A more oblique reflection on the great event was a smaller oil he apparently painted and exhibited at this same time: The Victory returning from Trafalgar. This picture – and a similar watercolour he made34 – shows three views of a ship, allegedly the Victory, off the south-west shore of the Isle of Wight, though she does not seem to have a jury-rig, as the Victory did following a temporary refit at Gibraltar after the battle, or an ensign at half-mast, as would be expected with the Admiral’s body on board. Turner once again put some fishermen in a small boat directly in the path of the warship, which is running eastwards up the Channel under topsails and main topgallant; it was his customary device for bringing the spectator into a small drama, but here also seems to suggest that, even at this tragic moment, ordinary life goes unthinkingly on.
Although he sometimes put the facts aside when they offended his compositional needs, Turner’s grasp of naval detail was often admired in the press. For example, on 8 May 1808, the Examiner wrote – this time with enthusiasm – of his painting the Confluence of the Thames and Medway (which Lord Egremont bought): ‘The ships in ordinary, or which are taking on board their heavy stores and rigging, display considerable technical knowledge of marine affairs, and are painted with great care, as are also the machinery for swinging in the masts and guns, and the small vessel, laden (we suppose) with hay.’ This knowledge was something the usually secretive artist could be generous with, beyond what he imparted in his paintings, to the right person. As we will see, Robert C. Leslie, as a boy of eight, found this out while staying with his father at Lord Egremont’s mansion at Petworth, when Turner made a model boat for him. Turner himself never forgot having been a lonely child who had liked playing with a toy vessel. In a sketchbook of 1809, he penned some verses about a poor cotter’s child: The daring boy …
Launches his paper boat across the road
Where the deep gullies which his father’s cart
Made in their progress to the mart
Full to the brim deluged by the rain
They prove to him a channel to the main
Guiding his vessel down the stream
The pangs of hunger vanish like a dream.35
In these years, Turner’s sketchbooks contained – apart from sketches and poems and letters and lists of materials and numbers of banknotes – jottings to do with the techniques of commercial fishing; in one he notes, ‘Fleet of Fishermen. Smelting’, and records how they set about this: ‘One throws out the net – then rows round and while is pulling up another net runs out, so one net is always down.’36 In another he remarks that ‘Large Eeel Hooks’ – note the three ‘e’s – are ‘Patent Yellow’.37 He was also interested in the appearance of water and the effect of light on and in it, reflected and refracted; his awareness that reflections do not necessarily appear uniform is demonstrated in one of several paintings he did of Walton Bridges, possibly exhibited in his gallery in 1807, where the curves of the reflected bridge arches are a good deal more squashed than the actual arches above.
In a sketchbook he used between 1806 and 1808,38 he tortuously attempts to define in words such matters: ‘Reflection in water [:] tho’ the real shadow is nearly the same from the plane of the Horizon in near Objects, yet when the whole of the light lays behind it frequently streaks a shade 3 times its hight.’ On the River Dee, while visiting his patron Sir John Leicester’s country house at Tabley in 1808, he sees a white body floating (whether human or not he doesn’t say; perhaps ‘body’ meant object) and observes, ‘yet the reflection of the white body had not any light or white reflection but on the contrary had its reflection dark’.39 And he goes into a long and convoluted disquisition on reflections that can be condensed to the propositions that, on water which is rippled, reflected objects are elongated; that the theory of a looking-glass is not relevant when dealing with reflections in flat water; and that, if they are treated in terms of such a theory, they are ‘most fallacious to the great book of nature’. This is a point, he concludes, poignantly, ‘When panting art toils after truth in vain’.40
After his short lease came to an end at Isleworth, Turner did not give up the river. Farington wrote in his diary for 10 May 1806: ‘Turner is going to reside abt. 10 or 12 miles from London, & proposes only to retain in London His Exhibition Gallery. This he does from an economical motive.’ Although Turner – uneconomically – went on paying the Isleworth rent until March 1807, he had by then taken on the lease of another house on Upper Mall in Hammersmith, a little closer to town than Isleworth and once again with a Thames view. Young Trimmer recalled ‘a garden [which] ran down to the river, at the end of which was a summer house. Here, out in the open air, were painted some of Turner’s best pictures.’ When the Reverend Trimmer expressed ‘his surprise that Turner could paint under such circumstances, he [Turner] remarked that lights and a room were absurdities, and that a picture could be painted anywhere. His eyes were remarkably strong. He would throw down his watercolour drawings on the floor of the summer-house, requesting my father not to touch them, as he could see them there, and they would be drying at the same time.’41 According to the Pre-Raphaelite artist and critic F. G. Stephens, who later lived in the vicinity, the house was painted white and ‘was of a moderate but comfortable size’.42 The front garden that extended to the river was traversed by a tree-lined public pathway to the church. Market gardens lay behind the house. Looking downriver Turner could see the sun rise and looking upriver see it set.
The immediate neighbourhood had stronger artistic associations than Isleworth. William Hogarth had lived and died nearby. James Thomson the poet, whose work Turner had been devotedly reading, wrote his Seasons in his lodgings at the Dove, a riverfront inn along Hammersmith Terrace, where Charles II and Nell Gwynne used to meet. In the Terrace, too, lived P. J. de Loutherbourg, whose career as a successful painter was now being matched by his popularity as a prophet and ‘healer’. So many would-be patients thronged to the Terrace that de Loutherbourg’s neighbours were annoyed; some threatened to wreck his house, and indeed a few windows were broken. After this, de Loutherbourg scaled down his practice, and agreed to see new clients only on Thursdays and his established patients on Monday and Friday evenings. Whether Mrs de Loutherbourg continued to hold a grudge against Turner for – as she had alleged – filching her husband’s artistic secrets is not known. Certainly Turner in later life retained an affection for the Swiss painter’s work, which had several times spurred him to competition, Alpine or marine; he bought some small drawings of Welsh and Shropshire subjects by him at the sale of Dr Monro’s collection in 1833.
Although Turner kept a much lower profile than de Loutherbourg, he and his father were well known on the Hammersmith waterfront, particularly to Mr Sawyer, a local boatmaster. Presumably Turner brought his boat down from Isleworth and had it moored where he could get at it for excursions and sketching trips. And he saw a good deal of the Trimmers. Henry Syer Trimmer remembered walking as a boy with his father and Turner ‘under the blaze of the great comet’ one night in 1811,43 the last year he had the Hammersmith house.
One of his riverside winters was fierce with cold. A sketchbook44 has pencil drawings of barges and small boats imprisoned in the frozen Thames. The coalman’s deliveries would have been more frequent, as the fireplaces at West End, Upper Mall, added their quota of smoke to the Hammersmith air and the painter tried to keep his hands warm enough to wield a brush. When boating weather returned, Turner was out on ‘the happy river’45 again, jotting down verse that constantly paid homage to Pope and Thomson, refought the Trojan War and dribbled on about swains and meads and azure skies. All the while he drew the river craft and riverside vegetation and naked boys fishing. On a sketch of sky he noted, ‘Light stationary clouds with blue at the bottom.’ In a cottage along the river he hastily drew the interior with figures and wrote, as if to help him remember what it was all about: ‘Girl breaking off sticks and putting them on the grate.’ ‘Girl filling the tin kettle out of a large brown jug.’ On
a narrow canal barge, he sketched a woman holding an infant while a man did the cooking. In another sketchbook of river scenes and boats46 a subject occurs to him: ‘Ulysses and Poly’ – the Cyclops Polyphemus was to be encountered several decades later on a larger scale.
In the years to come Turner continued to look at water both as artist and as boatman: the height and heft of waves was doubly meaningful to him. On one occasion he was spotted near Westminster Bridge by someone who passed by again half an hour later, and there was Turner still squatting on his heels, staring at the ripples at the edge of the river current. Effie Ruskin, fascinated by her first husband’s god, said of Turner: ‘The way in which he studied clouds was by taking a boat which he anchored in some stream, and then lay on his back in it, gazing at the heavens for hours and even days, till he had grasped some effect of light which he desired to transpose to canvas.’47 And he hung on to his boating skills. Mary Lloyd, later to write a book named Sunny Memories, was staying at Thames Ditton with the Carrick Moore family – friends of Turner’s – one summer when Turner, by then well into old age, was also a guest. She recalled that ‘when the ladies proposed to go over the river to Hampton Court Gardens, Turner said “and I will row you”. This was an offer difficult to refuse, so we got into the boat and started … There was some difficulty in landing by the sedgy bank, but we said it would do very well; however, Turner insisted on taking us further on to a more convenient spot, because, he said with his shrug, “None but the brave deserve the fair.”’48 ‘His shrug’ seems to have been well known.
He may well have looked back to his period at Isleworth and Hammersmith as a sort of golden age – with his Hesperidean front gardens facing out on a sunlit river, with Thames aits or eyots for classical islands, and with time framed by tide. For some six hours the river’s current flowed towards the sea and for some six hours it was stopped and thrust back by the incoming flood. One of the Hesperides – the sweet-singing nymphs who guarded the golden apples in their garden on the river Oceanus – was Aegle or Brightness, a granddaughter of the Sun, called by Ruskin ‘the healing power of living light’.49 For Turner, the river offered reflected light and moving water, a double blessing.
Notes
1 Greig, Diary, i, p.284n.; Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, pp.78–9.
2 Letters, p.31.
3 Hill, Turner on the Thames, p.59.
4 TB XC, f.58a.
5 TB XCIII.
6 TB XCIV.
7 Hill, Turner on the Thames, pp.60–2.
8 TB XCVI.
9 Wilton, Painting and Poetry, pp.40, 149–50.
10 TB XC.
11 Ibid., f.16.
12 TB LXXXIV.
13 TB CVIII.
14 TB XCIX, f.86.
15 Poem in TB XLIX, 1799.
16 TB XCVIII, f.8a.
17 Th. i, p.343.
18 Ibid.
19 Th. 1877, p.456.
20 TB CVIII.
21 TBXCV.
22 Barge on the River, Sunset, 1805, oil on canvas, Tate no.2707; Hill, Turner on the Thames, pp.98–100.
23 TB XCIII, f.12.
24 TB XCIII.
25 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, p.36.
26 TB LXXXVII, TB LXXXIX.
27 TB CXXI s.
28 TB CXX c.
29 TB LXXXIX f.14.
30 Kennedy, Nelson and his Captains, pp.331–2. First published as Nelson’s Band of Brothers, 1951.
31 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, p.36.
32 B&J, no.58.
33 Finberg, p.142.
34 TB CXVIII c.
35 TB CXII.
36 TB CI.
37 TB CIV.
38 TB CI f.88a.
39 TB CV.
40 TB CV, flyleaf; Th. 1877, p.486, and Finberg, p.152, misread Turner’s handwriting here as ‘painting art’. Turner was talking about the laborious and thus breathtaking attempt of the artist to capture the ‘truth’ (see Hill, TSN, no.67, pp.11–16).
41 Th. 1877, p.116.
42 Whitley, 1800–20, p.195.
43 Th. 1877, p.116.
44 TB CI.
45 TB XCVI, f.74v.
46 TB XCVIII.
47 Gage, Colour, p.260n.
48 Lloyd, Sunny Memories, pp.31 f., 36.
49 Ruskin, Modern Painters, v, pp.345, 392.
7: Boxing Harry
For most of Turner’s nine million countrymen, this was a depressed time. Trade was flat. In new building, in commerce, the war created no boom. If he had followed his first inclination and become an architect, he might well have starved. As it was, a number of his painting contemporaries found it hard to make ends meet. George Morland, landscape and animal painter – and heavy drinker – was frequently in and out of debtor’s prison, as Haydon was later. James Barry, like Haydon a troublesome person, an ex-professor of Painting at the RA, died in reclusive poverty at the age of sixty-five in February 1806.
Yet for Turner money rolled in. He asked high prices for his pictures and, if buyers cavilled, he asked higher prices. (This was generally a shrewd bargaining ploy, giving his clients the impression that, if they resisted his first price, his pictures would cost more, not less.) In May 1804 Sir John Leicester offered him 250 guineas for The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Mâcon, a painting for which Turner wanted £300. By the time Sir John agreed to pay the £300, Turner had upped the ante to £400. The Earl of Yarborough paid this price. ‘Opie said to Thomson he did not see why Turner should not ask such prices as no other person could paint such pictures,’ wrote Farington;1 but a few months later he noted with a trace of malicious pleasure that Turner ‘was to have painted 2 pictures for Mr [Thomas] Barnard [a founder of the British Institution] at a certain price, but on hearing Daniell had that price, demanded double, and the pictures were not painted’.2 Farington also thought that Turner’s pictures ought to have had a lot more work done on them to suit the prices he was asking. Whether enviously or sincerely, other Academicians shared this judgement about Turner’s finishing skills. In July 1809 Farington enquired of Thomas Hearne and Henry Edridge ‘“what might be reckoned a fair price for one of those pictures [of Turner’s] for which Lord Essex gave 200 guineas?” Hearne said “For a person a full admirer of his pictures 50 guineas, but for myself I would not give fifteen.”’
Despite Hearne, full admirers were on hand, and not only Sir John Leicester and the Earl of Yarborough; other ‘exalted personages’3 lined up in 1805 to subscribe to the engraving Charles Turner did of the painting Sir John had purchased, The Shipwreck, among them the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Carlisle. Other less exalted subscribers were the artists John Varley, Thomas Stothard and William Havell, and, among the art-lovers, ‘Miss Wells’ – probably Clara4 – and Daniel Lambert, a celebrated fat man of the age, who in April 1806 came from Leicester to London in a specially constructed large coach and had a portrait painted from which Charles Turner made a mezzotint print.
Turner’s gallery was a money-spinner, producing sales far greater than those he achieved in such venues as the Academy and the British Institution: in 1808, for instance, he sold through his gallery four paintings to Lord Egremont and three to other buyers for a total of £1417 10s, an average of £200 a picture; Further sales in this year brought his earnings up to roughly £2000. (One can multiply this figure by about forty to get an equivalent for today – say, £80,000 or $130,000.) He was a good salesman for his work; for much of his career, until the art dealer Thomas Griffith came on the scene in the 1840s, he handled his own business. In a letter of 21 November 1809 written from his house in Hammersmith to James Wyatt, carver, gilder and printdealer in Oxford, he set forth his prices for certain standard sizes of oil paintings he could make for a Wyatt print. ‘My pictures are all 3 feet by 4 feet, 200 gs., half which size will be 100, but shall not mind an inch or two. A drawing I will do you for 80 gs.’5 (Turner’s syntax was weak, as usual; he meant not that all his pictures were 3 by 4, but that for all 3 by
4s he charged – at this point – 200 guineas.) And there were occasions when for diplomatic reasons he was less straightforward. In 1811 Earl Grey wanted to buy his Mercury and Herse (just over six feet by five feet) for 500 guineas, but, as Farington noted, there was a report that the Prince Regent had purchased it, ‘which not being the case, Turner was embarrassed about it, and under these circumstances, with his usual caution, will not name a price when asked by his acquaintance[s]’.6
Turner’s caution or prudence about money was demonstrated in many a sketchbook, where he listed at the front or back the serial numbers of banknotes taken along or spent on his tours. He continued to jot down from time to time his daily expenses, as on a trip to Leeds in 1816: ‘Porterage, 2s. 8d. Fare to Leeds, £2. 2s., Coachman, 1s., Dinner at Eaton 5s. 6d., Coachman – Scrooby, 1s. 6d., Ditto 1s., Breakfast Doncaster, 2s. 3d., Brandy & Water, Grantham, 1s. 6d., Coachman & Guard, 4s. 6d. Total £3. 2s. 11d.’7 (In fact, he added it up wrongly: the total was a shilling less.) In a scruffy little notebook8 used between 1809 and 1814 he made a comprehensive account of his financial worth and also placed in a pocket inside the cover a statement of various stock-holdings. On 17 August 1810, his investments in government bonds, usually called ‘the Funds’, were:
J.M.W. Turner Page 15
