The writer had settled in England in 1771 on Garrick’s invitation to superintend scene-painting at Drury Lane. The Envoy to Constantinople was the seventh Earl of Elgin, who arranged for the Parthenon frieze to be conveyed to England in 1803.
May it please Lord Elgin, Earl of Kincardine,
to consider the undersign’d, sole author
and inventor of the Eidophusikon,
for the position so lately rejected
by Mr. Turner. On giving the measure
of its Effects—calm & storm both, sunset
or moonlight, the accurate imitation
of Nature’s sounds: approaching thunder, the dash
of waves on a pebbly beach, the distant gun—
my Device was pronounc’d by no less a judge
than Richard Wilson, R.A.—the same who cried out
at the sight of Terni Cascade, “O well done,
water, by God!”—was pronounc’d, I say, by him
“highly successful in agitated seas,”
by reason of the high finish carrying
severally their satellites of color
into the very center of the Pictures.
As it happens, your Lordship, I visited
the same Joseph Turner known to your Lordship
(I believe) only this week, and found a man
pacing to and fro before his pale muslin
on which the sick and wan Sun, in all the doubt
of darkness, was not allow’d to shed one ray,
but tears. Even as he work’d, pouring wet paint
onto paper till it was saturated,
then tore, then scratch’d, then scrubb’d in a frenzy
at the sheet, the Whole being chaos, until
as if by enchantment, the Scene appear’d then,
great ships gone to pieces in order to fling
magical oranges on the waves—but I
digress: even as he shew’d me two books fill’d
with studies from Nature, several tinted
on the spot—which he found, he said, much the most
valuable to him—this Turner discuss’d
the present urgency of your Lordship’s need
for an artist who might draw Antiquities,
with suitable finish, before Removal,
by your Lordship’s design, from Athens. He said
he could not, himself, endure the Ideal,
but enjoy’d and look’d for only litter—why
even his richest vegetation is confus’d,
he delights in shingle, debris and mere heaps
of fallen stone. Upon communicating
the intelligence that your Lordship’s stipend
must include assistance to Lady Elgin
in decorating fire-screens and the like,
the man turn’d back in some heat to his labor
upon what I took to be that mysterious
forest below London Bridge, where great ships ride,
sails filling or falling, disorder’d too
by the stress of anchorage, all beautiful
though wild beneath the Daemonic pressure
of his inquiry (with so much of the trowel,
surely a touch more finishing might be borne!).
Enough of Turner, I have not to speak here
of him, though what I saw was but the scribbling
of Painting, surely. What I would say is this:
I venture to suggest in myself a man
your Lordship, and my Lady, most certainly,
might rely upon for accurate Service,
work of a conclusive polish, not a sketch.
There is, may I make so bold, a point at which
in Turner’s Picturesque, as Fuseli says,
two spiders, caressing or killing each other,
must have greatly the advantage, in roughness
of surface and intricacy of motion,
over every athletic or am’rous
Symplegma left by the Ancients. I do not
wish to speak further of the man who renounc’d
your Lordship’s commission to copy marbles,
muttering (though plain to hear), “Antiquities
be damn’d, by Thames’ shore we will die,” and went on
raking at the sea with his untidy thumb;
but only to call your Lordship’s kind notice
and gracious favor, for the appointed task,
to the creator of the Eidophusikon,
these many years a loyal British subject,
Yours, &c.
PHILIPPE-JACQUES DE LOUTHERBOURG
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