Literature’s influence on painting in early 19^th c. England: One in a series of articles examining the relationship between literature and the visual arts.  

William Wordsworth’s 1802, Preface to Lyrical Ballads proclaimed, “the worthy purpose [of poetry] is the spontaneous overflow or powerful feelings… [taking] its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.” From this perspective, Wordsworth strived to capture the character and emotions of the common man and to metaphorically link self-realization with one’s natural surroundings. In defense of poetry’s more lasting effects on the reader, when compared to prose in matters of, “passion, manners or characters”, he also points out that, of the two (poetry and prose), “the one..in verse…will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.” artes fine arts magazine

Wordsworth’s writings informed many poets that followed. In the hands of an emerging generation of writers, his focus on inspiration from the natural world would have to be balanced against the profound social, scientific and political changes that were sweeping Europe at the time. Mid-19th century poets, writing for an urbane and more broadly-literate audience, were discounting contact with nature as a pre-requisite for appreciating poetry. Rather, they argued for an attuned inner-sensibility as a necessary component of the poetic experience. This shift of emphasis to the interior landscape of emotions, it will be argued, occurred at a key juncture in a psychologically-charged arena of artistic expression. This newly-defined emphasis on the inner world of the creative individual set the stage for a romantic English painter, Joseph Mallord William Turner, to produce works unique for their time, expressing emotionality through loosely-defined forms and swirling colors. Decades ahead of his contemporaries in terms of his handling of landscape-as-abstraction, his paintings helped shape public sensibility for a new genre of painting and ultimately, the emergence of the modernist style.

By the 1830s, the argument regarding the place of poetry in the literary genre was setting the stage for those events, in that some believed poetry had progressed beyond Wordsworth’s focus on the role of nature in the service of awakening human emotions. As John Mill states in his 1833 essay, What is Poetry? (quoting Ebenezer Elliot), “poetry is impassioned truth”. Mill includes eloquence in that same category and explains that both eloquence and poetry, “[are] both alike the expression orutterance of feeling.” Poetry, for Mill, was interiorized, making it a uniquely personal process…”the natural fruit of solitude and meditation. Eloquence, of intercourse with the world [of other’s] feelings.” Thus, for Mill, communing with nature was not an essential requisite for the production of meaningful poetic discourse.

Drawing too, on the writings of Wordsworth, whom he referred to as calling poetry, “the breath and finer spirit of knowledge”, Matthew Arnold wrote (in, The Study of Poetry, 1880), that, “…for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world…of divine illusion…More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us.” He cautions that a society’s poetic output should not be rated on the strength of its historic significance or import but, “on the basis of its personal estimate (impact).” He cautions in the same article against, “an era that is opening [for] masses of a common sort of reader…and literature and that it will become a vast and profitable industry…and to be able to enjoy the truly classic in poetry,” even if it means, “ having to enjoy it by oneself.” He equates this conscious choice to keep good poetry alive in society as, [an act of] “supremacy…the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.” For Arnold, the pursuit and appreciation of poetry’s message, in changing times, must decidedly be a personal one (i.e. through the revelation of the interiority of the reader)

For John Ruskin, an avid proponent and critic of the visual arts, “painting is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as a vehicle of thought (emphasis mine), but by itself, nothing.” He argued that narrative painting, or that which endeavored to relate a story or recreate a scene from history or literature with paint, was not grasping the true importance of the medium. For Ruskin the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ (Of The Pathetic Fallacy, 1856), was the artistic effort that endowed nature and inanimate objects with human traits and feelings, mistakenly creating “art without emotion”. With this unique revocation of Romantic art’s historical and allegorical raison d’être at that time, he unknowingly set the stage for the coming-of-age of a new generation of painters, exemplified by Turner, who painted from the heart, not on the basis of formalized principles of color and composition. Ruskin’s recognition of Turner’s ‘noble effort’, although controversial in the eyes of most, provided the painter with a dash of legitimacy as he broke new compositional and technical ground with his work. Ruskin’s support of Turner’s approach reflected the view of other poets, like Mill and Arnold, at the time: suggesting that art could be personalized, reflecting the inner dimensions of perception and emotion unique to that individual writer or artist and still provide a legitimate view of the perceived world for others.

As noted above, this highly personalized emotional platform for creative motivation had been spelled out by Ruskin’s contemporaries and was gaining traction in the literary arts. For painters, on the other hand, some decades would need to pass before Turner’s bold, non-representational approach to subject matter would be accepted.

William Turner would certainly be, in Mill’s estimation, one of the geniuses that, “…is a valuable element in human affairs” to stand against, “…the tyranny of opinion” (On Liberty, 1859). Ruskin described him as one who could, “stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of nature.” An amateur poet in his own right, Turner was not a believer in the inherent power of man to prevail over nature. His epic poem, Fallacies of Hope (undated), was a dispiriting and fatalistic diatribe on the power of the elements to foil man’s ambitions. This pessimism was reflected in his painting. However, his interpretation of scenes from nature was brilliant and revolutionary for their time. Using oil paints to develop thin, watercolor-like layers on canvas, Turner captured the protean and transient elements of the natural world in a manner that was essentially Romantic, but with an ironic twist that set his work apart. His 1830 painting, The Slave Ship was inspired by a poem, The Seasons, Summer, by James Thomson and was described by Ruskin as, “the noblest sea ever painted by man.” While his exuberant critical acclaim of the work goes far beyond what any authoritative voice would lend it today, it was clear that Ruskin considered Turner an innovator and one who stood at the leading edge of an important movement in the visual arts.

Perhaps as a result of Turner’s fatalistic view of man’s place in the natural realm, sublime nature was portrayed as awe-inspiring and unmastered. The savage grandeur of Turner’s storm-tossed sea and the portrayal of the heartless sacrifice of slaves in the face of a pending storm sent shock waves through civilized English society at the time. They objected to his representation of a painful event in their recent history as much as to his unique approach to painting, which his colleague, John Constable cryptically called, “airy visions painted with tinted steam.”

But Turner, working in large part unknowingly in parallel with poets of the time, had developed an expressive language of his own—one that was highly personal. Poetry, like painting, was not constrained by the limits of the historical or narrative style of the novel or prose essay.  Unencumbered from the strictures of storytelling or exposition, the poet, like the painter, was free of Wordsworth’s pastoral constraints to explore the boundaries (or absence of them) of the pathetic and the sublime in the individuals and places around them. Ironically, after Turner introduced his innovative style, it would take the French, with their long history of tradition-bound painting, to move his impressionistic vision to another level of critical acclaim, some four decades later. -RJF

*Pathetic: From the Greek, pathos; as in affecting or moving the feelings.

**Sublime: Impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration; thrilling, but with ever-present danger.