At this point, Turner said that, before anything else, he had to have some bread, cheese and porter.
Very good bread and cheese were produced, and the home-brewed suited Turner, who expatiated upon his success with a degree of excitement which, with his usual dry short mode of expressing his feelings, could hardly be supposed. I pleased him further by inquiring whether bacon and eggs could be obtained; and getting an affirmative reply, we supped in clover, and sat until midnight in conversation. I found the artist could, when he pleased, make sound, pithy, though sometimes caustic remarks upon men and things with a fluency rarely heard from him. We talked much of the Academy, and he admitted that it was not all which it might be made in regard to art. The ‘clock that ticked against the wall’ sounded twelve; I proposed to go to sleep. Turner leaned his elbow upon the table, and putting his feet upon a second chair, took a position sufficiently easy, and fell asleep.
Redding laid himself at full length across some chairs, and followed Turner’s example.
Before six in the morning we rose, and went down towards the bridge. The air was balmy; the strong light between the hills, the dark umbrage, and the flashing water presented a beautiful early scene. Turner sketched the bridge, but appeared, from changing his position several times, as if he had tried more than one sketch, or could not please himself as to the best point.7
Redding, as already noted, found Turner unniggardly, cheerfully paying his way at inns when often more than bread, cheese and porter were involved. The journalist was also a guest at the picnic party Turner gave at Mount Edgcumbe near Plymouth, as a return for all the hospitality he had received. He went with Turner on various inland excursions. ‘It was during these rambles that I imbibed higher ideas, not only of the artist, but of the man, than I had previously held.’ He was also pleased to have had a chance to appreciate Turner’s mind: ‘Concealed beneath his homely exterior, there was a first-rate intellect.’8
Others gave help to Turner during his Devon visits. The young Plymouth-born painter Charles Eastlake, who studied with Haydon but did not adopt any of that artist’s anti-Academy feelings, took Turner to his aunt’s cottage at Calstock, up the Tamar. The local artist Ambrose Johns was a member of the party and fitted out a portable painting-box for Turner, containing among other materials paper already prepared for oil sketches. Eastlake later recalled that Turner made his first sketches in pencil and in a stealthy fashion, and his companions didn’t intrude. But he then relaxed. Perhaps feeling a Devonshire man among other Devonshire men, he let down his guard:
When Turner halted at a scene and seemed inclined to sketch it, Johns produced the inviting box, and the great artist, finding everything ready to his hand, immediately began to work. As he sometimes wanted assistance in the use of the box, the presence of Johns was indispensable, and after a few days he made his oil sketches freely in our presence. Johns accompanied him always … Turner seemed pleased when the rapidity with which those sketches were done was talked of; for, departing from his habitual reserve in the instance of his pencil sketches, he made no difficulty of showing them. On one occasion, when, on his return after a sketching ramble to a country residence belonging to my father near Plympton, the day’s work was shown, he himself remarked that one of the sketches (and perhaps the best) was done in less than half an hour.9
According to a member of the Turner family, Turner called on his relations in Barnstaple during his West Country travels. He also visited his uncle Price Turner, who lived in Exeter. Uncle Price thought his son Thomas had artistic talent and was told by his brother, William Turner senior, to get the boy to make some drawings to show JMWT. Turner called at the Price Turners but apparently offered no encouragement to young Thomas, whose talents lay elsewhere. In fact, Turner back in London reverted to his customary reclusiveness where his Devon relatives were concerned. When Thomas Price Turner came to London in 1834 to sing in the chorus at a Handel commemoration concert, he called twice on his famous cousin before getting to see him. On the third occasion, the painter gave him a cool reception and didn’t even ask him to sit down.
Turner’s souvenirs of the West Country included the lovely ink-and-wash drawing of Berry Pomeroy, which he did for the Liber series – the castle misty in the distance to the right; a frail wooden bridge over a stream; a Turner-out-of-Claude tree almost centre stage, with more boskiness behind and to the sides. Although some of the oil sketches done with the aid of Johns’s box were seen by the ladies at the Mount Edgcumbe picnic, they seem to have disappeared afterwards into his Queen Anne Street stockpile. It was of course the Southern Coast commission which had set him off, and the watercolours he did over a number of years for this – with London, not Devon, water – were important products of these tours. In these, by his now experienced alchemy, the shorthand of his sketches was transformed with brilliant colour and energetic line into full-fledged visions. They were done on white paper, about ten inches by seven and a half – slightly smaller than his usual practice. The play of light, the movement of clouds and trees, the placing of people at work in fields or on beaches, were for the most part called up in his studio from the store of images and data in his well-stocked imagination. He brought the Devon weather on to his paper. His brush evoked dewy grass, damp air, hazy sun.
His watercolour methods involved both a production line and a kind of baptism by immersion. At one point the painter W. L. Leitch observed Turner working on several watercolours at once. First, he pencilled in light outlines. Then ‘he stretched the paper on boards and, after plunging them into water, he dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout the work. His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out highlights and dragged, hatched, and stippled until the design was finished. This swiftness … enabled Turner to preserve the purity and luminosity of his work, and to paint at a prodigiously rapid rate.’10 The boards to which the paper was attached had handles at the back to facilitate plunging them into water-filled pails. Turner washed in the principal hues on one and while it dried began similar washes of groundwork on the next, so the first would be ready for finishing by the time the fourth drawing had been ‘laid-in’. In some watercolours that came from his West Country tours, he painted for himself alone, not for engravers: Hulks on the Tamar: Twilight,11 for example, where detail and ‘finish’ have been forgotten and hues and shapes are everything.
Turner liked conceiving things in groups as well as doing things in bunches and series. The boy who had become an only child seemed to want to surround himself with families of pictures, almost protective phalanxes. One view of something was rarely enough; he needed different aspects of it, at different times of day, in different moods or atmospheres – such as calm and storm. One river or bridge was insufficient; he had to have many bridges, many rivers. And then he didn’t like them separated, as pictures most often are when sold to individual buyers. Once again: ‘What is the use of them except together?’ Engravings were therefore valuable to him since they made a sequential record; and Turner’s willingness to tackle large groups of related subjects made him the perfect illustrator for print publishers like the Cookes and Charles Heath, who kept on dreaming up new series of ‘Views’ for what they hoped – somewhat recklessly – was an ever-expanding market. After the Southern Coast, for instance, the Cookes decided to do a series called The Rivers of Devon. Turner did them four watercolours, from which engravings were made, but the project did not reach publication stage.
The greatest single memento of his Devon days was Crossing the Brook – a title he purloined from Henry Thomson RA, whose 1803 picture of that name had been bought by Sir John Leicester. In his studio, sketchbooks lay on a table near at hand, ready to consult. On his easel, a tall stretched canvas, roughly six feet high and five and a half feet wide, faced him in the mornings as he stood there at work: brush to paint to canvas, brush to paint to canvas, over and over again. Much of
the scene – the low valley receding gently out of the foreground hills; the winding river spanned by a high, multi-arched bridge; the soft Tamar countryside with its thick mantle of woods; the horizon at mid-height with a hint of distant sea – is assembled from his recent tours. In the immediate foreground is the brook, which here widens to a shallow pool. A young woman leans against a large block of stone, which may be part of an old bridge. Her feet are ankle-deep in the water and she looks back at an unkempt dog which is loyally following her across the brook, bearing her hat in its mouth. Five or six yards away on the right a girl sits at the water’s edge, pensively watching – behind her, a little lane leads into a dark tunnel formed by overhanging trees. On the left, out of deep shadows rises one of Turner’s trees – hard to imagine he had never been to Italy – which was now almost his trademark, though still an act of homage to Claude. It is tall, slim and sinuously trunked, lacking boughs until it branches out in a broad-brimmed mass at the top. A less emphatic sister tree stands behind it. The two trees reach into the luminous sky above the two young women.
When they got to see the picture, Turner’s Devon companions claimed knowledge of many of the elements. Redding wrote: ‘Meeting him in London one morning, he told me that if I would look in at his gallery I should recognize a scene I well knew, the features of which he had brought back from the west.’ Part of the foreground, thought Redding, was taken from a spot near New Bridge on the Tamar.12 He felt proud to have been part of its making. Eastlake looking at the same scene said with his own sense of attachment, ‘The bridge is Calstock Bridge.’13 Others believed they saw a resemblance to Turner’s daughter Evelina in the girl sitting on the edge of the brook. Evelina was thirteen in the winter of 1814–15, when the picture was probably painted. (Georgiana was then only three years old.) The young woman paddling on the left is too old to have been modelled by Evelina. As for the dog, was it Eastlake’s aunt’s?
Although Crossing the Brook received high praise from most viewers when shown at the Academy in 1815, Sir George Beaumont, as we shall see, did not like it. And though it was more spacious than any Claude, Crossing the Brook did not sell. In 1818 Turner quoted prices for it and Frosty Morning to the Norfolk banker and antiquarian Dawson Turner: 550 guineas for Crossing the Brook, 350 guineas for Frosty Morning. But the other Turner didn’t take the bait. (He did, however, buy a set of the Liber.) Much later, in 1845, the artist thanked Dawson Turner for a generous comment on Crossing the Brook and added, ‘Thank Heaven which in its kindness has enabled me to wade through the Brook’ – of life, one supposes. He concluded, referring to the painting, ‘it I hope may continue to be mine – it is one of my children’.14 Kept in his gallery, it was despite his possessiveness in fact looked after by him like one of his children – with lofty indifference.
Soon there were other commissions, other parts of Britain, and much water that wasn’t always nicely confined in brooks and rivers. He was in the north of England in the torrentially wet summer of 1816, sketching subjects for a History of Richmondshire, staying with his friends the Fawkeses, and travelling hundreds of miles in mud and rain; but this will be looked at in detail in Chapter 12. In the following summer of 1817 he had already been across the Channel, to Waterloo and up the Rhine, when he journeyed north again, staying with the Fawkeses near Leeds and calling at Raby Castle, the Earl of Darlington’s seat, to do some sketches for a commissioned oil painting. He went to Durham for another local history for which he had been asked to make illustrations. There was more travelling ‘deep strewed paths and roads of mud to splash in and be splashed’.15 His touring equipment generally included an umbrella. Samuel Rogers, the poet-banker, recalled an occasion when Turner left his umbrella behind at a dinner in town. ‘He was very anxious about it as it was the one he used when out sketching. Mr [Charles] Babbage returned it, who had taken it in mistake for his own. It was a very shabby one, and in the handle (like a bayonet) there was a dagger quite two feet long.’16
Scotland saw him in late October 1818. He went on assignment: to make sketches for thirteen drawings for the Provincial Antiquities of Scotland, for which the author Walter Scott was providing the text. Turner stayed in Edinburgh and its vicinity for several weeks, hard at work, and didn’t go out of his way to sweet-talk the local arts folk. Jane Schetky, whose brothers were both painters, reported in a letter, ‘Turner breakfasted with us, and was very gracious; he saw Alick’s pictures and mine, and condescended to praise my copies of Havell. We are all, however, provoked at the coldness of his manner. We intended to have a joyous evening on his arrival, but finding him such a stick, we did not think the pleasure of showing him to our friends would be adequate to the trouble and expense.’17 Turner evidently didn’t want to be lionized by the Scots. According to Miss Schetky, he further displeased the Edinburgh portrait painter William Nicolson, who prepared a feast for Turner and invited ‘ten fine fellows to make merry with him’. Turner didn’t show up.18
In August 1822 he was again in Edinburgh. On this occasion he had a busy social life. He met the architect Charles Cockerell, dined with Henry Raeburn the portrait painter, and went to banquets and church services. One has the impression that this time he did want to be noticed, and in particular by George IV, king since 1820. A royal ceremonial progress was being made in Scotland, and Turner planned twenty pictures for engraving. William Collins RA was on the quay at Leith when the royal yacht, the Royal George, sailed in and Collins was surprised to find Turner there too. Like the King, Turner had made the trip by sea, since another commission he was gathering material for was the Cooke venture dealing with English rivers and ports, and he took the opportunity to reconnoitre the east coast of England by way of the boat from London to Leith.
Although nothing directly came from the ceremonial-visit drawings, Turner’s time was not wasted. Some sketches provided the groundwork for title-page vignettes he did for Scott’s Provincial Antiquities. Two oil paintings, never finished, depicted the King at the Lord Provost’s dinner and a service in St Giles’s Cathedral. Instead of helping create a published record of the King’s Scottish progress, he took up a royal commission in 1823 that Sir Thomas Lawrence helped him acquire: to supply St James’s Palace with one of several paintings celebrating the success in battle of the House of Hanover. Turner was to do another Trafalgar for the King’s Levée Room. As usual, he got stuck into the research. He borrowed drawings of ships which had fought in the battle from John Christian Schetky, now the King’s Marine Painter in Ordinary and handily placed at the Naval Academy in Portsmouth. (Schetky had accompanied the King on his Scottish progress and presumably met Turner then.) Schetky now offered him sketches of the Temeraire but Turner needed a specific view of the Victory, ‘three-quarter bow on starboard side’.19 He looked up his sketches for the painting he had done of the battle in 1806. He revisited the Medway and sketched details of warship hulls, spars and rigging.20
He had been down to Portsmouth in June 1814 when the then Prince Regent had attended a naval review in Spithead, that splendid protected anchorage for Britain’s wooden walls. The Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia, Britain’s allies in the last stage of the Napoleonic struggle, were guests to view the fleet and attend a ‘collation’ in the great cabin of the Impregnable. Turner, afloat in a small boat, was on hand, enjoying himself as a reporter, listing the names of the ships and their captains, and making light, rapid sketches of the vessels.21 The results seem meagre. But then many of his sketches were the merest jottings: the bare bones of a possible picture; a few quick lines to prompt in the studio his recall of a scene, which he could generally conjure up in as much colourful complication as he wanted. Yet sometimes fairly simple sketches were more than rudimentary in effect, for example a landscape in one of his ‘Devon Rivers’ sketchbooks22 where a few pencil lines of varying weight and emphasis suffice to suggest wonderful recession. And sometimes he felt the need to use his time on the spot to make detailed, even elaborate, pencil or pen drawings, like that of Chris
tchurch Abbey in Hampshire,23 or precise studies of plants, weeds and flowers,24 done for his satisfaction at the moment.
Some of his southern country excursions in the decade from 1810 in Kent and Sussex were for oil-painting commissions, and in several sketchbooks he made panoramic views of Rosehill Park, the home of the member of Parliament and Jamaica landowner John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller; the oils followed the drawings closely, conveying the soft folds of the Sussex downland. Where the landscape offered him the slightest opening, he showed glimpses of the sea. Except in Yorkshire, he gives the impression of following every brook and river to the coast, the seaside, to sketch the new Martello towers and old castles, to draw the fishing boats that were moored in harbours or pulled up on beaches. He was constantly attracted to Hastings, Deal, Ramsgate and Margate – particularly the last. It was as if he knew it had not only been part of his childhood but had a further role to play in his life. He was going to continue to visit it and sketch there until he found out what that role was.
In the lists he made in his sketchbooks of what to take on his tours, one item often figures among the painting kit and clothes: ‘Fishing Rod’. Wherever Turner first baited a hook and dropped it into the water – on the Thames foreshore below the Strand, upriver at Brentford while living with his uncle and aunt Marshall, or off the beach at Margate – the pastime caught him; he was an angler for life. One reason he wanted to live beside the Thames was so that he could go fishing. One of the attractions of country-house commissions was that natural lakes or architect-designed ponds were an essential part of the scenery, nicely enhancing the landscape but also usefully stocked with tench, pike and carp. When he visited Tabley Hall in the summer of 1808, another visitor, Henry Thomson RA, told Callcott (who told Farington) that Turner’s ‘time was occupied in fishing rather than painting’.25 Most likely, Turner, up at dawn, had done his sketching and drawing and then gone fishing by the time Thomson got up and noticed.
J.M.W. Turner Page 24
