J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  Turner put out a prospectus for the Liber Studiorum. He displayed a copy of this inducement in his gallery together with examples of the drawings that would be engraved in the first set he intended to publish. He promised subscribers a hundred landscapes, designed and etched by him, and engraved in mezzotint. The publication – so the Review of Publications in Art for June 1808 declared – would describe ‘various styles of landscape, viz., the historic, mountainous, pastoral, marine, and architectural’. A capital letter on the print would denote the classification. Turner shortly came up with a sixth category, with the initials EP, apparently signifying ‘Elevated Pastoral’ – and, by the way, indicating his own ambition to elevate landscape art above ‘map-making’.5 He intended to bring out the work in sets or parts, each of which would have five engravings stitched into blue folders. On the front was a printed title, a written-in part number and his signature.

  He did not get around to a frontispiece until well into the project, in 1812, but now, with his mind full of the Liber, he saw ideas for it everywhere he travelled. In 1807, in the late autumn, he went to Portsmouth to watch some captured Danish ships sail into the harbour, and sketched and wrote poetry on the way down and back; his painting Spithead, exhibited at his gallery the following spring, came from this trip and so did some sketches that were transformed into four finished drawings for the Liber. One was of Hindhead Hill, crossed by the Portsmouth road, with its gibbet on a mound in the middle distance and sheep in the foreground; this – Liber plate number 25 – combined a pastoral calm with intimations of highway villainy and cruel retribution. His Isleworth time provided other subjects. In one sketchbook6 he noted the names of subscribers and the expected costs and profits of the venture.

  In the end, Turner produced fourteen parts of his Liber, one of which had a sixth print in the shape of the frontispiece: making a total of seventy-one of the intended hundred. Only nineteen of the prints were based on works – oil paintings or watercolours – he had done in the past. In the first few years he brought out two parts annually. Sometimes there were longer intervals in publication. To begin with he charged fifteen shillings for a set of prints, and one pound fifteen shillings for a set of the earlier proofs, but after a couple of years these prices were increased. John Pye, an engraver who greatly admired Turner and remained friendly with him perhaps because, not using mezzotint, he didn’t work on the Liber and had none of the grudges of engravers who did, wrote later: ‘Turner’s own selling price of lettered proofs was two guineas each number of five, or upwards of eight shillings each proof for ready money only.’ And he gave no discounts, even to good friends.7 He wanted the prints of each part of the Liber to be seen as a set, and he called buyers of separate prints ‘a pack of geese’. Irritated, he demanded, ‘Don’t they know what Liber Studiorum means?’8 On another occasion, when he was told that some prints from the Liber were being picked out as of special value, he said to Ruskin, ‘What is the use of them but together?’9 Production of the Liber was effectively over and done with in the early 1820s, though afterwards he worked on some smaller mezzotints to which the title ‘Little Liber’ has been given.

  Whether from his suspicion of printdealers or his desire to encompass as much of the printmaking business as he could, Turner’s Liber was very much a do-it-yourself thing, albeit with frequent help from professionals. And, like many such projects, it had problems. After making his working drawing or cartoon with pen and brush, sometimes boldly mixing the sepia ink with watercolours, he usually had an engraver make a tracing of the main structure of the drawing in red chalk. This tracing Turner used in reverse (turned over, that is, so that the plate would produce prints with left and right as in the original drawing), as a pattern for cutting the line work into the wax. The plate was then sent back to the engraver for biting in with the acid, and proofs were taken at this stage so that Turner could direct the engraver in changes needed for the next. The engravers occasionally complained that Turner, when etching the line work, hadn’t followed his own designs but had changed an emphasis here and there.

  In the course of the project, Turner – already a proficient etcher – mastered engraving techniques; he engraved eleven of the seventy-one plates himself.10 This hard work also required immense precision of touch with the engravers’ tools. When engravers were working for him, he kept them busy altering the plates, whether or not they had counted on so many requests for changes. While James Lahee was doing the final printing from a plate, Turner often went down to Lahee’s workshop to watch the prints come off the press, to check on the effect of alterations he had made, and with burin or scraper to make further changes on the copper. Much of his correspondence of this time is with engravers, full of fussy comments about outlines, proofs or parcels of plates going to or from Hammersmith or Queen Anne Street. Engravers received willy-nilly an education from Turner, and he from them.

  For many of the first parts of the Liber, Charles Turner, his former fellow student, made engravings and also acted as publisher, accepting subscriptions at his home at 50 Warren Street. But from 1811 the artist took over the sales side as well; he had a good base for this at his gallery. Nevertheless, despite having a hundred subscribers in 1810, as a sketchbook note recorded,11 the project was unprofitable at the time. It is unclear how many proofs Turner actually had made from each plate, but after eight or so proofs a copper plate could produce only some thirty prints before being in need of considerable repair work. Not only did Turner have too many prints and/or proofs printed, but, as we will see, he seems on occasion to have passed off prints as proofs, taking extra cash for what unsuspecting customers believed were pressings from the more prized early states. As doubts were raised about these ‘proofs’, buyer confidence was shaken.

  Moreover, Turner’s distribution system was faulty. Printdealers increasingly declined to handle the Liber for Turner because he allowed them too small a discount. Colnaghi’s allowance was cut back from 20 per cent to 10 to 5 to zero. The parts were published erratically. His advertising was either too little or too late. He wrote an irritated author-to-publisher note to Charles Turner on a proof of the Lake of Thun, Liber plate number 15, brought out in 1808: ‘Respecting advertizing you know full well that everything ought to have been done long ago!! I have not seen a word in the papers … if you can get advertized anywhere DO SO … the plates not done – not advertized, in short everything has conspired against the work.’12 When it came to doing it himself, there were similar problems. In June 1811 he advertised the sixth and seventh parts of the Liber in the Sun and felt bound to tell subscribers who had not received part five to contact him.

  Although the Liber may not have been the lucrative venture he had hoped for, it had an impact on his fellow artists. A few, jealous of Turner’s versatility, might have scoffed at it, as John Constable did when he mockingly referred to it in a letter as the ‘Liber stupidorum’.13 But others – particularly those in the landscape business – were impressed. John Varley was one such and David Cox another; Cox was an early subscriber to the Liber. Turner seems to have meant the work to have instructional value and also to boost the status of landscape painting, which – despite Wilson and Gainsborough – in many academic minds still played second- or third-string to the schools of history and portrait painting. (Reynolds and West still mattered; there were those who shared the alleged opinion of the French painter François Boucher who died five years before JMWT was born, that nature was ‘too green and badly lit’.)14 Turner took up Reynold’s challenge to put things in a proper order by ‘establishing the rules and principles of our art on a more firm and lasting foundation’.15 Landscape, he wanted to show, could express profound and diverse ideas, associations and emotions.

  His ability to think in light and shade, that Ruskin later admired,16 was one that made him, as a painter, the maker of work perfectly suited for translation into print form. It was said that, seeing a proof lying with the top of the paper towards him on a table some distance away, he could
diagnose its tonal faults and prescribe remedial changes without turning it around. John Pye – who went on to engrave thirteen non-Liber plates after Turner’s work, the first being Pope’s Villa in 1809–10 – wrote with a fan’s enthusiasm:

  He would turn his proofs, after touching them, from side to side and upside down that the key of colour might be maintained and carried into effect. He was wont to say that engravers have only white paper to express what the painter does with vermilion. He was never tired of going to Hampstead and would spend hours lying on the Heath studying the effects of the atmosphere and the changes of light and shade, and the gradations required to express them. The great principle he was always endeavouring to advance was that of the art of translation of landscape, whether in colour or black and white, [and] was to enable the spectator to see through the picture into space.17

  His admirers saw other things in the Liber. Pye thought Turner’s success with it lay in his ‘government of chiaroscuro’. Pye also regarded it as ‘the depository of true principles belonging to a school of landscape which was in danger of passing away’.18 Indeed, it seems now a final eighteenth-century work of Turner’s; the ‘Little Liber’, by contrast, is less precise, more expressively ‘romantic’. Ruskin detected ‘decay and humiliation’ in the Liber, giving ‘solemnity to all its simplest subjects’. And he thought ‘the meaning of the entire book was symbolized in the frontispiece … Tyre at Sunset, with the Rape of Europa’ – suggesting the decay of European civilization, ‘its beauty passing away into terror and judgement’.19 One may also perceive a ‘landscape of conflict’20 – possibly between the classical idyll and the real life of hedgers, ditchers, watercress gatherers, bargees and fishermen; but Turner in the Liber doesn’t seem that interested in the people who provide scale and focal points; they are simply components of the scene. John Lewis Roget, the editor of Pye’s papers, took a more down-to-earth view than Ruskin:

  We may look at the plates in the Liber Studiorum for indications of Turner’s views of life, and of human pride, his hopelessness and sadness, and his sense of humiliation and decay. We may trace in them his keen perception of the phenomena of nature, and his firm grasp of their various characteristics; the growth of wood, the hardness of stone; the swell of waves, and evanescent forms of vapour. But the practical artist will do well to remember that they are, at the same time, a set of very careful ‘arrangements in brown’, and to observe how much of their effect upon the mind is due to the so-called ‘tricks’ of contrast and gradation, of balance and harmony of parts and masses, which preserve a unity in their variety, and enabled the painter to place each subject plainly and impressively before the spectator.21

  Some of the ‘sadness’ of the Liber may in fact spring from the fact that those ‘arrangements in brown’ are brown – there is a quality in prints, over and above their worlds-that-are-lost subject matter, that lies in their very brownness or monochrome condition and evokes a subdued response. Whether this was felt by the artist is not known. Turner may on the contrary have felt, on top of the usual mixture of dissatisfaction and satisfaction that creation brings, an exhilaration in demonstrating his range and power. His project was a lot less like Claude’s than the word Liber suggested. The engravings he had done from his own paintings and watercolours were very different from those models. And, above all, he must have felt with pride that he had shown what he could do without the aid of colour.

  Yet, putting away his etching needle or the chalk with which he touched a proof, the short-tempered artist was not necessarily in a good mood. The cantankerous element in Turner, never far below the surface, frequently bubbled over in his dealings with engravers; the hard bargainer seemed to become ever more implacable. With F. C. Lewis, the first engraver he got to work on the Liber, a price of five guineas was agreed for Lewis’s work in putting areas of Turner’s etched outline into aquatint. (This was a form of etching that created flat tones to produce something of the effect of a watercolour wash.)

  Trouble soon followed the agreement. Turner wanted twelve proofs from the plate before Lewis started his aquatinting work. He also sent a drawing for a second plate and wanted Lewis ‘to get on with it’ before he, Turner, had done the original etching of the plate. When Lewis showed reluctance to do this, Turner proposed that the engraver do the initial etching and then he would add any further etching he felt was needed. Lewis quite rightly thought the agreed fee, just acceptable for the first plate, was insufficient for the second. He told Turner that the charge would now be eight guineas. At the time, Lewis was making engravings from works in the Royal Collection by Claude and Raphael and getting between fifteen and forty guineas a plate, depending on their size. The proper charge for the Turner work should have been fifteen guineas, Lewis thought. But Turner dug his heels in. He wrote to Lewis:

  Sir

  I received the Proof and Drawing – the Proof I like very well but I do not think the grain is so fine as those you shewed me for Mr Chamberlain [John Chamberlaine, the publisher of the Royal Collection engravings] – the effect of the Drawing is well preserved, but as you wish to raise the Price to eight guineas I must decline having the other drawing engraved therefore send it when you send the plate, when they have arrived safe, the five guineas shall be left in Salsbury St where you’ll be so good as to leave a recept for same.

  Yours,

  J. M. W. Turner

  14 Dec. 1807,

  Hammersmith.22

  Turner moved his custom to Charles Turner, who had done such a successful job with The Shipwreck, and – poor Lewis! – agreed to pay eight guineas a plate. The terms between the two Turners were tightly drawn: JMWT personally to begin the plates by drawing the subject in outline through the etching ground on to the copper; CT to etch these outlines and perform the subsequent mezzotinting. Charles Turner also acted as publisher over the next two years, bringing out parts 1 to 4 of the Liber, twenty plates in all. Each plate took him about two weeks to engrave. In 1809, however, Charles Turner ran into extra trouble with a plate and told JMWT that he ought to be paid more – twelve guineas, according to a Pye memo on the subject, ten guineas according to CT’s account.

  Whatever the additional sum, the artist wouldn’t pay it. He was already in a bad humour with the engraver. Charles Turner was also a grumpy character, short in height like his namesake, and with a limp because of a congenitally damaged foot. The artist called on the engraver between the publication of parts 3 and 4 of the Liber and, according to Pye, said, ‘This is a pretty business. Why, I find that some of the Liber prints have been stolen.’

  CT: ‘Well, do you suppose I stole them?’

  JMWT: ‘I don’t say who stole them!’

  CT: ‘How do you know that some of them have been stolen?’

  JMWT: ‘Why, because many proofs are about that have never been published. I have seen some of them for sale without needle holes in their margins – which could not be if they had not been stolen.’23

  The upshot was that after the engraver’s demand for a higher fee the two Turners did not speak to one another for a number of years – nineteen, Charles Turner used to say, though in fact he engraved plate 57 of the Liber, Norham Castle on the Tweed, in 1816, so the quarrel seems to have been patched up after nine years. In 1810, the artist – believing that he had reserved to himself the sole right to colour prints – wrote the engraver a peremptory note about another alleged offence: ‘Mr Turner requests Mr C. Turner to explain through what cause the Print of the Shipwreck now in a shop in Fleet St., late Macklin, happens to be coloured when Mr C. Turner expressly agreed that none should be coloured but by J. M. W. Turner only.’24 During these moments, Charles Turner may well have recalled the drawing of a scowling JMWT he had executed around 1795, entitled ‘A Sweet Temper’.

  And yet the scowl was not permanent; as we have seen, the artist’s grudges didn’t last forever. When Charles Turner was elected an Associate Engraver at the Royal Academy in 1828, JMWT wrote to him from Rome, where he was paintin
g:

  Dear Charles

  I have just received a letter from Mr Jones and I sit down to congratulate you or rather myself, for without Sir Tho[mas’s] casting vote your losing the election by my absence would have made me miserable – I do not mean by saying so to take any credit to myself but on the contrary do beg that you regard with truly worthy and not an obsequious respect the Members who so nobly supported you and particularly to the President who may have had some cause of yore of displeasure, for the flattering manner which he bestow’d it, your never to be forgotten esteem and regard, and now do think what a shame the clamour of the love of money caused, dismiss it now unworthy of yourself, your family need it not and will readily account [?] for your honor and your name.

  Belive me most truly yours

  J. M. W. Turner

  P.S. You see I am acting the Papa with you but it is the last time of asking.25

  (JMWT was in fact a year younger than the engraver.)