While there was talk in the country of a French invasion, which caused the militias to be doubled in strength, Turner seems to have been having his own strenuous ups and downs. In Margate, presumably visiting his Marshall relatives, if not his old teacher Mr Coleman, he was apparently distracted one moment and fired up the next. Even Finberg, no enthusiast for the personal, believes that ‘Something unusual must have happened [to him] in 1796.77 Thornbury concluded that 1796 was the year that Turner caught ‘the old ailment’, love.78 The girl was the sister of a former school-comrade, ‘vows of fidelity were exchanged’, but the affair was blighted by a separation: Turner left on a tour; she received no letters from her lover, possibly because they were kept from her by her parents, and she then yielded to the importunities of another more proximate suitor. Turner turned up again too late, and the disappointment – he had been jilted – soured him for life.
Although this romance as recounted by Thornbury is improbably stretched out, Turner may have failed to write promised letters to his love object and paid the price. An independent source, Robert C. Leslie, son of Turner’s friend and fellow artist C. R. Leslie, wrote later that when he was living at Deal around 1869, ‘my next-door neighbour was an old lady of the name of Cato; her maiden name was White; and she told me that she knew Turner well as a young man, also the young lady he was in love with. She spoke of him as being very delicate, and said that he often came to Margate for his health. She seemed to know little of Turner as the artist.’79 That may be the way the young artist wanted it.
Notes
1 TB I A and I B.
2 Th. 1877, p.236.
3 Ibid., p.26.
4 Ibid., pp.28–9.
5 Ibid., pp.27–8.
6 Watts, p.xiii.
7 Century, p.252.
8 Farington, Diary, 20 January 1799.
9 Twenty-six of the thirty-two drawings exhibited by Turner from 1790 to 1796 feature buildings such as abbeys and cathedrals: see C. F. Bell, A List of the Works Contributed to Public Exhibitions by J. M. W. Turner, 1901.
10 Gage, Wonderful Range, p.24.
11 Th. 1877, p.29.
12 Shanes, Human Landscape, p.256.
13 Th. 1877, p.27.
14 Finberg, p.17.
15 Th. 1877, p.2.
16 Hutchison, ‘R.A. Schools’, Walpole Society, xxxviii, pp.123–81.
17 Whitley, 1800–20, p.262.
18 Whitley, Artists and Friends, p.287.
19 TB XXXVIII, f.19.
20 Farington, Diary, 22 December 1796; 31 December 1795.
21 Whitley, 1800–20, p.82.
22 Farington, Diary, 15 January 1798.
23 Reynolds, Discourses, pp.323–37.
24 Ibid., Rogers’ introduction, p.2.
25 Th. 1877, p.37.
26 TB V D.
27 Ruskin, Modern Painters, iii, pp.327–8.
28 Monkhouse, p.39.
29 Hamerton, Turner, p.25.
30 Th. 1877, p.36.
31 AR, i, p.145.
32 Whitley, Artists and Friends, p.334.
33 TB II.
34 TB III A.
35 Watts, pp.xlii-xliii.
36 Th. 1877, p.39.
37 Robin Hamlyn, ‘An Early Sketchbook by J. M. W. Turner’, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, vol.44, no.2, 1985, p.7.
38 Ruskin, Works, xiii, p.473; Finberg, pp.27, 50.
39 Finberg, pp.27, 50, 28.
40 TB XIII H.
41 TB XIX f.35. Turner’s ‘E.B.P.’ may stand for ‘E.P.B.’, possibly meaning ‘Ephesian Base’.
42 TB XXVI p.5 itinerary. ‘Mr Landseer’ was presumably the engraver John Landseer.
43 TB XX.
44 TB XXVI p.3 itinerary.
45 TB XX, f.35.
46 Lindsay, p.22.
47 Th. 1877, p.8.
48 Finberg, p.19.
49 Farington, Diary, 30 December 1794.
50 Ibid., 11 November 1798.
51 Roget, ‘Old Water-Colour’ Society, i, p.83.
52 Ziff, TS, 6, 1, pp.18–24.
53 Roget, ‘Old Water-Colour’ Society, i, p.122, 122n.
54 Finberg, p.39.
55 Ibid., p.40.
56 Gage, Colour, p.26.
57 Sickert, A Free House!, pp.201–2.
58 Th. 1877, p.38.
59 Century, p.155.
60 Th. 1877, p.98. ‘Hand Court’ now appears as part of his address for these years in the RA catalogues.
61 Walpole Society, 1, pp.105–6.
62 TB XXV; written in pencil inside cover.
63 Tate Gallery, 941.
64 Century, p.252; Wilton, p.46.
65 TB XX, f.17.
66 TB XXV, f.1.
67 Th. 1877, pp.77–8.
68 Farington, Diary, 12 October 1799.
69 TB CXCV, 156. See C. Price, ‘Turner as Scene Painter’, TSN, no.50, pp.7–9 and TS 7, 2, pp.2–8.
70 TB IX A.
71 Th. 1877, p.115.
72 Century, p.161.
73 Finberg, Sketches and Drawings, p.20.
74 TB XXX.
75 Finberg, p.35.
76 TB XXXVII.
77 Finberg, p.35.
78 Th. 1877, pp.41–3.
79 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, pp.539–40.
3: Rising Star
People saw Turner in different ways. And Turner saw himself in a way no others did. Fellow artists who tried to draw him found it difficult to catch a likeness – for one thing, he didn’t want to be portrayed by others; it was almost as if he feared the effect of an evil eye. In public, he seemed to create an aura around himself that repelled the sizing-up gaze of would-be portraitists. It made him a hard subject to get hold of. About some of his chief characteristics there might be, in conversation if not in portraiture, ample agreement. He was fairly short – about five feet four inches in height. (This has been determined from a tailor’s pattern for some of his trousers. His waist measurement was thirty-five inches.) He had a great beak of a nose, like that of a parrot or, putting it more admiringly, an eagle. His head seemed large, though with a low forehead that sloped back under a shock of brown hair, roughly parted in the middle. His eyes, in various lights, were blue, or bluish-grey, or grey, and, though they rarely met the eyes of other people, his gaze was described as penetrating. The lips were full, the complexion – at any rate in later life – ruddy. He was somewhat bandy-legged and had big feet. (Delacroix, whose Paris studio he visited on one occasion in either 1829 or 1832, remarked on his big shoes.)
‘An odd little mortal,’ was how one woman described him.1 Dayes wrote in 1805: ‘The man must be loved for his works; for his person is not striking, nor his conversation brilliant.’2 Others called him ‘homely’.3
When trying to describe his appearance in maturity, people often used down-to-earth analogies: ‘he had the look of an English farmer’, said Delacroix.4 The Redgraves believed he looked like ‘a long-stage coachman’.5 Many at most stages of his life were made to think of a seafarer: ‘A short, sturdy, sailor-like youth’, said Lovell Reeve;6 ‘the captain of a river steamboat’, wrote C. R. Leslie;7 ‘a North Sea pilot’, was the view of Leslie’s son Robert.8 The profile appealed to those who wanted to make a quick study, for seen from the side the Punch-like nose was an unforgettable feature: one example was the drawing done on 31 March 1800 by George Dance. But the future engraver Charles Turner a few years earlier caught his fellow RA student full-face and – perhaps in consequence of what was going on – in an unforgiving mood. Charles Turner wrote at the bottom of his study the ironic title, ‘A Sweet Temper’. Under beetling eyebrows the very widespread eyes seem to be enfilading the presumptuous draughtsman with musket fire.
Turner’s vision of himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four was less hostile. He is not known to have painted any other portraits, or indeed any other self-portraits, so the oil painting he did of himself between 1798 and 1800 must have sprung from a strong feeling at a particular time. It was
as if he wanted to put on record a J. M. W. Turner who was his own man. He, too, chose the front view, which diminished the impact of his nose. He wore the same accoutrements that Dance and Charles Turner sketched him in, a high-collared dark jacket, a waistcoat and a white cravat wound several times around his neck and then knotted in front: the effect is almost that of a heavy bandage or a sort of adult swaddling to prevent coughs and colds. For someone who in the painting of human figures sometimes showed a haphazard sense of anatomy, this head-and-shoulders is a remarkably skilful piece. Clearly the subject interested him. There is no hint of his less than average height or jockey’s legs. He catches the self-absorption and also the self-assurance, the ambition and the intransigence. For a moment, too, he seems to have had a young man’s normal interest in clothes: in a sketchbook of 1799, he listed the apparel he needed on a tour, including three coats, ten waistcoats (five coloured, four white, one black), four under-waistcoats, six shirts, eight cravats, six cotton stockings and three silk stockings.9
Turner’s career as a professional artist continued to be bound up with the Royal Academy – with its politicking, its exhibitions, its friendships and animosities. And in 1798 and 1799 he went on making use of the Life Academy, for although portrait painting was never going to be his métier he wanted to practise his sketching of figures, in chalk and watercolour.10 For a young man whose own family life provided little stability or ease, the Academy offered a sure point, a professional home from home. It was also an arena in which, without too much damage to his reputation as a difficult introvert, he could perform and shine. He could do this more easily because by and large it was not a high moment in English art. Great honours and great prices were awarded to Benjamin West, the American-born President of the Academy, whose gloomy, staged and stilted paintings met a contemporary mood. (West’s unenterprising inaugural presidential address in 1792 dwelt on two subjects, ‘the excellence of British art, and the gracious benevolence of His Majesty’, George III, the Royal Academy’s – and West’s – great patron.) Henry Fuseli, another incomer (from Switzerland), achieved celebrity for his highly mannered and theatrical pictures (and among Academy students for his flamboyant behaviour as Keeper of the Plaister Academy and then Professor of Painting). Thomas Lawrence’s portraits were fashionable and de Loutherbourg’s landscapes popular. But the only threat to Turner would have been Thomas Girtin, had he painted in oil.
Within the Academy, Turner’s name was being bandied about. Joseph Farington’s diary, full of Academy and Whitehall gossip, first alludes to him in 1795, but towards the end of the century his name appears often. During the 1798 exhibition Opie and West were both talking of him. According to Northcote, Farington ‘was no painter; he cared nothing at all about pictures, his great passion was the love of power’,11 and on 24 October 1798 the diarist was apparently pleased with the coming man’s recognition of him as a mentor and guide to his Academic future:
Turner has called. He talked to me about his present situation. He said that by continuing to reside at his Fathers he benefitted him and his Mother: but he thought he might derive advantages from placing himself in a more respectable situation. He said, he had more commissions at present than he could execute and got more money than he expended. The advice I gave him was to continue in his present situation till he had laid aside a few hundred pounds, and he then might with confidence, and without uneasy apprehensions, place himself in a situation more suitable to the rank he bears in the Art.
Farington soon afterwards went to call on Turner in Maiden Lane:
The apartments, to be sure, small and ill-calculated for a painter. He shewed me two books filled with studies from nature – several of them tinted on the spot, which he found, he said, the most valuable to him … He requested me to fix upon any subject which I preferred in his books, and begged to make a drawing or picture of it for me. I told him I had not the least claim to such a present from him, but on his pressing it I said I would take another opportunity of looking over his books and avail myself of his offer.12
Turner, quietly and pragmatically currying favour with the Academy hierarchy, had also put aside his inclinations for working undisturbed to invite John Hoppner to call. Hoppner, portrait painter to the Prince of Wales, chose a study Turner had done in Durham, but was not inhibited by the gift from giving the younger man some advice. Turner told Farington that Hoppner had suggested Turner’s paintings were a bit too brown. Turner was therefore ‘attending to nature’ to try to correct this tendency. The humility is startling, and perhaps rather suspect.
Via the Academy, Turner was also coming to public notice. In 1797 the art critic of the Morning Post, Anthony Pasquin, wrote about Turner’s Fishermen coming ashore at Sunset previous to a Gale, which was displayed at the RA exhibition:
We have no knowledge of Mr Turner but through the medium of his works, which assuredly reflect great credit upon his endeavours. The present picture is an undeniable proof of the possession of genius and judgment and, what is uncommon in this age, it partakes but very little of the manner of any other master. He seems to view nature and her operations with a peculiar vision, and that singularity of perception is so adroit that it enables him to give a transparency and undulation to the sea more perfect than is usually seen on canvas.13
An Ipswich amateur of the arts, Thomas Green, wrote in his diary:
June 2, 1797. Visited the Royal [Academy] Exhibition. Particularly struck with a sea view by Turner – fishing vessels coming in, with a heavy swell, in apprehension of [a] tempest gathering in the distance, and casting, as it advances, a night of shade; while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore. The whole composition, bold in design, and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist; but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department.14
A wider acquaintance is suggested by a Gillray print of this same year. A woman named Mary Ann Provis claimed to have rediscovered Titian’s secret colouring methods, which she sold to several gullible Academicians. Gillray’s satire showed Sir Joshua Reynolds rising from the grave (Sir Joshua had devoted much time in trying to find out the Venetian methods), while a monkey, representing Fashion, urinated on a stack of works by artists who had not succumbed to Mrs Provis’s lures: the artists included Beechey, Loutherbourg and Turner.
Among the enterprising patrons of the day, the word was ‘Keep an eye on this man Turner.’ In 1797 Edward Lascelles, heir to Lord Harewood, wanted drawings from him of the family mansion in Yorkshire.15 The banker and amateur artist Sir Richard Colt Hoare, also of Adelphi Terrace, invited him to his country estate at Stourhead, Wiltshire. In 1798 Lord Yarborough got him to make some drawings of the new mausoleum that the architect James Wyatt had designed for his estate in Lincolnshire. William Beckford asked him to the great Gothic abbey he was building at Fonthill in Wiltshire, to make a watercolour record – and Turner went. More distant subjects were proffered by Lord Elgin, who in early 1799 paraded the idea that Turner – recommended by Benjamin West – should accompany him to the Ottoman Empire to draw sculptures and buildings in Athens, with the understanding that Elgin would keep all his work and Turner would give Lady Elgin free drawing lessons. But they could not agree on a price. The mean Elgin had offered Girtin £30 a year for the job; Turner – with big ideas of his own value – apparently wanted £400 a year, though later Elgin claimed he had asked £700 to £800 a year, plus expenses. A more satisfactory patron shortly appeared in the shape of John Julius Angerstein, timber trader, insurance broker and art collector. Turner told Farington in May 1799 that Mr Angerstein was to give him forty guineas for a drawing of Caernarvon Castle in north Wales – a price greater than he would have asked – which he had rendered as if it were a seaport by Claude, with the river and Menai Strait beyond illumined by sunset. Angerstein had asked him to come and see his pictures, which included Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648). The magnate came into the room while Turne
r was looking at this picture, so Turner’s colleague George Jones later recalled. ‘Turner was awkward, agitated, and burst into tears. Mr Angerstein enquired the cause and pressed for an answer, when Turner said passionately, “Because I shall never be able to paint anything like that picture.”’16
Not every patron of the arts thought Turner could do no wrong. In 1799, Dr Whitaker, a local historian and vicar in the north of England, took up Turner to illustrate his history of the parish of Whalley, but had problems with the young artist, whom he condescendingly called ‘the draftsman’. Turner refused to copy a ‘very bad painting’ which a friend of Whitaker’s wanted used in the history instead of a Turner sketch, and Whitaker had trouble soothing his ‘draftsman’, who had ‘all the irritability of youthful genius’.17
Turner put his name down for associate membership of the Royal Academy in 1798. There were twenty-four candidates, including his teacher Thomas Malton; two would be chosen. Farington had promised his vote. Turner came third in the ballot, after Shee and Charles Rossi. It was a good result for the first attempt, and particularly since he was standing in defiance of an Academy rule, adopted two years before, that artists were not eligible for election until they were twenty-four; he was twenty-three. (Thomas Lawrence had been the youngest Associate to date, being elected in 1791 when he was only twenty-two.) But the following year Turner had no age barrier. He continued to call on Farington, asking his advice again about whether he should take separate lodgings and telling him about his recent sketching tours in Yorkshire, Wales and elsewhere. At the end of October 1799 Farington noted in his diary that Turner ‘has been in Kent painting from Beech trees. Very anxious about the election.’ Farington told him he had no reason to worry, and he was right. At the election in November Turner came first in both of two ballots and was elected Associate. He went next day to thank Farington. At the Council meeting on the last day of the year, the Secretary of the Academy read out Turner’s obligation, which Turner signed. Benjamin West, the President, who had not in fact voted for him, handed him his diploma.
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