In all these years, during which he kept up this constant rivalry with so many artists, living and dead--and we have not exhausted the list of them--he was continuing his unresting severe study of nature. For many more years this was to continue, this double artistic life, the strife for fame by grand pictures, of which emulation was the motive, the patient development of his knowledge and power by the close study of nature. Few who watched his pictures from year to year could have guessed what a store of beautiful studies of the Alps, about Chamouni, Grenoble, and the Grande Chartreuse he had lying in his portfolios; few could imagine that with materials for landscapes of a truthfulness and an original power never before known, he should prefer to paint pictures in rivalry with the fames of dead men. Possibly he thought that it was the nearest way to fame to show the public that he could beat Vandevelde, Poussin, and the rest of them on their own ground; possibly he may have been diffident of his power to dispense with their aid in composition. However this may have been, he chose to ground his fame so. Even in his “Liber,” he in three years gave only three foreign subjects out of twenty plates: _Basle_, _Mount St. Gothard_, and the _Lake of Thun_.
THE LIBER STUDIORUM--HIS POETRY AND DRAGONS.
In 1807 Turner commenced his most serious rivalry, “The Liber Studiorum,” a rivalry which not only exceeded in force but differed in quality from his others. Previously he had pitted his skill only against that of the artist rivalled, adopting the style of his rival, but in these engravings he pitted not only his skill, but also his style and range of art against Claude’s. There are indeed only a few of the “Liber” prints which are in Claude’s style, and most of the best are in his own. Lovely as are _Woman Playing Tambourine_, and _Hindoo Devotions_, they seem to us far lower in value than _Mount St. Gothard_ and _Hind Head Hill_. There is the usual mixture of feeling in the motives with which Turner undertook this work, the same dependence on others for the starting impulse which we see throughout his art-life, the same originality, industry, and confusion of thought in carrying out his design. The idea of the “Liber” did not originate with him, but with his friend Mr. W. F. Wells. The idea was noble in so far as it attempted to extend the bounds of landscape art beyond previous limits, to break down the Claude worship which blinded the eyes of the public to the merit that existed in contemporary work, and prevented them, and artists also, from looking to nature as the source of landscape art. It is scarcely too much to say that in those days Claude stood between nature and the artist, and that he was as much the standard of landscape art as Pheidias of sculpture. To try to clear away this barrier of progress, as Hogarth had striven years before to abolish the “black masters,” was no ignoble effort, and it was done in a nobler spirit than that of Hogarth, for he did not attempt to depreciate his rival. Yet the nobility of the attempt was not unmixed, for if he did not disparage Claude, he attempted to make himself famous at Claude’s expense. He did not indeed say, as Hogarth would have done, “Claude is bad, I am good;” but he said, “Claude is good, but I am better.” His own experience even from very early days should have told him that, despite the cant of connoisseurs and the strength of old traditions, no purely original work of his had passed unnoticed, and that the truest and noblest way of educating the public taste was by following the bent of his original genius, and leaving the public to draw their own comparisons.