J. M. W. Turner

by Peter Ackroyd

  He was also concerned with matters of property. On the death of his uncle this year he inherited two houses in Wapping and some land in Barking; it is a testimony to his entrepreneurial skills that he converted the pair of houses into a single public house called the Ship and Bladebone. It was not perhaps the most unusual title for a public house by the riverside, but it conformed to his London instincts. In the same period he was involved in litigation with one of his tenants, a dentist renting rooms in his house in Harley Street.

  But his most important concern this year was the building of a new gallery; he was also involved with the enlargement and remodelling of the house in Queen Anne Street. He wrote to a friend to thank him for your kind offer of refuge to the Houseless, which in the present instance is humane . . . some demon eclypt Mason, Bricklayer, Carpenter etc. etc. etc. has kept me in constant oscillation between Twickenham and London, from London to Twit [sic], that I have found the art of going about doing nothing—“so out of nothing, nothing can come.”

  “Doing nothing” here meant having neither the time nor the opportunity to paint which, for an artist of Turner’s energy, was perhaps the most aggravating condition of all. Yet he managed to channel his activity into the new house itself. He busied himself about its architectural details, and made elaborate plans for the furnishing of his new residence.

  The work on the house was extensive, and continued well into the next year; the consequent disturbance meant that Turner had no paintings to exhibit in the Academy show of 1821. One artistic colleague told Farington that Turner had received no commissions, but had added that “he can do very well without any commissions.” By which he meant that Turner was by now sufficiently wealthy to be able to dispense with ready money. One of the sources of his income was on display this year, however, since in the spring of 1821 there was an exhibition of the work of engravers, many of whom had created prints out of Turner’s water-colours. One reviewer particularly remarked that “the prints of W. B. and G. Cooke after Turner are remarkable for brilliancy, spirited and scientific etching, airiness, depth and power.”

  Yet some critics have also discerned in this pause, this cessation of painterly activity, an instinctive change in his art. It was as if he were taking breath before embarking upon a new engagement with the possibilities of colour in his work. Certainly, by 1824, there is a renewed emphasis upon what one contemporary described as “the mysteries of light” in Turner’s pictures together with “the singular mixture of prismatic colours with which he represents sky and water.” It may have been connected with his Italian journey, and perhaps more particularly to his immersion in the light of Venice, but it can more plausibly be attached to the inherent development of his genius. He was beginning to create what might be called structures of colour or even structures of light, which in themselves create harmony and contrast, recession and movement. His contemporaries sometimes referred to it as painted mist but it is rather the depiction of the mysterious intimations of evolving form.

  The new gallery was opened with a flourish in 1822. It was situated on the first floor of the house, beside Turner’s studio; on the ground floor were the parlour and the dining-room, which seem to have betrayed little other than the artist’s opulent circumstances. The whole ménage was supervised by Hannah Danby, the niece of his erstwhile mistress, who stayed with her employer until his death. There have been many descriptions of the gallery itself, and one early visitor recalled that the walls were of the colour then known as “Indian Red.” He went on to say that it was the best lighted gallery I have ever seen, and the effect got by the simplest means; a herring net was spread from end to end just above the walls, and sheets of tissue spread on the net, the roof itself being like that of a greenhouse. By this the light was diffused close to the pictures.

  Stories of Turner’s gallery abound, making it sound like a cross between Aladdin’s cave and Bluebeard’s castle.

  It did not for long remain in its pristine state. When one artist called in the 1840s, during a day of heavy London rain, he found “the floor strewed with old saucers, basins and dishes, placed there to catch the rain, which poured from broken panes, cracks and crevices.” Many of the paintings were cracked and peeling; others were used to keep open doors or to block a window. They were dusty and dirty, stained and altogether neglected.

  Another painter, William Leighton Leitch, was invited to visit the gallery when Turner was not present, apparently a rare privilege. Leitch noticed at once that the house in Queen Anne Street “had a desolate look. The door was shabby and nearly destitute of paint and the windows were obscured by dirt.” On ringing the bell the door was opened a very little bit, and a very singular figure appeared behind it. It was a woman covered from head to foot with dingy whitish flannel, her face being nearly hidden. She did not speak, so I told her my name, and that Mr. Turner had given me permission to see the pictures. I gave her my card and a piece of silver with it, on which she pointed to the stair and to a door at the head of it, but she never spoke a word and shutting the door she disappeared.

  Hannah Danby was the presiding spirit of this forlorn place; she hid her face because she was suffering from some debilitating and disfiguring skin disease.

  When Leitch sat down in a chair, the better to view a particular painting, he suddenly felt something moving around his neck. It was a cat. In his alarm he startled four or five more cats that had begun to creep around his legs. He fled in horror, and “on looking back I saw the cats at the top glaring at me, and I noticed that every one of them was without a tail.” The cats were of course Manx, and it has often been said that cats without tails save money; they do not take so long to enter or exit a room, and so preserve its heat.

  It is a cautionary tale of entering the great artist’s sanctum, but not as cautionary as if the artist himself had been present. Turner’s studio was adjacent to the gallery, and he had fitted a spy-hole so that he could see exactly what the visitors were doing in his apparent absence. If they attempted to touch a painting—or, worse, to sketch it—he came out in belligerent mood. One man dared to make a note of a painting; Turner came out and tore it up. Very few visitors were allowed to enter the studio itself which harboured the secreta secretorum of Turner’s art. It was what W. H. Auden called in another context the cave of making, and for Turner it was very like a cave—a secret and secluded place where he could work and brood. Here he kept on a shelf several glass bottles, each one filled with a different colour—among them chrome yellow, emerald green and red lead. There were many brushes, small and large, a bureau of old paints and oils, and a palette upon which he mixed the variously coloured powders with cold-drawn oil. In the studio, too, he kept models of ships and some views of foreign scenery. Here he worked from early morning, keeping long hours, and yet “work” is hardly the word for what was essentially a mode of life. From here emerged the painting hung in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1822, What You Will!, a study of a scene from Twelfth Night; the title itself has a punning allusion to Watteau, whose style he seems to have borrowed for the occasion. It is very much a studio piece, with various Shakespearian characters grouped among statuary and trees.

  If he was essentially a studio painter he still made his forays into the world in order to refresh his imagination and to find new themes. In the summer of this year, for example, he travelled up to Edinburgh in order to record the arrival there of George IV. It has been suggested that this was a bid for royal approval or patronage near the start of a new reign (George had been crowned two years before), or that he was preparing for a series of royal paintings, but the latter endeavour came to nothing. Four unfinished oil-paintings of this royal visit were later found in his studio. But he always made good use of his time. That is why he found the opportunity on this journey to sketch various rivers and ports, in preparation for a book of engravings on that subject.

  Even if he had not succeeded in inaugurating a series of royal paintings, it seems that he had caught the new king’s notice.
At the end of 1822 George IV commissioned Turner to paint the battle of Trafalgar, to be placed in one of the state apartments of St. James’s Palace. He must have seemed the ideal artist for such an enterprise. He readily complied, and wrote to the king’s marine painter for details of the ships that took part in the naval action. He worked upon the canvas for some sixteen months and, as a result of his labours, had nothing to offer the Royal Academy for its exhibition in 1824.

  In the spring of that year The Battle of Trafalgar was revealed to the world, gaining a decidedly mixed response. It was generally believed that the government was not happy with the completed work, and that the scene depicted was implausible and inaccurate. He had received the benefit of professional advice, however, during the last stages of its composition. While finishing it in St. James’s Palace he was “instructed daily by the naval men about the Court. During the eleven days he altered the rigging to suit the fancy of every fresh critic; and he did it with the greatest good humour.” He was not in “good humour,” however, on the day he was approached by the duke of Clarence, later to become William IV. Turner seems to have been somewhat belligerent and the Duke ended the conversation by saying, “I have been at sea the greater part of my life, sir, you don’t know who you are talking to and I’ll be damned if you know what you are talking about.” This sounds apocryphal—who, after all, would have reported the exchange?—but the painting was not received with royal favour. It was banished to Greenwich, and may have cost Turner the knighthood which he believed he deserved.

  He was perhaps more fortunate in the reception of his water-colours at an exhibition arranged by the engraver W. B. Cooke, in Soho Square. Fifteen of Turner’s works were hung here, confirming his mastery of that medium. In 1824, too, he began preparing for a series of landscapes of England and Wales; for that series, and perhaps for earlier ones, he had now devised a technique of painting watercolours in batches. Sometimes he would paint the subject on several different sheets, adding and refining until one of them caught the mood and atmosphere that he required. On other occasions it seems that he would employ just one colour on several different compositions before turning to another colour. There was another technique that one artist saw him using.

  There were four drawing boards, each of which had a handle screwed to the back. Turner, after sketching in his subject in a fluent manner, grasped the handle and plunged the whole drawing into a pail of water by his side. Then quickly he washed in the principal hues that he required, flowing tint into tint, until this stage of the work was complete. Leaving the first drawing to dry, he took the second board and repeated the operation. By the time the fourth drawing was laid in, the first would be ready for the finishing touches.

  It was an interesting technique, perhaps owing something to the factory system that was even then expanding all over England but of course also conforming to Turner’s own brisk and expeditious nature.

  In this period, too, he was arranging and labelling his sketchbooks so that they might form some kind of order. He put numbers on the spines, as well as compiling a table of contents, so that he had ready access to the thousands of landscape drawings that he had executed over the preceding years. It was part of the tidiness and efficiency with which he approached all aspects of his life and work, but he may also have been putting in order his entire corpus in anticipation of his eventual demise. He had an overwhelming need to leave his legacy to posterity in as complete a form as possible.

  He employed four of these sketchbooks on a tour in the summer of 1824, when he travelled to the rivers Meuse and Mosel. In one of these books he appended little diagrams of the areas he was visiting, complete with miles, local inns and important “sights.” He was away for a little over a month, and in that period completed many thousands of sketches. Two of these sketchbooks were expressly designed for the artistic traveller; they were soft-covered, and could be rolled up in order to be stowed in a capacious coat-pocket. He travelled for much of the time in a boat or in a barge pulled by horses; there are notations such as “horses obliged to swim” and “horses again across the river.” He also travelled by road, of course, although on one occasion his “diligence” or coach overturned and had to be dug out of a ditch between Ghent and Brussels. He completed a water-colour of that incident. He sketched everything, his capacious eye taking in scenes and landscapes at a glance— the churches, the bridges, the mountains, the castles, the villages, the inns and the medieval buildings he glimpsed en route. Only one oil-painting was actually created out of the materials of this journey, Harbour of Dieppe (Changement de Domicile), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the following year.

  On its presentation in 1825 it was praised in one periodical as “one of those magnificent works of art, which make us proud of the age we live in.” Other critics were not so sure, and complained that the painting was not “true to nature”; the brilliancy of its colours, and the general heightening of light and tone, were not consonant with what the English knew of Dieppe. He had given the French port the atmosphere of Venice. It is clear enough that most observers had not yet understood the direction of Turner’s art, or the qualities that he was now bringing to it. They were happier with his water-colours and, indeed, with the engravings of those water-colours. Such works were more familiar.

  Turner must have been satisfied with the results of his expedition to the Meuse and the Mosel since, in the late August of this year, he travelled to Holland before proceeding up the Rhine. He was revisiting the landscapes of the Dutch masters he revered. He visited The Hague as well as Amsterdam and Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges. His methods were much the same as those of the previous year, with sketchbooks on hand for brief notations and more elaborate drawings. Out of this trip came one of his most famous paintings, although it had little to do with the topography of Holland itself. It was entitled Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening, and derived from an impression he received at the very end of the tour.

  Soon after his return from this journey he received the unwelcome news that his friend and patron, Walter Fawkes, had died. He was one of what might be called the “old school” of collectors, landed gentlemen who came to admire and befriend the artists whom they patronised. Collectors of a new kind soon came to take their place as the purchasers of Turner’s art, the self-made industrialists who were even then changing the entire landscape of England. Turner never returned to Farnley Hall and in a letter written a few weeks after Fawkes’s death he laments that “my good Auld lang sine is gone . . . and I must follow; indeed, I feel as you say, nearer a million times the brink of eternity.”

  There was more domestic unsettlement in this period, too, and as he said “Daddy being now released from farming thinks of feeding . . .” By which he meant that he had sold Sandycombe Lodge, thus sparing the old man the labour of gardening; the odd couple now moved into Queen Anne Street as their permanent home. But his father was now entering his eighties, a great age for a Londoner, and was clearly declining. Indeed Turner had to cancel some of his lectures on perspective, at the beginning of the following year, when his father became ill.

  In the spring of 1826 Turner exhibited Cologne at the Royal Academy, but the canvas was noted chiefly for the artist’s use of yellow. The true merits of the work went largely undiscussed. It was also reported that the controversial painting was so egregiously yellow that two adjacent portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence seemed insipid in contrast; Turner is then supposed to have covered his canvas with a layer of lampblack to dull the resplendent effect. The tale is almost certainly apocryphal; it is unlikely that Turner would ruin the surface of one of his paintings for the sake of a fellow artist. There may be more truth in the report that Turner had “toned” the oil-painting with water-colour on the day preceding the exhibition. It had in fact now become part of his practice to mingle the two kinds of paint. In the same exhibition he showed Forum Romanum for Mr. Soane’s Museum, a result of his visit to Italy seven years before. Some ideas, and ideals, lingered;
they waited in the wings, as it were, for the right moment of inspiration.

  In this year, too, Turner was working upon what was conceived to be the largest series of engravings from his works, entitled Picturesque Views in England and Wales. He had agreed to provide 120 drawings, which would then be issued in “parts” with accompanying text—four engravings in each part—and three numbers duly appeared in 1827. It was essentially to furnish material for further drawings that in the same year he embarked on a number of visits to various parts of England—to Margate, to Petworth and to the Isle of Wight. On the island he was the guest of John Nash, the architect and town planner who completely changed the aspect of London with the construction of Regent Street and Regent’s Park, not to mention Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. He owned a castle on a hill opposite West Cowes, and from that eminence Turner proceeded to sketch views of the Cowes Regatta.

  Caricature of Turner slathering on his favourite chrome yellow. He was said to have made last-minute adjustments to one canvas by spitting on it and then using his fingers to rub in some snu f, while his painting of Jessica from The Merchant of Venice was nicknamed “lady getting out of a large mustard-pot.”

  Nash also placed a painting-room at the disposal of his eminent guest, and as a result Turner stayed longer than he had expected. He was obliged to write to his father, asking him to send more painting-materials as well as extra items from his wardrobe. “I want some Scarlet Lake and Dark Lake and Burnt Umber in powder from Newman’s,” he wrote; he also needed two white waistcoats. He managed to fill three sketchbooks and began work on several paintings, some of which he worked up in time for the Royal Academy exhibition of the following year. He also completed some sketches in oil, on two different rolls of canvas. One of these works, Study of Sea and Sky, Isle of Wight 1827, is perhaps the first of his paintings in which he attended simply to the forces of water and cloud.