J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  21 Lindsay, p.44.

  22 Th. 1877, pp.234–6.

  23 Finberg, p.69. RA Catalogue 1801 (Wells was an exhibitor).

  24 Th. 1877, pp.234–6.

  25 Ibid., p.4.

  26 Lindsay, p.72.

  27 Powell, TSN, no.62, p.11.

  28 Farington, Diary, 2 April 1804.

  29 Powell, TSN, no.62, p.11.

  30 Powell, TSN, no.62, p.12.

  31 Th. 1877, pp.4, 319.

  32 TB CVI, f.67a.

  33 Finberg, p.27.

  34 TB CIV; Ann Livermore, TS 3, 1, pp.44–8. She also points out that six books of music were found in Turner’s effects after his death.

  35 Finberg, p.155.

  36 Golt, TS 9, 2, pp.4–10.

  37 IGI; Geese, p.107.

  38 Dossier.

  39 Farington, Diary, 22 March 1804. The RA catalogue for 1804 also gives 64 Harley Street as his address once again.

  40 Th. 1877, p.122.

  41 TB XLIII.

  42 TB LXIX.

  43 TB XLIX. Although some words of Turner’s lament are hard to decipher, I have for the most part followed the reading in Hill, Turner on the Thames, p.60.

  44 Whitley, 1800–20, p.28.

  45 Watts, p.xvi.

  46 Whitley, 1800–20, pp.6–7.

  47 Ibid., p.19.

  48 TS, 1, 1, p.6; cited Monthly Mirror, June 1801.

  49 Farington, Diary, 26 April 1801.

  50 Finberg, p.71.

  51 TB LXIX.

  52 Ibid., f.116.

  A sketch by Turner of – probably – his mother, c. 1794

  4: Fair Winds and Foul

  The war with France had been going on and on, sapping Britain’s energies and spirits; but in March 1802, the Treaty of Amiens was ratified between the two ancient rivals. In the ensuing period of peace it became possible for the first time in nine years for English travellers freely to visit their neighbour across the Channel. Hundreds jumped at the chance. Among them were many with artistic inclinations: the actor John Philip Kemble, the banker-poet Samuel Rogers and a number of Academicians, including the President Benjamin West, Martin Archer Shee, Joseph Farington, Henry Fuseli, Robert Smirke and the new full member, Joseph Mallord William Turner, twenty-seven years old that April and bursting to see France. Leaving his mother in Bedlam, and his father, his mistress Sarah Danby and baby daughter Evelina in Norton Street, Turner went abroad. It was his first foreign journey. That he had been looking forward to it for some time is evident from his small ‘Dolbadarn’ sketchbook of 1799, in which – amid lists of castles, clothes and meteorological terms and of course pages of sketches – are found jottings of basic French grammar: pronouns personal, possessive, demonstrative and relative; the verb donner, with the imperfect spelt wrongly je donnerios. ‘What have you given me?’ Sarah might have said as the artist, clutching his portmanteau, sketchbooks, new passport and letters of credit, made his au revoirs and went out of the door.

  Farington and Fuseli set out a month after Turner, but the three met while in Paris and compared notes on their journeys. Farington recorded in his diary how he haggled with the packet master at Dover over the fare to Calais, in the end bringing the price down to half a guinea. A supper of chickens and pigeons at Montreuil cost fifteen pence per person. Burgundy was expensive – four shillings and sixpence a bottle – but the beds at their inn were ‘very well’. They set off next morning at 5.15. ‘At the barrier going out of town, a Savoyard girl played on a Mandoline, which catching the ear of the Drivers, they stopped their Horses a little. The musick, the appearance of the warm rays of the rising sun, and the freshness of the air caused very agreeable sensations.’1

  Turner, starting in mid-July, had for companion on this trip no poor workman but rather a well-to-do country gentleman, amateur artist and antiquarian from Durham named Newbey Lowson, two years older than himself. The professional and the hobbyist had probably been introduced by the Earl of Darlington, for whom Turner later did drawings of his place, Raby Castle, and who with Lord Yarborough now took a helpful interest in the new Academician. The noblemen seem to have subscribed funds for Turner to make the journey to the Continent, and Lowson may have assisted. Yarborough also provided a reference for Turner when he applied for his British passport. As Farington was to hear, Turner and Lowson travelled in some style, buying their own two-wheeled carriage – a ‘cabriole’ – in Paris for thirty-two guineas and selling it there on the way back; they stayed in good inns and took their own Swiss servant, also acquired in Paris, who was paid five livres a day.

  But such a journey at this time was never altogether comfortable, and the initial stages were particularly onerous. It generally took a full day to reach Dover by a more than averagely expensive coach from London. At the harbour, the porters who carried luggage to be cleared at the customs house were notoriously avaricious. The town charged passengers several shillings to cross the gangplank to the packet. Tobias Smollett some years before called the route from London to Dover the worst road in England: ‘The chambers are in general cold and comfortless, the beds paltry, the cooking execrable, the wine poison, the attendance bad, the publicans insolent, and the bills extortion.’ Dover was a den of thieves; the inhabitants lived by piracy in time of war and ‘by smuggling and fleecing strangers in time of peace’.2 The Dover-Calais crossing was the shortest (other packets started from London and landed at Dunkirk or Boulogne), but even then could take as long as fourteen hours. Passengers wishing to be out of the elements were crowded into a single cabin. Turner’s friend the journalist Cyrus Redding in 1815 found ‘beds in tiers, male and female in confusion together … there was no moving without trampling upon the prostrate, even the floor occupied’. Redding spent most of the voyage on a coil of rope, near the cabin door, wrapped up in a cloak, drinking hot water and brandy, and munching biscuits. If low tide or contrary wind or sea conditions made difficult the packet-boat’s entry into Calais harbour, passengers were often transferred into smaller boats, rowed by apparently fearless desperadoes.3

  This happened to Turner. A good sailor who did not suffer from mal de mer, he travelled as ever with all his senses vibrantly alert and recording mechanisms immediately at hand. Deluges of spray may have kept his sketchbook closed in the small boat that ferried them in, but it was open the moment he set foot on shore. Next to a bold black and white chalk sketch of breakers and boats, he noted, ‘Our landing at Calais – nearly swampt.’4 He then went out along the pier in order to watch and draw his packet – or another like it – as it came charging in through the tormented seas of the congested entrance. Waves broke over the pier. The usual pier-head crowd of gawkers and fisherfolk were this day crouching as much out of the wind and spume as possible. The arriving English packet, forced over to the west side of the entrance by a bluff French fishing boat reaching out with scandalized mainsail, looked as if it was going to run down a smaller boat being rowed desperately across the channel. Imminent shipwreck – man against the raging ocean – was still his matter (and never ceased to be), and in this case the viewers at the Royal Academy next summer would see the result: Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing for Sea, an English Packet arriving. Here were his favoured comings and goings, with near collisions and imminent disaster, rendered in a way that was both a personal tribute and a toss of the gauntlet to the old Dutch sea-painters. ‘Poissards’ was a typical Turner off-the-cuff piece of Franglais, derived it would seem from the actual French word poissarde, which meant fish-wife.

  Turner’s touring experiences this year we know about largely through the somewhat formalizing filter of Farington’s diary. Possibly because he was travelling in unaccustomed upgraded style with Mr Lowson, Turner failed to make in and around his sketches his usual jottings about the weather, distances and expenses. His sketchbooks on this trip were comparatively hefty – the ‘St Gothard and Mont Blanc’ sketchbook5 was nineteen by twelve inches and leather-bound – and the carriage and servant were therefore useful. Yet Turne
r apparently felt his usual secretive urges. One of the rules of the companionship said to have been laid down by him was that Lawson was not to draw any view that Turner was sketching. It has also been claimed that Turner failed to show his generous fellow traveller a single sketch he had made. Given the enforced proximity of their coach-sharing, this seems unlikely.

  Turner got back to Paris from Switzerland towards the end of September and Farington encountered him on the 30th sketching in the Louvre. On this day and the next, Turner unburdened himself of various terse travel tips and complaints. He told Farington that on the outbound journey they had taken four days to go from Paris to Lyon and the countryside was ‘very bad’, though from his sketchbooks it certainly didn’t look that way around Mâcon. He was three days in Lyon. He thought little of what he saw of the River Rhône there but the views of the Saône were fine. Scotland – where Turner had toured the previous year and Farington had also been – came to mind: though the buildings of Lyon were better than those of Edinburgh, there was nothing so good as Edinburgh Castle. But generally in Lyon he felt unsettled; the place was ‘very dear’, and the nightly price of a bed was eight livres. In the vicinity of Grenoble, ‘about a day’s journey beyond Lyons … there are very fine Scenes’.

  As for ‘Swisserland’, as Farington (and Jane Austen) spelt it, Turner found that country in ‘a very troubled state, but the people well inclined to the English’. In particular, Grindelwald was fine. Lawson didn’t seem to figure in Turner’s account, at least as Farington reported it, of his journey through the defile of the Grand Chartreuse, nine miles long, which abounded ‘with romantic matter’. Then Chambéry–Geneva–Chamonix–Bonneville. Still the Prince of Rocks, Turner climbed the Montanvert at Chamonix and made a tour around Mont Blanc over the Col du Bonhomme and Col de la Seigne to Courmayeur and then Aosta via a road over which French and Austrian forces had battled in 1796. He regretted not going to Turin, only a day distant from Aosta. He (and presumably Lawson) crossed by the Great St Bernard Pass to Martigny – ‘Road and accomodations … very bad’ – but thereafter things improved on the way to Chillon and Vevey. He saw the Reichenbach Falls and the great fall at Schaffhausen – eighty feet deep, and ‘the width of the fall about four times and a half greater than its depth’, the observant tourist told Farington. ‘The rocks of the fall are inferior to those above the fall of the Clyde but the fall itself is much finer.’

  The information that passed between the senior and junior Academicians was for the most part professional artist-talk. Turner thought Switzerland offered ‘rather broken’ lines in the way of landscape features, though ‘there are very fine parts … [with] fragments and precipices very romantic and strikingly grand’. However, Swiss trees were ‘bad for the painter’, except for the walnuts, and the houses had ‘bad forms – tiles abominable red colour’. It seems that despite his well-to-do companion, carriage and servant, Turner kept his thrifty habits to the fore. ‘He underwent much fatigue from walking, and often experienced bad living and lodging.’ He told Farington that his living expenses amounted to seven shillings a day and it was ‘necessary to make bargains for everything, everywhere, or imposition will be the consequence’. Swiss wines were also bad for this painter: ‘too acid for his constitution being billious’. Yet ‘the weather was very fine’ – that is, as far as Turner was concerned, for ‘he saw very fine thunderstorms among the mountains’. Turner worked hard, as always; in his three months away he made about 400 drawings, over four a day, of which a score were in colour. He was trying to put it all down, perhaps a little unselectively, bowled over by Alpine scenery.

  These sketches are his real memories of the tour, and Farington would have got a better sense of Turner’s journey by looking at them rather than listening to him. But he hadn’t just sketched mountains, passes, meadows, rivers and waterfalls. In one vellum-bound sketchbook with a few drawings of Swiss local people is a fairly detailed drawing, brightly coloured, of a young woman in a rumpled bed, with another person lying behind her.6 The almost spotlit young woman is bare-breasted, and her festival dress lies on the floor. Although two women’s hats are among the litter of clothes, the person in shadow close behind the Swiss girl looks to this viewer like a man – with tousled hair, eyes closed, his left arm under her head and his hand on her naked shoulder. Indeed, if one puts aside scholarly notions of a brothel frolic or lesbian entanglement, it is possible to see in the cartoon-like features of this ‘companion’ the rudiments of a self-portrait by the artist–tourist himself. He sleeps, after his romp with the chambermaid, while the young woman, bemused, looks at the dawn light flooding in through the window. How soon afterwards, one wonders, did he make this drawing – turning amor into art? This sketchbook, by the by, has scribbled inside its back cover Turner’s rendering of the ribald old song ‘I am a Friar of Orders Grey’.

  Many English travellers felt awestruck when arriving in post-revolutionary Paris and seeing everywhere relics of bloody times. Haydon, travelling with Wilkie at the end of the war, noted places that brought to mind ‘murders in the name of liberty’ but also felt some insular bemusement: ‘The first impression of Paris … on an Englishman used to the regularity of London streets was that of hopeless confusion; cabs, carts, horses, women, boys, girls, soldiers, carriages, all in endless struggle; streets narrow, houses high, no flat pavement …’ On the other hand, the people had vitality, and ‘though most men enter Paris with disgust, no man ever left it with disappointment’.7

  Turner knew where he wanted to concentrate his attention. During his several weeks in Paris he often went to the former Royal Palace of the Louvre. There, in what Farington called ‘the Picture Gallery’, works were to be seen which the Corsican upstart’s armies had recently ‘liberated’ from Italy – for example, Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr from the Church of SS Giovanni and Paolo in Venice. Turner made rough sketches of the masterpieces and noted the way colours were used and effects were achieved. He sometimes – as with Titian’s Christ crowned with Thorns – recorded details of the thickness of paint and the process by which the picture had been painted, but he also felt with the subject, Christ, remarking how ‘the position of the legs indicates excessive pain and exertion to sustain it’.8 He copied Titian’s The Entombment, and of the St Peter Martyr he wrote in his sketchbook (which he labelled ‘Studies in the Louvre’), ‘The characters are finely contrived, the composition is beyond all system, the landscape tho natural is heroic, the figure wonderfully expressive of surprize and its concomitate fear. The sanguinary assassin striding over the prostrate martyr who with uplifted arm exults in being acknowledged by heaven. The affrighted Saint has a dignity even in his fear …’9 There is something touching about this earnest analysis, this identification with the characters, in words put down only for himself.

  These Titian studies were to bear fruit in his own attempt at a biblical Old Master, The Holy Family, exhibited at the RA the following year, 1803. But other masters made their impression in the Louvre. He looked hard at Raphael’s Infant Jesus caressing St John and Correggio’s St Jerome. He studied the works of Giorgione, Guercino and Domenichino. He was unhappy about Rembrandt’s Susannah, ‘finely coloured but … miserably drawn and poor in execution’, and the Rubens Landscape with a Rainbow was characteristically ‘defective as to light and the profusion of nature’. He could see ways of making better even the works of artists he particularly admired, like Ruysdael’s A Storm off the dikes of Holland; in his sketch of this picture, Turner improved things by leaving out a house that he thought spoilt the ‘dignity’ of the right side of the painting. One artist – one of his heroes – unaccountably missing from his Louvre sketchbook was Claude Lorrain, despite being the obvious influence on another large canvas he was thinking about at this time, and showed in 1803, The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon. (On seeing this picture, the influential patron and amateur artist Sir George Beaumont said it was ‘borrowed from Claude but all the colouring forgotten’.10 What
Sir George did not notice was that Turner for his Claudescape had with cross-Channel panache taken more from an earlier sketch he had done of the Thames at Richmond than from his recent studies of the Saône at Mâcon.)

  However, another French seventeenth-century painter was fully though not uncritically regarded. Turner approached Nicolas Poussin, a master, on remarkably equal terms. He admired his The Israelites gather manna (‘the grandest system of light and shadow in the collection’) but declared of Poussin’s Deluge, ‘The colour of this picture impresses the subject more than the incidents, which are by no means fortunate either as to place, position or colour, as they are separate spots untoned by the under colour that pervades the whole. The lines are defective as to the conception of a swamp’d world and the fountains of the deep being broken up. The boat on the waterfall is ill-judged and misapplied, for the figures are placed at the wrong end to give the idea of falling …’11 He wrote as someone who had recently been gazing at waterfalls, who knew boats and had looked – not long before, off Calais Pier – into the fountains of the deep.

  With Farington he also went to an exhibition of contemporary French painting and ‘held it very low – all made up of Art’. But his taste was eclectic; he made a sketch of P.-N. Guérin’s Return of Marcus Sextus, a painting of 1799 that Haydon would have liked, and he approved as ‘very ingenious’ the small domestic paintings of Madame Marguerite Gérard, the wife of the historical painter Baron François Gérard: she had studied with Fragonard, her brother-in-law, and liked painting young mothers with children. Turner, Farington and Fuseli called on the sculptor Jean-Guillaume Moitte at the Louvre but found the Frenchman ‘cold and dry, apparently little disposed to conversation’, at least with the three Royal Academicians. And they visited Mademoiselle Jaullie, said by Farington to be an Irish pupil of David, and apparently a more genial person, for Fuseli began to talk about how he had got started as an artist, stealing bits of candle at the age of eight so that he could sit up all night drawing.