' — Messr3 Singer and Sons, of Frome, to whom the casting of the bronze statue. of Mr. Gladstone, which is intended to be placed near the Manchester Exchange, has been intrusted by the arsist, Signor' Mario .Jlaggi, have nearly completed their work. It is a representation of the late Liberal leader as he stood in April, 1886, before an excited House of Commons delivering his speech on the second reading of the Home Rule Bill. The statue is being executed at the instance of the executors of the late Mr Roberts.