J. M. W. Turner

by Peter Ackroyd

  He returned to Farnley in time for the opening of the grouse season and a family tragedy: in the course of the shooting, Walter Fawkes’s younger brother was injured and subsequently died.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1816–1819

  Turner had worked on drawing and painting the English landscape for some twenty-five years, ever since he had travelled to Bristol in the autumn of 1791 at the age of sixteen. He had created a panorama of England in succeeding years, an achievement that was then more associated with him in the public mind than his more controversial paintings. But he had not been entirely insular—he had travelled to France and Switzerland, for example, in 1802—and by the end of 1816 he began making plans for a European journey in the succeeding year. It was to be one of many visits to the European continent, in the course of which Turner would reflect upon the role and nature of his own painting and upon his virtues as a specifically English artist.

  He showed only one painting at the Royal Academy this year, but it was one that provoked much admiring comment. It was entitled The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire— the full title is some fifty-one words long—and it acts as a companion piece to his painting of two years before on the subject of Dido erecting the city of Carthage itself. Its appearance prompted one critic to call for the establishment of a “National Gallery” where such works could be hung beside the Old Masters. The livid sky and the setting sun were also the occasions for praise, as if Turner were depicting the fiery splendour of an expiring age. He had already advanced the art of history painting to new intensity and even sublimity, as if the poetry of Byron or of Shelley had found colour and texture, light and shadow.

  Then, in the summer of 1817, he set off by boat from Margate to Ostend. He had made a preparatory list of indispensable items, as many travellers do. He included in it books and fever medicine as well as pencils and colours. He also made out a list of Dutch phrases with their translation in English—“what church do you call it; can I leave my mantle; have you seen my baggage.” The last question became of vital importance. Inevitably he managed to lose his knapsack, which held a waistcoat, a razor, six cravats, and a guide-book to Belgium.

  While en route he also made notes to himself on his circumstances. In Ostend, for example, he wrote: “inn The Hotel de la Cour Imperiale. Badly served. Charges dear. 2 francs for Breakfast . . .” He travelled by carriage through Ghent and Brussels, and then spent a day inspecting the site of the battle of Waterloo. Here he made notes of the battlefield, which evidently still bore signs of the recent slaughter, with ashy cinders of the bodies as well as bloodstains on the farm walls and buildings. He jotted down the notes of fatalities, “1500 killed here” and “4000 killed here.”

  He went on to Cologne since his principal object was to make a series of pencil sketches of the Rhine which were later worked up into water-colours for Walter Fawkes. He walked for some forty miles, but then took a boat to Mainz before returning to Cologne. Then he went on to Antwerp, where the work of Rubens was to be seen in its most appropriate surroundings, and then to Rotterdam and Amsterdam where he had reminded himself to see Rembrandt’s Night Watch and The Anatomy Lesson.

  On his return to England he travelled north once more. He spent some time at Raby Castle in County Durham, at the invitation of the third earl of Darlington who commissioned him to depict his country seat. The work duly appeared, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy before being despatched to its owner, complete with a fox-hunting scene. The hounds are to be seen racing across the billowing landscape. It was at Raby Castle that he completed the water-colours of the Rhineland which were purchased by Fawkes. He had taken three sketchbooks with him on his journey, and out of these he made some fifty-one watercolours. But the transformation was complete. The pencil drawings were executed rapidly and sketch out the topographical details of the scene; only later, in the completed water-colours, did he impart atmosphere and colour.

  The more formal results of his journey were exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1818 with Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam becalmed and The Field of Waterloo. The Dort painting was reputed to be one of Turner’s own favourites, and indeed much of the comment at the time was laudatory. The Morning Chronicle described it as “one of the most magnificent pictures ever exhibited” which “does honour to the age.” More graphically, perhaps, a fellow artist described its colours as so vivid that “it almost puts your eyes out.” It is indeed a magnificent piece, with the stately sailing boat resting calmly on the water and casting shadows upon the serene surface so that it seems almost to be hovering in air. It is said that another artist gave up his own place so that it could be exhibited in a central position in the Great Room of the Academy; if so, it was a tribute to the respect with which Turner’s work was now greeted. Constable declared of the painting that it was “I think the most complete work of genius I ever saw.”

  The calm and composure of this painting are amply contrasted by the glare and horror of The Field of Waterloo in which the thousands of dead lie mixed upon the plain of battle. Behind the scene of fallen men is the fervid glare of burning buildings, sending up billows of black smoke into the already fiery and super-charged air. It is not necessarily a paean against warfare as such—in some respects Turner was a profound patriot and would not have regretted the result of the battle—but rather a description of the lamentable effects of human strife. It shows the pity of victory, against a background which has intimations of eternity.

  The wife of Walter Fawkes made an entry in her diary for Thursday 4 June 1818. “Went to Eton to see the boat-race. Dined and slept at Salt Hill. Little Turner came with us.” And little Turner used the excursion to great effect by finishing a sepia drawing of “Windsor Castle from Salt Hill.” His landscape work was still flourishing, with many watercolours issuing from his brush for the engraver’s burin.

  In the autumn he travelled to Scotland, since he had agreed to furnish drawings for The Provincial Antiquities of Scotland; Sir Walter Scott had consented to write the text for this volume, but their eventual encounter was not a success. Some months later Scott wrote to a friend that “Turner’s palm is as itchy as his fingers are ingenious and he will, take my word for it, do nothing without cash and anything for it. He is almost the only man of genius I ever knew who is sordid in these matters.” The cause of Scott’s complaint is likely to have been Turner’s determination to be paid the highest possible fees for his work. But why should he not assert his own worth? Scott, of all people, should have known the value of money in return for creative labour.

  Turner also met certain Scottish artists, as befitted a visiting celebrity. But his manner did not altogether please his generous hosts. A sister of one artist wrote to an acquaintance that “we are all, however, provoked at the coldness of his manner. We intended to have a joyous evening on his arrival, but finding him such a stick, we did not think the pleasure of showing him to our friends would be adequate to the trouble and expense.”

  Turner was only ever a “stick” in the “wrong” company. It may be that there was some incompatibility of temperament between the English painter and his Scottish hosts. There is some indication that he was not in any case in the best of moods. A dinner had been arranged for him, with ten guests, and he failed to turn up. He may have found the welcomes just too hearty.

  His interest in “cash,” intimated by Scott, was in fact put to some beneficial use in this year. In the summer of 1818 he had purchased three adjacent parcels of land in Twickenham, and in his will he instructed his executors to build alms-houses on them for the benefit of impoverished artists. Since he was so secretive about financial matters, his motives were often misconstrued. Questions of finance must certainly have influenced his decision, at the very beginning of the following year, to discontinue the series known as Liber Studiorum. He had supervised its publication but he had had neither the time nor the inclination to publish it punctually; he had also had disagreements with various engravers, and had
clearly decided that he had had enough of the entire business. His new manner of working, producing watercolours for other publishers, was more efficacious and more remunerative.

  His reputation was in any case greatly enhanced in the early spring when there were two separate exhibitions of his work. Sir John Leicester exhibited eight of his oil-paintings, housed in his gallery in Hill Street, and a month later Walter Fawkes displayed no less than seventy of Turner’s watercolours in the rooms of his town house in Grosvenor Place. It was a remarkable collection in the most obvious sense, since Turner’s water-colours had never been seen before as a coherent whole. One newspaper wrote that “this artist’s fame can acquire no better vindication than this Collection,” and added with a touch of jingoism that Turner was “at the head of all English (and in saying so we necessarily include all living) artists.”

  At the Royal Academy in 1819 he chose to display two oil-paintings, Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, going to Pieces and England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday . The first was obviously indebted to his recent journey to the Low Countries, and was the first painting by Turner ever to be seen by the visionary artist Samuel Palmer. Palmer was fourteen years old at the time and later recalled that “being by nature a lover of smudginess, I have revelled in him from that day to this.”

  If the Meuse painting is the result of a recent journey, the oil of Richmond Hill returns to one of his old obsessions. It also has the distinction of being the largest work he had yet completed, some eleven feet in length. It can be viewed as an affirmation of nationhood or as a celebration of the royal family (it has been suggested that Turner was in pursuit of royal patronage), but it can also be seen as part of a tribute to himself at the centre of the landscape tradition. His residence, Sandycombe Lodge, is situated in the middle of the composition as if his was a secret presence in this fluent and melodious work. But such paintings go beyond conscious intention or motive. Richmond seems for him to have become a sacred place, part of the landscape of his imagination. There were certain regions of the Thames that prompted in him the most profound meditations or, rather, his response to the riverscape had within it elements of rapture as well as contemplation.

  There is a description of Turner visiting the exhibition put on by Walter Fawkes in Grosvenor Place. He came alone and while he leaned on the centre table in the great room, or slowly worked his rough way through the mass, he attracted every eye in the brilliant crowd, and seemed to me like a victorious Roman general, the principal figure in his own triumph. Perhaps no British artist ever retired from an exhibition of his own works, with so much reason for unmixed satisfaction, or more genuine proofs of well deserved admiration from the public.

  He did indeed have every reason for “unmixed satisfaction.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  1819–1827

  It seems that he was now ready to confront Italy, then considered to be the world’s home of painting. His enthusiasm for the Italian landscape may already have been kindled by some water-colours of Italian scenes which he had just completed, using as his models certain camera lucida sketches by James Hakewill; Turner’s work would eventually be seen in a volume entitled Tour in Italy. A letter from a fellow artist, Sir Thomas Lawrence, had stated that “Turner should come to Rome. His genius would be here supplied with materials, and entirely congenial with it.” Turner himself no doubt would have agreed since a few weeks later, at the beginning of August 1819, he set off across the Channel on his way to Italy.

  He journeyed to Turin by way of Paris, Lyons and Grenoble. From Turin he travelled to Como and the lakes of the vicinity before moving on to Milan and Verona. And then he encountered Venice for the first time. His first thoughts on seeing the floating city are not recorded but we may imagine the response of one who was so deeply attuned to the movement of water, to the passage of light and the intermingling of the sun among the waves. This was a marine world of boats and barques and gondolas, of masts and sails and flags of every colour and description; it was a world of great ships and wide quays, with palaces and domed churches seeming to spring out of the sea itself. There were boats of dark hue lying in the shadows, the reflections of lamps and houses and torches glistening in the water, arches and mansions and towers innumerable. There were grand piazzas, too, with candle lights like something out of an enchanted fable; there were porches and cloisters and galleries falling away in an endless perspective. This was Turner’s world.

  It was perhaps his world in a different sense also. The connection between Venice and England has often been made, both insular and maritime powers of uncertain or perilous destiny. But there was perhaps a closer connection. David Wilkie, the artist whose work had recently hung on the walls of the Royal Academy beside that of Turner, remarked of Venice that “by land and by water the town is full of intricacy, full of St. Martin’s Courts, of Maiden Lanes, and Cranbourne Alleys, interrupted at every corner with canals and high bridges.” Of course Turner’s boyhood haunts had been Maiden Lane and Cranbourne Alley, now transposed into the setting of water and of the sea. How could he fail to fall half in love with such a place?

  He stayed for only five days on this occasion but the city seized his imagination; he filled some 160 pages of his sketchbooks with drawings and groups of drawings. He also executed some wonderful water-colours of the Venetian morning, where the translucent and ethereal light of the city is evoked in washes of blue and yellow. That sense of light never left him. It irradiates much of the rest of his work. His oil-paintings of Venice, completed at a later date, glow upon the wall as if a bright light were shining through them. The effect of Venice upon him was altogether profound, and seemed to grow in intensity as the years passed. His various periods of stay in Venice lasted altogether for less than four weeks, but in the last twenty years of his painting life he devoted one third of his productive work to views of that city. For him it became a jewel of great price.

  From Venice he made a slow progress to Rome, in which city he arrived toward the end of October. He stayed there until approximately the middle of December, during which time he completed some fifteen hundred pencil sketches. He had come to see, and to draw, the city and its landscape hallowed for him by many associations with Raphael and Claude. He drew everything—columns, fascias, entablatures, pillars, ruins and inscriptions. He studied paintings and sculptures in the Corsini and Farnese palaces; he visited the churches and the chapels; he walked among the temples and the markets of ancient Rome.

  He was not continuously in the Italian capital, however, since some timely activity from Vesuvius prompted him to travel on to Naples. In an era without the benefit of cheap cameras, one aspect of the artist’s role was to record the spectacle of great events. The son of Sir John Soane happened to be in the vicinity, and wrote in a letter home that

  Turner is in the neighbourhood of Naples making rough pencil sketches to the astonishment of the Fashionables, who wonder of what use these rough draughts can be—simple souls! At Rome a sucking blade of the brush made the request of going out with pig Turner to colour—he grunted for an answer that it would take too much time to colour in the open air—he could make 15 or 16 pencil sketches to one coloured, and then grunted his way home.

  The “sucking blade of the brush” was one of those English amateurs or dilettanti who thronged to Italy to satisfy their finer feelings and also to pick up relatively cheap tuition from Italian professionals. Turner despised such people, and his “grunt” was no doubt distinctive.

  He also made a private pilgrimage, to the grave of Virgil outside Naples. Virgil was for him the poet who had managed to combine the pastoral and the allegorical, to create spiritual landscapes, and to derive legendary enchantment out of historical events. In his own way, and in his own medium, he had similar ambitions.

  He returned home by way of Turin and the Mont Cenis Pass, where the snow was so deep that his carriage capsized. Turner, and the rest of the passengers, were obliged to climb out through th
e window and complete the rest of the journey by foot—or, as he put it later, “flounder up to our knees, nothing less, in snow all the way down . . .” A fight broke out between the guides and drivers which no doubt finished as quickly as it had started. But Turner was as observant as he was self-possessed. He completed a water-colour for Walter Fawkes, entitled The Passage of Mt. Cenis, 15th Jany, 1820, which amid the sublime white landscape of the Alps conjures up all the details of the incident.

  There were of course other fruits of his Italian journey. By dint of effort and hard work he managed to complete one large oil-painting for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1820. It was entitled Rome from the Vatican: Ra faelle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his pictures for the decoration of the Loggia. It was a densely allusive title—“La Fornarina” being the mistress of Raphael—and the picture itself is somewhat difficult to decipher. It is not one of Turner’s happier compositions, being both cluttered and anachronistic. It has been suggested that the painting is in part semi-autobiographical, but there is no reason to doubt Turner’s responsiveness to Rome and the Roman landscape.

  From the time of his return at the beginning of 1820 he was engaged in Academy business, and indeed in this year he was appointed inspector of the Cast Collection. He was also obliged to serve on various committees, determining matters from pensions to purchasing policies. At a later date he was also appointed auditor of the Academy, which suggests that his reputation for the cautious handling of money had spread among his colleagues. There is no doubt that he was in fact a good member of any committee, being brisk and expeditious in all matters of business.