Turner went to Carlisle’s lectures and alluded to them in his own; he believed that perspective and anatomy complemented one another and shared a foundation in geometry. Like the other Academy professors, Turner was paid £10 for each performance; sixty pounds a year if he fulfilled his duties. Being Turner, he must have found the money an enticement. Being Turner, he sometimes didn’t bother to collect his fees.
There were no Life Guards in Turner’s tardily started lectures, but much to do and not to do with his nominal subject. There were chunks of poetry. Claude – as we have seen – and Sir Joshua were much in evidence. He gave the impression of having done a lot of research in the three years since his election, and a great number of authors were brought to bear, including Pliny the Younger, Franciscus Junius, Guidobaldo del Monte, Bernard Lamy and Gérard de Lairesse. He owned a copy of Leçons de perspective positive, by the sixteenth-century French architect Jacques du Cerceau and had been reading the works of the English portrait painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson. As a former architectural draughtsman, Turner had a sound working knowledge of perspective. Thomas Malton senior, the father of one of his own teachers, had written an influential treatise on the subject, whose definitions Turner borrowed; some of Euclid’s axioms he acquired from the same source. He quoted – and argued with – Charles du Fresnoy’s The Art of Painting and paraded many of the ideas of John Joshua Kirby, the maternal grandfather of his friend the Reverend Henry Trimmer and popularizer of the perspective theories of the mathematician Dr Brook Taylor. The standard notion of perspective was that of a view as it would be if traced on the glass of a window, by someone looking from one spot with one eye closed. But Turner shared with Kirby a distrust of ‘standard perspective’. On the one hand, as an artist he appreciated the value of structure: ‘The knowledge of rules begins to create a confidence unattainable by any other method, which … enables the mind not only to act for itself but to duly appreciate with truth and force what nature’s laws declare.’10 On the other hand, it was the truth of nature that one was really after.
Standard perspective was dominated by straight lines; Turner – the landscapist – believed art had to take into account the curvature of things, and he tried to incorporate this: ‘The meandering river and the rushing cataract appear sometimes not wholly unapplicable [to perspective], but they evade such weak control – turning aside like graceful elegance, defying all rules.’11 In his own work, he often bent the rules, sometimes having two viewpoints or ‘points of sight’ in a picture. However, George Leslie said that ‘His pictures always looked right, even if the perspective in them was theoretically faulty.’12
In his lectures, Turner also examined various architectural elements – spires and towers, columns and colonnades. He discussed his own experiences with reflections and refraction. (He found such matters moving: sketching Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale, he writes on his drawing of the river water, ‘Beautiful Refln.’)13 Many aspects of the science of optics and human perception interested him, for example the author Richard Payne Knight’s account of a boy, born blind, who gained sight with the removal of cataracts but needed ‘the gradual employment of impressions received through the other senses … to learn to distinguish near from far’.14 One knew what one saw as a result of all sorts of associations. His own chief aim, the painting of landscape, was acknowledged. He stressed its value once again; even in history paintings by the old masters the landscape backgrounds were ‘part of the subject and equal in power’.15
In spite of the fascinating material in them, the lectures – six in all that winter season of 1811 – were generally agreed to be a let-down. Part of the problem lay in the scripts Turner read from, and lost his way in. Long insertions were crowded in the margins. Capital letters and numbers provided keys, indicating where he should use an insert or show an illustration, but he frequently got confused about where he was and what came next. He amended his original drafts, had fair copies made, and then further revised them. One neat version of his fourth lecture was written out by a copyist named W. Rolls, but soon it was added to and corrected. The cultured script of Henry Howard, the Secretary of the RA from 1811, has been detected in a draft of another lecture, possibly giving the anxious Professor a helping hand, while the script of others seems feminine: did he get Sarah Danby to be his unpaid clerk? As Turner’s additions mounted and his sentences rambled on, he put in marks with red watercolour to show where he should pause for breath and let his listeners catch up.
If they could. In fact, the associations of facts and ideas that Turner made were not easily grasped by his audience. His leaps of mind were his and were put in his own way. Sometimes the trouble was that he had not understood the text he was quoting from. His scholarship was often suspect: he would give credit to primary sources, which he hadn’t read, rather than to the secondary sources in which he had found his material. He paraphrased Sir Joshua Reynolds, who in turn had adapted the ideas of Roger de Piles – when it might have been simpler to quote de Piles or Sir Joshua. In his reading, Turner now and then fixed his attention on the footnotes rather than on the main text, and, when planted in his lectures, the resulting information seemed not only pedantic but astray. He borrowed pompous terms and wrapped them in involved, even inscrutable sentences. Yet his curiosity could not be faulted. John Constable – an RA exhibitor since 1802 but still waiting to be an Associate – sat next to Turner at an Academy dinner in 1813 and reported: ‘I was a good deal entertained with Turner … He has a wonderful range of mind.’16 The trouble was that, when not encountered on a one-to-one basis, that mind manifested a magpie-like voracity. The material Turner gathered made for a cluttered compost heap. He had no training in how to sift and distribute it. It might eventually help to generate pictures, but it did little for rational discussion of artistic strategies and principles.
He had some supporters in his audiences. His father proudly came to several lectures. John Linnell, an RA student from 1806 to 1810, was in the Great Room on 27 January 1812 and drew the senior Turner, lips compressed, his mind no doubt wandering on to things other than perspective. Thomas Stothard, too deaf to hear Turner’s words, faithfully attended his lectures. When a fellow Academician enquired why, Stothard explained, ‘Sir, there is much to see at Turner’s lectures – much that I delight in seeing, though I cannot hear him.’17 The illustrations, sometimes displayed at the relevant moment, were often ‘a rare treat’ and ‘truly beautiful’, thought Richard Redgrave, ‘speaking intelligibly enough to the eye, if his language did not to the ear. As illustrations of aerial perspective and the perspective of colour, many of his rarest drawings were … placed before the students in all the glory of their first unfaded freshness.’18 Turner eventually compiled a collection of some 200 pictures: drawings to demonstrate types of shadow; coloured drawings of water-filled glass balls, some of which showed reflections from one another; watercolours of steeples and spires, of façades and screens and pediments; and even more elaborate watercolours of prison and mausoleum interiors. Most of the lecture illustrations were his own work, but he also showed pictures by Dürer and Raphael.
Diagrams and sketches for the purpose of his lectures crowd his sketchbooks of this period. The ‘Perspective’ sketchbook of 180919 has not only perspective diagrams – and the ever-present sketches of boats and barges – but a line from Virgil’s Eclogues, which he may have jotted down for quoting at a lecture, or else simply to bear in mind as a crutch: Non omnia possumus omnes (‘Not everyone can do everything’). But with some of his listeners the titbits of poetry he proffered were popular – even via the fog-creating medium of Turner’s voice. He quoted Milton. He recited lines from The Pleasures of the Imagination by Mark Akenside. And he worked bits of Akenside into lines purportedly his own: Reclaims their fleeting footsteps from the waste
Of Dark Oblivion, thus collecting all
The various forms of being to present
Before the curious aim of mimic Art.20
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nbsp; Over the twenty-seven years that he held the post, Turner’s six lectures were repeated in varying forms. He went on rewriting them, as though striving for purity. He tried to fit them together more effectively with his illustrations. But ‘mutability’ – an Akenside term – was strong, and his heart wasn’t always in it. At one lecture in early 1812, according to Soane, who was there, ‘No drawings … very thin audience … the word Perspective scarcely mentioned.’21 He gave the lectures in 1811, 1812, 1814, 1816, 1818, 1819, 1821, 1824, 1825, 1827 and 1828. In 1827 there were four rather than the customary six lectures, and he was paid only £40. Why didn’t he give the lectures every year? Did he feel they needed greater improvement but had no time for it? Was he overwhelmed by sour moods of feeling unwanted or of not wanting to face the public? The midwinter lecture season may sometimes have given him the genuine alibi of poor health. On 28 December 1812 the minutes of the RA Council recorded that a letter had been read ‘from the Professor of Perspective asking to be allowed to postpone his course of lectures until the season of January, 1814, on account of indisposition’. The postponement, of a full year, was allowed; nothing was said about the nature of the indisposition.22 And when the year passed, Turner again had difficulties. Although his first lecture of 1814 was set to be delivered on 3 January, it did not take place. An advertisement, placed by the errant Professor, appeared in the Morning Chronicle two days later:
LEFT in a Hackney Coach which stopped at Somerset House on Monday night (January 3rd) a PORTFOLIO containing demonstrations, etc., etc., etc., of the Science of Perspective. Whoever will bring the same to Mr Turner’s, Queen Anne Street, W., corner of Harley Street, shall receive TWO POUNDS reward, if brought before Thursday, afterwards only ONE POUND will be given for them at the end of the week. No greater reward will be offered nor will this be advertised again.
The absent-minded Professor apparently meant to deal as firmly with greedy finders of his property as he did with hungry engravers.
But another advertisement – placed by someone who hadn’t read Turner’s – appeared in the Morning Chronicle on 6 January:
PORTFOLIO FOUND. A gentleman having engaged a Hackney Coach on Monday evening last, from the Strand, opposite Somerset House, found therein a large portfolio (much damaged) containing some drawings of the Science of Perspective. They will be restored to the owner on his giving a proper description of the contents, and defraying the expense of this advertisement. Should no application be made within fourteen days they will be disposed of as waste paper, being considered of little value. Apply at Messrs Boore and Bannister’s Don Cossack Warehouse, New Street, Covent Garden.
No doubt fuming, ‘Waste paper! Of little value!’, Turner recovered his precious portfolio with its fifteen or so diagrams and drawings. The course of lectures was rearranged to begin on 10 January but apparently did not. A correspondent in the March issue of the New Monthly Magazine reported ‘something laughable’ at Somerset House: although the Perspective lectures had been meant to start at 8 p.m. on the 10th, the audience had to wait until 9 p.m. before the Professor appeared. Then – ‘oh, sad disaster!’ – it was to hear him announce that he had lost his lecture. ‘In this dilemma Mr Turner held a conference with the Keeper, Mr Fuseli [who was in the chair that evening], and the latter informed the company that his friend had left the lecture in the hackney coach which conveyed him.’
Fuseli, apologizing for his own lack of preparation, stepped into the gap and gave a talk on painting in his usual spirited manner, and thus spared the audience the usual ‘grunts and groans’ of dismay and disbelief he himself was known for uttering during Turner’s lectures. Lightning shouldn’t strike the same spot thrice, but in 1818 (when Turner delivered two of his lectures within a week) those attending his fourth lecture were told by the Professor as he mounted the rostrum that he had again left his lecture in the hackney coach bringing him here. This time no other speaker stood in for him. The audience – including John Sell Cotman – sportingly applauded the Professor and went home. Some must have speculated on what lay behind his neglectful behaviour: was he losing his mind?
In 1817 a new form of lighting came to Somerset House. The Great Room’s immense bronze chandelier, a gift of the Prince Regent, was fitted with gas jets. But it did not illuminate Turner on the rostrum. Late in 1816 he dickered with the Council, asking that he be allowed to postpone the 1817 series for a year; he seemed to expect immediate permission. The Council indeed replied with speed, but wanted to know why. The Council members felt there should be good reason for suspending ‘any part of the regular routine of education in the Royal Academy’. Turner answered that he had pressing engagements. The Council reluctantly went along with this but reproved their Professor, telling him his reasons had not been ‘satisfactorily stated’, and reminding him ‘that it is incumbent on the Professors of the Academy not to enter into any engagements which may preclude them from fulfilling permanent duties’.23
In 1827, his fifth lecture was called off. Advertisements in the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle explained the cause of cancellation as a ‘domestic affliction’. The Times on 13 February ascribed it to ‘the death of a near relation’ – though who this may have been is unclear. His nearest and dearest at this time was his father, and though he may have been ill he did not die in 1827.
John Taylor’s flattering remarks on Turner’s inaugural lecture in 1811 were welcomed in a note from the artist. Taylor’s review of the second lecture (which discussed theories that reflected light ‘makes a regular parabolic kind of curve’ and Malton’s dissent from this) said that it ‘manifested deep investigation’. But Taylor added, ‘From the nature of the subject, it was not probable that the lecture would afford much gratification to those who were unacquainted with the subject.’24 To this, Turner replied with some fifty lines of doggerel which made flattering play with a satire Taylor had written on Walter Scott; clearly he had read Taylor’s The Caledonian Comet. Taylor was more than kind in his comments on the next four lectures, calling the Professor ‘a rare example of scientific knowledge and practical excellence’.25 Other commentators, in ensuing years, were less generous. A writer in the New Monthly Magazine in 1816 made fun of Turner’s speaking and his accuracy:
Excellent as are Mr Turner’s lectures, in other respects there is an embarrassment in his manner approaching almost to unintelligibility, and a vulgarity of pronunciation astonishing in an artist of his rank and respectability. Mathematics he perpetually calls ‘mithematics’, spheroids ‘spearides’, and ‘haiving’, ‘towaards’, and such like examples of vitiated cacophony … He told the students that a building not a century old was erected by Inigo Jones; talked of ‘elliptical circles’; called the semi-elliptical windows of the lecture room semi-circular, and so forth.26
His last Perspective lectures were delivered in 1828. He had lost interest; he had other things to do; everyone had heard what he had to say on the subject. Yet he remained Professor of Perspective for the next ten years. A Parliamentary Committee in 1836 looked at art instruction and, turning to the Royal Academy – evidently aware of a lack of lectures – asked if the ‘school of perspective’ was being properly conducted. The Academy President, then Sir Martin Archer Shee, replied that Turner had not been pressed to deliver his lectures, in part because some Academicians thought that lecturing was ill calculated to convey the science of perspective. But they had also forborne to do so ‘from a delicacy which cannot perhaps be perfectly justified, but which arises from the respect they feel for one of the greatest artists of the age in which we live’.27 At the end of 1837, when he was sixty-two, Turner told the Council that he proposed to resign the professorship, doubtless to the relief of most members, though his decision was received ‘with great regret’.28 This sentiment was shared by the General Assembly on 10 February 1838, when his resignation was formally announced. The Academy went back to having a ‘Teacher of Perspective’.
In later years Turner took no great pride in what he had achiev
ed as professor. According to David Roberts, his health was proposed at one occasion by an Irishman who had attended the lectures, and Turner replied in a jocular way that ‘he was glad this honourable gentleman had profited so much by his lectures as thoroughly to understand perspective, for it was more than he did’.29 But his diffidence had always been a crucial part of his public speaking. At the end of one lecture he had admitted, ‘After all I have been saying to you, gentlemen – the theories I have explained and the rules I have laid down – you will find no better teachers than your own eyes, if used aright to see things as they are.’30
For all of his omissions and failures as a professor, Turner went on being a thoroughly useful teacher in the Academy Schools. Former students talked of the practical help he gave them. He was repeatedly appointed a Visitor in the Life School because of his instructional ability, although his advice might be conveyed with gesture and example rather than in carefully phrased language; to some, his assistance seemed to be given almost telepathically. Richard Redgrave observed:
A few indistinct words, a wave of the hand, a poke in the side, pointing at the same time to some part of the student’s drawing, but saying nothing more than a ‘Humph!’ or ‘What’s that for?’ Yet the fault hinted at, the thing to be altered was there, if you could but find it out; and if, after a deep puzzle, you did succeed in comprehending his meaning, he would congratulate you when he came round again, and would give you some further hint; if not, he would leave you with another disdainful growl, or perhaps seizing your porte-crayon, or with his broad thumb, make you at once sensible of your fault …The schools were usually better attended during his visitorships than during those of most other members.31
J.M.W. Turner Page 21
