Review; Turner in January: The Vaughan Bequest of Turner Watercolours

HENRY Vaughan’s bequest of 38 watercolours by Turner came to the Scottish National Gallery in 1900. They have been shown every January, and only in January, ever since. That is a condition of the bequest. Nor have they ever been away on loan. That too was stipulated by Vaughan. The son of a London hatmaker, he inherited a fortune and built a large and comprehensive collection of Turner’s works on paper.

He did not just collect Turner, however, and made other significant benefactions. One of his most striking acts of public generosity was to buy Constable’s Hay Wain and give it to the National Gallery in London. How much poorer we would have been without that gift. The Hay Wain, more than any other image, has come to represent the English countryside. That is testimony to its beauty, certainly, but also to the way public ownership has given it currency. Could it have become such an icon in a private collection, or in a collection abroad? If you think modern reproductions make that argument redundant, try it. Take a print of the Hay Wain into the National Gallery, or better still, do it with the Turners. The rapid movement of the artist’s hand in all the countless intuitive decisions that it makes, the tiny differences of texture that convey the physical act of painting, these are things that cannot be reproduced. You are in the presence of the artist. There is no substitute.

The Turners that came to Edinburgh were only part of Vaughan’s collection and were matched by a similar group bequeathed to Dublin. This distribution was carefully considered. London already had Turner’s own bequest, while Ruskin, who had a similarly collection to Vaughan, had split his between Oxford and Cambridge. As the story of the Hay Wain shows, Vaughan understood the significance of public ownership and how art that is freely available can work like a leaven in the public imagination. He evidently also understood that one major constraint on that freedom is geography, the problem of distance. Vaughan and Ruskin, as though working in partnership, sought to overcome that by distributing their collections around the country. In fact we don’t know that Vaughan knew Ruskin personally, but there can be no doubt both his passion for Turner and his munificent distribution of his collection were inspired by his example.

In Modern Painters, Ruskin both established Turner’s reputation and deployed his art as the prime exemplar of his central idea: great art is an agent for good. It can actually change people’s lives. For Ruskin it demonstrated truth. That truth which we see abundantly in these watercolours resides in the balance between exact description of what the artist sees and, with equal exactitude, what he feels. The one is discipline for the other, but the balance is crucial.

Turner was the great exemplar because he belonged to the modern age, not to some imagined past. His watercolours are also central to his art. They are small, direct and intimate. Looking at a little jewel like Ehrenbreitstein, for instance, scarlet, purple, silver and gold on blue paper, or the Falls at Schaffhausen, Moonlight, a scene of breathtaking grandeur apparently set down in minutes, we are right beside the artist, sharing the moment with him in a unique way.

Distributing such brilliant, intimate and spontaneous examples of Turner’s art around the country was to distribute a force for good.

Vaughan’s intention was almost akin to social reform. In an age where we rate artists so highly whose productions are mostly an expensive form of trivia, how refreshing to be confronted with such visible conviction of the importance of truth.

So have these pictures had an impact? In the 111 years that they have been shown they have undoubtedly given a lot of pleasure to the countless people who have seen them. Initially, too, for the artists at least, their impact is clear. When the Vaughan Bequest first went on view, William McTaggart walked into Edinburgh from Lasswade to see it. His own work was already marked by great spontaneity, but in the last years of his life it opened up further in ways that have little parallel in contemporary art, unless in the brilliance and freedom of some of Turner’s watercolours here.

McTaggart’s younger contemporary, the Colourist FCB Cadell, began his career as a painter just as the Vaughan Bequest arrived in Edinburgh.

Many things may have contributed to the flowering of his work during a visit to Venice in 1910, not least perhaps the example of McTaggart himself. In the display of the Vaughan pictures this year, however, the six Turner watercolours of Venice have been hung together. Seen that way, the potency of the example of such luminous pictures as the Sun of Venice, or the shimmering beauty of the Grand Canal and Salute is undeniable and finds a clear echo in Cadell’s own work. So if he was susceptible to the power of Turner’s example, what about the other Colourists? There is no space to explore that idea here, but surely it would be foolish to underestimate the impact of the flaming, incandescent brilliance of Turner’s watercolours as Henry Vaughan has preserved it for us through the careful stipulations of his remarkable will.

Vaughan could not have anticipated the way the collection would grow around his initial benefaction, however. There are now almost 70 watercolours by Turner in our national collection. Such wealth allows the National Galleries of Scotland to ring the changes with the annual display. This year it is limited to Vaughan’s original group, but with one addition, the beautiful, recent acquisition of a highly finished watercolour of Rome from Monte Mario, a hill in the north-west of the city. It was in September 1819 that Turner saw Rome for the first time. Painted the following year, this picture records that visit.

In the picture it is evening. The foreground is in the shadow of a stand of cypresses. Beyond them the setting sun floods the scene with the golden light of September and touches the distant buildings with pink. Exaggerating the height a little, Turner looks down over what was then still a patchwork of farms, fields and olive groves towards the Seven Hills. Two white columns of smoke rise from bonfires in the fields below and to the left, a bend in the Tiber glimmers blue and silver. The evening light is misty, but all the main landmarks are nevertheless discernible in the haze. St Peter’s to the right has been raised to match the raised viewpoint from the hill. Two lovers, dressed in brightly coloured clothes, are prominent in the foreground. The boy is playing a double flute to a girl, who is hiding her face in bashful delight. A picnic basket beside them suggests that they have climbed the hill on an amorous ramble and are not just conventional pastoral figures.

This lovely picture is especially to be valued as an addition to the Turner collection. The journey to Italy was a landmark in his career and the picture was a souvenir for his close friend and patron, Walter Fawkes. That gives it a special kind of intimacy and I do wonder if the two lovers, so prominent in the foreground, may not have been a private joke. We will never know. Turner was a private person.

Adding love and music to the warmth of a September evening and the beauty of the scene, he makes it clear, nevertheless, that this is more than just a painting of a view. It records his delight in all the pleasures of the senses and we are privileged to be beside him as he shares it with his friend.

RATING: *****

• Until 31 January

Review; Turner in January: The Vaughan Bequest of Turner Watercolours - Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh