J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  In the course of his home tours, Turner displayed not only a predilection for the Elevated Pastoral but an interest in subject matter that might be called Humble Parochial. Great storms at sea, great classical setpieces and great Claudean exercises were for a moment set aside. On his travels he captured an essence of England. Although much of the work that came from those journeys rose well above the level of illustration, it provides a first-rate record of rural and provincial Britain at the time. The watercolours he did for the various series of engravings are landscapes often populated by working people: soldiers and smugglers, sailors and their women, shepherds and shepherdesses, colliers and keelmen, milkmaids and washerwomen; they are usually at their specific tasks, such as the fisherman seeking flounder and the miller mending the sails of his windmill. Others, not so hard at work, were tramps, bathers, market-shoppers and children playing. He looked only briefly at the industry that was changing the face of the North and the Midlands, and the lives of many people: in one watercolour, smoke drifting diagonally up from the chimneys of the mills and factories of Leeds provides a backdrop for a scene that suggests an attractive busyness – cloth being dried in a field; masons at work on a wall; various people on errands coming up a rutted roadway – but hardly anything oppressive or satanic. In another, a little less oblique in its approach to the Industrial Revolution, nightfall at Dudley with a new moon discloses flames as well as smoke from a chimney, but the artist still finds charm in a rather dingy waterway and barges moored bow to stern along the right bank, where a white tow-horse is being tended after its day’s labour.

  The writers of the time did a better job than the artists of portraying the massive changes happening in Britain. Turner was no Elizabeth Gaskell or Charlotte Brontë, or Disraeli even. His references to the new age are generally either tangential or almost commemoratively rueful, as we will see when he paints the Temeraire and the Great Western Railway. Although he registered signs of change, he was not the illustrator equivalent of an impartial social historian. He was clearly happier in the persisting British countryside. He was interested in its livestock, both managed and wild: horses pulling timber wagons and coaches or carrying packs; cattle, sheep, pigs; rabbits, hares, deer; pheasants, geese, ducks, swans, woodcock, gulls; many dogs but – surprisingly given Queen Anne Street – no cats (perhaps he thought of them as suitable only for interiors). Similarly, the structures in his landscapes are for the most part of long standing: old inns, venerable castles, great country houses, ancient churches and monuments. Stonehenge was an artefact he responded to in a way that was not at all antiquarian; rather he caught its archaic immanence.

  Compared with his then far less celebrated contemporary John Constable, Turner sometimes seems a victim of his immense range and ambition. He is not satisfied with the reality of nature but has to transfigure it by brilliant colour and energetic line into an ideal. Occasionally the brilliance and energy seem to lack heart. But more often he presented observations that have the intensity of visions, caught in the moment when a cloud passes across the sun or when a shower has just dampened the grass. Watercolour was the perfect medium for such spontaneity – even if the spontaneity was hard worked for, brought about as ever in his winter studio from the shorthand of his sketches and the deep reserves of memory.

  But he could achieve similar effects in oil. Frosty Morning is a case in point: wintry sunlight, leafless trees, hard ground, rime in the furrows, a chill in the air. On a journey to Yorkshire his coach had paused; Turner had got out for a stretch and taken all that in. At his easel, all that was expressed, and more. The melancholy of a rural morning in winter is heightened by two of the figures: the young girl – Evelina perhaps – has a rabbit-stole for warmth over her shoulders, giving the viewer the strange feeling that the animal has just been shot by the man with a shotgun – her father? There is something curious and uncertain about the relationship between her and him. She stands more or less behind him but close to him, almost sheltering, though there is no contact with him. He, leaning on his gun, seems more interested in the two horses (for which the model – according to the eldest Trimmer son – was the old crop-eared bay he kept at Twickenham). Man and girl are not talking to one another but brooding separately.

  Constable’s friend and patron Archdeacon John Fisher saw Frosty Morning at the Royal Academy in 1813 and felt it was ‘a picture of pictures’. It was the only painting at the exhibition he liked better than Constable’s. Fisher wrote to his friend, ‘But then you need not repine at this decision of mine; you are a great man like Buonaparte, and are only beaten by a frost.’42 The Reverend Trimmer prized the picture, and said that Turner had once talked of giving it to him. But Turner did not part with it – it remained in the gallery, one of the painter’s favoured children.

  Notes

  1 Leslie, Inner Life, p.144.

  2 Redding, Past Celebrities, p.66.

  3 Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, i, p.198.

  4 Ibid., p.200.

  5 Fraser’s Magazine, February 1852, cited Finberg, pp.199–200.

  6 Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, i, pp.204–5.

  7 Fraser’s Magazine, February 1852, cited Finberg, pp.200–1.

  8 Ibid., pp.202, 203.

  9 Th. 1877, p.153.

  10 Gage, Colour, p.32.

  11 TB CXCVI E.

  12 Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, pp.201–2.

  13 Th. 1877, p.152.

  14 Letters, p.207.

  15 Letter to Holworthy, 21 November 1817, Letters, pp.71–2.

  16 Letter to Ruskin, quoted in Letters, p.280.

  17 Schetky, Ninety Years, pp.108–9.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid., pp.127, 129.

  20 TB CXCIX.

  21 TB CXXXVI.

  22 TB CXXXIII.

  23 TB CXXXVII.

  24 TB CXLII.

  25 Farington, Diary, 11 February 1809.

  26 Th. 1877, p.281.

  27 Ibid., p.120.

  28 Ibid. p.242.

  29 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, pp.533–5, 537. On p.533 Leslie gives the date of this incident as 1832, and on p.536 as 1834. The observant young Leslie nonetheless lets us know that Turner smoked. Note, too, how it is Charles Leslie, not Turner, who tips the boatman.

  30 Wilton, Painting and Poetry, p.163.

  31 TB CXII.

  32 Letters, p.96.

  33 Ibid., p.102.

  34 Th. 1877, p.228. Abbreviated, and punctuation altered.

  35 TB CCLXIII 339.

  36 Th. 1877, p.242.

  37 Letters, p.240.

  38 Ibid., p.205.

  39 Walton, Compleat Angler, pp.30–2.

  40 Letters, pp.108–10.

  41 TB CCXXVI f.64.

  42 B&J, no.127.

  11: Sir George Thinks Otherwise

  Turner as a natural force, as formidable as the Russian winter – that was one way of looking at him; and Archdeacon Fisher was not alone in seeing him that way. In 1815 Turner was forty. He was of all British artists the hardest to ignore. Most of the attention he received continued to be in the shape of praise. The newspaper and periodical writers generally raved about his exhibition entries. At the Academy this year four of his watercolours were joined by three oils: the 1809 Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand (so far only shown in his gallery); Crossing the Brook; and Dido building Carthage. The latter two paintings were hailed in the Champion, on 7 May 1815, as ‘achievements that raise the achievers to that small but noble group, formed of the masters whose day is not so much of today as of “all time”’. Thomas Uwins, an artist who later became an RA, went to see the exhibition at Somerset House and wrote to a friend ‘in praise of Lawrence’s portraits, of Wilkie’s “Distress for Rent”, and of that greatest of all living geniuses, Turner, whose works this year are said to surpass all his former outdoings’.1

  The following year, William Hazlitt, trained as an artist but the most perceptive literary critic of the time, mixed praise with criticism
that seemed to have been helped by a crystal ball. He called Turner ‘the ablest landscape-painter now living’. But he went on – in the Examiner – as if he was aware of how Turner was going to paint in the near future. Hazlitt thought that Turner’s

  pictures are however too much abstractions of aerial perspective, and representations not properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they were seen. They are the triumph of the knowledge of the artist, and of the power of the pencil, over the barrenness of the subject. They are pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world, or to that state of things when the waters were separated from the dry land, and light from darkness, but as yet no living thing nor tree bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the earth. All is ‘without form and void’. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing, and very like.2

  Others felt differently. Sir George Beaumont was a perfect gentleman, landowner, amateur artist, collector, member of Parliament from 1790 to 1796, and a patron usually most generous to artistic talent, but his sensibilities were rubbed the wrong way by the professional painter from Covent Garden. It was remarkable that the hero of both men was Claude Lorrain. The baronet owned – along with pictures by Poussin, Bourdon, Rubens, Rembrandt and Richard Wilson – three Claudes, one of which, Hagar and the Angel, he took everywhere with him. And yet in 1815, faced with two large, well-formed Turners – Dido building Carthage and Crossing the Brook – that showed Claude’s beneficent influence, Sir George bristled. He poured out his feelings to Farington. Of the Dido, he complained:

  The picture is painted in a false taste, not true to nature; the colouring discordant, out of harmony, resembling those French Painters who attempted imitations of Claude Lorrain, but substituting for his purity and just harmony, violent mannered oppositions of Brown and hot colours to cold tints, blues and greys: that several parts of Turner’s picture were pleasingly treated but as a whole it was of the above character.

  Of his picture Crossing the Brook, he said it appeared to him weak like the work of an Old Man, one who no longer saw or felt colour properly; it was all of pea-green insipidity. These are my sentiments said he, and I have as good a right and it is as proper that I should express them as I have to give my opinion of a poetical or any other production.3

  Sir George had early on been intrigued by what he heard of the new Covent Garden talent. He had sent John Britton to Maiden Lane on a reconnaissance, to look at the young artist’s sketches and report back to him, and he had no doubt heard from Britton that Turner had declared: ‘Tell Sir George Beaumont that I don’t show my unfinished works to anyone.’4 Sir George’s pride had perhaps been hurt by this rebuff. Yet, in 1799, he had admired Dutch Boats in a Gale. Farington reported that the baronet thought ‘very highly’ of this painting, though ‘the sky [was] too heavy and the water rather inclined to brown’.5 Sir George seemed to be straining here to find a point to criticize, since he was normally fond of – even passionate about – brown. He was celebrated for saying, ‘A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown,’ for then it would have the look of a much varnished Old Master.6 He was also reputed to have said, ‘There ought to be one brown tree in every landscape.’ (And Turner’s paintings should have made him happy on that score.) By 1803 Sir George had cooled further. He told Farington that Turner ‘finishes his distances and middle distances upon a scale that requires universal precission throughout his pictures, but his foregrounds are comparatively blots, and faces of figures without a feature being expressed’.7 The water in Calais Pier looked to him like veins in a slab of marble. The following year he agreed with Edridge that Turner ‘never painted a good sky’.8

  Sir George may have been on surer ground in 1806 when he declared that Turner ‘is perpetually aiming to be extraordinary’, though he went on, ‘but rather produces works that are capricious and singular than great’. Moreover, opined Sir George, his colouring was now ‘jaundiced’.9 At a dinner in June that year, over cold roast beef and pigeon pie, Sir George, Farington and Edridge had ‘a strong conversation on the merits of Wilson as a Landscape Painter and the vicious practise of Turner and his followers’.10 In 1811 Augustus Wall Callcott – one of the followers – talked to Farington about Sir George’s ‘continued cry against Turner’s pictures, but said Turner was too strong to be materially hurt by it. Sir George, Callcott said, acknowledged that Turner had merit, but it was of a wrong sort, and therefore on account of the seducing skill displayed should be objected to, to prevent its bad effects inducing others to imitate it’.11 And in 1812 more of the same: Sir George thought that Turner was doing ‘more harm in misleading the Taste [the art world] than any other artist … he had fallen into a manner that was neither true nor consistent. His distances were sometimes properly finished, but when he came to the foreground it bore no proportion in finishing to the distance beyond it.’12

  Yet Sir George could now and then set aside this somewhat antiquarian didacticism; he had the discernment to want to buy Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand, one of the most seductively direct seascapes Turner did at this period. According to Thornbury, Turner refused to sell it to ‘his old enemy’.13 Turner in 1810 proffered it, along with three other marine pictures, to Sir John Leicester, in a note with tiny sketches to illustrate the paintings, but it remained in his gallery.

  Some contemporaries thought Sir George’s damaging effect on Turner’s clientele was considerable. But Sir John Leicester remained a faithful purchaser – indeed, in 1818 he bought one of the four pictures Turner had advertised in his note, the 1807 Sun rising through Vapour, which Turner, in a little title above the sketch, had called ‘Dutch Boats’. At this point the Yorkshire squire Walter Fawkes was well into his long career as a Turner collector, and had in the last few years bought London, the view from Greenwich that Turner exhibited in 1809. Lord Egremont bought thirteen oils from Turner between 1806 and 1812. However, some of the dukes and earls who had given his career such a flying start had fallen away, and the new wealthy manufacturers had yet to make up the gap. Sir George’s criticism of Crossing the Brook was given as a reason why it didn’t sell. Callcott, who had not sold a picture at the Academy exhibition for three years, told Farington that Sir George Beaumont’s ‘persevering abuse of his pictures had done him harm’,14 and that Turner had suffered from the same cause. Turner had thought of not exhibiting at the RA this year, but had since changed his mind; he was ‘determined not to give way before Sir George’s remarks’. Two years later, Thomas Phillips RA talked to Farington ‘of the great injury done to Turner by the reports of Sir George Beaumont and others of his Circle. He said Holwell Carr [the Reverend W. Holwell Carr, a director of the British Institution and collector who had subscribed to the engraving of The Shipwreck], ‘speaking … of Turner’s picture of Dido building Carthage, observed that “Turner did not comprehend his art.” By such speeches Philips [sic] thought Turner was greatly injured and the sale of his works checked.’ Farington himself thought that what he considered to be Turner’s high prices were more to blame.15

  In fact, of more than seventy oils painted between 1803 and 1815, twenty-six failed to sell during the lifetime of the painter; half a dozen or so sold some years after being painted. But roughly half of his output of that twelve-year period did find a purchaser before, on, or soon after first exhibition. The main negative impact seems to have come in the years 1813–15, when none of his five big pictures sold. These were Frosty Morning, Apullia, Dido and Aeneas, Crossing the Brook and Dido building Carthage. From 1812, Snowstorm: Hannibal crossing the Alps also remained on his hands.16

  *

  Seen from Turner’s and Callcott’s point of view, Sir George seemed an ogre. For many artists, on the contrary, he was pure benevolence. He helped many young painters with gifts and commissions. He was a patron to John Jackson, son of a Yorkshire tailor, providing him with £50 a year till he gained a footing in London. He went on helping B. R. Haydon, or
dering pictures from that difficult man, even though Haydon in his megalomania insisted on painting canvases that were too big for the Beaumonts to cope with. He was one of those who generously supported J. R. Cozens in his lunacy, when Cozens – whose father Alexander had been Sir George’s drawing master at Eton – was in the care of Dr Monro for three years in the mid-1790s. He bought work by the young George Lance. He had the perception to collect more than thirty Girtin watercolours, and to show them to the young John Constable – who was, brightly, sent by his mother to see the helpful baronet. Beaumont also showed the aspiring East Anglian painter his Claude Hagar and the pictures he himself had painted, which, friends of Farington told the diarist, ‘looked like pictures painted more in imitation of pictures than of nature’.17 (But a drawing of a lady, probably his wife Margaret, shows ability, and perhaps love.) Sir George went on over many years to encourage Constable’s career, even though the artist told him that he would never put brown trees in his landscapes. (Constable thought that the passion that collectors like Beaumont had for the darkened canvases of old paintings was a threat to ‘God Almighty’s daylight’.)18 Beaumont befriended Coleridge and Wordsworth. The latter helped Sir George lay out the new gardens at his Leicestershire country seat, Coleorton. Sir George left Wordsworth a yearly pension of £100, which made up a fifth of the poet’s income.