What effect did his Academy training have on the adolescent Turner? It is hard to imagine him openly mocking his teachers or doing anything other than what was asked of him. There are hints, rather, of a head-down dutifulness, within which his own as yet barely suspected fires were banked. He sketched the antique figures; he drew the posed models; and he attended some of the lectures, and fitted in his many part-time jobs. Along the way, he made notes of useful technical tips. On the back of one black and white chalk drawing done in the Schools he wrote:
Turpentine Varnish and Lamp Black26
The Academy provided a different discipline from his work copying topographical illustrations or washing-in architectural backgrounds. John Ruskin, who became Turner’s most passionate advocate half a century after this, thought the effect of the Schools had been dire:
Turner, having suffered under the instruction of the Royal Academy, had to pass nearly thirty years of his life in recovering from the consequences … The one thing which the Academy ought to have taught him (namely, the simple and safe use of oil colour), it never taught him; but it carefully repressed his perceptions of truth, his capacities of invention, and his tendencies of choice. For him it was impossible to do right but in a spirit of defiance; and the first condition of his progress in learning was the power to forget.27
But other experts have stressed the Academy’s positive effects. It ‘taught him all it knew’, said Cosmo Monkhouse.28 Philip Hamerton thought that, even for one who was a budding landscape artist, the advantage of academic figure study was that ‘it thoroughly educates the eye to the perception of line, projection, and colour. It does not educate the special faculty of the landscape painter, which is a peculiar kind of memory, but it prepares him for his future work by a steady training in the elementary business of art.’ For that matter, ‘a figure, placed in a certain light, is as much an object under an effect as a near mountain in clear weather; it is, therefore, an initiation in the laws of effect as well as in those of form and colour’.29 The Academy gave him other things, too. Frequent association with young painters – camaraderie – was good for a youth with somewhat solitary inclinations. Competition with them spurred him on. And from the start the Academy gave him recognition: his Lambeth Palace watercolour, an exercise in Malton’s manner but immensely skilful for a fifteen-year-old, was hung on the walls of Somerset House for the Academy exhibition of 1790.
One other indoor element of Turner’s education as an artist came from visits to other painters. He is said to have sat in occasionally at Sir Joshua’s ‘octagonal, snuff-strewn’ studio in Leicester Fields, watching the master create his highly polished portraits.30 C. R. Leslie, who was to become an Academician and a friend of Turner’s, wrote that Sir Joshua ‘kindly allowed young artists to call on him early in the morning before he had himself commenced painting. He criticised their works … and he most readily lent them his finest works to copy. Turner … told me that he copied many of his pictures when he was a student.’31 Turner may also have studied briefly with a far less successful portraitist named Mauritius Lowe, the natural son of an Irish peer, who recognized Turner’s talent. In 1781 Fanny Burney called Lowe ‘a certain poor wretch of a villainous painter, who is in some measure under Dr Johnson’s protection’. Lowe’s studio was off-putting, at least to potential clients. A Mr Crutchley, bullied by Johnson into going there for a sitting, was ‘so horrified by the dirt and squalor that he thrust the price of the portrait into the artist’s hands and ran away’.32 Lowe’s widow and daughters later applied to the Royal Academy for charitable help, and Ruskin later still organized an annuity for the daughters, partly on the strength of Lowe’s connection with Turner.
Young Turner’s ‘steady training’ by now involved him in trips into the countryside. It was a time when almost every artist was – not just in his journeyman years – a taker of journeys. It seemed as if every meadow, hillside, abbey lawn and castle courtyard in Britain sooner or later had an itinerant artist seated in it, busily sketching in pursuit of picturesque beauty. Turner did not mean to be left out. Those two copy-drawings he made in 1787 of Friar Bacon’s Study and Nuneham Courtenay House foretell his way westward. Two years later, aged fourteen, he visited his uncle Joseph Marshall at the house he had retired to at Sunningwell, near Oxford, and sketched several views in the locality: Sunningwell Church; Radley Hall, near Abingdon; and Nuneham Harcourt. His sketchbook labelled ‘Oxford’33 was a home-made affair of twenty-six pages stitched within a marbled paper cover. He filled it for the most part with light pencil sketches that showed an eye not only for perspective and architecture but for natural detail. He drew the tall chimneys of a big house and rendered with clever squiggles the leaves of a tree. He sketched a herd of cows, a dog pointing, a stable lad holding the reins of a stiff, merry-go-round sort of horse, and a boat under sail on the river. At least one Oxford sketch furnished material for a watercolour when he returned home.34
In 1791 he got further west, to Bristol and Bath. While still in his teens he went several times to Wales, the West Midlands and the Isle of Wight, as well as to nearer-at-hand Kent and Surrey. The habit of a summer or early-autumn sketching tour was set, and stayed with him. By stagecoach, on hired or borrowed horses, but often on foot, he travelled considerable distances. The writer Lovell Reeve, his contemporary, later wrote, ‘He would walk through portions of England, twenty to twenty-five miles a day, with his little modicum of baggage at the end of a stick, sketching rapidly on his way all striking pieces of composition, and marking effects with a power that daguerrotyped them in his mind. There were few moving phenomena in clouds and shadows that he did not fix indelibly in his memory, though he might not call them into requisition for years afterwards.’35 His baggage usually contained a book or two – early on, perhaps a volume by that apostle of the picturesque, the Reverend William Gilpin. In 1792–3 he seems to have carried a copy of Don Quixote, for in two drawings the Spanish knight and his faithful Sancho Panza appear in their ‘enchanted boat’ in the unlikely setting of a Welsh millstream. Thornbury tells us that on one early tour on foot to Oxford, Turner had ‘the company of a poor artist named Cook, who afterwards turned stonemason. Cook’s feet got sore, and I believe he was soon left behind by the indefatigable Turner. [When Thornbury says ‘I believe’, the reader may suspect some invention.] As for sleeping, the thrifty lad, careful never to affect prematurely the style of the fine gentleman, rested in any humble village public-house whereat he could obtain shelter.’36
Sometimes the shelter was free. In 1791 he stayed for several weeks with friends of his father’s, the Narraways, in Broadmead, Bristol. John Narraway was a well-to-do dealer in animal hides and a maker of glue from animal bones. While there, Turner clambered up the steep banks of the Avon gorge. He drew the distant Welsh coast and the ruins of a chapel on an island in the Severn. One high, bird’s-eye-view drawing, with a few preliminary washes of yellow and blue, shows the topsails of an otherwise unseen boat running downriver, sails lifting above the craggy Avon banks; the power of selection, of deciding what is not shown, is already impressive. Because of his mountain-goat-like pursuits, the Narraways nicknamed their young guest ‘the prince of rocks’. John Narraway also noted, on the frame of a watercolour of a Bristol church that Turner gave him, ‘NB he has crooked legs.’37 Turner sketched some members of the family and at their request grudgingly portrayed himself, from the waist up. A miniature which Ruskin later owned is said to be the self-portrait done by the sixteen-year-old artist, though the pop-eyed, long-haired stripling in a jacket much too small for him looks not just unwilling but younger than sixteen. Turner defensively told the Narraways, ‘It’s no use taking such a little figure as mine. It will do my drawings an injury. People will say such a little fellow as this can never draw.’38
Turner’s self-consciousness about his fairly small size was obviously matched by his fear of damage to his reputation as an up-and-coming artist. Ruskin’s informant was Ann Dart, a niece of John Narraway. Whe
n she wrote to Ruskin in 1860 – nearly seventy years later – her memory may not have been certain about dates, but she retained (and had perhaps rehearsed on and off through the intervening years) a definite impression of a youth for whom his art was everything. Indeed, her account of conversations about the self-portrait may have been based on Narraway family gossip, since she herself seems to have first met Turner on a later visit he made to Bristol, en route to Wales, in 1798. But one way or other Miss Dart concluded that Turner was
not like young people in general, he was singular and very silent, seemed exclusively devoted to his drawing, would not go into society, did not like ‘plays’, and though my uncle and cousins were very fond of music, he would not take part … He had no faculty for friendship and though so often entertained by my uncle he would never write him a letter, at which my uncle was very vexed.
Is it possible that old Miss Dart had never got over being ignored as a girl by the grumpy young prodigy? Yet she noted, on the plus side, that ‘he would do anything my uncle or cousins would ask him in the way of taking sketches in the neighbourhood [and] he gave us many of these drawings’. And despite being ‘very difficult to understand, he would talk so little … people … could not help but like him because he was so good-humoured’. On the debit side once again, ‘he was very careless and slovenly in his dress … He would talk of nothing but his drawings, and of the places to which he should go for sketching. He seemed an uneducated youth, desirous of nothing but improvement in his art … Sometimes [he] would go out sketching before breakfast, and sometimes before and after dinner … He was not particular about the time of returning to his meals.’39
This unfriendly yet good-humoured, hard-to-understand but singular, slovenly and at the same time ambitious youth most often came back to Maiden Lane with crammed sketchbooks to work on during the winter. Some sketches were studies for work he had been commissioned to do for Walker’s Copper-plate Magazine and Harrison’s Pocket Magazine, which published engravings (based on drawings) that helped satisfy a popular demand for picturesque topographical views. The cathedrals, castles, old bridges and abbeys provided paying material; but Turner also sketched showmen’s vans, a donkey and watercart, a ploughman, a sleeping dog. In his late teens, some of the sketchbooks became more substantial: leather-bound, with brass clasps. In his notes within, his handwriting didn’t seem uneducated but rather a serviceable copperplate, with slightly ostentatious curlicues to the capital letters. In some places he made notes to help his recall: ‘The distance last with the sky a lovely tint of Blue Lake and Indian – more as it approaches.’40 In others he noted architectural details: ‘Wollaton Hall, Lord Middleton. Tuscan, Doric and Ionic with E.B.P. to each. The wings have niches.’41
On the backs of some pages he recorded the names of clients. In his ‘South Wales’ sketchbook of 1795, for instance, he proudly reminded himself of ‘Order’d Drawings’ for Dr Mathews of Hereford; Viscount Malden of Hampton Court, Herefordshire; Mr Landseer; and Sir Richard Hoare.42 He also made little lists of art materials needed: ‘wood slab, brushes, I. rubber, Bells Ink, Slab book, pencil’.43 A friend inscribed for him in the South Wales sketchbook a list of places against some of which he put an X, explaining, for future reference, ‘X places mark’d thus have good Inns.’ It seems his early frugality was now not always adhered to. But next to St David’s he pencilled the warning ‘no Inn’.44 Where did he spend the night?
In most places he was attracted to water: to mill races, to streams where men were fishing, to beaches and foreshores where boats were setting out or being hauled up. Sometimes his destinations met the contemporary picturesque requirements, as with the multicoloured cliffs at Alum Bay, on the Isle of Wight, while fulfilling his own need simply to get close to the sea. Occasionally among the useful topographic sketches something utterly personal impends, like the head of a sleeping woman, wearing a mob-cap.45 The woman has, it seems, features in common with Turner. Is this his mother, for once peaceful in sleep?46
*
Much of his education in these teenage years still came from making copies. But now his masters were not the makers of handbills and silver serving trays but Thomas Gainsborough, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Michael Angelo Rooker and Paul Sandby, among others. Later, looking over some prints with his friend Henry Trimmer, he picked up a mezzotint of a van de Velde showing a large seventeenth-century warship running before the wind in stormy seas. Turner said to Trimmer: ‘Ah! that made me a painter.’47 But it could have been said that the close study or copying of works by a score of other artists ‘made’ him, or to be exact helped make an artist of a youth who had every instinct for and every intention of becoming a painter. The topographical artist and engraver Edward Dayes wrote in 1804, not long before his death by suicide, that Turner – whom he knew quite well by that stage – was
indebted principally to his own exertions for the abilities which he possesses as a painter, and … he may be considered as a striking instance of how much may be gained by industry, if accompanied by temperance, even without the assistance of a master. The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing, where he could, a drawing or a picture to copy from; or by making a sketch of any one in the [RA] Exhibition early in the morning, and finishing it at home.48
Dayes was frequently to be found at the London house of Dr Thomas Monro, a medical man who specialized in nervous and mental problems. (He was principal physician to Bethlehem Hospital for the insane and briefly had King George III as a private patient.) From 1794 to 1820 the doctor lived in the Adam Brothers’ new Adelphi development, facing the river, south of the Strand and not far from Maiden Lane. There, at 6 Adelphi Terrace, he patronized the arts. Other residents included Robert and James Adam, who had managed to rescue their costly building scheme from financial collapse by a lottery; James Graham, notable quack doctor and impresario of Emma Lyon, later Lady Hamilton; and David Garrick and his wife. Dr Monro had inherited wealth; he collected pictures and their makers, whether senior artists of the time or young men of promise like Tom Girtin. Turner’s name first appears in the doctor’s diary in 1793, though it seems Monro had already come across the youth’s work on show in the Maiden Lane barber shop and had bought several drawings at an extravagant two guineas apiece. The doctor also bought a watercolour of St Anselm’s Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, which Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794.
Joseph Farington may have taken an interest in Turner from the start because he, Farington, had attended the life classes of the artists’ society that met at 20 and 21 Maiden Lane, just before number 21 became William and Mary Turner’s first home. At the end of 1794 Farington was told by his friend Dr Steers that ‘Dr Monro’s house is like an Academy in an evening. He has young men employed in tracing outlines made by his friends, etc. – Henderson, Hearne, etc., lend him their outlines for this purpose.’49 The evenings were generally on Fridays in winter. Later Farington heard further gossipy details of the Monro ‘school’ or ‘manufactory’:
Turner and Girtin told us they had been employed by Dr Monro 3 years to draw at his house in the evening. They went at 6 and staid till Ten. Girtin drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects. They were chiefly employed in copying the outlines or unfinished drawings of [J. R.] Cozens etc., etc., of which copies they made finished drawings. Dr Monro allowed Turner 3s. 6d. each night. Girtin did not say what he had. Turner afterwards told me that Dr Monro had been a material friend to him, as well as to Girtin …50
The rewards of these Friday evenings included oysters for supper.
Where the two rising stars, Turner and Girtin, first met is unclear. It may have been at John Raphael Smith’s shop in King Street, where both worked at colouring prints by hand. Tom Girtin, born 18 February 1775, the son of a Southwark ropemaker, had studied under Edward Dayes. Like Turner, he toured the English countryside and the Welsh mountains, and showed genius even earlier than Turner. At the good Dr Monro’s, Girtin sometimes copied works by Malton, Tu
rner’s ‘master’, and Turner copied works by Dayes. Increasing the chances of their evening work being confused, they were both influenced by John Robert Cozens, who had travelled to Italy with the wealthy art patron and novelist William Beckford and there painted seemingly tranquil watercolours that had a powerful impact. In 1776 Cozens showed at the RA a painting called Hannibal, in his march over the Alps, showing to his Army the Fertile Plains of Italy, a subject that stuck in Turner’s mind. Poor Cozens was one of several artists of these times who cracked up under the strains of life – Dayes and Haydon are others. Cozens lost his reason and for his last three years of life was confined under the care of Dr Monro, who also helped him out financially.
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