J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  At the end of 1802 the King, George III, took against those supposedly royal Academicians who had been seduced into travelling to France that year, believing them to have ‘democratical’ tendencies.12 Turner might have felt the not uncommon impatience for reform, but no one questioned his patriotism. All the same, like many others he was fascinated by the Frenchman – ‘the Giant Usurper’ as the British press called the First Consul – who dominated the times. Napoleon and his wars figured obliquely in such works of Turner’s as The Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desart by a Whirlwind (RA 1801) and Hannibal crossing the Alps (RA 1812). Less oblique and more contemporary were a number of canvases: The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d’Aouste, Piedmont, 1796 (RA 1815), several with the Battle of Trafalgar and its sailor casualties as a subject, and one showing the bloody aftermath of Waterloo. Much later, in 1842, he exhibited War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet, a quirky comment on the banal end of Napoleon’s career. Although he was generally unaffected by the trappings of class or title, he did not reject occasional contact with great names. He later got to know Louis-Philippe, son of the Duke of Orléans, while he was living in English exile in 1815 near his own house in Twickenham.

  The Peace of Amiens came unstuck. Rightly suspicious of Bonaparte’s empire-building intentions in the Near East, Britain hung on to Malta, despite the treaty provisions. In May 1803 the two countries were at war again. By then, another closer-to-home calamity had affected Turner. His fellow apprentice Tom Girtin had also gone to France during the truce to draw and etch Parisian scenes. Critics and colleagues had sometimes boosted Girtin or Turner at the expense of one another. Hoppner reported to Farington on 9 February 1799 that ‘Mr Lascelles as well as Lady Sutherland are disposed to set up Girtin against Turner – who they say effects his purpose by industry – the former more genius. Turner finishes too much.’13 Four years on, Farington listened to Northcote discuss the merits of various artists, including Lawrence, Hoppner and Beechey: ‘Turner has a great deal of painter’s feeling, but his works too much made up of pictures, not enough of original observation of nature: Girtin had more of it.’14

  Yet Turner himself was in no doubt of his old friend’s talent. Whether or not he made the oft-quoted remark, ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved,’15 or declared to a collector named Chambers Hall that he would have given one of his little fingers to have made a drawing like Girtin’s White House, Turner greatly admired the mature work of his companion-worker at Dr Monro’s and John Raphael Smith’s. He was naturally aware of Girtin as a competitor in the landscape business. Hearing him say that he was planning to go sketching at St Albans, Turner didn’t dally. He had gone and come back with a book of sketches before Girtin got around to making the excursion. Yet much later he told the Reverend Trimmer, ‘We were friends to the last, although they did what they could to separate us.’16

  In 1802, however, poor Tom Girtin was in the grip of severe pulmonary disease, and on 9 November, despite the ministrations of the ubiquitous Dr Monro, he died. The funeral took place at what by now seemed to be Turner’s church, St Paul’s, Covent Garden, and Turner was among Girtin’s friends who were there, inevitably thinking about fate and fortune. Poor Tom, despite his immense talent, was gone at twenty-seven.

  Turner was not only alive but pushing for promotion in the workings of the Academy. Farington that December noted: ‘Turner was very urgent to be a Visitor’17 – that is, a Visitor in the Academy Schools; but Farington tried to cool his ambitions. Turner was in the thoroughly committed stage of the new volunteer, pitching in for every assignment. Unfortunately the way ahead was not straight, acceptance not easy. The institution to which he wanted to give his all was riven by dispute; pleasing one faction of the forty oil-painters, sculptors and architects who were members meant annoying another faction. The Academy was both a club and a trade union. Its members met constantly and exchanged useful tips, gossiping about patrons and prices. Its functions included an annual dinner. At that of 1803, the first toast as usual was to ‘our founder and patron’, the King, and was followed by the singing of the national anthem. Other toasts were accompanied by airs and glees, among them ‘The Wooden Walls’ and ‘To love I wake’. After the final toast, to ‘the Patrons of the Arts’, came the air ‘Inspire us Genius of the Day’. At the 1804 dinner, with the Prince of Wales as the guest of honour, the actor John Philip Kemble competed with the Duke of Norfolk in a battle of Greek and Latin quotations and then entertained the company with recitations from Shakespeare.

  The Academy gave financial relief to elderly artists and their families, and bolstered the status and sales of its active members. Academicians often did good turns for each other, as Thomas Lawrence did in 1809 when he suggested to a collector named Penrice who was thinking of buying some Old Masters that he instead patronize living artists, in particular ‘Mr Turner’.18 And they also indulged in the back-biting and bitchiness that members of most clubs are susceptible to. Probably, all in all, it was better to be a member, on the inside, not necessarily taking it all too seriously (though that was not Turner’s way), than to be on the outside, not a member, taking it extremely seriously, as did Benjamin Haydon-a man whose genius unfortunately (for someone who was sure he was a great painter) flourished most richly in words. Too often for the sake of his career these were words of invective against the Royal Academy.

  The royal patronage of the Academy was one cause of internal dispute at this time. How much influence should the King (who provided its home at Somerset House) have in Academic business? Secondly, what were the rights of Academicians, and should their General Assembly – made up of all forty members – have the power to approve and disapprove the decisions of the eight-strong Academy Council? Malcontent members used these questions about hitherto undefined matters to make trouble and forward their own interests. A court party formed which wanted to get rid of the Academy President, Benjamin West. West’s supporters, keener on the independence of the Academy from the Crown, were led by Farington. In 1803 the court party had a slim majority on the Council. There was a great deal of politiciking over items that now seem very dusty indeed. West – a former royal favourite but now one of those the King believed to be admirers of Napoleon – lost a large commission for paintings at Windsor Castle and had his royal pension stopped, and there was a further attempt to do him down by leaking to the press an accusation that one of his paintings for the 1803 RA exhibition had already been exhibited in 1794 (second showings were not allowed); West claimed that he had repainted and altered the picture.

  This was the year that Turner was on the exhibition hanging committee for the first time, along with Soane, Rossi, Bourgeois, Richards and Wilton. It was also the year he joined the Academy Council for a statutory two-year term. To begin with he faithfully attended Council meetings, and usually voted with the Democrats against the Royalists, but soon he was absenting himself – it was as if he couldn’t stand this almost domestic acrimony. Through much of 1804 he failed to show up at Council meetings. The disagreements often became hotly personal. Farington reported an argument – overheard by William Daniell – between Turner and his fellow Council member the painter Sir Francis Bourgeois. The dispute took place after the Academy General Meeting on Christmas Eve 1803, and was notionally about whether to give a gold medal for architectural drawings at the annual prize giving, with Turner among the majority who voted not to give one on this occasion. Farington wrote:

  Bourgeois had said that when premiums for Architecture & for Models [Sculpture] were to be adjudged, he attended to the opinions of those who were more conversant in these studies. Turner hinted that [it] might be well that he [Bourgeois] should [do the same] in what related to the figure, signifying his incompetency. This caused Bourgeois to call him a little Reptile, which the other [Turner] replied to by calling him a great Reptile with ill manners.19

  Turner’s self-importance – or was it simply independence? – was asserted on 7 February 1804, when he refused to tell Farington
how he planned to vote in the upcoming election for the post of Keeper of the Academy. Farington himself had a fight with the small-statured artist at a Council meeting on 11 May. Turner arrived late, after some of the other members – Farington, Bourgeois and Smirke – had briefly adjourned for a private chat. When they came back into the room, it was to find (wrote Farington) that Turner ‘had taken my chair and began instantly with a very angry countenance to call us to account for having left the Council. On which, moved by his presumption, I replied to him sharply and told him of the impropriety of his addressing us in such a manner, to which he answered in such a way that I added his conduct as to behaviour had been cause of complaint to the whole Academy.’20 This from his old mentor! That Turner’s brilliance as a painter might be accompanied by what some of his colleagues saw as big-headedness seemed now to affect their judgement of his pictures. Hoppner, after seeing Turner’s works at the 1803 Exhibition, ‘reprobated the presumptive manner in which he [Turner] paints, and his carelessness. He said that so much was left to be imagined that it was like looking into a coal fire, or upon an old wall, where from many and undefined forms the fancy was to be employed in conceiving things … His manners so presumptive and arrogant were spoken of with great disgust.’21 On the way home from a dinner at Hoppner’s on 13 May 1803, Farington talked with other guests on the subject of artists ‘being like their works … Turner confident, presumptuous, – with talent’.

  There was a sudden burgeoning of disapproval for the works of this ill-mannered genius. Fuseli – generally an enthusiastic supporter – joined Sir George Beaumont in using the term ‘blot’ about parts of some of Turner’s pictures,22 and these critics meant something accidental and messy, and not products of chance disposed to produce ‘one comprehensive form’ in the way that Alexander Cozens had used blots.23 Even the press was no longer full of praise. The Sun, commenting on Calais Pier, said that ‘The sea looks like soap and chalk … All the figures are flat and are by no means enlivened by dabs of gaudy colour.’ On 16 May the True Briton wrote, ‘A certain artist has so much debauched the taste of the young artists in this country by the empirical novelty of his style of painting that a humorous critic gave him the title of over-Turner.’ This indicates that he already had followers, even disciples – which must have annoyed some of the senior Academicians all the more.

  John Constable, the landscape artist who in 1802 exhibited his first picture at the RA but who, despite being only a year younger than Turner, had seventeen years still to go before he became an associate member of the Academy, talked to some of the younger artists and was startled to hear that they thought Turner’s work was ‘of a very superior order’ and not ‘in any extreme’.24 The novelty of Turner’s colouring and the drama of his compositions threatened the static world of his older colleagues; there was something confusing in much of his work (‘incongruity and confusion’ – the Sun on Calais Pier).25 He presented wreck and catastrophe, sometimes averted, sometimes witnessed and participated in. It was enough to make one want firm, ordered, understandable works to hold on to. And perhaps it was also confusing that he would then provide just that, producing pictures of such splendid serenity as the Mâcon harvest festival.

  There were rumours at this time of members seceding from the Academy. If Lawrence, Opie, Fuseli and Shee pulled out, wouldn’t Turner go as well? Word got around that he was building his own gallery, and would fail to exhibit at the Exhibition in 1804. But Turner, despite all these ups and downs, went on loving the Academy and wanting ‘to be useful’ to it, as he afterwards declared in a lecture.26 Some of the ways in which he served the Academy will be looked at in greater detail later on, but at this point it is sufficient to note that although he continued to express disgust at the Academy’s self-inflicted troubles – as he did to Farington in January, 1807 – he went on thrusting himself into prominence within its hierarchy: in the same year, 1807, he volunteered for the Academy’s vacant Professorship of Perspective. And his affection for it lasted too. He felt for it, like a son for a mother.

  As for his own mother, she died, still in Bedlam, on 15 April 1804. Where she was buried, or whether her son attended her funeral, we do not know.

  Notes

  1 Farington, Diary, 30 August 1802.

  2 Smollett, vol.viii, pp.3–4.

  3 Hibbert, Grand Tour, p.41.

  4 Finberg, Sketches and Drawings, pp.47–8.

  5 TB LXXV.

  6 TB LXXVIII, f.1.

  7 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, pp.207–8, 216.

  8 TB LXXII, f.51.

  9 Ibid., f.28.

  10 Farington, Diary, 2 May 1803.

  11 Lindsay, p.79; Finberg, pp.89–90.

  12 Farington, Diary, 12 December 1802.

  13 Finberg, p.92.

  14 Farington, Diary, 26 January 1803.

  15 Th. 1877, pp.71, 222.

  16 Ibid., p.222.

  17 Farington, Diary, 10 December 1802.

  18 Whitley, 1800–20, pp.150–1.

  19 Farington, Diary, 24 December 1803.

  20 Ibid., 11 May 1804.

  21 Farington, Diary, 29 April 1803. In this and other quotations from Farington, I have for clarity sometimes altered punctuation, spelling and emphases.

  22 Finberg, p.99.

  23 A. P. Oppe, quoted in Lindsay, p.83.

  24 Constable’s letter to Dunthorne, May 1803, quoted in ibid.

  25 Finberg, p.100.

  26 See Ziff, TS, 8, p.13

  5: Aladdin’s Cave

  April 1804 was important in another respect: it was the month in which Turner opened a gallery for exhibiting his own work. The reasons for this venture were numerous. The idea for it may have come from his friend William F. Wells, whose house in London and cottage in Kent had provided frequent refuge. Wells founded the Watercolour Society this year, and he may have prodded Turner into entrepreneurial activity; he was to do so even more notably two years later. Another factor in the establishment of the gallery was Turner’s unhappiness with the way things were going at the Royal Academy, which had led to the rumours – heard by Farington – that he was not going to exhibit there this year ‘but was painting pictures to furnish a gallery … where he means to make an exhibition and receive money’.1 He in fact took refuge in one of the Keeper’s Rooms at the Academy this same spring to work on a painting, Boats Carrying Out Anchors and Cables to Dutch Men of War, in 1665, because of the turmoil at Harley Street.

  In having his own display room Turner was not unique. Other painters – such as Fuseli, Northcote and West a few streets away – had their own galleries, and some, like Haydon, were forced to rent rooms for the purpose when they had completed a work that they wanted to receive special attention. Turner was not very fond of dealers, apart from one man later in life. Like many artists, he didn’t always seem to want to sell his pictures, even though that was what his professional life and sustenance depended on, and what a gallery would seem to be designed to expedite. But the gallery may also have been a manifestation of the pleasure he increasingly took in keeping his pictures together; in a codicil he made to his will in 1832, the gallery became a fall-back position for effecting this if certain other measures were not adopted.

  The gallery was the first of two he was to have near this corner of Harley Street and Queen Anne Street.2 It extended from the rear of the house into the back garden; Turner, inviting Farington to see it, told him it was seventy feet long and twenty feet wide. The building works may have been one reason (Sarah Danby possibly another) that had kept him at 75 Norton Street, but in 1804 he resumed giving 64 Harley Street as his address in the Royal Academy catalogues. The proud painter sent out printed invitations to colleagues and collectors and the gallery was apparently opened by 18 April, three days after his mother’s death. Evidently he was not in mourning, at least in terms of the public; it seems he wanted no one to know that his mother had died, or where.

  Farington could not go to Harley Street at once but recorded Sir George Be
aumont’s carping verdict that Turner was displaying too many pictures – pictures, moreover, with overly ‘strong skies and parts not corresponding with them’.3 Another critic took a contrary tack, accusing Turner of sending inferior works to the Academy and keeping the best for his gallery. The gallery struck some members of the Royal Academy as part of a threatening tendency, seen in the formation of such rival bodies as the Watercolour Society and – in 1805 – the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts. A few artists made comments in which envy had an obvious role. Hoppner, in 1805, was to remark that the gallery ‘appeared like a Greens stall, so rank, crude, and disordered were his pictures’4 – and the implication may have been that Turner hadn’t come that far from his origins in Covent Garden, near the vegetable market. But Turner, however proud of his profession, also could not help but treat it as a trade. In a letter to his friend James Holworthy in April 1827 he refers to his gallery as ‘the shop’.5 Callcott later told Farington that ‘when Turner first opened his gallery, he hesitated whether he should ask one or two hundred guineas for about a Half Length size picture, and determined on the larger sum, as in that case if he sold only half the number he might otherwise do, his annual gain would be as much and his trouble less’.6

  At least to begin with the gallery seems to have been a success. Influential buyers were forthcoming. Lord Auckland wrote to thank Turner for his invitation and to say that he and his family planned a visit. (Never one to waste a piece of paper, Turner did a quick pen-and-ink sketch of a shipwreck on the back of Auckland’s note.) John Soane, the architect, came and Mrs Soane bought a drawing. In May 1805 Sir John Leicester toured the gallery and decided he wanted Turner’s new marine stormpiece, The Shipwreck, though it was the following January when he paid Turner the £315 price for it. In 1805 Turner thriftily used the Academy porters to hand-deliver to Academicians his invitations to his ‘Exhibition at home’, in what was also a way of showing he was on good terms with them as individuals, despite being miffed enough with the Council not to exhibit at the Academy that year.