Frith told of one well-known ‘picture merchant [who] though … aware of Turner’s dislike of the fraternity’, determined one day to see the famous gallery in Queen Anne Street. ‘Forgetting – or perhaps not knowing – that his card must be given to the servant before admission could be obtained, or believing, possibly, that the maid merely took it as a matter of form, he was proceeding leisurely upstairs into the gallery, when he found himself pulled backwards by his coat-tails, and on looking round saw the irate face of the great artist who, without a word, pointed to the front door, through which the dealer made an ignominious retreat.’30
Others saw a more affable Turner in his exhibition room. Young Robert Leslie made many visits to Queen Anne Street with his father, a member of the Academy. The senior Leslie, so his son thought, had leave to go to the gallery whenever he pleased. Robert Leslie recalled several occasions when Turner, hearing friends at hand, would pop out of his studio
in a mysterious way … and then leave us again for a while …I particularly remember one visit, in company with my father and a Yankee sea captain, to whom Turner was very polite, evidently looking up to the sailor capacity, and making many little apologies for the want of ropes and other details about certain vessels in a picture. No one knew or felt, I think, better than Turner the want of these mechanical details, and while the sea captain [whose name was Morgan] was there he paid no attention to any one else, but followed him about the gallery, bent upon hearing all he said. As it turned out, this captain and he became good friends, for the Yankee skipper’s eyes were sharp enough to see through all the fog and mystery of Turner, how much of real sea feeling there was in him and his work. Captain Morgan, who was a great friend of Dickens, my father, and many other artists, used to send Turner a box of cigars almost every voyage after that visit to Queen Anne Street.31
We learn occasionally that life went on elsewhere in the house. Robert Leslie also retold a story he had heard
of how Turner was one day [before 1830] showing some great man or other round his gallery, and Turner’s father looked in through a half-open door and said, in a low voice, ‘That ’ere’s done,’ and that Turner, taking no apparent notice, but continuing to attend his visitor, the old man’s head appeared again, after an interval of five or six minutes, and said, in a louder tone, ‘That ’ere will be spiled.’ I think Landseer used to tell this story as having happened when he and one of his many noble friends were going the round of Turner’s gallery about the time that Turner’s chop or steak was being cooked.32
Turner was self-absorbed, self-preservatory, and even fierce when cornered, like a cat – sometimes cool, sometimes responsive. But he didn’t lie around; he worked hard. As noted, the studio that adjoined the gallery – the hard-work room where the exhibited marvels were created – was off-limits to all but a favoured few. Clara Wells called it ‘emphatically his sanctuary, his harbour of refuge’.33 G. D. Leslie, brother to Robert, wrote later of going into the studio from the gallery to look at a painting on an easel that Turner wanted to show his father, and seeing, too, ‘on a shelf a row of fat glass bottles, closed by bungs, with brilliant colours in powder inside them. These most likely contained orange and yellow chrome, orpiment, emerald green, red lead, or other pernicious pigments which the great genius delighted in and recklessly employed.’34 The room – the ‘drawing room’ of the house – had the correct-for-a-painter north-facing outlook, giving daylight with less shadow.
According to Thornbury, the room ‘was remarkable for a dusty and dirty buffet … In this he kept the immemorial sherry bottle with the broken cork that served him for a decanter … A friend who called upon him was treated to a glass of sherry from the old bottle and the old buffet – one glass. About the same time next year the artist came again, had another glass, and praised the wine. “It ought to be good,” said Turner; “it’s the same bottle you tasted before.”’35 (However, this is not a story that seems to fit with Thornbury’s other stories about Turner’s heavy drinking. And other visitors recalled the sherry bottle as being kept in a cupboard on the stairs.) Thornbury further claimed that ‘the chief furniture’ of the drawing room ‘was a common oak-grained table, once, it is believed, the property of Lawrence; a huge paint-box, sheafs of uncleaned short brushes in a tin case, and a palette that also once belonged to Sir Thomas’.36 Several more reliable witnesses saw a few models of full-rigged ships, which he kept close at hand to provide details of rigging arrangements and perhaps also simply as touchstones.
Yet, for most who came to 47 Queen Anne Street, the studio remained – as it did for a long time for the Reverend Trimmer’s son, Henry Syer Trimmer – ‘enshrined in mystery, and the object of profound speculation’. It was not until after the painter’s death that the younger Trimmer gained entry to ‘the august retreat’.
I entered. His gloves and handkerchief lay on a circular table, which had in the middle a raised box (with a circle in the centre) with side compartments; a good contrivance for an artist, though I had never seen one of the kind before. In the centre were his colours, the great object of my attraction. I remember, on my father’s observing to Turner that nothing was to be done without ultramarine, his saying that cobalt was good enough for him; and cobalt to be sure there was, but also several bottles of ultramarine of various depths; and smalts of various intensities, of which I think he made great use. There was also some verditer. The next object of interest was the white; there was a large bottle of blanc d’argent, and another of flake white. Before making this inspection I had observed that Turner used silver white. His yellow pigments consisted of a large bottle of chrome. There was also a bottle of tincture of rhubarb and some iodine, but whether for artistical or medicinal use I cannot say. Subsequently I was told by his housekeeper that ultramarine was employed by him very sparingly, and that smalt and cobalt were his usual blues.
Hannah also informed Henry Syer Trimmer that she often set Turner’s palette. The palette he saw
was a homely piece of square wood, with a hole for the thumb. Grinding colours on a slab was not his practice, and his dry colours were rubbed on the palette with cold-drawn oil. The colours were mixed daily, and he was very particular as to the operation. If they were not to his mind, he would say to Mrs. Danby [that is Hannah], ‘Can’t you set a palette better than this?’ Like Wilson, Turner used gamboge; simply pounded and mixed with linseed cold-drawn oil.
His brushes were of the humblest description, mostly round hog’s tools, and some flat. He was said to use very short handles, which might have been the case with his water colours; but I observed one very long-handled brush, with which I have no doubt he put in the effective touches in his late pictures. According to his housekeeper, he used the long brush exclusively for the rigging of ships, etc. However, there were a great many long-haired sables, which could not have been all employed for rigging. She also said that he used camel’s hair for his oil pictures; and formerly he showed my father some Chinese brushes he was in the habit of using. When he had nearly finished a picture, she said, he took it to the end of his long gallery, and there put in the last touches.
In Turner’s travelling box, together with some books, Henry Syer Trimmer found many deeply worn cakes of watercolour and a few sable brushes and lead pencils. His belief that Turner had used wax in his early pictures, ‘from their having turned yellow’, was confirmed – to his mind – by finding in the studio ‘a jar of wax melted with rose madder and also with blue, which must have been used very recently, though it might have been for water-colours. There was also a bureau of old colours and oils … a bottle of spirit varnish and a preparation of tar, tubes of magilp, old bladders of raw umber and other dark earths.’ The remaining contents of the studio were numerous unframed pictures and a large assortment of well-thumbed ‘views of foreign scenery … the drudgery of art, of which master minds avail themselves’.37
Notes
1 Farington, Diary, 22 March 1804.
2 The ‘e’ on Anne was sometimes
used by Turner and sometimes not. Thornbury spells it with the ‘e’ and Finberg does without it. I have followed present usage.
3 Farington, Diary, 19 April 1804.
4 Ibid., 11–13 May 1805.
5 Letters, p.107.
6 Farington, Diary, 8 June 1811.
7 Letters, p.43.
8 Lindsay, p.115; Letters, p.49.
9 Letters, p.82.
10 Finberg, p.268.
11 Ibid., p.186.
12 TB CV, f.67a and 68.
13 R. S. Owen, cited Butlin with Wilton, p.186.
14 Letters, p.235.
15 1811: Redding, Past Celebrities, p.45; 1813: Wilton, p.125.
16 Redding, Past Celebrities, pp.51–2.
17 William Leighton Leitch, quoted in Wilton, pp.221–2.
18 Both G. D. Leslie, in Inner Life, p.143.
19 Eastlake, Journals, p.188.
20 Letter to Thomas Griffith, 1844, in Letters, p.196.
21 Eastlake, Journals, p.188.
22 TS, 1, 1, p.34.
23 Ruskin, quoted in TSN, no.46, p.8.
24 Wilton, pp.221–2. I have abbreviated some sentences and altered punctuation here and there.
25 Th. 1877, p.244.
26 Ibid., p.317.
27 TSN, no.42, pp.8–12.
28 Mary Ann Widgery, Chancery affidavit, 24 January 1854, Dossier, f.72.
29 Gage, Colour, p.166.
30 Frith, Autobiography, i, pp.141–2.
31 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, p.540. Captain Elisha Morgan commanded a Black X Line sailing packet.
32 Ibid., p.543.
33 Th. 1877, p.235.
34 Leslie, Inner Life, p.143.
35 Th. 1877, p.317.
36 Ibid., p.321.
37 Monkbouse, p.87; Th. 1877, pp.363 ff.
Turner’s father, and the eyes of J. M. W. Turner, sketched at the RA as William Turner listened to his son lecture, by John Linnell, 1812
6: Golden Apples, Silver Thames
Although Queen Anne Street – and its Marylebone surroundings – might be a satisfactory though sedate place for a successful artist to live, it had one great disadvantage for Turner: it wasn’t close enough to the water. He was a child of the Thames, and, by way of the river, a child of the sea and the seashore. He needed to be able to get to one or the other. He needed flowing water, fresh or salt. He needed the sound of a rushing weir or of a grating shingle-beach. His presence in London was now bolstered by his gallery, at least in the exhibition season; even when closed, it was there, standing in for him and awaiting fresh pictures. In July 1805, he felt free to leave town and take deep breaths of fresh air. He was getting away from the squabbling of his acrimonious fellow Academicians – who called forth his acrimony – and putting himself at a distance from constant talk of the French and the likelihood of invasion. The armies of Napoleon – now Emperor – were still drawn up on the north coast of France, poised to strike England once the French fleets had been gathered there to control the Channel. The art treasures of London would then be added to the other loot in the Louvre.
Putting such concerns to the back of his mind, Turner rented a house on the banks of the Thames in the village of Isleworth. This was a mile upstream from Brentford, where since his boyhood stay the Grand Junction canal had been built to join London to Birmingham, part of the spreading waterway network that served a rapidly industrializing nation. Between Brentford and Isleworth elegant parkland surrounded Syon House, the crenellated home of the Duke of Northumberland. Across the river from Isleworth, spanned by Syon Ferry, was the equally sylvan deer park of Richmond. Downstream on the south bank, in Surrey, was Kew, where King George III was having a new palace built (the King, it was hoped, was recovering from the mental disorder which had overwhelmed him in 1804). Not far away on Richmond Hill was Sir Joshua Reynold’s former out-of-town residence, Wick House, while across from Richmond at Twickenham, a little way upriver in Middlesex, stood Horace Walpole’s fantasy Gothic edifice called Strawberry Hill, Alexander Pope’s riverside villa, and the Palladian Marble Hill House, which George II had built for his friend Mrs Howard and which had more recently been the abode of Mrs Fitzherbert, putative wife, by secret marriage, of the Prince of Wales.
Turner thus followed the aristocracy and leaders of culture when choosing an out-of-town house. And as he did so he seemed to have a high, even noble, purpose in mind for his art, meaning to emulate Reynolds’s attempt to place portraiture in the tradition of European history painting, in his own case by bringing landscape painting into the same fold. On the concave bend of the Thames at his new abode, Syon Ferry House, he could see not just the river and the working life on it but – a few hundred yards downstream, as if in a time-warp – a classical temple. This was the Pavilion, a small, cylindrical structure the Duke of Northumberland had had built for riverside parties.
At Isleworth, the smattering of classics Turner had been treated to as a boy was vastly enlarged. Now, at the age of thirty, he did a boot-strap further-education job on himself. The ‘Greek Craze’ was at its height, affecting all the arts. Flaxman’s illustrations for Homer and Aeschylus were much admired. Fuseli was to be heard exclaiming ‘The Greeks vere Gods! The Greeks vere Gods’ – indeed, both Farington and Haydon heard him do so, the former to the students of the Academy’s Antique School, the latter when seeing the marbles that Lord Elgin had brought back from the Parthenon in 1804 to his house in Park Lane.1 (They were not unpacked until 1806 or exhibited publicly until the summer of 1807.) Benjamin West was among the artists who went to see them. Turner had a privileged private view of the marbles in August 1806; he wrote fulsomely if clumsily to thank Lord Elgin:
your Lordships collection is perhaps the last that will be made of the most brilliant period of human nature –
Graiis ingenium. Graiis dedit ore rotundo
Musa loqui
showing that he had read Horace’s Ars Poetica (‘It was the Greeks to whom the Muse gave genius and polished speech’). Turner went on: ‘I shall be run away with, so must with the rest of mankind who venerate the arts, pay my homage to your Lordships exertions for this rescue from barbarism.’2 As we have seen, Turner was sufficiently run away with to purchase casts of the marbles, which he displayed, dustily, in his front hall at Queen Anne Street.
Turner’s pictorial interest in man’s ‘most brilliant period’ had begun before Isleworth. Several works of the previous few years have classical subjects, Greek and Roman, among them Tivoli – Temple of the Sibyl and the Roman Campagna and Diana and Callisto, free copies of paintings by Richard Wilson. All his own work were Aeneas and the Sibyl, Lake Avernus of 1798 and Jason (1802); the latter seems to have sprung from his reading of the English translation of part of Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautics in the 1795 fourteen-volume set he owned, edited by Robert Anderson, entitled Works of the British Poets. He had been dipping into Ovid by way of Addison’s translation of the Metamorphoses, and his Narcissus and Echo (1804) arose from this source. Anderson’s large anthology made up part of the library Turner brought to Isleworth; it also contained Pope’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, and Dryden’s Aeneid, Eclogues and Georgics.
Ideas for paintings were generated by his reading, and as he sketched the scenery near Syon Ferry House he jotted down in his sketchbooks the titles of possible subjects that seemed to fit a chosen landscape. Looking at a spot on the riverbank, overhung by a few trees, the scenery might prompt ‘Jason: arrival at Colchis’ or ‘Ulysses: arrival at Crusa’. It seemed to be the composition and the place that came first and the ‘subject’ could be one of several vehicles he had in mind. It was the same with ‘The Meeting of Pompey and Cornealia’ – or, it might be, ‘The Parting of Brutus and Portia’ or ‘Cleopatra sailing down to Cydnus’. He was clearly obsessed with farewells – Portia, Cleopatra and Cornelia, three heroines in Plutarch’s Lives, were widows, whose loves ‘sailed away to fulfil a fateful destiny’.3 Was he currently estranged from Sarah Danby or preparing him
self for such a state? Aeneas and Dido provide a parallel of tragic love and separation, and Aeneas was the hero he most identified with. One rough drawing in his ‘Studies for Pictures, Isleworth’ sketchbook4 is inscribed ‘Eneas and Evander’. In Virgil’s Aeneid, book VIII, Aeneas sails up the Tiber and encounters the river god, who informs him that this is going to be his home. Then King Evander greets him and allies himself with Aeneas. Turner perhaps hoped for a similar encounter with Old Father Thames.
In another sketchbook he used at the time,5 he penned a note concerning ‘The Fall of Rome’. Isleworth hovered between now and then, with drawings of Windsor Castle or Kew Palace on one page, classic temples or Carthaginian harbour fronts on another. Among the sketches is one of a Thames-side glade with figures to which he attached the word ‘Hesperides’, and which would be the seedcorn for a large Poussinesque painting, The Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides. He exhibited this in 1806 at the British Institution, and though the subject came from classical legend, it may have struck him as a likely one just then because of Royal Academy bickering. Some sketches in another book6 are of murder and mayhem: ‘Death of Achelous’, ‘Death of Nessus’ and ‘Death of Liseus’. Turner was evidently still reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which provided enticing and possibly useful – for pictures – stories of bodice-ripping and costly passion among the gods and their companions: the nymph Syrinx, pursued by Pan; lovely Salamancis, joined eternally to the lustful Hermaphroditus; and Phaeton, who went joy-riding in the chariot of his father, the Sun, and fell dead into the River Evidanus, which Turner couldn’t help but picture as resembling the Thames.
Despite what seems an almost total immersion in the classics, he did not neglect other books. He read the Bible, at least Genesis, where the story of devious Jacob and honest Esau appealed to him. He read the poetry of John Milton, James Thomson, Edward Young and Mark Akenside; he had begun to attach to his paintings catalogue citations or epigraphs from such poets. And following his memo in a sketchbook about Esau, he noted – as if for future use in this way – some lines from Alexander Pope’s pastoral Summer: ‘A Shepherd’s Boy, he seeks no better name / Leading his Flock beside the Silver Thames’.7
J.M.W. Turner Page 13
