J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  The seas in many of these seascapes could have been painted from studies of those off Margate, though the colouring of the Van Goyen was more Venetian than northern. However, The Rotterdam Ferry Boat, exhibited in 1833, was thrashing through waters remembered from his last trip to the Low Countries in 1825. Where historical fact or contemporary reality did not provide a Dutch ‘subject’, his imagination stepped in, as in two paintings of 1827 and 1844 with Port Ruysdael in their titles; this was a harbour he invented to convey his admiration for the Dutch master, though neither were very like Ruysdael, and the earlier of the two pictures, at any rate, showed that he could paint the North Sea better than Ruysdael or the Willem van de Velde who he had once claimed had made him a painter.

  But pictures with Dutch themes were only a part of his immense marine production of these years. From the age of fifty to sixty-five, between 1825 and 1840, he gave the impression of viewing the sea daily, from ashore or afloat, whether he was actually in Margate and Deal, or in Queen Anne Street listening to the rut of the waves in his head. The ‘space’ he found at Venice was in many of these seascapes, and so was the salt breeze and slapping spray of British coastal waters. No one till now had got so fully within the movement of air and water. His hours of watching and sketching had brought him into the heart of the elements, and if he had never painted a single landscape or Carthaginian picture, these seapieces would have merited for him the title of Master. He continued to be engaged by the sea’s destructive force and a good many of his marines were of storms and squalls, wrecks and ships aground. One such oil painting was his lengthily titled Life-boat and Manby Apparatus going off to a Stranded Vessel making Signal (Blue Lights) of Distress, exhibited in 1831. This may have represented a scene on the Norfolk coast near Yarmouth, where George Manby had invented his life-saving device, a mortar that fired a rope from lifeboat to craft in distress. The picture showed that he could paint in his old darker manner when he chose. From the same part of the East Anglian coast came a later watercolour, showing a sailing ship approaching Yarmouth harbour entrance through heavy seas while several groups of drenched fishermen haul small boats up the beach.17

  A number of these pictures did not have conventional subjects; human beings were often not visible in them. If they were ‘about’ anything, it was the elements and man’s place in the elemental mess, hanging on to the rigging, the bare bones of order. He went a trifle reluctantly to Scotland in 1831, to see Sir Walter Scott at his home at Abbotsford and then on tour to collect materials for the illustrations he was to make for a complete edition of Scott’s poetical works. Robert Cadell, the Edinburgh publisher, as we have seen, had told Scott that Turner would ‘insure the subscription of 8,000 [copies] – without, not 3,000’.18 Cadell paid the expenses and Turner put aside his talk of not feeling well, of having already enough appropriate Scottish drawings to work from, and of being short of time, since he wanted to make if possible a summer trip across the Channel.

  Turner declined Scott’s offer of a pony on account of what he called his ‘bad horsemanship’, 19 which seems to indicate that he had lost some of the abilities or confidence that had taken him over hill and dale in the north of England out of Farnley; but he seized the opportunity of a new steamboat service to get out to the Western Isles. From Tobermory he embarked on the Maid of Morven, bound for Staffa and Iona. However, as he wrote in a letter a number of years after the event,

  a strong wind and head sea prevented us making Staffa until too late to go on to Iona. After scrambling over the rocks on the lee side of the island, some got into Fingal’s Cave, others would not. It is not very pleasant or safe when the wave rolls right in. One hour was given to meet on the rock we landed on. When on board, the Captain declared it doubtful about Iona. Such a rainy and bad-looking night coming on, a vote was proposed to the passengers: ‘Iona at all hazards, or back to Tobermoray.’ Majority against proceeding. To allay the displeased, the Captain promised to steam thrice round the island in the last trip. The sun getting towards the horizon, burst through the rain-cloud, angry, and for wind; and so it proved, for we were driven for shelter into Loch Ulver, and did not get back to Tober Moray before midnight.20

  On Staffa, Turner, a rock-climber since youth, showed none of his horse-riding hesitation. He was one of the party that scrambled into Fingal’s Cave, where he sketched the interior. The cave, a place of Romantic pilgrimage, had been discovered in 1772 by the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, and featured in the fashionable works of Ossian – the purported ancient Gaelic epic that turned out to have been forged by the Highland-born poet and publicist James Macpherson. Turner, back home, did a vignette of the cave from within for the Scott Poetical Works. And he recorded on canvas with stormy brushstrokes the offshore scene that had prevented the Maid of Morven reaching Iona: the oncoming foul weather, the sun low on the murky horizon, the steamer plugging away from the steep-cliffed island, smoke streaming sideways in the wind. Despite the title – Staffa, Fingal’s Cave – it was the rough sea and threatening sky he was interested in.

  Although the critics generally admired this masterpiece at the 1832 RA exhibition, the picture remained in his dusty gallery until 1845, when his friend C. R. Leslie, acting as agent for Colonel James Lenox of New York, bought it for £500. But a complaint followed – and controversy thereafter. Turner asked Leslie how Colonel Lenox liked Staffa and Leslie felt bound to say that Lenox thought it indistinct. According to Thornbury, Turner replied to Leslie, ‘You should tell him indistinctness is my forte.’21 A later reading of Leslie’s letter to Lenox suggests that Leslie in fact quoted Turner as saying the ‘indistinctness is my fault’ – he perhaps felt he should take the blame because the picture’s varnish had bloomed on the sea voyage to New York. But in a sense Thornbury’s mistake was a lucky hit: indistinctness had become Turner’s forte.

  Whatever his feelings about the times in which he lived, now going with them, now harking back away from them, Turner liked steamboats. A lovely watercolour from around 1830 shows one – a paddle-steamer – bustling along perhaps towards Margate with a thunderstorm looming towards it, a slash of lightning scribed across a wall of falling rain.22 A paddle-wheel tug goes about its undertaking in the Fighting Temeraire of 1839, which will be discussed in a later chapter. Another paddle-steamer appears, more or less, in another bad-weather oil painting that demonstrated his genius for the indistinct. This was the 1842 Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, a title that went on, and on, in his inimitable fashion, making signals in shallow water, and going by the lead. The author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich. Just how much of a fiction ‘the author’ perpetrated in this tumultuous seascape is moot. Since Staffa the weather had worsened. Indeed, in the 1842 picture an Alpine storm had apparently hit the North Sea; the steamer was in an avalanche of waves, going downhill, possibly going under.

  The Reverend William Kingsley told Ruskin the story of how he took his mother (who, he claimed, knew nothing about art) to Turner’s gallery:

  As we were passing the ‘Snowstorm’, she stopped before it, and I could hardly get her to look at any other picture; she told me a great deal more about it than I had any notion of, though I have seen many sea storms. She had been in such a scene on the coast of Holland during the war. When, some time afterwards, I thanked Turner for his permission for her to see his pictures, I told him that he would not guess what had caught my mother’s fancy, and then named the picture; and he then said, ‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘my mother once went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her.’ ‘Is your mother a painter?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then she ought to have been thinking of something else.’23

  Prior to that final bit of churlishness, was he conco
cting some exciting background for Kingsley? One remembers, as he may have done, Ulysses bound to the mast to prevent him heeding the sirens’ voices. There was apparently no Ariel sailing out of Harwich at this time. But a packet of that name operated from Dover, and in 1840 had brought Prince Albert from the Continent to England. A government survey vessel, the Fairy, which had set out from Harwich, was one of a number of ships lost in a great storm that devastated the south-eastern coasts of England on Friday, 13 November 1840 (a storm which figured in David Copperfield). Turner’s wonderfully associative mind could easily have exchanged the Fairy for the Ariel, also a sprite, and from The Tempest at that! We note that he didn’t specifically state in his title that he was on board the Ariel, but says, rather differently, he ‘was in this storm’. He might have been on the beach at Margate, braced against the wind, watching the breakers roar, and perhaps watching a paddle-steamer trying to gain ground against the seas. If he had been aboard such a ship, he would have realized how impossible it would have been for any seaman to cast a lead to take soundings in the nearly terminal weather he painted.24 And yet he definitely felt that he had been in this storm. He told Ruskin, his mind again drifting quickly from one idea to another, ‘I hope I may never be out in another. Anything but snow: like the King of Sweden – anything but a bear – he wouldn’t have minded a lion; but he didn’t like a bear.’25

  The critics had their easy way with Snow Storm. The writer for the Athenaeum (14 May 1842) said derisively: ‘This gentleman has, on former occasions, chosen to paint with cream, or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant jelly, – here he uses his whole array of kitchen stuff.’ The Art Union (1 June 1842) wanted to wait for the storm to clear a little before giving a full account of the picture. One commentator claimed the picture was nothing but a mass of ‘soapsuds and whitewash’.26 Turner had by then become acquainted with the Ruskin family, and young John Ruskin got the artist’s reaction to this. ‘Turner was passing the evening at my father’s house on the day this criticism came out: and after dinner, sitting in his armchair by the fire, I heard him muttering to himself at intervals, “soapsuds and whitewash! I wonder what they think the sea’s like? I wish they’d been in it.”’27 What it was like was, as he had shown, a vortex of hurtling water and screaming air – sea and sky conjoined. He was sixty-seven when he exhibited this picture. He must have felt he was heading into the vortex.

  Yet, as was always the case with him, two poles presented themselves: calm alternated with storm. It was sometimes ‘the morning after’ as he walked the beach and saw a ship aground, small boats in attendance, anchors placed ready to try to haul her off at the next tide. He saw and sketched a peaceful and exceptional game of cricket being played at low tide on the sometimes murderous Goodwin Sands. He watched children on the beaches and sketched them flying kites, building sand castles or looking for shells and crabs. ‘Marine Dabblers’ had been a subject in the Liber and cropped up again as a faint label in a sketch in 1829–30 of small figures on a beach, along with others of Margate and its harbour.28 A painting of 1840 was called The New Moon: or ‘I’ve Lost My Boat, You shan’t have Your Hoop’. In this the children are on Margate beach – cliff and pier in the background, the smoke from a steamer’s funnel trailing into the sunset beneath the new moon, a white dog looking at a boy with a stick and a black dog scampering towards the water.

  He found another sunset scene on a beach on the other side of the Channel – women bent crab-like over the wet sands – and from it painted Calais Sands, Low Water, Poissards collecting Bait, exhibited in 1830. (After twenty-eight years, he still had Calais linked with poissards.) Any sort of fishing activity continued to catch his eye, at any time of day, whether of a catch being sold on the beach or the boats themselves at work. One immediate oil sketch, two foot by three, showed a cream-sailed cutter ghosting through the mist past a shore on which vague figures sort white shapes, presumably the morning haul. The sky above has a vivid Mediterranean-blue intensity but the small high-bowed, steep-sheered vessel is of authentic English shape.29 Many of the great number of pictures he did at this time of inshore seas and calm beaches were unpopulated and painted for his own pleasure, with no thought of exhibition. A gentle sea laps the beach in The Evening Star, painted around 1830.

  The edge of the sea formed a parallel for ‘the brink of eternity’, the closeness of which he had already felt. Hard to look at the sea without thinking of immensity, mortality, futility. And yet the beauty of it! In the 1830s, as he took the steamers to and from Margate for long weekends or summer weeks, he sometimes thought about his parents, who had first sent him there. In the summer of 1832 he finally got around to having a memorial to them erected in St Paul’s, Covent Garden:

  IN THE VAULT

  BENEATH AND NEAR THIS PLACE

  ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF

  WILLIAM TURNER

  MANY YEARS AN INHABITANT

  OF THIS PARISH, WHO DIED

  SEPTEMBER 21st 1830.

  TO HIS MEMORY AND OF HIS WIFE

  MARY ANN

  THEIR SON I. M. W. TURNER R.A.

  HAS PLACED THIS TABLET

  AUGUST 1832

  He evidently composed this rather confused epitaph himself. He got the year of his father’s death wrong. He seems to have decided at the last minute to include his mother in the tribute to his father. There was an element of self-advertisement though also some truth in his pointing out the achievement of his parents in having such a son, an Academician. And the making of the monument resulted in one of his fits of pettiness. A mason was owed 7s 6d for his work on it, and a churchwarden at St Paul’s, Mr Cribb, paid the bill, ‘feeling certain that Turner would repay him when he came to look at the tablet. Turner called, and seemed satisfied with everything; until Mr Cribb mentioned the 7s 6d, when Turner told him to come some day and bring a receipt for the money, and said “he shouldn’t pay it without he did”. The money was not worth the trouble, so Turner got the mason’s work without paying for it.’30

  His old foe Sir George Beaumont had died in 1827. In the 1830s, the ‘catalogue of death’31 included his former mentor and his mother’s physician, Dr Thomas Monro, who died in 1833. In 1836 his friend of so many years William Wells died, aged seventy-five. A rather terse note on black-edged paper from Turner to Wells’s daughter Clara, by then Mrs Wheeler, says:

  I am much bothered and much agrieved by your injury and Mr Wheeler calling yesterday Evening hope you have written to Mitcham with my best regards

  Believe me most truly

  tho in great haste

  J M W Turner32

  But in person he allowed his feelings to show. Clara recalled that Turner came round to her house ‘in an agony of grief. Sobbing like a child, he said, “Oh, Clara, Clara! these are iron tears. I have lost the best friend I ever had in my life.”’ Clara thought Turner would have been ‘a different man … if all the good and kindly feelings of his great mind had been called into action’.33 That point – the partial rather than total deployment of those feelings – had been demonstrated in the new will he made in 1831; or, possibly, what was shown in this instance was how grand his generosity could be on a large, institutional scale, how meagre in terms of real people.

  This, his second such testament, was drafted by his solicitor George Cobb, and William Marsh, his stockbroker, who had witnessed his will in 1829, gave no help this time. Cobb evidently had pondered some of the legal problems involved in Turner’s desire to set up a charity for ‘Poor and Decayed Male Artists born in England and of English Parents Only and lawful issue’. The Mortmain Act of George II’s time prohibited bequests of land for charitable purposes. So this second will directed Turner’s executors to sell his land and invest the proceeds in a fund from which, after bequests were paid, the balance could be used to set up and maintain his charity for decayed artists, the charity to be called ‘Turner’s Gift’. The executors were to be Wells, the Reverend Henry Trimmer, Samuel Rogers, George Jones and Charles Turner. However, in
this will, and in a subsequent codicil of 20 August 1832, his niggardly legacies to his ex-mistress and their daughters made a strange contrast to that munificent ‘Gift’. Although like most people Turner realized that you can’t take it with you, he was not about to give pleasure to individuals he actually knew and had blood ties with by leaving them generous amounts; there clearly wouldn’t have been any pleasure for him in contemplating such action. So Hannah Danby, ‘niece of John Danby, musician’, and ‘Eveline and Georgiana T the daughters of Sarah Danby’ were by this 1831 will to get £50 a year for life, and Sarah herself a miserable £10 a year – sums increased in the 1832 codicil for Hannah and the girls to £100 a year. (Hannah was also to get an extra £50 a year for looking after 47 Queen Anne Street and keeping the ‘Gallery in a viewable state … concurring with the object of keeping my works together’.)

  After various such bequests and the setting up of Turner’s Gift, the residue of his estate was left by him to the Royal Academy as long as they had a dinner on his birthday, paid for a professor in landscape painting, and gave a biennial ‘Turner’s Medal’ for landscape painting. If the Academy did not accept this arrangement, so the 1832 codicil declared, ‘I give the same to Georgia Danby or her Heirs after causing a Monument to be placed near my remains as can be placed’.34 Georgiana’s name he or Cobb got wrong, although this mistake might not have worried her if she had indeed received the residue. Evelina had had her Christian name misspelled in the 1831 will and in this codicil her married name was given as Dupree rather than Dupuis. Though mentioned last, the monument (and its proximity to his remains) seems to have been high on his agenda now. So was the disposition of his paintings in the new National Gallery in a room to be called ‘Turner’s Gallery’, with the paintings he referred to as Dido building Carthage and The Sun rising through Vapour to be always hung between Claude’s Seaport and Mill. Turner had an Anglo-Saxon appetite for fame after death – after the battles of life. What his relatives, his ex-mistress and his daughters thought of him was less important.