J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  And yet he should be given credit for trying. His reading, not always incisive, was wide. As well as the classical and eighteenth-century poets, he dipped into works of ancient history and made notes about Roman emperors and Assyrian kings. In the ‘Tabley no.3’ sketchbook he jots down details about the first Christian church supposedly built in Glastonbury in AD 44. Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welsh ecclesiastical chronicler, interests him on the subject of the building of Pembroke Castle. In the ‘Finance’ sketchbook51 he transcribes part of a Hindu account of the Creation of the World from Alexander Dow’s History of Hindoostan (1768), along with notes on essays he had been reading by Sir William Jones about Hindu chronology and Indian, Greek and Roman gods. (Some of this was fed into several Liber engravings.) He read the Travels (1805) of James Bruce, who reached the source of the Blue Nile in the early 1770s. He bought Thomas Hope’s On the Costume of the Ancients (1809) and in his notes on Shee took issue with Hope’s call for national patronage for historical painting, with art being seen as a vehicle for enhancing British commerce. Turner thought art should have higher goals. He read Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), in which the ‘Nature of Poetry’ and ‘Sublimity’ were considered, and he copied out in his ‘Derbyshire’ sketchbook of 1807–952 a passage from Blair on writing style:

  Perspecuity in writing is not to be considered as merely a sort of negative virtue, or freedom from defect. It has higher merit. It is a degree of positive beauty. We are pleased with an author, we considered him as deserving praise, who frees us from all fatigue of searching for his meaning; who carries us through this subject without any disarrangement or confusion, where we see to the very bottom.

  Poor Turner! He took this to heart, enough so to write it down, and it didn’t do him much good. But he would have been a different person, and artist, if it had.

  Turner was aware of his lack of perspecuity in writing. He often brooded about what he wanted to say in a letter or speech and drafted passages in a sketchbook. Before an Academy dinner in 1809, he evidently wanted to get his witticisms right, in referring to the Examiner’s suggestion that Academy professors were ‘sons of indolence’, and worked up a reply. But his pride was nevertheless sometimes touched. In 1813 he wrote some caption material for the Southern Coast series, which W. B. Cooke sent to the journalist William Coombe for copy-editing. Coombe wrote to Cooke that it was ‘the most extraordinary composition I have ever read. It is impossible for me to correct it, for in some parts I do not understand it.’53 Turner, miffed, withdrew his contribution and Coombe wrote his own.

  In his correspondence Turner frequently repeats words unnecessarily, misuses words, omits words. Drafting a letter to Sir John Leicester on the back of a drawing of donkeys on a hillside, he leaves many blanks in the text;54 it is as if there were gaps in his thought processes. Often his punctuation is idiosyncratic, his spelling haphazard. But suddenly the clouds part, the wind drops, the sun shines and he spells difficult words correctly. In 1811 John Britton sent him a copy of the letter-press he was planning to use with the Pye and Heath engraving of Turner’s Pope’s Villa he was publishing, and Turner’s reply to Britton – despite a few misspellings and distensions of sense – is in the main well thought out and well expressed:

  Sir

  I rather lament that the remark which you read to me when I called in Tavistock Place is suppressed for it espoused the part of Elevated Landscape against the aspersions of Map making criticism, but no doubt you are better acquainted with the nature of publication, and mine is a mistaken zeal. As to remarks you will find an alteration or two in pencil. Two groups of sheep, Two fishermen, occour too close – baskets to entrap eels is not technical – being called Eel pots – and making the willow tree the identical Pope’s willow is rather strained – cannot you do it by allusion? And with deference: – ‘Mellifluous lyre’ seems to deny energy of thought – and let me ask one question, Why say the Poet and Prophet are not often united? – for if they are not they ought to be …55

  A letter of March 1812 to James Wyatt in Oxford about the plate Pye was making of his View of Oxford from the Abingdon Road makes similar cogent points about details in a proof. Wyatt had apparently been suggesting the introduction of a ‘venerable Oak or Elm’ and Turner writes, ‘Fancy to yourself how a large Tree would destroy the character! That burst of flat country with uninterrupted horizontal lines throughout the Picture as seen from the spot we took it from! The Hedgerow Oaks are all pollards, but can be enlarged if you wish …56

  One area where Turner’s love of words consistently did not cause him to fall on his face was that of the titles he gave his pictures. Some of these – particularly the marines – have the poetry of exact observation and briney detail: Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar going to Pieces; Brill Church bearing S.E. by S., Marensluys E. by S. (1819); Life-boat and Manby Apparatus going off to a Stranded Vessel making Signal (Blue Lights) of Distress (1831); Van Tromp, going about to please his masters, ships a sea, getting a good wetting (1844).

  Hazlitt, referring to the slips of the pen and slovenliness of style in Northcote’s Fables, said that he did not hold Northcote at all accountable, ‘since an artist wrote with his left hand and painted with his right’.57 Fortunately Turner’s art depended on a creative power of altogether different strength and focus than that which brought forth his words. In his pictures, his ‘optics’ and brush-holding right hand played their part, and his reasoning or intellectual faculty had less to do. Making his paintings, as a famous admirer was to point out, Turner worked with ‘inspired unconsciousness’.58

  Notes

  1 Davies, Turner as Professor, p.21. Since this is more or less what Turner’s audience heard, I have corrected several misspellings in Turner’s draft for this lecture.

  2 Whitley, 1800–20, pp.180 ff.

  3 Farington, Diary, 28 January 1811.

  4 Century, p.257.

  5 Letters, p.35.

  6 Davies, Turner as Professor, p.15.

  7 Letters, pp.29–30.

  8 Finberg, p.154.

  9 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition.

  10 Davies, Turner as Professor, p.43.

  11 Ibid., pp.82–3.

  12 Leslie, Inner Life, p.20.

  13 TB CXXXIV, f.81.

  14 Venning, TS, 3, 1, p.39.

  15 TS, 1, 2, p.30.

  16 Leslie, Constable, p.44.

  17 Century, p.258.

  18 Ibid.

  19 TB CVIII.

  20 British Library Add. MS 46151, N, p.22, cited by Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape, pp.255 and 370 n.28.

  21 Whitley, 1800–20, p.184.

  22 Ibid., p.204.

  23 Ibid., pp.265–6.

  24 Letters, pp.46–7.

  25 Ibid., pp.48–9 n.3.

  26 Whitley, Burlington Magazine, xxii (1912–13), pp.202, 255.

  27 Whitley, 1800–20, p.266.

  28 Finberg, p.369.

  29 Ballantine, Roberts, p.238.

  30 Whitley, 1800–20, p.184.

  31 Century, p.257.

  32 Wilton, Painting and Poetry, p.143.

  33 TB CVIII, f.31r.

  34 TB CXII, f.88r.

  35 Wilton, Painting and Poetry, pp.180–1.

  36 Timbs, Anecdote Lives, p.340.

  37 Finberg, pp.408–9.

  38 Lindsay, Sunset Ship, pp.53–4.

  39 Richardson, Works, pp.249, 37.

  40 Reynolds, Discourses, p.112.

  41 Ziff, TS, 4, 1, p.51.

  42 British Itinerary, f.80v; Wilton, Painting and Poetry, p.172.

  43 TB CXI

  44 Stokes, Painting and the Inner World, p.77.

  45 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.7.

  46 TS, 9, 1, p.4.

  47 Letters, p.57.

  48 Finberg, p.230. Finberg improves Turner’s punctuation.

  49 TB CX.

  50 As suggested by Wilton, Painting and Poetry, p.14.

  51 TB CXXII.
>
  52 TB CVI, f.68.

  53 Letters, p.55 n.3.

  54 TB CXIX Y.

  55 Letters, pp.50–1.

  56 Ibid., pp.51–2.

  57 Hazlitt, Collected Works, ‘Conversations of Northcote’, 6, p.416.

  58 Ruskin, Modern Painters, iii, p.94.

  26 Maiden Lane and entrance to Hand Court, by J. W. Archer 1852

  10: Crossing the Brook

  Whatever his ambitions as a professor, Turner never looked like one. Nor was there, for this knockabout poet, any ivory-tower pallor. As we have seen, he had the appearance of someone with an out-of-doors job – a seaman or a coachman. He indeed made many of his British coach journeys as an outside passenger. Except in winter, when in his studio, he spent a good deal of the year in the open air. His complexion was a ruddy red from exposure to sun, wind and rain. Young G. D. Leslie, meeting him in later life, said, ‘His large grey eyes were those of a man long accustomed to looking straight at the face of nature through fair and foul weather alike.’1 To the journalist Cyrus Redding, who got to know Turner in 1811 or soon after, the artist (then aged thirty-six) was ‘rather stout and bluff-looking’ and ‘somewhat resembled the master of a merchantman’.2 His short stature and bandy legs enhanced the impression of one whose centre of gravity was – for a mariner – usefully low to the deck. The side-whiskers he allowed to grow at this time added to the effect.

  In the summer of 1811, Turner set off on his first considerable tour for some years. Since his Scottish expedition of 1801, his only extended travels had been to France and Switzerland in 1802. In the following nine years he had been preoccupied with the Thames, and his country jaunts had for the most part taken the form of visits to friends like the Wellses, at Knockholt, or to places where he had been invited to paint a great house and the surrounding landscape. In 1807 such a trip was to one of the houses of the Earl of Essex, Cassiobury Park, near Watford, in Hertfordshire; in 1808 he visited Tabley Hall, Sir John Leicester’s place in Cheshire; and in 1809 he travelled to Petworth House, in Sussex, and Cockermouth Castle, in Cumberland, both belonging to Lord Egremont. In 1811, he kept his gallery closed while he contemplated changes to it. He had a good show at the Academy, where the Prince of Wales – made Regent this year – had been among those who praised his Mercury and Herse. Now the Cooke brothers wanted many drawings from him for their proposed Southern Coast; it would require a ‘professional tour’ of nearly three months to the Dorset coast, to Devon and Cornwall, giving him a chance to see new ground and also to pause on his ancestral territory near Barnstaple. He did some preliminary reading. Then, taking sketchbooks, paint-box, clothes, books and fishing rod, and leaving his father and Hannah in charge at Hammersmith and Harley Street, he shook off the worries of Somerset House and the dust of the Strand.

  On the way he did a lot of hill-climbing and beach-walking, for better views of castles such as Corfe and St Michael’s Mount and the cliffs at Lulworth Cove. He sketched and scribbled – in his own fluent shorthand for one and his less legible longhand for the other. He imagined gallant tars and sportive sea nymphs. In Plymouth he drew the ships at anchor in the harbour off the Hoe and the hulks moored up the River Tamar; he was as interested in the whale-shapes of the moribund vessels as he was in those full-rigged, in fighting trim. These were the wooden walls that kept England safe from Boney.

  He was to make follow-up trips in 1813 and 1814, but it was apparently on this first south-west expedition that he met Redding, then editor of a local paper. Redding, Cornish by birth, had grown up in the West Country; he was a knowledgeable companion and got on well with the crusty artist. He had reformist political views and shared with Turner an interest in shipwrecks. Turner was also befriended by a wealthy Quaker merchant named John Collier, afterwards the member of Parliament for Plymouth, who on Fridays and Saturdays held open house for a cosmopolitan crowd of ships’ captains, import and export dealers and local worthies. With Collier and Redding, Turner went sailing on the St German’s river and talked of his Devonshire origins. Redding had a privileged glimpse of the artist at work and remarked how little, ‘to the unpractised eye’, his first sketches showed of the after picture. Perhaps, thought Redding, he bore much away in memory which helped him decipher his sketches back in his studio.3

  In 1813 Redding accompanied Turner on a coastal voyage to Burgh Island, in Bigbury Bay, about twelve miles east of Plymouth. Other members of the party were Collier, an Anglo-Italian scene painter and panorama artist named James De Maria, and an army officer. The boat was of Dutch build, undecked, crewed by one sailor and its owner-master, Captain Nichols, ‘a fine old weather-beaten seaman’. They had all been invited to a lobster feast at their destination. However, it was a nasty-looking morning, with a heavy swell and rising wind. ‘The sea’, wrote Redding, ‘had that dirty puddled appearance which often precedes a hard gale.’ Off Stoke Point, where the sea rolled in grand furrows from the Atlantic, the conditions became stormy, but the boat ran before the wind, mounting the ridges bravely. Turner seemed to be enjoying himself.

  He sat in the stern sheets intently watching the sea, and not at all affected by the motion. When we were on the crest of a wave he now and then said … ‘That’s fine! Fine!’ Two of our number were ill. The soldier, in a delicate coat of scarlet, white, and gold, looked dismal enough, drenched with the spray, and so ill that at last he wanted to jump overboard. We were obliged to lay him on the rusty iron ballast in the bottom of the boat, and keep him down with a spar laid across him. De Maria was silent in his suffering. In this way we made Burgh Island. The difficulty was how to get through the surf, which looked unbroken. At last, we got round under the lee of the island and contrived to get on shore.’4

  They were pretty wet when they landed. Nevertheless, while the lobsters were being boiled, Turner clambered up despite the wind towards the summit of the island. It seemed to Redding that he perched there writing rather than sketching. Then he joined the others for the picnic and ‘did ample justice’ to the lobsters. The journalist noted that the artist drank porter with his food but afterwards liberally took his share of the wine. Meanwhile the gale increased. Captain Nichols declared that he was going to sail back – his boat would defy any sea – but the landsmen in the party had had enough. They proposed to walk at low tide across the sands to the mainland and spend the night at Kingsbridge, three miles away. This they did, and Turner accompanied them. Redding wrote: ‘We rose at seven the next morning in Kingsbridge and went before breakfast to Dodbrook, to see the house that had belonged to Dr Walcot [Dr John Wolcot, the writer ‘Peter Pindar’], and where he was born. The artist made a sketch of it and of another house … We had now more than twenty miles to travel home. A vehicle was provided, but we walked much of the way, for Turner was a good pedestrian, capable of roughing it in any mode the occasion might demand.’

  Trudging on, they met a local peer named Lord Boringdon who invited Redding, Turner and De Maria to spend the night at his house, Saltram. Its parkland provided views over a broad passage of the River Plym. At Saltram another guest was the singer Madame Catalani, who evidently found the weary travellers an appreciative audience, treating them to some of her favourite airs. The rooms of the great house were full of pictures, but Turner when being shown round was in one of his taciturn moods. The old masters – according to Redding – ‘seemed to attract little of his attention, though they might have drawn more than I imagined, for it was not easy to judge from his manner what was passing in his mind’. As to the flimsy, picturesque landscapes of the Florence-born Francesco Zuccarelli (1702–88), a founder member of the RA, Turner refused to express an opinion; he would have felt it disloyal to criticize a fellow Academician. However, in the billiard room, in front of Stubbs’s Phaeton and the horses of the sun, he let slip the one word ‘Fine.’ And later he warmed up a little. Redding wrote: ‘Turner on retiring to rest had to pass my bedroom door, and I remarked to him that its walls were covered with paintings by Angelica Kauffmann – nymphs and
men like nymphs, as effeminate as possible. I directed his attention to them, and he wished me “Good night in your seraglio.”’ In the morning, Turner and Redding walked in the park and Turner found a high spot again from which he sketched.5

  On another day near Plymouth, Turner, De Maria and Redding were standing just after sunset beside the Tamar river. Turner had earlier remarked that, when the sun went down, the gunports of a seventy-four-gun ship lying in the shadows of a hill below Saltash would be indiscernible. De Maria now said, ‘You were right, Mr Turner, the ports cannot be seen. The ship is one dark mass.’

  ‘I told you so,’ said Turner. ‘Now as you can see it – all is one mass of shade.’

  ‘Yes, I see that is the truth, and yet the ports are there.’

  ‘We can take only what we see, no matter what is there. There are people in the ship – we don’t see them through the planks.’

  ‘True,’ replied De Maria.6

  But if De Maria had been more knowing, he would have pointed out to Turner that he sometimes set aside this empiricism for a different sort of artistic realism – as his 1823 Trafalgar was to demonstrate, with the people of the Victory being disposed to show various moments of the battle.

  On another boating excursion, this time a long way up the Tamar river, with four in the party and Redding once more as guide, they were surprised by nightfall. Redding recalled:

  To go down the river in the night was impracticable, on account of the chance of getting on shore upon the mud banks. There was an inn hard by at which beds could not be obtained; and some course must be resolved upon. We might walk to Tavistock, three or four miles off but a vehicle which had come from Plymouth that day with two of our party could do no more than carry two to the town. Turner said he would rather stay until the morning on the spot where we were debating the subject. He did not mind sitting up – would anyone volunteer with him? The horse would come over fresh in the morning with those who might then leave: I volunteered. Our friends drove off, and the painter and myself soon adjourned to the miserable little inn. I proposed to ‘plank it’, in the sailors’ phrase – that is, to go to sleep on the floor; but some part of it was damp, and the whole well sanded, so that it was not a practicable couch, however hard.