Haydon – in his calmer moments not unmindful of Beaumont’s generosity – called him ‘a tall, well bred handsome man with a highly intellectual air’.19 C. R. Leslie thought him ‘a very delightful person’, although he later wrote that this ‘sincere friend to the Arts’ was in many respects ‘a mistaken one’.20 Sir George’s range of taste in art was fairly narrow. He had a high opinion of his own connoisseurship, an opinion which struck some as conceit. Northcote, not taken up by Sir George, said the baronet was ‘all for fashion and novelty, took people up and then dropped them’.21 Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet’s long-suffering sister, found the Beaumonts ‘so good and kind-hearted’.22 And they certainly dropped neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth during the long estrangement between those former friends. Sir George in a lasting act of generosity left many of the masterpieces in his collection – including his beloved Hagar – to the nation, as part of the basis for a National Gallery. Haydon was moved at hearing of Sir George’s death in 1827 and praised his love of art, while not ignoring his weaknesses, especially as they seemed to apply to B. R. Haydon: ‘His great defect was a want of moral courage; what his taste dictated to be right he would shrink from asserting if it shocked the prejudices of others or put himself to a moment’s inconvenience. With great benevolence he appeared, therefore, often mean; with exquisite taste he seemed often to judge wrong; and with a great wish to do good he often did a great deal of harm.’23 Sir Walter Scott at the same time called Sir George ‘by far the most sensible and pleasing man I ever knew – kind, too, in his nature, and generous – gentle in society, and of those mild manners which tend to soften the causticity of the general London tone of persiflage and personal satire’.24
Did Sir George have a genuine case against Turner – a case based on something other than a personality conflict? The fact that he had not been with the vanguard of those who encouraged the young Turner, and had not been able to make a protégé of him, may have had a bearing on his attitude. Despite his high Tory politics, Sir George appeared sympathetic to the new emphasis on personal feelings and inner vision that swayed Wordsworth and Coleridge, and was labelled Romantic; why didn’t he care for it in Turner too? Wordsworth wrote, in Resolution and Independence (published 1807):
All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops; – on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.
Turner’s work of this time, particularly his watercolours, strikes a similar note of gladness at creation, though with hints of the possibility of what Wordsworth in a following stanza saw as the final despondency and madness poets (and presumably all artists) were subject to. Defending Wordsworth against the strictures of the critics of the Edinburgh Review, Sir George showed that he had accepted Coleridge’s notion that a new and original writer had to form the taste by which he was to be appreciated. Sir George said to Farington: ‘All men who write in a new superior stile must create a people capable of fully relishing their beauties.’25
That he could not see Turner in the same light, as an artist needing to create an audience to understand him, may have been because his own knowledge of traditional painting got in the way. He, George Beaumont, was an artist. He knew how it should be done. He could see that Turner was no longer dedicated to eighteenth-century clarity and precision; he was – as the prescient Hazlitt had noted – beginning to pursue the unclear, the indefinite, the imprecise (all of which were of course harder to get at and render, but Sir George did not give credit for that). Turner had stopped trying to be an old master and was, on his own terms, seeking to be a new one. To Sir George’s mind, it seemed that Turner was doing harm ‘by endeavouring to make painting in oil to appear like watercolours, by which attempting to give lightness and clearness the force of oil painting has been lost’.26 In the Dido building Carthage, Turner’s liberal use of yellows bothered some critics at the time, and Sir George was not alone in finding the colouring ‘discordant’. Lawrence and other colleagues at the Academy told Turner that something was wrong, and Turner seems to have agreed. During one of the varnishing days that had been established in 1809 for artists to put final touches on their pictures hanging in Somerset House, he altered the picture, painting an entirely new sky, according to Trimmer, and making the sun white rather than yellow.
Although the Dido building Carthage was ranked by Robert Hunt, in the Examiner, beside the best works of Poussin, Rubens and Claude, its 1817 sequel led Hunt to complain of ‘the false splendour’ of its colouring.27 Turner’s second study in imperial ambition would have won him the prize for longest title, had there been such a trophy: The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire – Rome being determined on the Overthrow of her Hated Rival, demanded from her such Terms as might either force her into War, or ruin her by Compliance; the Enervated Carthaginians, in their Anxiety for Peace, consented to give up even their Arms and their Children. For those hungry for more, he appended in the catalogue seven lines of his verse – ‘At Hope’s delusive smile …’ and so on. Both Carthages, rising and falling, were in his grand manner, and their frames functioned as prosceniums: Carthage looks like a stage set. The lighting is theatrical, even operatic; the curtain has just gone up and the orchestra is going full blast.
And yet Turner loved them, particularly the first of the pair. They were his classical dream writ large: the gladness of creation, the despondency of failure, hymned with all the stops out. As we have seen, he rebuffed offers for Dido building Carthage. He wanted the nation to have it (and possibly the Decline) if he wasn’t going to be rolled up in it for burial. For an artist whose figure-painting was not consistently wonderful, the figures on the waterfront of this rising Carthage are admirably done, and the dream becomes real or at least common property by way of the boys sitting at the edge of the stone quay. They watch their toy boat – properly rigged for the Mediterranean with a lateen sail – sail across the harbour basin, while Dido turns aside from supervising the construction works to glance their way, as if seeing in them the hopeful future of her new city. The morning sun glints in long beams down the crowded harbour towards us. But when this painting is hung alongside a similar subject by Claude, as Turner also wanted, we see the inherent restlessness that was in Turner and not in Claude; and which Sir George was perhaps reacting to when he talked of Turner ‘perpetually aiming to be extraordinary’. Turner’s truly great performances came when he did not try so hard to outdo and update his idol.
Turner’s response to criticism was, as we might expect, rarely uniform. Ruskin was later given the impression that his enthusiastic commentaries weren’t read by their subject. Earlier, Turner had thanked writers such as John Taylor for their remarks. At this time, when he was forty or so, he was used to praise and blame; sometimes he greeted both with a grunt or a shrug; but on other occasions, according to his friend the Vicar of Heston, Henry Trimmer, critical comments brought tears to Turner’s eyes. Were these lachrymose reactions brought on by suggestions that he was tending to imbecility, as West had suggested? In 1806 James Boaden of the Oracle looked at Turner’s Schaffhausen at the Academy exhibition and declared, ‘That is madness. He is a mad-man,’ and Turner’s old supporter John Taylor, editor of the Sun, agreed. As time went on, the word ‘maniac’ cropped up. ‘Bedlam’ was mentioned.28 Sir George’s remark that Turner’s works were those of an old man who had lost his power of execution carried the implication of pre-senile dementia. In 1809 Thomas Hearne, Henry Edridge and Farington were looking at one of the Earl of Essex’s three Turners at Cassiobury Park when Hearne said, ‘The sky was painted by a mad man.’29 Perhaps the fate of Turner’s mother had become known, and the condition was assumed to be hereditary. Turner’s tears may have been of anger at such comments or of unhappine
ss that he could not forfend such madness if it was – like some nightmarish demon of Fuseli’s – waiting to embrace him.
Turner was concerned about his reputation. Talking with Farington on 17 August 1810 he complained about the use of his name in a print-publisher’s advertisement. He did not mind his name being associated with Farington’s or Hearne’s, ‘but would not have it united with the names of artists taken up accidentally and not of established respectability’. (The pomposity may well be Farington’s rather than Turner’s.) When it came to Sir George Beaumont’s attacks, he didn’t quail; they brought out the competitor in him. In 1806 Sir George had taken up the young Scottish painter David Wilkie, who did homely Dutch-type scenes – popular examples being Village Politicians and The Blind Fiddler, the latter commissioned by Sir George. The rural genre paintings of the recently deceased George Morland were also in vogue. Turner determined to show that he could produce pictures in the same category. One result was – another lengthy title – A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron, and the Price charged to the Butcher for shoeing his Poney, shown at the RA in 1807. Turner had evidently read in the papers that wartime inflation had hit the cost of iron, and had used those stalwart British characters the blacksmith and butcher to show the grassroots effect of rising prices. However, the picture could perhaps have been subtitled ‘The Painter sticking his Tongue in his Cheek, and challenging the attention given to newly fashionable Scottish Artists by Regency Patrons’.
There was gossip at this time of Sir George being made President of the once again riven Royal Academy, no doubt furthering his shocking ambitions to get Wilkie elected an Academician without first being elected an Associate. One can read Sir George’s name into a note Turner scribbled in the margin of a page of Shee’s Elements of Art: ‘It is natural that there should be more dictators than encouragers, more critics than students, more amateurs than artists.’ And next to a passage by Shee referring to the Academy’s rival, the British Institution, Turner noted: ‘to have no choice “but that of the Patron” is the very fetter upon Genius, that every coxcomb wishes to rivet but Choice should even a Beggar stand alone. This stand is mine and shall remain my own.’30
In 1814 Sir George held sway as one of the directors of the British Institution, which had offered a prize of one hundred guineas for a landscape to be a proper companion to the Old Masters. Ten days later than the date specified in the rules, and thus cleverly disqualifying himself, Turner sent in a picture which largely was an Old Master: at first sight it appeared to be a replica of Lord Egremont’s Claude, Jacob with Laban and his Daughters. (Lord Egremont was also a director of the BI and on its prize-giving jury, but didn’t turn up on the day the jury voted.) Turner called his version Apullia in Search of Appullus vide Ovid. The reference was to Ovid’s poem ‘The Transformation of Appullus’, which he had found in his edition of Anderson’s Complete Poets – in the translation therein Appullus was a ‘bold buffoon’ who mimics the motions of the wood nymphs ‘with gest obscene’ and is turned into a wild olive tree, a shrub which retains ‘the coarseness of the clown’.31 For that matter, one of the nymphs in Turner’s picture seems to be looking out at the viewer – and the prize judges – in a saucy or scornful way.
Turner’s beautifully painted near-Claude thus seems to have been a bright piece of mockery at Sir George and his cronies for their doctrinal attitudes towards contemporary art. If they wanted unoriginal Claudes, he could paint them – and tease his antagonists. But he could also – vide his Didos, his Carthages – paint scenes that showed he had read his Virgil, his Goldsmith’s Roman History, and had thought about the influence of individuals and human relationships on what had happened in the past. The British Institution gave its hundred guineas to T. C. Hofland, a not very lively landscape painter who specialized in close imitations of Claude and Poussin, Wilson and Gainsborough. Yet Hazlitt did not detect any leg-pull; he was happy with the Apullia, in which ‘all the taste and all the imagination being borrowed, his [Turner’s] powers of eye, hand, and memory are equal to anything’. And he added, ‘We could almost wish that this gentleman would always work in the trammels of Claude or N. Poussin.’32
The strained relations between the RA and BI factions were much in evidence in 1815 (a year in which the end of the great war brought about enormous financial uncertainty, with Government Funds falling in value, and prices of day-to-day goods starting to shoot up). Two years before, Turner, Robert Smirke and Callcott had declared their disapproval of the BI’s plan to display the works of Reynolds at the same time as the annual RA exhibition. Now the Academicians were worried that a BI exhibition of ‘foreign old masters’ would harm their own exhibition sales. They counter-attacked. An anonymous seventy-four-page polemic entitled A Catalogue Raisonné of the Pictures now Exhibiting at the British Institution lambasted though didn’t name the ‘pretended patrons’ – Sir George, the Reverend Holwell Carr and Richard Payne Knight – and defended Turner. Callcott was suspected of being one of the Catalogue’s authors and Walter Fawkes one of its backers. Smirke told Farington that he approved the remark in the Catalogue ‘that there had been a virulence of criticism on the pictures painted by Turner, such as should be reserved for Crime …’33
Despite these distractions, and despite the faltering sales of some of his big canvases that may have impelled him towards the engravers and watercolours, Turner’s standing in 1815–16 was immense. He had put landscape painting in the front rank. His genius and hard work had brought him fame and the money to build his gallery and, more recently, a new house near the Thames in Twickenham, and also to publish the Liber Studiorum, a fanfare for landscape, a salute for his own talents. At this moment of national victory over Napoleon, he was – as Sir George ruefully acknowledged – influential, too, among other artists. He had founded what was almost a school – ‘the White Painters’ – whose members had given up the old black and brown tones of landscape painting. ‘The Taste’ brought into being by, in particular, the Reverend William Gilpin, author of Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, disapproved of white. Gilpin thought the chalkiness of its coast made the Isle of Wight objectionable; similarly the glaciers of Savoy. Turner, using white grounds for large parts or even all of his oil paintings, as if they were watercolours on white paper, was achieving effects that offended connoisseurs brought up to consider a prospect of countryside improved if seen through a Claude Glass, which gave things a dusky-gold Old Masterish hue.
As Sir George put it, Turner was ‘misleading the Taste’ with the help of such ‘followers’ as William Havell, William Daniell and Callcott. (Sir George had criticized the ‘white look’ of Callcott’s two coast scenes shown at the Academy in 1806; seeing these, James Northcote had commented that Callcott ‘had founded himself on Turner’s manner, which several others had adopted, and “had leapt out of the frying-pan into the fire” – to avoid the appearance of oil in their pictures, they now seemed as if executed with mortar’.)34 Sir George’s BI crony Richard Payne Knight had bought several of Callcott’s works, but that may have been a deliberate ploy to advance Callcott at Turner’s expense. Callcott himself later recalled that he had been a ‘devout admirer’ of Turner’s work from the moment he saw it, though this did not prevent him from lamenting about his old hero ‘that a species of perversity induces him to court public outrage …’35
Turner and Callcott became friends – good enough friends for Callcott to know that Sarah Danby was living with Turner in 1809. They worked together on Academy Councils and committees, and were both elected to serve among the Visitors at the Academy’s new School of Painting in 1815. They sat together at the Academy dinner that year with their ally the artist James Ward, who shared with Turner a passion for Yorkshire and an interest in the sublime. Also at their table were the collectors Walter Fawkes, Sir John Swinburne and Thomas Lister Parker, another Yorkshire landowner who was a patron of Turner’s and had bought one of Callcott’s 1806 coast scenes. Turner’s influence ove
r young painters continued into the next generation. David Roberts, who came from Scotland to London in 1822, to begin as a theatre-scene painter, thought of Turner as ‘the mighty painter of the day that all spoke of, and whose works were the all-in-all to every young artist’.36 Roberts’ friend and Drury Lane and Covent Garden rival Clarkson Stanfield shared these feelings. Turner’s Carthages were lessons in colour and composition to the scene painters. Art writers in the 1820s and 1830s saw Turner’s influence in the works of Roberts and Stanfield, one in the Art-Union claiming that the brilliance of their scenery was due to colour-lessons learnt from Turner.
One of the first of Turner’s oils to be painted on a white ground was Petworth from the Lake, Dewy Morning, done for Lord Egremont in 1809; Turner had found a way of making country-house portraiture new and luminous. But white was not everything for the dean of the White Painters. Turner once told the Reverend Henry Trimmer that yellow was his favourite colour; he had more varieties of it in his studio than he had of reds, browns, blues or greens. Sir George in 1806 had observed that Turner’s colouring was now ‘jaundiced’ and we have seen how annoyed viewers were by the yellows in Dido building Carthage. In his ‘Chemistry & Apuleia’ sketchbook37 used around 1813, Turner recorded the formulations of various yellows, along with a method for waterproofing linen (possibly to keep him dry while sketching and fishing) and a description of the symptoms of and a remedy for the Maltese Plague – should he ever encounter that dread disease. Hazlitt in 1816 noted critically that Turner was putting blue and yellow paint side by side on his canvases ‘to produce the effect of green at a distance’ – a procedure Hazlitt thought ‘quackery’,38 though the Impressionists were to follow suit. The artist William Westall once spotted a yellow palm tree in a Turner picture and felt bound to approach the painter, albeit timidly.
J.M.W. Turner Page 27
