Verse filled the interstices of his teeming mind, by notable poets and by himself – although (as will be seen) it was not to J. M. W. Turner that the Muse gave poetic genius and polished speech. For some of his friends, it seemed part of his oddness that he was so fond of talking about poetry. Sometimes while on sketching expeditions from Isleworth the weir of his imagination overflowed and he scribbled alongside his drawings short fragments and longer snatches (now often hard to decipher). That a painter could also be a poet was impressed on him in 1805 by his portrait-painting colleague Martin Archer Shee, who published a successful satirical collection called Rhymes on Art. Would-be poets generally feel the poetic impulse in their late teens, but Turner’s urge came later, following his interest in songs. One of his early brief bursts of poetic inspiration went first into a sketchbook:
Discord dire sister – of Ethereal Jove
coeval hostile even to heavenly love8
and then, somewhat refined, into a notebook he started to keep about this time specifically for his verse. Here, where the theme was once again the Goddess in the garden of the Hesperides, the choice of the ‘apple of contention’ led on implacably to the Trojan War:
With vengeful pleasure pleas’d the Goddess heard
of future woes and then her choice preferred
The shiny mischief to herself she took
Love felt the wound and Troy’s foundations shook9
From the sketchbooks emerges a picture of his life at Syon Ferry House. In the Hesperidean garden of Isleworth he had All Saints Church as a near neighbour, with a wharf in front of it at which small river barges and lighters collected market produce and delivered grain, coal and timber. The riverfront pub the London Apprentice furnished legends of smugglers and liquid solace for visiting watermen, locals and recently arrived artists. Turner wrote his new address in his new top-of-the-line calf-bound sketchbook,10 which he labelled ‘Studies for Pictures, Isleworth’, and set forth to fill its pages – grey-washed so that they gave off less glare when he worked out-of-doors in bright sun. He sketched the riverbanks, the King’s never-to-be-completed palace at Kew, the castle at Windsor, the trees and meadows and swans and fishermen. At some point near Windsor he picked a leaf from a bush and pressed it between the pages. And he drew the craft which moved up and down the river by sail, quant pole and oar, or were plucked along by the current or the tide (below Teddington) or were towed by men called halers or by horses – or by any combination of these. Among the workboats and fishermen’s skiffs, his gaze fell on such special craft as royal barges, propelled by oars and used for state occasions; and his eye imagined other vessels that would indeed have been rare on the Thames, like Greek triremes.11
Wherever Turner was he drew boats, whether in the West Country, in Wales, in Scotland, in France or in Italy – on the Avon and the Seine, the Severn or the Tweed, on the beach at Brighton or at Margate, under castle walls or on city foreshores. There was always a sail, a mast or a hull whose shape and sheer required the attentions of his pencil. Even an 1804 sketchbook apparently devoted to academic figure drawings12 has boats in it, almost as if a chore had been relieved by delight. Here at Isleworth boat-ownership became a possibility; he wanted a boat of his own. Among the sketches of craft of all kinds now appear strictly two-dimensional drawings of small boats, showing them side-on, bows-on, in elevation and plan, and with various rigs for which he drew sail-plans with measurements attached. These pipedreams sometimes combined characteristics of Thames craft, Dutch fishing boats and Mediterranean vessels; they had low freeboard, leeboards and lateen rigs – that is, with a large wing-like sail hung from a single yard that inclined upward from just above the bow. Reef points were a feature that Turner added to such a sail, with northern caution making provision for reducing sail-area in bad weather. On one boat the mainsail, forward, is lateen-rigged while the smaller mizzen sail, aft, has the more conventional – for the Thames – sprit-rig.13 Several rough sketches show his cogitations on how a lateen sail would perform when hard on the wind and actually head to wind, shaking vigorously. In one more considered drawing, the helmsman sits on the weather gunwale, slightly crouched as if trying to reduce his own windage or protect himself from spray. On a sketchbook page he worked out the costs of various items for a boat:
Sails £10. Mast 3. Bows[prit?] 1. Booms (?) 2.
Rigging 5. Iron[work?] 1. Pump 1. -: [total]23.14
What Turner’s ‘easy bark’15 looked like is not certain but one sketch16 may give an idea: this was more or less a Thames wherry, clinker- or lapstrake-built, with low topsides, a raking stem and broad stem. The fact that a lateen rig would be unhandy when obliged to tack frequently in confined waters may have convinced him to have lugsails or spritsails for main and mizzen, and perhaps a jib for extra windward drive and help in bringing the boat about from one tack to the other. An orange-sailed sprit-rigged craft in his 1808 Sheerness as seen from the Nore is painted almost with pride of ownership.
Word of Turner’s boat-ownership soon spread. Lord Egremont, the great Sussex estate-owner who had bought his first Turner, Ships bearing up for Anchorage, in 1802 or shortly thereafter, and Narcissus and Echo in 1804, was heard to assert that Turner had ‘a yacht’.17 Turner’s friend the Reverend Trimmer, who lived at this point at Kew, told his son (who told Thornbury) of a boat Turner kept on the Thames, though he mentions Richmond as its mooring place. Thornbury himself claimed that ‘a good deal of [Turner’s] knowledge of seamanship was picked up during his trips to the North, to which he always went by a collier’,18 but it is more likely that he began to acquire his boat-handling skills as an eighteen-year-old, out sketching on the tidal river at Battersea with Edward Bell, the engraver, when they at least once got stuck on the mud. (Thornbury elsewhere claims that Turner ‘beat about year after year in all sorts of smugglers’ boats’.)19
What was his Isleworth boat called? The Owner’s Delight was the name he inscribed on the stern of a small boat, on the river near Battersea Bridge, in a watercolour by him once owned by his friend Walter Fawkes at Farnley – November: Flounder-Fishing. But a sketchbook of around 1809 contains a draft of a long poem, or series of verses, about the building of a British Argo on the Thames. The man behind this project is an ‘artificer’ ‘Whose pregnant mind long in confusion lay’. Ingenuously but touchingly Turner conveys the excitement of this Argo’s launching:
All ready, ready let her go
Long as the Thames shall flow
May thou be blest my dear Argo
All ready, ready every one replies
O Goddess hear my ardent sighs
Swift as an arrow from a bow
She goes she goes then let her go
Long as the Thames shall flow
O Goddess bless the ship Argo20
This summer, as he rowed and sailed his Argo or Delight upriver and down, the weather was unsettled. There were standard English sunny periods and showers and several severe thunder-storms. And there were rainbows. It was good weather for watercolours, particularly of the sort Turner painted, with wet paint often deployed on wet paper. Sailing his boat from Isleworth to Kew, Richmond, Kingston and Hampton Court, he often pulled into the bank in order to sketch and sometimes paint the ordinary with extraordinary touches; many sketches were hasty, even rudimentary, but captured something he wanted to remember; others – also rapidly done – were much more detailed watercolours. His subjects were moving clouds, passing light, shadowed or sunlit trees and grass, people in boats or standing on the riverbanks. He painted his own house, to which he came back in the evening, where his father – all being well – would have supper ready. He went further up the Thames to Eton and Windsor, and then up its tributary, the Wey, to Guildford. In some places he moored for the night along the riverbank, cooked supper on an open fire and slept on the bottom boards of his boat; in others he stayed at inns, like the White Lion at Guildford or the Swan at Walton.
On one such cruise he took along some mahogany boards on which he
made oil sketches, working in the boat or on the bank, and the paintings that resulted seem spontaneous, moment-catching; he carried a travelling paint-box, outfitted for the purpose, with linseed oil and a dozen or so bladders of oil colour. He spent more time apparently on some larger ten-by-fifteen-inch drawings21 and oil sketches that he made on four-foot-by-three-foot canvases – taken into his boat rolled up and then pinned to a board when he painted on them in the more settled autumn weather. He was in the vanguard of a movement towards painting in the open air – a movement that included several Thames Valley painters he knew, such as William Delamotte and William Havell, and the East Anglian John Constable. Turner on these occasions deployed his oils almost as if they were watercolours, sometimes not using a ground on the wooden panels, letting the wet paints blend together. In mood, he seems a long way from The Shipwreck, which he had displayed in his gallery only a few months before (and for which he may have summoned memories of the wreck of the East Indiaman Mars on Margate Sands in 1787). Claude and Poussin are well off-stage. The effect is original and unshadowed by predecessors; it is one of exhilaration and gratitude for being where he was, doing what he liked doing – sailing, rowing, fishing, having a good time in the open air, with painting and drawing almost by-products of his voyage rather than its purpose.
Many of the oil sketches on canvas show evening scenes, painted after he had tied up for the night. If he had to stop to wait for a lock gate to open, or felt like fishing or calling at an inn, he often fitted in a painted sketch. He camped out on one occasion close to some bargemen who had tied up in Cliveden Reach and had their dinner fire going as the sun went down, and the artist caught the scene.22 As a river excursionist, one man in a boat, he was as much a pioneer as in his art, though unlike the later writer Jerome K. Jerome he did not memorialize his misadventures – except perhaps in the Argo poem. He happily persevered past Marlow, Henley, Reading, Caversham, Pangbourne, Goring, Wallingford, Shillingford and Dorchester. It was ninety-seven winding miles from Isleworth to Oxford, where he painted (for reproduction in the Oxford Almanack) Christ Church from the river, a mistier, more distant version of his 1798–9 study of the college.
He also sailed downriver, away from rural agricultural confines. By now he was convinced of the seaworthiness of his craft and his own boat-handling abilities. There is no evidence that he had a crew, but perhaps his father accompanied him on some voyages. Between Isleworth and the City he made no sketches or paintings until he reached London Bridge and Billingsgate market, where the fishing smacks unloaded their catches. For a watercolour here,23 his point of view along the foreshore suggests that he beached his boat – whether to draw or spend the night. He navigated the ship-crowded Pool of London and followed the bends of the river down past Deptford and Greenwich, down Bugsbys Reach and Gallions Reach, marshes and creeks on either side, to Tilbury and Gravesend where the river widens into the estuary. There, slopping about in the waters between Sheerness on the Kent side and Southend and Shoeburyness on the Essex shore, he sketched small craft and larger ships. Here, at the confluence of the Thames and the River Medway, was the historic naval anchorage of the Nore, and the sea was choppy. His sketchbook24 has water-stains on most pages. He drew warships and guardships, passenger-carrying hays and barges bearing hay from country to city. He was stocking up with material for marine paintings. He drew boats with all sails set, sails reefed, sails brailed up, sails furled. He noted dimensions, proportions. He sketched boats passing dramatically close to one another and recorded the interaction of wakes and waves, wind-driven seas and tidal currents. He noted passing clouds and changing light. Putting these things on paper helped fix them in his visual memory. Meanwhile the breeze tried to turn the pages of his sketchbook, damp spray flew, and his own boat pitched and lurched in the seaway.
He now observed these happenings as a sailor as well as an artist. When it came to making a record in paint of something he had actually seen on the water, he got things right. For instance, in the painting he called Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide setting in (RA 1809), the title in its finicky way establishes the time and whereabouts of painting in almost logbook fashion: the tide was flooding over the Blythe Sand, a six-mile-long, one-mile-broad shoal area in the southern half of a section of the Thames known as Sea Reach – Canvey Island to the north, Cliffe Marshes and Yantlet Spit to the south. The title asserts the fact that he, the artist and boatman, had been there. A broad patch of sunlight falls on the shallow waters where the fishing boats flock – it is a favourable time for sprats or whitebait. In the nearest boat, beating out towards the sunlight from the shadowed foreground close to the beach, the helmsman sits to leeward under the orange-tan mainsail, looking attentively forward to the luff of the jib. The observation is more than matter-of-fact; the identification of artist with subject is moving. He understood how boats sit in the water, how they move in a calm or angry sea, and how the men on board them sat or stood at particular tasks, perched on a thwart, standing with one hand gripping a mast-shroud; and he instilled this knowledge into his work, in no braggadocio way but infusing it, so that seamanship became part of the painting’s essence.
Among other examples of this nautical and artistic ‘rightness’ are Sheerness and the Isle of Sheppey of 1807, in which the foredeck hand is backing the jib to help his boat come about, and the Bridgewater Seapiece of 1801, Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen endeavouring to put fish on board, which was one of his more overtly dramatic ‘are they going to crash into each other?’ pictures – in this, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the helmsman of the smaller, nearer boat, who is at that moment putting his helm down, turning his craft to pass under the leeside of the larger vessel, which is otherwise going to run it down.
Although summer ended, Turner stayed with the river and maritime matters. Tired of waiting for his navy, Napoleon moved his troops eastward to defeat the Austrians at Ulm; but the news of this calamity was more than balanced in England by reports of the British victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar on 21 October. The country was enraptured by accounts of the tragic but splendid battle in which the nation’s great sea commander had laid down his life. Haydon reflected the mood, writing in his journal how Nelson’s death ‘affected me for days. But all fears of invasion were now over, and we looked forward to our pursuits with a degree of confidence which only those can estimate who passed their early days among the excitement of perpetual war.’25
Turner was no exception to this interest and the feelings that mixed mourning with celebration. In his case, there was almost a regret that he had not been on hand. As with the Pantheon fire, the occasion brought out the reporter in him. When, in late December, the Victory reached Sheerness with Nelson’s body preserved in a cask of spirits, Turner took two sketchbooks, one almost used up, one new,26 and went down to Sheppey and the Nore again. He sketched the battered first-rate ship-of-the line from various angles. He did several large drawings in pencil, watercolour and ink: one27 of the Victory’s quarterdeck had notes attached – ‘Guns 121 lb. used in the Ports marked i.x.’, ‘Splinter hitting marks in pencil / 9 inches thick’, and ‘Rail shot away during the action’ – while another28 showed the battered masts and rigging. In the sketchbooks, he recorded dimensions and drew details of naval uniforms. Talking to the officers, he took notes about the battle: ‘After the ST [presumably the Santissima Trinidad] … passed some other ship with a White Lion Head raked the Victory.’ He jotted down the characteristics of the ship’s master, Mr Atkinson: ‘square, large, light hair, grey eye, 5-11’. After noting that Nelson’s stalwart aide Captain Thomas Hardy ‘wore B. gaiters’, he wrote: ‘4 sailors carried some officer down about the time L. N. fell, on his left arm. Some one forwarded to help him. A marine to every gun stands aft. 8 others. C. Hardy rather tall, looks dreadful … fair, about 36 years.’29
Turner knew that he had to put these things – relevant or not – on paper as they flowed in conversation, faster perhaps than he could cope with, ot
herwise back in Isleworth or Harley Street he would realize that he needed a detail whose lack would impede the picture or, as would prove to be the case, pictures. One assumes that he was among the crowds in London for Nelson’s funeral on 9 January 1806, when the Admiral’s coffin under a great black canopy was borne – in a funeral car built like a small Victory – from the Admiralty past Somerset House to St Paul’s, amid what one onlooker called ‘awful silence’, broken only by the rustle made as people respectfully removed their hats.30 Haydon noted: ‘At the conclusion of the funeral service in the Cathedral, the old flag of the Victory was torn into a thousand shreds, each of which was carefully preserved by its fortunate owner as a relic of the hero.’31
The Battle of Trafalgar was a subject Turner wrestled with these first months of 1806 and thereafter could not shake off; it haunted him for another eighteen years. To begin with he painted a view of the battle ‘as seen from the Mizen [sic] Starboard Shrouds of the Victory’32 – a title that seems to suggest the artist actually climbed into the rigging to size up the view. He has Nelson in white breeches lying on the deck at the base of the main mast, like Christ removed from the Cross. Gunsmoke billows up on all sides. Most of the picture is a great jumble of the masts, yards and sails of the embattled ships. Compressing the occasion, Turner shows a sailor bringing forward a French flag to the dying Nelson, as evidence that victory has been won. (Turner made a key for the picture for visitors to use when viewing it in his gallery, with a description of the action at the moment Nelson was shot and a list of the names of various officers and crew who are portrayed.) Farington, coming to the gallery to see the picture on 3 June 1806, wrote, ‘It appeared to me a very crude, unfinished performance, the figures miserably bad.’ Perhaps it was unfinished. The critic of the Examiner was also caustic, suggesting that it looked as if all the men on Turner’s Victory had been ‘murdered’.33 Turner’s attempt to get across the confusion of battle, and indeed not only the course but result of the battle, was a brave one, but neither Farington’s nor the Examiner’s judgement seems wildly unfair.
J.M.W. Turner Page 14
