J. M. W. Turner

by Peter Ackroyd

  Rain, Steam and Speed is a token for Turner’s experiments in colour during this period, an exercise in what may be called the vaporous sublime, in which the material world is wreathed in a veil of majesty and in which the laying down of pure colour elicits the most powerful and profound responses. He was trying to create a new sense of form as an inalienable property of light.

  His late paintings were not in any case meant to be immediately comprehended. When Ruskin said to him that “the worst of his pictures was that one could never see enough of them,” he replied, “That’s part of their quality.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1844–1851

  By the mid-1840s, Turner was significantly ageing. He wrote to a friend that “the evening beat me. Time always hangs hard upon me, but his auxiliary, Dark weather, has put me quite into the background, altho’ before Xmas I conceived myself in advance of Mr. Time.” In 1846 he seems finally to have abandoned domestic life in Queen Anne Street and left the house and gallery there to the attentions of Hannah Danby whom, in letters, he had a habit of calling “my damsel,” although anyone looking less like a “damsel” would be hard to imagine. He moved to a small house in Cremorne Road, Chelsea, just by a bend in the river. He constructed a kind of gallery on the roof of this building, and from there he could sit and watch the changing light upon the river. It is said by one who knew him well that he would climb the stairs on to the roof before sunrise “and if there was a fair promise of an effective rising he would remain to study it, making pencil notes of the form of clouds, and writing in brief their tints of colour.”

  The place had another attraction also. Sophia Booth shared the house with him, and indeed they lived together for all practical purposes as man and wife. She claimed that she had paid for the lease, with “Turner refusing to give a farthing towards it.” There are many anecdotes of their life here, gathered from Mrs. Booth herself and from the neighbours who were alternately amused and mystified by Turner’s odd behaviour. It seems that he was known to the locals as “Admiral Booth” or “Puggy Booth,” no doubt because of his whimsical nautical appearance. Turner called Mrs. Booth “Old ’un,” like a character out of Dickens, and she knew him as “dear.” “There are times,” Sophia told a picture-dealer, “when I feel he must be a god.” It was rumoured in the locality that he was a great man in disguise, and that on his death he would be buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, but no one knew the actual truth of the matter. He was said to sit by himself in a local public house, and indeed there are stories of his excessive drinking towards the end of his life. But he still retained his reputation for secrecy and mystery. He was seen by an artist in the Chelsea pub one rainy evening, and the acquaintance said to him, “I shall often drop in now I’ve found out where you quarter.” “Will you,” Turner replied. “I don’t think you will.” Whereupon he finished his drink and left.

  He was more convivial in less private circumstances. He had become a founder member of the Athenaeum in 1824, for example, and in these latter years “was always to be seen between ten and eleven at the Athenaeum, discussing his half-pint of sherry. As his health failed, he became very talkative after his wine and rather dogmatic.” He could also become triumphant after two or three drinks. When he was with Walter Fawkes’s son, Hawksworth, in a London hotel he staggered around saying, “I am the real lion. I am the great lion of the day, Hawkey.” When a young artist observed him in 1847 he reported that there is no evidence of unhealthy biliousness in his face. It is red and full of living blood, and although age has left its mark on him it does not seem to have taken the energy of his mind, for that lives in the observant eye and that compressed mouth, the evidence of an acute, penetrating intellect, which I may mention is seen in the whole contour of his face. He is a great little man—and all acknowledge it.

  This great little man was able to provide six canvases for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1846, but in the following year he produced only one—and that itself was a worked-over version of a canvas he had stored in his gallery. In truth he could not work because he was no longer in good health. It seems that he was obliged to forfeit all his teeth as a result of some disease or disorder of the gums. A dentist constructed a set of false ones but they were not altogether successful; as a result his digestion was impaired and his health weakened. He could only suck solid foods, and therefore became more reliant upon drink of every sort. He was placed on a diet of rum and milk, which he would drink to excess. And of course he may have taken alcohol in other forms to help curb the continual pain that he seemed to endure.

  The dentist, W. Bartlett—who was also a “surgeon” and a “cupper” or blood-letter—explained later that he visited the little house in Cremorne Road three or four times each day during Turner’s illness, and reported that “there was nothing about the house to indicate the abode of an artist. The Art Journal and the Illustrated London News were always on the table. He was very fond of smoking and yet had a great objection to any one knowing of it.” The artist told Bartlett that, if he recovered, he would “take me on the continent and show me all the places he had visited.”

  But he fell ill again, and Mrs. Booth took him down to Margate in order to savour the sea air. He then suffered from some kind of fit at Rochester. In the following year he seems to have contracted cholera, in one of those virulent epidemics that swept over London in the mid-nineteenth century. Areas like Cremorne Road, close to the effluent of the river, were particularly affected. But somehow or other he survived. Mrs. Booth’s nursing must have had a beneficial effect; she was “most unwearied, being up night and day.” But his own hardy constitution played a part in his recovery. He was tough and durable.

  Despite his bouts of severe ill health he had not lost his curiosity. He was particularly interested in the new invention of photography and, unlike many of his artistic contemporaries, did not consider the production of the daguerreotype to be any kind of threat to genuine painting. He knew well enough that an artist did much more than merely record impressions. In the late 1840s Turner used to visit a photographic shop in the Strand run by a Mr. Mayall. The proprietor knew nothing of his visitor, except that he believed him to be a “Master in Chancery.” How he received that impression is not clear.

  Mayall took several daguerreotypes of Turner and stated later that “I recollect one of these portraits was presented to the lady who accompanied him.” The gift was no doubt presented to Mrs. Booth. On one visit the artist “stayed for some three hours, talking about light and its curious effects on films of prepared silver. He expressed a wish to see the spectral image copied.”

  So Turner had not lost his enthusiasm for the effects of light. It had in fact remained his central preoccupation. He was “always with some new notion about light” on subsequent visits, and was particularly interested in Mayall’s photographs of the Niagara Falls. He “enquired of me about the effect of the rainbow spanning the great falls.” Mayall had a plate of that phenomenon, which Turner wished to buy. But it was not to be sold. It was too singular. Mayall recalled that he was inquisitive and observant, curious about every aspect of his work. It was for Turner, after all, a new pictorial world.

  It was only later, when he met his visitor at a soirée of the Royal Society, that Mayall was informed he knew “the Mr. Turner.” Turner carried on chatting about the spectrum as if nothing whatever had been said. If it seems somewhat odd that Mayall had taken him for a legal figure, it may have been the impression that Turner wished to leave. There is the story of his putting on the Lord Chancellor’s wig, at a private supper, where he was “so joyous and happy . . . in the idea that the Chancellor’s wig became him better than any one else of the party.” A legal persona, like the marine persona, may have suited him.

  In 1847 or 1848 he opened a drawing-book which Ruskin later called Turner’s “Actually Last Sketchbook.” There are only a few drawings within it. He exhibited no work at the Royal Academy in 1848, only the fourth time in fifty-eight years that he had nothing on
display in that institution. But in this same year a painting of his was placed in the National Gallery; his The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella, from the steps of the Europa was thus among the Old Masters whom he so revered, and has the distinction of being the first Turner ever displayed in that place. It was transferred to the Tate Gallery, the formal home of Turner’s painting, in 1949.

  It may have been this recognition by the national collection that persuaded him to change his will in 1848. He left his finished pictures to the National Gallery “provided that a room or rooms are added to the present National Gallery to be when erected called ‘Turner’s Gallery’ in which such pictures are to be constantly kept deposited and preserved.” If these provisions were not met, the paintings were to remain in Queen Anne Street.

  In the following year he seems to have been working upon what may justly be called his last paintings. He reworked a canvas that he had completed some forty years before, The Wreck Buoy, but he concentrated principally upon the sky that is irradiated by a double rainbow. He was also working on four new canvases, once more exploring the myth of Dido and Aeneas that had haunted him for so many years. It seems that he painted them in a row, going from one to the other in his familiar fashion. There were also some ten unfinished paintings that date from the last years of his life; whether they were unfinished as a result of age or weariness, or whether they had been left in that state to be reworked on the varnishing days of the exhibition, is an open question.

  In the Christmas of 1849 he wrote to Hawksworth Fawkes saying that “I am sorry to say my health is on the wain. I cannot bear the same fatigue, or have the same bearing against it I formerly had—but time and tide stop not.” He was now in his seventy-fifth year. There were many, however, who saw no lack of mastery in the last works he exhibited. When the paintings of Aeneas were shown at the Royal Academy in the spring of 1850 a friend wrote that “your intellect defies time to injure it, and I really believe that you never conceived more beautiful, more graceful, or more enchanting compositions.”

  One of the last descriptions of Turner dates from this year, when a young American encountered him in his gallery in Queen Anne Street. “I never saw a keener eye than his, and the way that he held himself up, so straight that he seemed almost to lean backward, with his forehead thrown forward, and the piercing eyes looking out from under their heavy brows, combined to make a very peculiar and vivid impression on me.” When the American ventured to remark that his country had the good fortune to own one of Turner’s “sea-coast sunsets” the artist remarked, “I wish they were all put in a blunderbuss and shot off!”

  He was living in Cremorne Road in 1851, the last year of his life. He had told a friend that “Old Time has made sad work with me” but he still attended dinners with friends, and on occasions made short trips along the river that he had known since his earliest childhood. He had no work to exhibit at that year’s exhibition but he visited on varnishing days; at the private view that year a fellow artist believed that he “was breaking up fast.” Yet at a party in the spring he conversed with other guests on politics and books as he had always done. One guest believed him to be “as secure in health, as firm in tone of mind, as keen in interest, as when I had seen him years before.” But he was too ill to attend the reception at the end of the exhibition.

  A friend and fellow artist, David Roberts, wrote him a letter asking to visit him. But Turner, true to his habit of secrecy, came to see Roberts instead. “You must not ask me,” he said, “but whenever I come to town I will always come to see you.” Then he laid his hand upon his heart and muttered, “No, no; there is something here which is all wrong.” Yet according to Roberts his eyes were as bright and as alert as they ever were. There was a large painting upstairs in Roberts’s studio, but Turner was too infirm to mount the stairs.

  He was still working in Cremorne Road. Mrs. Booth recalled how he would often call out for drawing materials even as he lay ill in bed. Hannah Danby, his housekeeper at Queen Anne Street, grew anxious at his absence. She found the address of Cremorne Road, and the name of Mrs. Booth, in one of his coat pockets. Whereupon the poor woman travelled to the neighbourhood with a female friend for support. It seems that they were afraid to knock upon the door of the house and instead enquired about Mrs. Booth in a ginger-beer shop next door. “The answer was that two very quiet respectable people of that name had lived for years next door, but that the old gentleman had been very ill and in fact was supposed to be dying.” Hannah Danby left, without ever seeing her old employer.

  Mrs. Booth again took him to Margate for a change of air but, once there, he insisted on returning to London. It may be that he wished to die in the only place he truly loved. A doctor visited him there, and told him that death was coming soon. “Go downstairs,” Turner said, “take a glass of sherry and then look at me again.” The doctor did so, but saw no reason to change his opinion. “Then,” Turner said, “I am soon to be a nonentity.”

  He died a few days later, on the morning of 19 December. An hour before his death the sun burst through the gloomy clouds. A few weeks earlier he is supposed to have remarked that “the sun is God.” The remark may be apocryphal, but it is appropriate enough for an artist who loved the light beyond all other things. He died by the river, where he had been born.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  In this series of short biographies I have not thought it appropriate to introduce footnotes and source notes within the text. Here instead is a list of sources and secondary materials that have been employed in the preparation of the narrative.

  Bailey, Anthony, Standing in the Sun. A Life of J. M. W. Turner (London, 1997).

  Bayes, Walter, Turner: A Speculative Portrait (London, 1931).

  Butlin, Martin and Joll, Evelyn, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, two volumes (London, 1984).

  Finberg, A. J., The Life of J. M. W. Turner RA (Oxford, 1961).

  Gage, John, Turner: “A Wonderful Range of Mind” (New Haven, 1987).

  Hamerton, P. G., The Life of J. M. W. Turner RA (London, 1879).

  Hamilton, James, Turner: A Life (London, 1997).

  Hill, David, Turner in the North (London, 1996).

  ——, Turner on the Thames (London, 1993).

  Lindsay, Jack, Turner (London, 1966).

  Powell, Cecilia, Turner’s Rivers of Europe (London, 1991).

  Shanes, Eric, Turner: The Great Watercolours (London, 2000).

  Townsend, Joyce, Turner’s Painting Techniques (London, 1993).

  Warrell, Ian, Turner and Venice (London, 2003).

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Ackroyd is the biographer of William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More, and the author of the bestselling London: The Biography. The subject of his previous Brief Life was Chaucer. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award (jointly), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and is the holder of a CBE for services to literature. He is the author of Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. His novels include The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Hawksmoor (Guardian Fiction Prize), Chatterton (short-listed for the Booker Prize), and most recently The Clerkenwell Tales. He lives in London.

  ALSO IN PETER ACKROYD’S BRIEF LIVES

  Chaucer

  ALSO BY PETER ACKROYD

  Fiction

  The Great Fire of London

  The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

  Hawksmoor

  Chatterton

  First Light

  English Music

  The House of Doctor Dee

  Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

  Milton in America

  The Plato Papers

  The Clerkenwell Tales

  Nonfiction

  Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of

  an Obsession

  London: The Biography

  Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

 
; Illustrated London

  Biography

  Ezra Pound and His World

  T. S. Eliot

  Dickens

  Blake

  The Life of Thomas More

  Shakespeare: The Biography

  Poetry

  Ouch!

  The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems

  Criticism

  Notes for a New Culture

  The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories,

  Lectures edited by Thomas Wright

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ackroyd, Peter, 1949–