In the water-colour of ‘Ewenny Priory’--now one of the chief treasures of the Cardiff Art Gallery (Pyke-Thompson Bequest)--Turner’s genius is less hampered by technical difficulties. If this be indeed the drawing that was exhibited in 1797[7] it shows an amazingly rapid development in the artist’s powers, especially when we compare it with the ‘Llandaff Cathedral’ (790, National Gallery), which was exhibited only twelve months earlier. The ‘Llandaff’ is merely the work of a clever and skilful topographical draughtsman, the ‘Ewenny’ is the work of a powerful imaginative artist. The gloomy interior of the Norman ruin is no longer an object to be measured, dated, classified and labelled. It is no longer an ‘interesting specimen’ that we have set before us. The artist has now broken with the ordinary, every-day world of sense-experience, and we plunge with him into the world of the imagination, where objects are no longer separated from and held over against the self; they now throb and tingle with our own emotional life.
This change of aim--we may speak of it for the sake of brevity as the change from objectivity to subjectivity--is accompanied by a change of method in the workmanship of the two drawings. In the ‘Llandaff’ (as in the ‘Lincoln’) the forms of all the objects are made out with the greatest possible clearness. When the artist has told us as clearly and precisely as possible the exact shape of every object from his chosen point of view, we feel that he has done all that he set out to do, and all that we can reasonably demand from him. Then these objects are left standing side by side in relative independence of each other and of us; they have no necessary connection one with the other, like the parts of a piece of music, or the points of an argument. Their only bond of union is the abstract one of space. The whole effect is of something severed from direct experience; the objects represented have an unreal air of permanence and immutability, with something of the intellectual coldness and aloofness of a diagram or mathematical symbol.
In the ‘Ewenny’ drawing we are brought into contact with objects which have not yet been severed from the emotional colouring of immediate experience. Instead of a series of abstract spatial determinations, appealing only to the abstract understanding, we now have a presentation fraught with the infinite suggestiveness of living, sensible experience. Each object represented is now no longer held over against the self as something alien, something indifferent to and independent of humanity, like the laws of the physical sciences; each object has now become merely a moment in the affective life of an individual. It therefore touches our own feelings, challenges our hopes and fears, appeals intimately to our sympathies with the contagion of the emotions of an actual companion. We cannot remain indifferent to such an appeal if we would. Unless our nerves tingle as the eye plunges from the familiar objects of the foreground into the gloom beyond, the picture has not begun to exist for us. But immediately it touches our inner life into responsive activity the picture becomes transformed from so much indifferent paper and pigment into an aspect of our own affective life. We have caught the contagion of the artist’s emotional experience, in which the objects of his representation were submerged.