The Dark Clue by James Wilson Page A

Mall, as if ashamed to show its dowdy fagade in such distinguished company. And the crowds that throng it – now that the ground floor has become a temporary art gallery – make it feel more like a railway station hotel than a private residence. But palace it is, and the first I have ever entered; and as we walked down a long covered passage into the lofty hall (so vast that Jenny Lind has sung here, before an audience of hundreds), and paid our shilling for a guidebook, I could not but reflect on how different it was from the house in which Turner had spent his last years, and in which I had first seen one of his paintings.
    Perhaps Walter was preoccupied by a similar idea; for he was unusually silent all the way there; and, when we arrived, looked about him with an almost incredulous air, as if comparing it with the scene of
his
last adventure – for surely the filthy little street where Turner had been born, though nearer in miles, must have presented an even starker contrast to this place than the cottage in which he had died?
    But then we turned, and all such thoughts and calculations instantly evaporated. We had both seen individual Turners before, of course; but never – for this is the first public exhibition since his death – more than thirty of them displayed together. All at once our eyes were assailed by the most brilliant radiance I have ever seen in paintings – and far more, I have to say, than Ishould have conceived possible. Reds, oranges and yellows, as hot and tumultuous as burning coals, erupted from the walls, making even the brightest objects about them – a woman’s gaudy green dress, a huge picture of the Battle of Blenheim above the chimney-piece – appear suddenly drab and lifeless. They seemed, indeed, more intensely real than the press of people staring at them, or the building itself – as if we were trapped in Plato’s cave, and the pictures, rather than merely flat pieces of canvas hanging
inside
, were in fact holes in the rock, through which we could glimpse the unimagined world beyond.
    The effect on Walter was immediate; and so dramatic that I wish I could have found some means to record it, for it would have convinced even the dourest sceptic of the power of art. He stopped dead, and drew himself up, as if someone had suddenly lifted a great weight from his back; his mouth set in a small, surprised smile, and the skin appeared to tighten across his forehead, raising his eyebrows into an expression of wonderment and pleasure. His gaze was fixed on a square picture on the opposite wall, which showed an indistinct white figure apparently emerging from the smoke and flames of a raging fire. From where we were standing it was impossible to make out more; but, rather than going closer (which, indeed, would have been difficult, so dense was the press of people), Walter remained there, seemingly uninterested in the subject, content merely to bask in the radiance of the colour, like a cat stretching itself in the sun. I waited for him a moment, and then, since he still showed no inclination to move, set off on my own to explore further.
    The impressions of the next half an hour were so forceful and so contradictory that I must try to set them down here in some detail, before they disintegrate into brilliant confusion. There were more than thirty pictures in the exhibition, and what you noticed about them first was simply their enormous variety. The view I had always associated with Turner,
London from Greenwich Park
, was there – although the original had a grandeur and richness you could not have guessed from our engraving of it; and a terrifying picture of a puny cottage caught in a mountain avalanche, and crushed by a deluge of broken ice and uprooted trees and a giant rock (so ferociously painted that the pigment was as thick and ridged as mortar), recalled some of the dread and horrorthe pictures in Mrs. Booth’s house had inspired in me.