George Lance attended a dinner where he met the then elderly Turner. ‘On the wall was a picture of mine, so elaborated that it approached to decided hardness: Lord Mornington [one of the guests] remarked the fault, appealing to Turner for a corroboration of his judgment; but the only remark he could extract from the kind old man’s lips was, “Oh, my lord, you should see it by daylight.”’ On a later visit to Turner’s gallery, Lance thanked Turner for a statement in which Turner had mentioned Lance along with Etty and Mulready as ‘the three greatest colourists’ in British contemporary art. Turner replied, a bit stiltedly but with feeling, ‘I have many times endeavoured to serve my brother artists, but you are the first that has ever expressed gratitude for it.’ Of course, as Lance realized, his friendly supporter was the ‘greatest colourist’ of all.37
Turner wasn’t celebrated for giving away his own work, though he left a sketchbook with the Narraways. He is also said to have presented a seapiece to a Margate boatman to settle an account for taking him out, and to have given ‘a drawing of great value’ to the man who kept the local ale-house near his friend Walter Fawkes’s Farnley Hall ‘in liquidation of a trifling score of some four or five pounds’.38
He was known for giving practical help to his colleagues in the Academy, but other instances were talked about. W. J. Broderip, an acquaintance of the engraver and watercolourist J. W. Archer, called at Chantrey’s studio one Sunday morning to see a maquette for a statue Chantrey was working on of George Canning, who had been Prime Minister. Turner was there, with other artists. Archer wrote:
While they were discussing the merits of this fine statue, Turner was to be observed casting his eye round the studio, till, discovering the object of his quest, he seized upon and poised a long pole which stood in a corner, and advanced with it pointed at the clay model, as if threatening the destruction of its plastic fabric. Mr Broderip, uncertain whether to suppose the great painter influenced by sudden frenzy, stepped forward to arrest the apparently rash deed; but Chantrey laid a hand upon his arm, saying, ‘Let him alone, he knows what he is doing.’ And Turner, having dug the end of the stick among the folds of drapery in front of the statue, drew a long vertical groove down to the base of the figure. Chantrey then approached the model smiling, lovingly thumbed the gashed clay, and said ‘Thank you, Turner! That straight line among the folds will make my figure stand firmly on his feet.’39
At the Trimmer house one day when Turner was on hand, Henry Howard RA painted a portrait of one of the boys holding a cat. The older Trimmer son told Thornbury that the cat gave the artist some problems. ‘The head and fore-legs were capital; but the hind-legs and tail caused the difficulty. What to do with them? “Wrap them up in your red pocket-handkerchief,” said Turner, who was looking on; and not only was the cat difficulty disposed of, but the picture was improved and it is one of Howard’s best works.’40
Turner could be brusque one moment and considerate the next. John Sell Cotman, the brilliant watercolourist and etcher, was offended when Turner, with apparent rudeness, declined to join him in undertaking a commission for the pair of them to do some drawings. Cotman said, ‘I am truly sorry to find such a man with such a mind.’ But Turner later recommended the hard-up Cotman for the post of drawing-master at King’s College School, paying £100 a year. The school authorities asked Turner – it seems not for the first time – whom he would propose for the job, and Turner said, ‘Why of course Cotman. I have already said Cotman. I am tired of saying what I say again: “Cotman! Cotman! Cotman!”’41 And despite his dislike of Haydon’s antagonistic attitude towards the Royal Academy, Turner out of artistic interest or compassion for the wilful and desperate artist called in at the special exhibition Haydon put on in 1814 for his Judgement of Solomon. Haydon exempted Turner from the bitter wrath he felt for Academicians in general: ‘Turner behaved well and did me justice,’ he wrote.42
Clara Wells saw both sides of Turner, miser and giver. She was sure that ‘there was more hidden good and worth in his character than the world could imagine’. She thought ‘he had a tender, affectionate heart, such as few possess’.43 Some who had business dealings with him, like the writer Walter Scott, might conclude that ‘Turner’s palm is as itchy as his fingers are ingenious.’44 But Clara had seen a different man. Under ‘that rather rough and cold exterior’, she detected strong affections and – perhaps more surprising – one of the most ‘light-hearted merry creatures’. When staying with the Wellses at Knockholt around 1807–9, Turner didn’t stand on his pride or parade his suspiciousness. Being with them seemed to take him out of himself. Clara – who was about twenty at this time – wrote later: ‘I remember one day coming in after a walk, and when the servant opened the door the uproar was so great that I asked the servant what was the matter. “Oh, only the young ladies [my young sisters], ma’am, playing with the young gentleman [Turner].” When I went into the sitting-room, where Turner was seated on the ground, with the children winding his ridiculously large cravat round his neck, he exclaimed, “See here, Clara, what these children are about!”’45 A pencil-and-oil sketch he did of an armchair while chez Wells seems to express the sense of solid comfort he felt when with them.46
‘Turner was fond of children,’ said the younger Trimmer, and children realized this and were fond of him in return.47 But to his own children he appears to have been a barely, or at the best fitfully, interested father. Someone else whose opinion one would like to have had on whether Turner was generous or mean was his children’s mother, Sarah Danby – but she left no recorded comment on the subject. Inside the cover of a sketchbook he used in 1809–11 for some scenes around Hastings,48 he noted various sums of money received and paid out: £210 came in from ‘Phillips’; payments were to ‘Platt 17–10’; ‘Mrs W 6–6’; and ‘Mrs D 4–4’. Sarah, assuming she is ‘Mrs D’, gets the least of the payments. That she was getting a pension from the Royal Society of Musicians while living with Turner may have given him an excuse for handing out less to her; she obviously kept it quiet that they had a ‘relationship’ for fear of losing her Society benefits. As we have seen, Turner apparently helped Sarah fiddle the books; it suited his secretiveness and fears of too definite an entanglement. During the years in Hammersmith when she was – according to Callcott – living with him, her daughter Marcella Danby began her apprenticeship as a teacher at the nearby Mrs Wyatt’s Catholic school for girls. Sarah Danby often sent deputies up to town to the Royal Society of Musicians offices in Lisle Street, Soho, to collect and sign for her monthly benefit of £4 14s 6d: one of her Danby daughters, generally Marcella, or her niece Hannah, or even Turner’s father went on these errands.
Sarah was about forty-three in 1810. In 1811, rather late to be bearing another child, she gave birth to her second Turner daughter, Georgiana; the birth apparently took place south of the River Thames ‘in Surrey’, according to a census return Georgiana made later, though perhaps untruthfully.49 (When Georgiana married in 1840, she gave her father’s name as ‘George Danby, deceased’; and John Danby had, as far as is known, no relatives named George.) It is worth noting that Turner in 1811 was in Hastings and its vicinity, as he had been in 1801 when Evelina was baptized in Guestling, Sussex. It is a ‘Hastings’ sketchbook which records his payments to Platt, Mrs W and Mrs D. Was Platt a doctor, Mrs W a midwife? On a later page of this sketchbook he scribbled ‘Guestling. Calld 3 Oaks. Cook.’ In another sketchbook used in 181150 is a small drawing of a wooden cradle. Perhaps it sheltered the infant Georgiana, who twenty-nine years later would refuse to name her real father.
That Sarah about this time ran into trouble with the Musicians Society may not be coincidental. Her monthly allowance was abruptly reduced. In January 1812 it was cut to one guinea, with an extra fifteen shillings every quarter for ‘school’ for one of the girls. The guinea-a-month was most likely a specific maintenance payment for the last Danby daughter, Teresa, who was still below the apprenticeship age of fourteen. In August 1813 Sarah wrote to the Society asking
that her full allowance be paid once again. Why had it been interrupted? Had the Society heard of Georgiana’s birth and found out that Sarah was living with JMWT? Her address in 1813 was given as 10 Warwick Row, possibly in Southwark, which was Surrey in those days. In any event, the Society’s acting Secretary Mr Cordell ‘informed the Board that Mrs Danby had been sworn by Mr Wm. Parsons who is satisfied with her statements. Ordered that Mrs Danby’s allowance be paid her including last month.’51
It seems that Georgiana’s arrival in the world was something Turner couldn’t handle. It apparently precipitated the final break-up with Sarah Danby. Perhaps, too, Sarah made him think of his mother – he didn’t want to be possessed by a woman. In any event, her successful appeal for her pension may well have depended on establishing that she was not in a state of ‘illicit intercourse’, and therefore she decided the time had come to move out. Neither Hannah nor Turner’s father helped her collect her widow’s allowance after 1813; she went on receiving it from the Society for another forty-eight years, until her death, aged about ninety-four, in 1861. (John Danby had certainly got his money’s worth for his modest payments into the Society’s pension fund before his death.) If Turner gave further financial help to the mother of his two daughters, there is no record of it. He would eventually consider assisting Evelina and Georgiana. For the moment his verdict was a few words scribbled lightly in a sketchbook: ‘Woman is Doubtful Love.’52
Notes
1 Farington, Diary, 22 May 1804.
2 Ibid., 8 September 1804.
3 Finberg, p.119.
4 Letters, p.293.
5 Ibid., p.36.
6 Farington, Diary, 8 June 1811.
7 Finberg, p.243.
8 TB CXXII.
9 Th. i, p.74.
10 Rosalind Turner brought this to my attention.
11 Chancery affidavit, Dossier.
12 TB CX.
13 Townsend, p.48.
14 MS note in Haskell copy of Th. ii, p.146.
15 Athenaeum, no.178 (14 December 1861), p.808.
16 Whitley, 1821–37, pp.135–6.
17 Watts, p.xxiv.
18 Gage, ‘Wonderful Range’, p.65.
19 Ibid., p.xxxix.
20 Letters, p.9.
21 Smith, Nollekens, pp.75, 302.
22 Letters, pp.2–3.
23 Finberg, p.391.
24 Letters, pp.8, 2, 4.
25 Archer, TS, 1, 1, p.32.
26 Hamlyn, Record of the Art Museum, P.U., p.5 citing J. B. Atkinson, Portfolio, ed. Hamerton, 1880, p.71.
27 Letters, pp.3, 10.
28 TS, 3, 1, p.26.
29 Redding, Fraser’s Magazine, February 1852; Fifty Years’ Recollections, p.204.
30 Letters, p.10.
31 Th. 1877, p.245.
32 Finberg, p.46.
33 Th. 1877, p.235.
34 Ruskin, Modern Painters, v, p.374.
35 Frith, Autobiography, i, pp.126–7.
36 Hamerton, Turner, p.373.
37 Archer, TS, 1, 1, p.34.
38 Watts, p.xxiv.
39 Archer, TS, 1, 1, pp.32,37 n.4.
40 Th. i, p.172; see also 1877, pp.223–4.
41 Century, p.356; Falk, Turner, pp.88–9.
42 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, p.200.
43 Th. 1877, p.235.
44 Finberg, p.257.
45 Th. 1877, p.236.
46 TB XCV Fa.
47 Lindsay, p.100.
48 TB CXI.
49 Geese I, p.115.
50 TB CXIII.
51 Golt, TS, 9, 2, p.4.
52 TB CXIII, f.59.
Turner, aged 17, in a portrait by George Dance, 4 August 1792
8: The Bite of the Print
Turner was staying with the Wells family in 1806 when the idea of doing a series of engravings, to be called the Liber Studiorum, came to the fore. The prints Charles Turner had done from his painting The Shipwreck were evidently going to be a success. He had, as we have seen, quite a few unsold paintings on hand and the publication of further engravings might well be worth his time and trouble; it was a medium in which, shooting for the moon as always, he could try new things. It must also have occurred to him that while oil colours faded and cracked, and canvases decayed, engravings were a way to gain posterity’s attention.1 According to Clara Wells, her father for a long time had been urging Turner to make a selection of his works for reproduction in print form, ‘telling him that it would surely be done after his death, and perhaps in a way that might not do him that justice which he could ensure for himself’.2 Wells, at that point teacher of draughtsmanship at the East India Company’s College at Addiscombe, Kent, kept on at Turner about this, until one autumn day at the Knockholt cottage the artist gave in. He said, ‘Well, Gaffer, I see there will be no peace till I comply; so give me a piece of paper. There now! Rule the size for me, and tell me what I am to do.’3
Turner no doubt had some preconceptions of what he was going to do, above and beyond reproducing ‘a selection’ of works he had painted; but Clara had the impression that it was her father – the ‘gaffer’ or foreman – who set up the structure of the project, in particular the way in which the prints were going to be placed in rather eighteenth-century-sounding subject categories, such as pastoral, architectural and mountainous. Turner then and there did some drawings for what would be the first set of prints to be published.
The title for the project – Liber Studiorum, the ‘Book of Studies’ – was an obvious obeisance to Claude Lorrain, one of his heroes. Claude (1600–82) had made 195 drawings as a record of his own works, so that posterity would be better able to identify fakes of his pictures. Thus the title of Claude’s collection of drawings, Liber Veritatis. The original of this was now in England, owned by the Duke of Devonshire, and had been reproduced by the engraver Richard Earlom for publication in London in the 1770s. Turner’s reverence for Claude was frequently visible in his landscape paintings – in his classical Thames-side idylls, for example – and was noticed by colleagues who saw him spellbound or even moved to tears in front of Claude paintings. An audience at a convoluted lecture Turner gave at the Royal Academy in 1811 heard one passage of surprising clarity as he declared:
Pure as Italian air, calm, beautiful and serene, spring forward the works and name of Claude Lorrain. The golden orient or the amber-coloured ether, the midday ethereal vault, the fleecy skies, resplendent valleys, campagnas rich with all the cheerful blues of fertility, trees possessing every hue and tone of summer heat; rich, harmonious, true and clear, replete with all the aerial qualities of distance (aerial lights, aerial colour) – where, through all these comprehensive qualities and powers, can we find a clue to his mode of practice?
Turner’s answer was: in a ‘continual study of the parts of nature’.4 Through his own Liber, Turner meant to show the effects of such a study, to do so by following Claude’s method of drawing and washing in with pen and brush using sepia ink, and – in the wake of Earlom’s print versions of Claude that had been successfully published by Boydell – to have his drawings translated into engravings, the most common reproductions of the time, which would make his Liber publicly accessible.
His Brentford hours spent colouring the prints of Boswell’s Antiquities for John Lees had made their mark. The Liber would also be in great part Turner’s Antiquities: it would feature castles, temples, abbeys, mills and old bridges, located by rivers and streams, and attended by herds of animals and small groups of people – both structures and persons often given an antique cast by being in classical guise or garb. As noted, he had been an illustrator from the start of his career, turning out drawings which had been engraved for magazine and periodical publication. The Copper-plate Magazine and the Oxford Almanack had both used his services. Covent Garden while he grew up had seemed as full of printmakers and printdealers as it was of fruit and vegetable merchants; two engravers, Vere and Woodfield, had worked in Maiden Lane. Ackermann’s well-known printshop was not far away in the
Strand. Turner had done his stint colouring prints for John Raphael Smith. He may have picked up tips from the engraver Edward Bell, with whom he toured Kent in 1793. His interest in the processes of printmaking was evident in sketchbook memoranda of materials needed for the craft. Now he meant to do a good deal of the actual print-creating work himself.
The ‘plate’ used for printing was at this time still copper. (Steel, which was more durable and hence better for making many impressions, only came into use in the 1820s.) The copper was heated and coated with a waxy varnish; on to this was traced the bare bones of the drawing being reproduced; and then the design was cut into the wax with an etching needle, a fine point which exposed the copper beneath. The plate was next dipped in acid, which bit into the exposed, wax-free lines; these lines would hold ink and thus produce black marks when the plate was used for printing. Further refinements to the plate, after the wax was removed, could be achieved by engraving – incising or gouging more lines directly on the plate with a burin or graver, and burnishing the copper to produce whiter, lighter areas – and by mezzotinting; this was a way of achieving strongly contrasting tonal effects by roughening the plate to produce little burrs that held the ink to make shade and by scraping or burnishing away the burrs to give the effect of light. Engraving was hard physical work and took time; it was generally left to professional engravers who were proud of their craft in translating artists’ drawings into prints by way of lines, hollows and dots. After being inked, the plate was wiped with muslin so that the ink remained only in the declivities. A dampened sheet of paper was laid on the plate, and then plate and paper put in a press and squeezed together. Early impressions of the print were called proofs; the artist could note or ‘touch’ corrections on these that he wanted the engraver to make. Engravers had the right to keep some of these early versions for themselves as a supplement to their fee.
J.M.W. Turner Page 17
