If he was not in a defensive or tetchy mood, Turner could be amicable and even show heartfelt sympathy with his engravers. Charles Turner got used to him arriving with his large umbrella, saying he couldn’t stop more than a couple of minutes, but then keep the engraver talking at his sitting-room door for an hour or so. George Jones recalled that when Charles Turner’s son was dangerously ill the artist ‘went constantly to enquire after the health of the youth and of the family; he never left his name, and this solicitude was not known to the parents until, after the son’s death, the servant then reported that a little short gentleman of odd manners had called every evening to know the state of the sufferer’.44 And after the death of Charles Turner’s wife in 1836, Turner wrote to the engraver, his always tortuous syntax further distorted by emotion:
My Dear Charley
I must break through the rules of propriety to ask you, ‘to throw myself upon your kindness’ – only – think what I suffered at Sir Thomas Lawrence’s [death] and for so long an illness – that I beg of you to yield to my fears against my will – which believe me Charley is with you in your present misery and do not think a particle of respectful regret is wanting to your amiable [?] loss or in any want of attention to your request by a note yet now arrived from Mr Chittendon [the undertaker] 43 Greek St. Soho – that I do again beg of you to let me feel at home all that true concern!! Without any alloy of apprehension.45
Puzzling this out must have momentarily taken Charles Turner’s mind off his loss.
Edward Goodall also had experience of Turner’s good side. His son told Richard Redgrave that his father on one occasion ‘unwittingly signed an agreement, in that careless manner too common with artists, to engrave a series of book illustrations from designs by Turner, and … when he came to study this agreement he found it contained clauses which laid upon him very serious terms, such in fact as he had never contemplated. He became much alarmed, and on seeing Turner he told him of his fears, and said, “You alone can help me out of my difficulties.”’
‘How is that?’ asked Turner.
‘Why,’ replied Goodall, ‘by refusing to complete or to make the illustrations I have engaged to engrave.’
‘That is a bad alternative,’ said Turner; ‘it would cost me £500 worth of work.’
‘True,’ said Goodall, ‘but I have been engraving your works for the last twenty-five years with increasing pleasure, and would you bind me to work on these to my great loss, and in misery as I work? You will fill up your time in an equally profitable manner, and you will relieve me from engagements which, on signing the agreement with the publisher, I certainly never understood.’
Turner agreed to do as he asked, but he added, ‘I have done that which I never did before, and would not do for another.’46
If Turner pushed his engravers hard, it was not only because he was acquisitive of cash but because he was anxious for fame. In his 1822 negotiations with Hurst and Robinson, he invoked an illustrious predecessor, Richard Wilson, four of whose pictures had been engraved by William Woolett for Boydell. Hurst and Robinson, successors to Boydell’s business, were proposing to print 500 impressions from a plate after a Turner painting. Turner, envisaging himself in a titanic struggle with past masters, wrote: ‘Whether we can in the present day contend with such powerful antagonists as Wilson and Woollett would be at least tried by size, security against risk, and some remuneration for the time of painting.’47 Although no agreement apparently was reached on that scheme, Hurst and Robinson commissioned John Pye to engrave Turner’s Temple of Jupiter Restored (RA 1816). In 1825 they also made an attempt to buy Turner’s Dido building Carthage (RA 1815). Alaric Watts went along with Robinson to Turner’s house to negotiate the purchase, Turner having named 750 guineas as his price a few days before. But when Robinson got to Queen Anne Street he found the ante had been raised to 1000 guineas. ‘Mr Robinson objected that he could not consent to so large an increase of price, without obtaining the sanction of his partners; but before they had time to make up their minds, Mr Turner sent them a verbal message, declining to dispose of it at all; he considered it, he said, his chef d’oeuvre.’48 As such, it seems he did not want it to be sullied by any form of translation into print. Later, again according to Watts, Turner refused an offer of 5000 guineas from a group of benefactors who wanted to present the Dido to the National Gallery. He had by then an even greater interest in the afterlife of his work than he did in a sale and had decided to leave the painting to the nation on his death.
Despite the difficulties of working with Turner, those in print-selling and publishing recognized how much of a draw his name could be. Robert Cadell, the Edinburgh publisher, met Turner on a visit to London in June 1831 and found him ‘a little dissenting clergyman-like person – no more appearances of art about him than a ganger’. But this look of a workers’ foreman did not prevent Cadell from talking Sir Walter Scott into the idea of having Turner illustrate an edition of Scott’s Poetical Works. Cadell believed that the engravings of Turner drawings would help sales: ‘With his pencil I shall insure the subscription of 8,000 – without, not 3,000.’49
As time passed, and the clamour of the love of money faded for him, too, his Queen Anne Street house filled up with engravings; at the end there were dusty heaps and boxes-full, numbering over 5000 prints and proofs. He was right to be nervous of a chimney fire. He went on making new prints from old Liber plates – and unlike his engravers, who used solid black capital letters (such as M, EP, H, for his categories of landscape) to denote prints, and outline capital letters to denote proofs, Turner ignored such niceties. The actual categories may never have had much point, other than to frame the tumble of notions fermenting in his imagination; the engraver and writer John Landseer was one who doubted their value. Part of his plan had been to put one print from five of the six categories in each set, to give subscribers a range of subjects, and he tried to keep to this. On the blue wrappers of the sets, he had filled in the part numbers and added his initials, using black ink for prints and red for proofs; and sometimes he actually put the word ‘Proof’ in the upper-left corner. But subscribers who paid for a set of proofs rarely got a full set; they were lucky to get one proof per set; the rest were in fact prints.
To some, Turner’s reuse of the old Liber plates seemed to involve a similar lack of honesty. He repaired worn spots and reissued prints that, as mentioned, he called proofs, charging the higher – by a few shillings – prices that proofs fetched. ‘Sham proofs’, Thornbury called them, while noting that this sharp practice required Turner to make alterations ‘with consummate art’. He hid ‘the wear and tear of the copper, the faintness, the blur, or the pallor of the plate’s old age’, and ‘devised new beauties’.50 In Liber plate number 50, Mer de Glace, he turned a smooth glacier into sharp waves of ice; in Aesacus and Hesperie, number 66, he changed the way the sun came through the trees in the glade where Hesperie sits, and altered her head.
Perhaps Turner really thought that in these alterations, repairs and reissues he was making things anew, and that this deserved a proper recompense. As usual, his logic was rather twisted. His genius for sleight of hand sometimes got the better of his adhesion to the conventional rules of the trade. But if one looks at the experimental engravings which didn’t get into the Liber or which were produced after he terminated its publication and which he didn’t bother to sell, one can see how far-reaching a genius it was. Some of these engravings – like Stonehenge at Daybreak, Moonlight at Sea, Sandbank with Gypsies, and the twelve of the so-called ‘Little Liber’ series in the 1820s – were more than translations of drawings into print. They showed not only ‘signs of struggle and dissatisfaction’,51 but an intensity and accomplishment which resulted from the power of creation at full stretch.
After the ‘Little Liber’, whose twelve mezzotints he engraved himself, he lost some of this interest in personally putting his own work in engraved form; but he went on being an illustrator for the projects of others – for poetry
by Milton, Byron, Scott, Campbell and Rogers; for topographical works and annuals. For these Turner did his original drawings in watercolour – colour replacing the monochrome of the Liber drawings – and the engravers had their work cut out to convey the deep complexities of his colour; they also had to cope with Turner’s continued requests for changes to the plate. Ruskin thought some of the plates done for The Harbours of England (earlier issued as The Ports of England) were ‘among the very finest that had been executed from his marine subjects’52 – though he added of the plate called Portsmouth that the artist had spoiled the original power of the work by retouching the proofs, forcing the engraver – Thomas Lupton once more – to tame what had been ‘a gaunt, dark, angry wave’.53 In the ‘Little Liber’, with numerous stormclouds and thickened skies, the dark angry waves were untameable.
Notes
1 Finberg, 1924, p.lxxxiv. See also Forrester, Turner’s ‘Drawing Book’.
2 Th. 1877, p.491.
3 Ibid.
4 Wilkinson, Turner on Landscape, p.18.
5 Letters, pp.50–1.
6 TB CXI.
7 Pye-Roget, p.82.
8 Wilkinson, Turner on Landscape, p.21.
9 Pye-Roget, p.22.
10 Numbers 28, 35, 39, 44, 50, 55, 58, 60, 64, 66, 70. See Forrester, op. cit.
11 TB XCI, ff.96a, 97a.
12 Finberg, p.150.
13 Wilton, p.59.
14 Quoted by Rogers in Reynolds, Discourses, p.399 n.28.
15 Ibid., p.322.
16 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, p.170.
17 Letters, p.276.
18 Pye-Roget, pp.18, 96.
19 Wilkinson, Turner on Landscape, p.42.
20 Pye-Roget, p.31.
21 Ibid., pp.12–13.
22 Letters, pp.33–4. Finberg, 1924, p.1, takes Turner’s side against the ‘rapacious’ Lewis.
23 Pye-Roget, pp.60–1.
24 Letters, pp.43–4.
25 Ibid., pp.121–2.
26 Pye-Roget, p.61.
27 Ibid., pp.79–80.
28 Ibid., pp.78–9.
29 TB CLXVIII C.
30 Letters, pp.104–6.
31 Th. 1877, p.316n. See also Goodall, Reminiscences, pp.161–2.
32 Letters, pp.187, 255.
33 Peter Cunningham, quoted in Watts, p.xxxix. A guinea is £1.1s.
34 Miller, quoted in Shanes, Turner’s England, p.12.
35 Th. 1877, p.299. Lindsay, p.261, cites p.xxii of an unidentified work by ‘E. Bell’, and says this story is ‘incorrect’.
36 Th. 1877, pp.343–4.
37 Frith, Autobiography, i, pp.133–4.
38 Huish, TS, 5, 2, p.27.
39 Finberg, pp.285–6.
40 Th. 1877, pp.195–6.
41 Huish, TS, 5, 2, p.26. For J. C. Allen, see Letters, pp.76–7.
42 Th. 1877, p.183.
43 Ibid., pp.192–3.
44 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.2.
45 Whitman, Charles Turner, p.18; Letters, p.159.
46 Redgrave, Memoir, pp.341–2.
47 Th. 1877, p.342; Letters, pp.86–8.
48 Watts, p.xxix.
49 Finberg, p.327.
50 Th. 1877, p.495.
51 Wilkinson, p.113.
52 Ruskin, Harbours of England, p.xix.
53 Ibid., p.102; Lyles and Perkins, p.63.
9: Deep Puzzles
At 8 p.m. on Monday, 7 January 1811, a short, beaky-nosed thirty-six-year-old man wearing a frock coat and a bulky white cravat – which made him look neckless – appeared on the rostrum of the lofty-ceilinged Great Room of Somerset House. Alongside him were a stack of drawings and a bas-relief for use as examples in the address he was about to give, while high on the walls hung huge copies of Raphael’s tapestry cartoons – permanent visual aids. The chairman for the evening was the elderly Academy President, Benjamin West, his Pennsylvanian origin still detectable in his voice despite nearly half a century in London. West had just introduced the speaker to the assembled Academicians, Associates, students and curious members of the public who had managed to get tickets for this long-awaited occasion: the first lecture by the Professor of Perspective. The spirits of the audience, precariously balanced between anticipation and dread, took an immediate dip as the speaker began with a hesitating, garbled apology: ‘Alacrity should have appeared earlier in my behalf, but when the continual occurrences and ardours of the profession crowd around, it too often happens that they prevent the completion of greater concerns, and therefore I must waive, saying I am ready that I have pleased myself, or can please.’1 The eyes of various listeners met, or tried to avoid meeting. ‘Alacrity’ should have had him standing there at least three years before.
Next day, the Sun newspaper’s John Taylor gave the Professor’s inaugural discourse a kindly thumbs-up: it ‘was written throughout in a nervous and elegant style, and was delivered with unaffected modesty’.2 Taylor, an unofficial press spokesman for the Academy, was right about ‘nervous’. Turner read much too fast from his script. He mumbled. His voice was deep – a higher tone would have been more distinct. His accent was still closer to a costermonger’s than a courtier’s; in the best Cockney manner, he dropped ‘h’s where they were needed and added them where they were not. Those members of the audience who were hard of hearing, like the engraver John Landseer and the Academy librarian Thomas Stothard, could understand little or nothing of what he was saying, but neither could many of those who were not at all deaf.
Things did not improve in his second lecture the following week. Charles Rossi, on hand with some other RA Council members, told Farington that Turner ‘got through with much hesitation and difficulty’. Farington himself was in the chair for lecture number four and seemed relieved that it ‘lasted [only] 35 minutes’.3 Later professorial performances showed no success in mastering such basic public-speaking skills as voice projection. Richard Redgrave, who was in the audience on several occasions, wrote: ‘Half of each lecture was addressed to the attendant behind him, who was constantly busied, under his muttered directions, in selecting from a huge portfolio drawings and diagrams to illustrate his teaching.’ Moreover, Turner’s ‘naturally enigmatical and ambiguous style of delivery [rendered the lectures] almost unintelligible’.4
The job had become his in November 1807, when twenty-seven members of the RA Assembly voted for him and one – in perceptive, solitary minority – voted against. A ‘Teacher of Perspective’, Edward Edwards, had instructed in the Academy Schools from 1788 until his death in 1806, but the Council then decided to elevate the post. Even so, Turner was the only candidate. Presumably the post would give him an opportunity to sort out all his ruminating about art, and it might help focus his reading. It would give him status as one of the nabobs of the Academy. In late 1809 he was clearly upset that he had not been accorded his title in a recently published edition of John Opie’s Lectures on Painting, to which he had subscribed, and asked that, if there were another printing, ‘all the Proffessors may be alike in the Subscribers list’.5 He had proudly begun signing pictures with ‘P.P.R.A.’ after his name and listed the title, Professor of Perspective, along with his current address, in the Academy exhibition catalogues. But, as he also said in that first lecture in 1811, he had another motive: he wanted ‘to be useful to an institution to which I owe everything’.6 For a while he may have hoped to emulate Sir Joshua, whose Discourses – at least as learned texts – had acquired immediate renown.
‘Alacrity’ in getting to the rostrum was not habitual with Academy professors. George Dance, Professor of Architecture until 1806, had never lectured. When John Soane was elected to the post that year, Turner congratulated him in a letter and quoted from Charles Churchill’s poem The Ghost:
Professors (justice so decreed)
Unpaid must constant lectures read;
On earth it often doth befall
They’re paid and never read at all.7
Soane waited three years to give his first lectu
re, and then, for the occasion, got Turner to help arrange and exhibit the illustrations. Both men were asked by the anxious Council in December 1808 when they were going to start lecturing. They were also, in Turner’s words, ‘tickled up’ by a letter-writer to the Examiner, who in January 1809 told the editor of that paper to thrash all the Academy professors – ‘these sons of indolence’ – for failing to deliver a single lecture the last season.8 Later that year, as if to indicate that he was brooding about the arena for his as yet unspoken thoughts on perspective, Turner made suggestions for better lighting in the Great Room; Soane proposed improvements to the seating. When Soane did get started, he was soon in trouble: his colleagues did not approve of his critical remarks in a lecture of 1810 on his fellow Academician and architect Robert Smirke. (Soane didn’t like Smirke’s designs for Covent Garden Theatre.) Soane’s lectures were suspended, and in 1813 his post was declared vacant, though the Council later backed down and let him resume. Soane, according to one listener in 1813, was the worst reader he had ever heard, but this comment may have been from someone who hadn’t attended the lectures of the Professor of Perspective.
Justice decreed that a few professors were worth hearing. John Flaxman, elected Professor of Sculpture in 1810, was good at getting his message across, though his lectures, often reprinted, were considered ‘heavy reading’.9 The biggest draw at this period was Anthony Carlisle, surgeon at Westminster Hospital and a medical adviser to the Prince Regent, elected Professor of Anatomy in 1808, and knighted in 1821. At one lecture Carlisle’s illustrative matter lay on two dinner plates, which were passed around an enthralled and somewhat unnerved audience, one plate bearing a human heart, the other a man’s brains. Hazlitt, who was there, almost fainted. Carlisle often brought on people to pose, sometimes nude. Prize-fighters, Chinese jugglers and Life Guards were among his models. He generally appeared at the rostrum in full court dress, including a cocked hat, and he packed the audiences in. At one of his Life Guards lectures, when the soldiery wielded their swords to demonstrate the flexing of certain muscles, a squad of Bow Street constabulary had to be summoned as would-be members of the audience stormed Somerset House, some attempting to get in through the Great Room skylights.
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