2: Up and Coming
In fact, William Turner, aged twelve, seemed more inclined to become an architect, as he turned out sketch after sketch of churches, abbeys, country houses and city streets. The two earliest drawings that he signed, though copied from prints, are The North-West View of Friar Bacon’s Study and Folly-Bridge, Oxford, after an engraving in the Oxford Almanack of 1780, and a View of Nuneham Courtenay from the Thames; both are inscribed ‘W. Turner, 1782’.1 Much later, Clara Wheeler, the daughter of his good friend William Frederick Wells, said that Turner had often declared that ‘if he could begin life again, he would rather be an architect than a painter’.2
The dormer windows and tiled roofs that he could see from his small bedroom in Maiden Lane, and the sky above, gave him subjects and new ways of making pocket money. In addition to his barber-shop sales, he began to earn small sums by adding backgrounds to the designs of architects, washing in ‘rolls of white clouds and blue wastes of summer sky’.3 He was hand-colouring prints for the engraver John Raphael Smith in nearby King Street, putting to work the simple techniques he had learnt while doing Mr Lees’ job in Brentford. Many of Smith’s mezzotints were of portraits of belles painted by Reynolds, Gainsborough and Romney – a different challenge for the colourist. In any event, if most of the suggestions we have are true, for the next few years young Turner was rarely without a pencil, pen or brush in his hand. Most of his part-time jobs made use of his sympathy for buildings and his skill in drawing them.
In the roll of architects who figure in the by no means substantially documented history of Turner’s apprenticeship are found the names of Bonomi, Porden, Dobson, Repton and Hardwick. His possible association with Joseph Bonomi comes a little later – Bonomi, an Italian who had been working in England since 1767, is alluded to as a fashionable architect in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. One account has Turner actually articled to an architect for a fee of £200 put up by William Turner senior; but the architect after a short trial decided that the youth’s talents lay elsewhere and returned the boy and the money. In a similar story, a barber-shop customer left a bequest of £100 to the hairdresser, and Humphrey Tomkison made the enterprising suggestion that the sum be used to article the lad to the topographical illustrator Thomas Malton. The result (according to Thornbury) was that Malton ‘in sheer desperation’ took ‘his unpromising pupil’ back to Maiden Lane and told the barber, ‘It is no use. The boy will never do anything … Better make him a tinker, sir, or a cobbler, than a perspective artist!’4 One gets the feeling that there are elements of truth in these stories, though the names attached to them could be shifted around without harm.
William Porden may provide firmer ground. The son of a Hull labourer, he studied with James Wyatt and went on to acquire a reputation as a neo-Gothic architect, though he failed to be elected as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1806. He designed several buildings for the Prince of Wales in Brighton: the stables at the Pavilion, the Prince’s pleasure palace, and a house on the Steyne for Mrs Fitzherbert, the Prince’s mistress. Porden is said to have nobly offered to take young Turner as an apprentice without any premium being paid. Thornbury, apparently unaware of Porden’s fondness for the Gothic, says that for him Turner ‘swept in gravel walks winding up to … Grecian porches, floated blue skies over his composite pediments, and pencilled in grass-tufts and patches of dock as the foregrounds to his Corinthian mansions’.5 Alaric Watts writes that, on leaving this employer, Turner ‘furnished Mr Porden with a liberal stock of skies for future use’.6
The notion that Turner found the lowest rung of the architectural ladder uncomfortable is given substance by the tale that, when colouring the perspective drawing of a mansion for a ‘Mr. Dobson’, the boy did the windowpanes in a way that showed the reflected light from the sky contrasting with the dark of the room within. Mr D objected to this novelty: the panes should be a plain dark grey, the glazing bars white; this was the recognized practice. ‘It will spoil my drawing,’ said the young artist. ‘Rather that than my work,’ answered the architect. Turner obediently finished the colouring in the way he was commanded but then ‘left his employer altogether’.7
Turner’s association with Thomas Hardwick has a definite base and appears to have been helpful to both parties. Hardwick’s father – also a Thomas – was a builder and architect in Brentford; once again, Uncle Joseph and family may have provided the connection. Thomas Hardwick junior had been a pupil of Sir William Chambers, whose new Somerset House was going up at the east end of the Strand, and had studied at the Royal Academy Schools. He worked for several years with the young John Soane in Rome, and according to James Wyatt was ‘a regular bred classical architect’.8 Hardwick’s classicism was cool and direct. Despite the building downturn that now began with the French Revolution and continued through the ensuing wars, Hardwick seems to have had steady surveying work and to have been kept busy designing public buildings, especially churches and jails. From 1787 to 1790, he was in charge of rebuilding St Mary the Virgin Church in Wanstead, north-east of London, and Turner did watercolours of the edifice before and after the changes. Hardwick also superintended the remodelling of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, after the disastrous fire that engulfed it in 1795; he recased it in Portland stone, while adhering closely to Inigo Jones’s original design. He drew up improvements for the Duke of Northumberland’s Syon House, and Turner may have helped with the plans. Turner evidently left Hardwick’s office on good terms, for Hardwick later bought some of his work, and his son Philip, also an architect and businessman, remained closely connected with Turner to the end of the artist’s life.
The bleak outlook for aspiring architects at this time may have been one factor that dissuaded young Turner from carrying on in the profession. Perhaps, too, he eventually found the job uncongenial in terms of the inspiration he got from it. In his meticulous early drawings and watercolours, architecture was the nub of things.9 His eye was taken not only by grand buildings but by humble, whether farm cottages or inns like the Swan, at Lambeth, which intruded its more homespun form in front of the Archbishop’s Palace, the purported subject of his first watercolour to be shown at the RA in 1790. And architecture remained an absorbing interest with him. It was a specific category to which he devoted many of the works for his great engraving project that began in 1807, the Liber Studiorum. In later years he designed several buildings: a neo-classical gatehouse for a friend; a country villa and a townhouse-cum-gallery for himself. He owned and read a number of books to do with the profession, Sir Henry Wotton’s 1624 Elements of Architecture being one. And the knowledge of perspective acquired in drawing buildings was to be put to further instructional use. Certainly the love of buildings never left him. C. R. Cockerell, architect and archaeologist, encountered Turner in 1825, when the artist was fifty, and remained ‘more than two hours with him talking of Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor & others, he as usual standing with his hat on’.10
As well as working for architects, Turner was associated with at least one architectural illustrator. Before he was fifteen, he had gone to evening classes at the studio of Thomas Malton, a scene-painter at Covent Garden Theatre and draughtsman of elegant topographical views. Malton had a wooden leg, following a childhood accident; he too had been a student at the Royal Academy Schools and may have told his pupil enticing tales of life on the Somerset House lower deck. Thornbury’s account of Malton saying that the boy was ‘no use’11 is evidently false. Malton’s influence is to be seen in early Turner works, such as the watercolour of the south front of Radley Hall, elaborated from rough drawings he made on a trip to Oxford in 1789. Malton’s own work of that year is nicely illustrated in a drawing of St Dunstan’s in the West, Fleet Street. In a lecture some twenty years later the pupil gave credit to Malton for his help: ‘His mode of instruction was divested as much as possible of prolixity … Whatever he saw in nature [was] incontravertible.’12 And further homage was heard ‘in after life’ when Turner described Thomas Malton as ‘my real maste
r’.13
Whether he jumped or was pushed out of the architectural profession, Turner had mentors who had definite ideas about where the fourteen-year-old should be spending some hours of his day. Thomas Hardwick may have proposed that he attend the Royal Academy Schools. Thomas Malton may have fired the same ambition. And a barber-shop customer then facilitated the process. One client of Turner senior was a clergyman from Foots Cray in Kent, the Reverend Robert Nixon, who had seen the drawings hanging in the shop while his whiskers were being lathered or his wig dressed. Nixon introduced the youth to John Francis Rigaud, a forty-seven-year-old portraitist and member of the Royal Academy. Rigaud made the necessary moves to recommend Turner as a probationary student at the Academy Schools.
The Turners at this point, 1789, were at 26 Maiden Lane and remained there for the next ten years, until the end of the decade. Although ‘William Turner’, presumably senior, does not appear by name in the rate books until Lady Day 1795, he stays in the books thereafter until 1800–1, second in the list for the north side of the Lane, a property – valued at £30 – next to Hand Court; this was a T-shaped alley running back from the street. The doorway to the hairdressing shop and house was set back on the left under an arch which gave entrance to the Court. That the Turner family was there before the barber actually became responsible for the Poor Rates is indicated by the ‘place of abode’ given for young Turner in a 1790 Royal Academy catalogue – ‘Maiden-lane’ – and the even more specific ‘No. 26 Maiden-lane’ in a catalogue for 1791.’14 Thornbury claimed to have visited Hand Court before these Maiden Lane buildings were demolished around 1860 and he described it as ‘a sort of horizontal tunnel, with a low archway and a prison-like iron gate’.15 Turner’s room, where he painted and slept, was at the top of the house, looking out over the Lane at the houses opposite, in one of which he had been born.
It was a five-minute walk down Southampton Street and along the busy Strand to the large greystone pile of Somerset House, where the Royal Academy had its quarters. The Academy itself was just over twenty years old – an institution, approved by the King, that had finally met the claims of British painters and sculptors for status and royal patronage. From its beginning in December 1768, the Academy had declared the free training of artists to be one of its duties, meaning to replace the various ‘academies’ for drawing and painting from life that came and went in London; one of the most recent of these was William Hogarth’s, in Peter Court off St Martin’s Lane. From 1771 the Royal Academy Schools had been housed in a portion of old Somerset House, the palace designed by Inigo Jones, along with the Academy’s Council Room and Library, though exhibitions had to be held elsewhere. But after the opening of the Chambers-designed buildings in 1780, all the workings of the Academy took place in the new Strand block of Somerset House.
To be admitted to the Schools, young Turner had to make a drawing of an antique plaster-cast and submit it to the Keeper, Agostino Carlini. Carlini, approving it, passed it on to the Academy Council, which could give or withhold admission. The decisive Council meeting was chaired by the Academy President, the distinguished portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Academy’s admission register for 11 December 1789 listed six successful candidates in alphabetical order: Dixon, Willm, age fifteen; Gyfford, Edw., age seventeen; Rosetti, Jno Baptista, age twenty-five; Sherridan, Jno, age twenty-five; Turner, Willm, age fifteen; and Wingrave, Fran. Chas., age fourteen. Turner was the Royal Academy’s 544th student. In pencil, after the ‘Willm.’, someone in the office had added to the register ‘Jos. Mallord’. If his 23 April 1775 birth-date was correct, he was in fact still fourteen.
Sir Joshua had declared that the Academy Schools must have ‘an atmosphere of floating knowledge’ and ‘an implicit obedience to the Rules of Art’. Furthermore, the President said, ‘every opportunity should be taken to discountenance that false and vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius. They are fetters only to men of no genius.’16 Among the rules that young William Turner had to subscribe to were those ‘for preserving order and decorum’ in the Schools. If he defaced a ‘Plaister [plaster] Cast, Model, or Book’, he would be expelled. He was to go on drawing ‘after the Plaister’ until judged fit to draw ‘after the living models’. The Plaister Academy was open all day, except on Sundays and holidays and during vacations. The School of Living Models – also called the Life School, Life Class or Life Academy – functioned in the evenings, in summer after 4 p.m., in winter after 6 p.m. There were two terms, in summer from 26 May to 31 August, in winter from 29 September (which was Michaelmas) until 9 April. About twenty-five students were admitted each year and were permitted six years of study. The admission policy was egalitarian: talent rather than family background counted for most. (John Soane’s father was a bricklayer.)
Although the regulations decreed that new students spend at least a term drawing from the plaster-casts before moving on to live models, Turner spent nearly two and a half years doing chalk and stump studies of the Apollo and the Antinous of the Belvedere, the Venus de Medici, the Diskobolus and the Dying Gaul, before being admitted to the Life Class in June 1792. Did he need to work harder at the antique, or was he thought to be too young to look at live flesh? The casts themselves were somewhat battered. When the Prince Regent twenty years later decided to give twenty-six better casts from the Vatican marbles to the Academy rather than to the British Museum, the editor of the Annals of Fine Arts lamented that ‘such fine casts … should be destined to the smoky, dingy rooms of the Royal Academy, liable to the carelessness of housekeepers, porters, and idle boys’.17
In the Life Academy, which Turner attended from June 1792 to October 1799, at first regularly, later on and off, two models at a time were ‘set’ by the Visitor in poses adopted from Old Master paintings, and continued for two hours, measured by an hour-glass, with several rest periods. Naked female models were introduced in the early 1770s, but were – as the painter and Academician James Northcote remarked – ‘much disapproved of by some good folks’.18 No students under the age of twenty, unless they were married, were permitted to draw female models. What seems to be Turner’s first drawing of a nude woman appears in a sketchbook of 1796–7: she is seated with legs crossed and hair in a turban; the drawing is nicely coloured, the anatomy well-rendered.19 One highly regarded male model was a serving soldier, Sam Strowger, who was afterwards taken on as an Academy porter. Students drew lots for their places, to give all an opportunity of the best drawing positions, though in winter a spot near the coal stove was most coveted by those trying to draw with chilblained fingers. While the models posed, the students were admonished to ‘remain quiet in their places’.
All these rules may have struck the new boy – no idler – as forbidding, but in reality the fetters were less confining. The sculptor Joseph Wilton, who succeeded Carlini as Keeper in 1790 and remained in the post until 1803, was elderly and lacked a firm grip. Conditions in the Schools were crowded and standards low. Joseph Farington, the governessy Academician who kept a diary through these years, noted on several occasions what he considered to be the deplorable activities of the students, drinking, loitering and behaving badly: for instance, throwing at one another the pieces of bread they were supposed to use for rubbing out mistakes.’20 Farington seems to have forgotten that boys will be boys.
Apart from those who signed on with him, Turner’s Schoolmates in the early 1790s included Martin Archer Shee, George Chinnery, Joshua Cristall and Robert Ker Porter, who was admitted at the tender age of thirteen. Bob Porter had a reputation for cheekiness; on one occasion he embellished his drawing of the antique Gladiator with a sword and helmet the cast didn’t have, knowing that ‘Squire’ Wilton would be aggravated by this. Porter went on to paint a vast 2800-square-foot Battle of Agincourt, shown at the Lyceum in 1805, and thereafter sailed to Russia where he married a princess. Another contemporary was Henry Aston Barker, son and assistant of Robert Barker who in 1789 created the panoramic display in the Haymarket of the Grand F
leet anchored in Spithead, that Turner may have gone to see. Queen Charlotte, visiting the spectacle, said it was so real it made her feel seasick. One anonymous Academy student of the time later recalled:
With the smoke from the candles and the lamps, and the dust from the chalk, the dresses of our respected instructors used seldom to exhibit any marks of splendour after their attendance in the schools. Mr Wilton, for example, was a man of very great personal neatness, frills and ruffles forming a prominent feature of his costume. Soon, however, the ardour of the artist would overcome the exactness of the beau, and if by chance a student made an error in his drawing by too powerful an outline or too marked a development of muscular action, Mr Wilton would gently come up to the draughtsman’s side, and collecting his delicately white ruffles between the tips of his fingers and the palm of his hand, begin to rub over the offending parts, smudging the white with the black chalk, saying, ‘I do not see those lines in the figure before you.’21
James Barry, the Irishman who was Professor of Painting and who lived in a dilapidated old house in Castle Street, near Oxford Street market, had none of Wilton’s sartorial standards. He was thought uncouth and sardonic, but was popular with the students, to whom he was invariably helpful; yet he got on badly with his fellow Academicians, who took away his membership of the Academy in 1799. (He had publicly criticized Reynolds, and in his lectures violated the rule that no allusion be made to works of contemporaries.) Turner probably attended Barry’s lectures, in one of which Barry made a ‘long parallel between Poetry and Painting’.22
Turner is said also to have been on hand on 10 December 1790, the twenty-second anniversary of the Academy’s foundation, when the President gave the last of his series of Discourses. The audience in the Exhibition Room – including Edmund Burke and James Boswell – was several hundred strong and, according to Dr Charles Burney who was there with his daughter Fanny, ‘very turbulent’, particularly the ‘young students … who seemed unable to hear and diverted themselves’. Turner, presumably attentive, would have heard Sir Joshua in his marked Devon accent recommend to students ‘a rational method of study’, with not too much indulgence for ‘peculiarity’, and citing Michelangelo as an example of the ‘mechanick excellence’ needed before painting could become boldly poetic. Reynolds praised ‘indefatigable diligence’ as the basis for inspiration.23 But while the President spoke, ignoring the less than diligent students, there was a ‘violent and unaccountable crack’, which suggested to Dr Burney that one of the main beams supporting the floor of the Exhibition Room was about to give way. Sir Joshua ignored this, and a second crack which shortly followed. After his address ended, safely, Fanny Burney met James Barry on the stairs and was told by him that the ‘danger had been very real, and our escape fortunate’. And she added, ‘We are universally abused by our friends for our foolhardy complaisance to Sir Joshua in not making the best of our way out at the first warning.’24 Sir Joshua, asked what he had thought when he heard the cracks, replied grandly, ‘I was thinking that, if we had all perished, the art in England would have been thrown back five hundred years.’25
J.M.W. Turner Page 4
