Turner and Mulready : the effect of certain faults of vision on painting, with especial reference to their works. The real and ideal in portraiture. The deterioration of oil paintings : three lectures / by R. Liebreich.

  • Liebreich, Richard, 1830-1917.
Date:
1888
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Turner and Mulready : the effect of certain faults of vision on painting, with especial reference to their works. The real and ideal in portraiture. The deterioration of oil paintings : three lectures / by R. Liebreich. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ment, or of an occasional success. Nothing of all this applies to what has been called Turner's manner. Nothing in him is arbitrary, assumed, or of set purpose. According to my opinion, his manner is exclusively the result of a change in his eyes, which developed itself during the last twenty years of his life. In consequence of it the aspect of nature gradually changed for him, while he continued in an unconscious, I might almost say in a naive manner, to reproduce what he saw. And he reproduced it so faithfully and accurately, that he enables us distinctly to recognize the nature of the disease of his eyes, to follow its development step by step, and to prove by an optical contrivance the correctness of our diagnosis. By the aid of this con- trivance we can see nature under the same aspect as he saw and represented it. With the same we can also, as I shall prove to you by an experiment, give to Turner's early pictures the appearance of those of the later period. After he had reached the age of fifty-five, the crystalline lenses of Turner's eyes became rather dim, and dispersed the light more strongly, and in consequence threw a bluish mist over illuminated objects. This is a pathological increase of an optical effect, the exist- ence of which, even in the normal eye, can be proved by the following experiment. If you look at a picture which hangs between two windows, you will not be able to see it distinctly, as it will be, so to speak, veiled by a greyish haze. But if you hold your hands before your eyes so as to shade them from the light of the windows, the veiling mist disappears, and the picture becomes clearly visible. The dis- turbing light had been diffused by the refracting media of the eye, and had fallen on the same part of the retina on which the picture was formed. If we examine the eye by an illumination resembling that by means of which Professor Tyndall, in his brilliant experiments, demonstrated to you the imperfect transparency of water, we find that even the clearest and most beautiful eye is not so perfectly transparent as we would suppose. The older we get the more the transparency decreases, especially of the lens. But to produce an effect equal to that visible in Turner's pictures after the year 1831, pathological conditions are required. In the years that followed, as often happens in such cases, a clearly-defined opacity was formed in the slight and diffuse dimness of the crystalline lens. In consequence of this the light was no longer evenly diffused in all directions, but principally dispersed in a vertical direction. At this period the alteration offers, in the case of a painter, the peculiarity that it only affects the appear- ance of natural objects, where the light is strong enough to produce this disturbing effect, whilst the light of his painting is too feeble to do so: therefore, the aspect of nature iR altered, that of his picture correct. Only within the last years of Turner's life, the dimness had increased so much, that it prevented him from seeing even his pictures correctly. This sufficiently accounts for' the strange appearance of his last pictures, without its being necessary to take into account the slate of his mind.