J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  How deeply he felt the loss of Fawkes was shown in the fact that he never went to Farnley again, despite remaining in close touch with Hawksworth Fawkes. Around 1817 he had painted a swirling colour study50 in preparation for a watercolour showing the loss of a man-of-war, maybe to be a companion of the First Rate taking in Stores; and at some point after Fawkes’s death he inscribed the study, ‘Begun for Dear Fawkes of Farnley’.51 A decade after Fawkes died Turner was sketching in the Alps with Hugh Munro when, one day in the Aosta valley, Munro found one of his companion’s partly used sketchbooks in his own luggage. Munro gave it to Turner. Turner looked it over and then, without a word, handed it back to Munro; he clearly wanted Munro to keep it. The sketchbook had a number of blank leaves, presumably why Hannah had packed it for him to bring on the tour, but those pages that had been drawn on contained sketches from his last Farnley visit. Usually he was as possessive as can be about such work. This time he didn’t want reminding about all that Fawkes and Farnley had been to him.

  Notes

  1 Hill, In Turner’s Footsteps, p.17. Newby Lowson, Turner’s travelling companion on that tour, may have brought Turner and Fawkes together.

  2 Farington, Diary, 4 November 1812.

  3 Hill, In Turner’s Footsteps, pp.17, 126n.

  4 Leitch/Huish, TS, 5, 2, p.26.

  5 Letters, p.227.

  6 Ibid., p.203.

  7 Th. 1877, p.237.

  8 Ibid., p.239.

  9 Edith Fawkes, typescript in National Gallery, cited by Wilton, p.114. Th. 1877, p.239, has Turner ‘tearing up the sea with his eagle-claw of a thumb-nail’; Hill, Turner’s Birds, p.20, suggests that Turner kept his left thumb-nail long in order ‘to scratch at the paper on which he was painting’.

  10 Harper, ‘Memoirs’, Walker’s Monthly, no.10 (October 1928), p.2.

  11 Ian Warrell, Turner in the North of England, 1797.

  12 Th. 1877, p.139.

  13 Farington, Diary, 20 December 1817.

  14 Finberg, p.242.

  15 Ibid., p.243.

  16 Letters, pp.67, 70.

  17 TB CXLVIII.

  18 Finberg, p.244.

  19 TB CXXVIII, TB CXLIX.

  20 Finberg, p.244.

  21 Letters, p.68.

  22 TB CLII.

  23 Letters, pp.68–70.

  24 Th. 1877, p.191.

  25 Harper, ‘Memoirs’, Walker’s Monthly, no.10 (October 1928), p.2. See also Th. 1877, p.238, which – inaccurately – has Turner landing at Hull from his Rhenish tour and going straight to Farnley. Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe, p.26.

  26 Letters, p.71.

  27 Finberg, p.253; Forrester, pp.136–7.

  28 Ibid., pp.274, 288.

  29 TB CLIII.

  30 TB CXXII f.4.

  31 Finberg, p.292.

  32 TS, 5, 2, p.26.

  33 Farington, Diary, 29 April 1818.

  34 Whitley, 1800–20, pp.294–5.

  35 Finberg, p.258.

  36 Carey, Memoirs, p.147.

  37 Farington, Diary, 10 July 1796.

  38 Lindsay, pp.138–9, 239 n.12.

  39 TB CXX Z.

  40 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 3, XXVIII.

  41 Th. 1877, p.292.

  42 Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape, pp.17, 347.

  43 Lindsay, p.141.

  44 Ibid.

  45 TB CXXIII.

  46 TB CLIV: ‘Farnley’ sheets, 1816 and later.

  47 Hill, Turner’s Birds, pp.12, 26 n.16. Finberg, p.287, says that Turner was not at Farnley in 1823; evidently a mistake.

  48 Finberg, p.291.

  49 Letters, pp.96–8.

  50 TB CXCVI Y.

  51 Perkins, Third Decade, p.29.

  13: The Squire of Sandycombe

  A letter of 29 June 1815 to James Holworthy is tersely eloquent:

  Dear Sir

  I am very sorry I cannot avail myself of your kindness today as I must go to Twickenham, it being my father’s birthday.

  Yours most truly

  J M W Turner

  Thursday morning1

  It was in fact William Turner’s seventieth birthday.

  Whatever our uncertainty about the depths of Turner’s affection for his mother, there is no doubt about the love he had for his father. ‘The old man’ had encouraged him in his ambitions. Since William Turner had retired from hairdressing he had been his son’s Man Friday in picture-making, stretching his canvases, varnishing the finished products, running errands and minding the ‘shop’. The house Turner built at Twickenham as his own retreat was also a retirement home for his father, where Turner senior could garden and enjoy his old age.

  Turner had bought the land in May 1807, when he was living at Harley Street and Hammersmith. It was a large, triangular plot in an area called Sand Pit Close, not far from the river and Richmond Bridge. He seems to have paid £100 for the ground and hoped to put up a house for £400. Soon he was spending a good deal of time pipe-dreaming and planning. Several sketchbooks used in the years 1810–12 contain figurings about the construction and workings out of the cost of labour and materials. He drew numerous ground plans and elevations. In one sketchbook2 he made a list: ‘4 Chimney pieces. 7 Best Doors – 2 got. 8 Common Doors. 12 Windows. 5 Attic Windows – 2 got. 2 Pr. of F [French?] Window Doors – outward doors.’ His favoured house design had an Italian Alpine chalet look about the roof, with broad, overhanging eaves that would create strong shadows on the walls beneath. One version had a prominently roofed porch at the rear of the house, where the ground sloped down past a pond toward the south-east – towards the rising sun. From upstairs, as a climb up a ladder or into a tree may have told him, there would be glimpses of the river.

  When staying at Farnley, or travelling on tour, he continued to think about the new house. He outlined the plot; he indicated where he would plant the building; he sketched an enlarged pond. He worked out the dimensions of rooms and sketched designs for such features as an Adam-influenced mantel- and chimney-piece. Altogether he drew more than twenty small plans for his villa and nearly fifty elevations. The delights of ownership were enhanced by the thrill of being his own architect, and seeing the results. However, in architecture as in art he began with models furnished by others: pattern books; designs for ornamented cottages shown at the Royal Academy; the work of architect contemporaries. He wanted a small house that sat nicely on the sloping ground. He liked symmetry and neo-classical formality. His old mentor Dr Monro had a cottage at Fetcham with overhanging eaves and a Palladian treatment of the windows. His friend and fellow professor Soane was probably bothered for advice, though Soane would have been pleased to help: he thought highly of Turner’s skills in this field; talking of Turner’s architectural drawings that had been used to illustrate the Perspective lectures, he had called them ‘dangerous models of excellence’.3

  Turner seems also to have been his own contractor, hiring and organizing the tradesmen and artisans, and like most owner-builders he was apparently worn down by this. The nervous disorder and stomach weakness he had complained about to Farington on 4 November 1812 may well have been the result of having to deal with his workmen. In the sketchbooks he noted the costs of landscaping: ‘100 Planting. 20 Garden. 40 Pond.’4 He reckoned up the labour costs, ‘Tayler Wages. 11 weeks 17.10’, which was 3s 1d a day, slightly over the three-shillings rate recommended in builders’ pattern books of the time. Characteristically he estimated the interest he was forgoing on the sum spent on the property – £30 – and this, with the annual rates of £20, meant the place would lose him about £50 a year. He eventually also concerned himself with the materials used for house-painting, jotting down what seems to be a recipe for distemper:

  4 Pounds of Roman Vitriol

  A Kettle of Boiling Water

  2 Pounds of Peat Ash

  ¼ of Yellow Arsenic makes a good green, for walls equal to oil5

  The house – in brick, stucco and slate – went up in the course of 1812. In July 1813 it firs
t appeared in the rate books. It had a small central two-storey block and on each side a small one-storey wing with rounded outer corners and sunken panels to give variety to the walls. It was smaller than many of the designs had suggested; it lacked the large roofed porch he had considered for the back, but an iron balcony outside the central French windows gave access to the garden. A ‘triglyph-band’ of brickwork, a sort of cornice, ran across the main gable-end from eave to eave. Inside, the rooms were small, though the domed entrance hall was nicely proportioned and detailed, with arches, fluted mouldings, and expensive glasswork for the front door. An elegant staircase curved up beneath an oval skylight, like the stairs in Soane’s townhouse facing Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The main sitting room, overlooking the garden, seems to have been the studio, where he painted in the morning light. The large bedroom above it (one of two rooms upstairs) also seems to have been his. The smaller bedroom at the front was his father’s. In the basement were storage rooms, a little informal dining room and the kitchen. A lane ran down the long north-eastern side of the garden towards Richmond Bridge. The garden itself had many shrubs and trees – willows, chestnuts, hawthorn, an oak – in and out of which blackbirds flew.

  ‘Solus Lodge’ he first called it; it was for life without Sarah Danby – his Dido left behind. He gave this and Queen Anne Street as his addresses in the 1814 RA catalogue. His surly, reclusive urge was being indulged – even advertised. But his mood lightened; the house was finished, furnished; friends came to call. His father enjoyed life there: memories of an upbringing in a Devon village had never faded despite his years in the hubbub of Covent Garden, and in Twickenham he was closer to the soil. Turner senior may have been brought in on the debate for an alternative to ‘Solus Lodge’ and as chief gardener promoted the sandy hillocks round about as the basis for a new and more picturesque name. The house had become ‘Sandycombe Lodge’ when Turner wrote to Ambrose Johns in Plymouth in October 1814. About this time Turner’s colleague William Havell sat in the garden and did a watercolour of the house for an engraving in W. B. Cooke’s Thames Scenery that was entitled Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham, the Seat of JMW Turner RA.

  ‘The Seat’! Turner must have relished that. All sorts of impulses and influences were gathered here. Some thought Sandycombe represented his idea of a nobleman’s fishing lodge. Some detected an act of homage in miniature to Alexander Pope’s riverside mansion in Twickenham, demolished in 1807; he had felt strongly about its decay and disappearance, with a draft of verses about Pope’s ‘lost fane’ appearing on the back of one of his sketch plans for Sandycombe,6 and a lovely sad painting, Pope’s Villa During Its Delapidation. But Sandycombe was also a statement of success: his own Thames villa, just across the river from where Sir Joshua Reynolds had had his suburban residence in Richmond. It was not far from Isleworth or indeed from Brentford, where as a small boy with great dreams he had first enjoyed these reaches of the Thames. He enjoyed as well the artistic reverberations that had already affected so many of his river works. He would not have needed telling by the Copper-plate Magazine that the view from Richmond Bridge was ‘one of the richest landscapes that nature and art ever produced, strongly reminding the connoisseur … of some of the best performances of Claude Lorrain’.7

  Life at Sandycombe for father and son was largely without frills. There might be Grecian statue-niches on the staircase, and a piece by Chantrey – Paul at Iconium – placed above the black marble fireplace in the formal dining room, but other prominent and less fancy objets were models of ships in glass cases, with their sky backgrounds and sea platforms painted by their owner, who sometimes consulted the shape and rigging of the vessels when working up a marine canvas. The eldest Trimmer boy, Henry Syer Trimmer, recalled visits to Twickenham:

  I have dined with him at Sandycombe Lodge, when my father happened to drop in, too, in the middle of the day. Everything was of the most modest pretensions; two-pronged forks, and knives with large round ends for taking up the food; not that I ever saw him so use them, though it is said to have been Dean Swift’s mode of feeding himself. The table-cloth barely covered the table, and the earthenware was in strict keeping. I remember his saying one day, ‘Old Dad,’ as he called his father, ‘have you not any wine?’ Whereupon Turner senior produced a bottle of currant, [concerning] which Turner, smelling, said, ‘Why, what have you been about?’ The senior, it seemed, had rather overdone it with hollands [that is, spiked it with gin], and it was set aside. At this time Turner was a very abstemious person.8

  Turner’s colleague, the sculptor Francis Chantrey, was often at Sandycombe. Chantrey, who had married his cousin, a wealthy Twickenham girl, had also had a humble start, working as a grocer’s boy in Sheffield; he had been bald because of an illness since he was twenty-one. Chantrey and Turner often went fishing during these visits; it seems likely that Turner continued to keep his boat at Isleworth. Other artists and friends came to call. John Pye, who engraved Pope’s Villa, was ‘feasted’ with the simple fare of cheese and porter.9 The Wellses came, bringing others. A close friend of the Wells family and collector of drawings, H. Elliott, who worked as a private secretary in the War Office, seems to have been devoted to Clara Wells. In July 1813 Elliott wrote to another of Clara’s admirers, Robert Finch (who owned two Turners, a watercolour and drawing), about a water-trip up the Thames:

  one of the most delightful days I have ever spent – everything went off well, & there was no drawback to our enjoyment. Our four-oared boat just held our party of 17, consisting of the Wells’s, Herbsts, Miss Perks, Turner, Wilson, Thos, Chas & Jas Wheeler, Edward & I. The six last only rowed, Wilson all the way there & back, Edw & I provided one oar between us, & the Wheelers for the other two. We dined in a beautiful part of Ham Meadows upon half-made hay, under the shade of a group of elms near the river, & had coffee and tea at Turner’s new house. Miss Perks took a guitar and Edward a flute & we had a great deal of music & singing … we had good veal & fruit pies, beef, salad, &c – but our table cloth being spread on the short grass in a lately mown field we reposed after the Roman fashion on triclinia composed of the aforesaid hay …10

  Elliott, a year later, described Clara as lively and unreserved and accustomed to treat her men friends like brothers. He wrote to Finch that some common people might have thought when they saw her together with a man that ‘there was a flirtation between them. But so might they say of you the next half hour, of me the next, of Turner the next, of Wilson the next …’ Turner undoubtedly felt close to Clara, and she to him, though of her many suitors it was Thomas Wheeler, a surgeon, whom she married. She and Turner kept in touch, but he saw her less often as time passed. Clara alluded to her feelings for Turner in a letter to Elliott in 1853: ‘I am sure no two persons (man and wife excepted) ever knew each other to the heart’s core better than we did – but enough, it is dangerous to open memory’s flood gates.’11 But, if it was dangerous for her, there seems a good possibility that Clara – about twenty-eight years old to Turner’s forty in 1815 – was attracted to Turner, perhaps even more than he was to her.

  A letter from Turner in Queen Anne Street to the Reverend Trimmer (on holiday in Southwold) of 1 August 1815, just before the artist set off for Farnley, may refer to Clara. Turner first complained that he wasn’t using his Twickenham place enough; he had been forced to return to town the day he had gone out to his retreat. ‘Sandycombe sounds just now in my ears as an act of folly, when I reflect how little I have been able to be there this year, and less chance (perhaps) for the next in looking forward to a Continental excursion, & poor Daddy seems as much plagued with weeds as I am with disappointments, that if Miss — would but wave bashfulness, or – in other words – make an offer instead of expecting one – the same might change occupiers …’12 But, more likely, the unnamed woman was interested in taking over Sandycombe from its proprietor, then suffering the not uncommon worries of a second-home owner who is too often prevented from getting to his little place in the country.

  Yet Sandyco
mbe came into its own on at least one occasion for entertaining some of his fellow Academicians. Turner was a stalwart member of the Academy Club, whose subscription cost two guineas a year and had gatherings at which red wine negus was the principal drink. (Joseph Nollekens used to steal the nutmegs needed for the negus on these get-togethers. One day, when the second bowl of negus was being made, the nutmegs were found to be missing. Rossi asked Nollekens to see if they had fallen under the table, at which ‘Nollekens actually went crawling beneath upon his hands and knees pretending to look for them, though at that very time they were in his waistcoat pocket.’)13 The Club frequently took to the water, downriver to Greenwich for a whitebait dinner in May, or upriver for a summer excursion. In July 1819 its members went afloat from Westminster Bridge in the Board of Ordnance’s barge or shallop with ten professional oarsmen to do the rowing; the weather, starting bleak, improved. Farington recorded:

  The river was a scene of much gaiety from the display of City Barges and Pleasure Boats. We stopped at Barnes, and in the boat had a loaf and cheese while the Boatmen had fare in the Inn. We then proceeded to the Eel Pie House at Twickenham, where we landed, a little after 3 o’clock and about 4 we sat down to excellent fare brought from the Freemasons Tavern under the management of a Clever Waiter.

  We dined in the open air at one table and removed to another to drink wine and eat fruit. Everything went off most agreeably.

  Before 7 o’clock we again embarked and rowed down the river, the tide in our favour, and a full moon. Turner and Westmacott were very loquacious on their way back …14