I do not want to say too much about this wispily beauteous watercolor painting of the stripling Turner. It is elegant and dignified as the abbey itself, even in its ruin, it is ravishing. I picture the young master wandering among those pointed columns, the abbey’s floor covered in grass, then depicting the abbey as an abandoned bride in her traceries and ivy veiled face.
Henry VIII was hell-bent enough to dissolute the church in England, leaving monasteries to vanish like the Tintern Abbey, just because he was angry with the Pope not letting him marry Ann Boleyn.
What can I say more? Tintern Abbey is a typical instance of humankind. We can create and ruin the same thing. Nature can take it back and a human can create it again with brushstrokes if nothing else. Nothing will be lost until we have a paper and a brush.
