Death, the final shipwreck, might be in his thoughts: now and then, as at the times of making these testaments, in the forefront of his mind, but mostly at the back of it. Meanwhile he embraced life, in the ample form of Sophia Booth or in snacks of shrimps eaten out of his handkerchief. He went on with untempered energy painting oils and watercolours, touring and sketching. Most professional artists continue to do what they do best, refining their craft, but not really changing form and subject. Turner was different – although his land and sea subject matter might seem the same, overall his way of presenting it changed. Despite occasional forays in past methods and styles, he was not satisfied with the mixture as before, however celebrated it had made him. What he had achieved was possible; he wanted to take the next step, to achieve the impossible. The sine qua non of great art is dissatisfaction, and Turner had an abundance of it.
At some point his restlessness affected his enjoyment of Margate. The railways began to bring more and more trippers. Perhaps he was spotted by a colleague, for he wasn’t the only artist who liked the Thanet coast, and then had to put up with joshing questions. Although Margate was Mrs Booth’s home, they may have moved on, seeking privacy; they seem to have spent a month or so in Deal in 1850. Alaric Watts heard that they sojourned in that town for a time after the move to Chelsea. A sketchbook of the 1840s contains sketches of Margate, Sandwich and Deal,35 and also has jottings by Turner that have to do with building or fixing up a house. There is a rough ground plan showing several rooms. A list of work and materials mentions roofs, stairs and window-sills: thirty-eight window-sills, in fact, a number which seems implausible. Perhaps he planned a longer seaside stay in a new abode. But the Eastlakes were also in Deal in August 1850, and this might have given Turner a fright.
The ‘wizened’ and ‘odd little mortal’36 with his sun-reddened face remained in Mrs Booth’s favour, whatever his eccentricities and stinginess. To his credit, he took an interest in the upbringing of Daniel John Pound, her son by her first marriage and a well-set-up youth, who ‘took after’ Turner to the extent of training as an engraver.37 Eventually, at least when Turner was in her company, the artist’s appearance was less untidy and unbrushed; she seems to have taken him in hand. There are hints to be gathered of their days together: he rarely let a subject for a drawing slip by undrawn, and he did three mackerel waiting on the Margate kitchen table.38
And there are hints of their nights together too. Those who later were suddenly made aware of Mrs Booth and claimed that all she had been was his housekeeper not only have to face David Roberts’s remark that they passed as husband and wife, but have to ignore a number of drawings and oil sketches from these years. One little sketchbook39 of the 1830s contains a number of blurry ‘Colour Studies’ – coloured mists or curtains, almost, that are waiting to be lifted or pulled; and when they are, at least partially, there are to be seen in a number of them forms, sometimes hard to make out: bodies, alone or together; legs up, limbs tangled; a woman lying on her side, buttocks exposed, vulva highlighted with a single dash of red paint; and what could be a tall dark toadstool seen from above but is – in the context of the limbs and nudes on surrounding pages – most likely an erect phallus. At fifty-nine or so he still had a powerful sex-drive, though he didn’t seem altogether free about revealing it, even for his own viewing.
Most of these ‘studies’ are not well drawn; only a part of him seemed involved. Some have a voyeuristic feeling: one shows two extra-terrestrial-looking figures watching a naked sleeping woman. The sensuality and cunning that David Roberts remarked are more evident than any ability to draw the human form. But now and then things become more straightforwardly clear – and more ably done. There are several pictures of the same period that seem to be of one woman – flat-faced, though with rounded cheeks and soft somewhat undershot chin, her hair in a bun at the back. One watercolour of a woman’s head, eyes closed; one red-chalk sketch of the same woman sleeping, her full bare breasts visible above rumpled sheets; and a rough oil sketch, perhaps done by oil light or candlelight, of the woman’s head as she sleeps.40 Some of these pictures were left with Mrs Booth and they could only be of her. It seems obvious that their intimacy was such that Turner could get out of bed, after love-making, and draw or paint Sophia while she slept.
Notes
1 Th. i, p.223.
2 Watts, p.xxxii.
3 Falk, Turner, p.195, gives the year 1827, but no authority; Wilton, p.163, suggests 1829.
4 Census, Parish of St John the Baptist, p.15, Margate Public Library.
5 Falk, p.238; Walbrook; Geese III, p.37.
6 Charles Turner, Diary, 8 September 1852.
7 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
8 Ibid., p.3.
9 Letters, p.199.
10 G. Jones’s copy of Th. ii, p.232.
11 Th. 1877, p.243.
12 W. Sandby, The History of the Royal Academy of Arts, 2 vols, London, 1862. i, pp.281–2; ii, p.36.
13 Century, p.269.
14 Ruskin, 1856, quoted in Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape, p.339.
15 Archer, TS 1, 1, p.34.
16 Ruskin, Praeterita, pp.434–5.
17 Yale, Mellon Collection, no.151.
18 Finberg, p.327.
19 Letters, pp.143–4.
20 Ibid., pp.209–10.
21 Th. 1877, p.337; B&J, pp.180–1.
22 Yale, Mellon Collection, no.144.
23 Ruskin, Notes by Mr. Ruskin.
24 My thanks to Fred Bachrach for this observation.
25 Ruskin, Diaries, 29 April 1844; TSN, no.42, p.10.
26 B&J, no.398.
27 Ruskin, Works, xiii, p.161.
28 TB CCXLI.
29 B&J, no.320.
30 Miller, Picturesque Views, p.xxxix.
31 Letters, p.83.
32 Ibid., p.163.
33 Th. 1877, p.236.
34 Ibid., pp.624–8.
35 TB CCCLXIII. C. J. Feret, p.59; Geese III, pp.59, 116; Watts, p.xxxiii.
36 Lindsay, p.172.
37 Falk, Turner, p.198.
38 Wilton, Life and Work, p.468.
39 TB CCXCI b.
40 Wilton, Life and Work, p.928; TB CCCLXIV f.269; B&J, p.453.
Margate: The seafront at Cold Harbour, Margate, with Mrs Booth’s bay-windowed house on right, 1820
16: Varnishing Days
Almost as if he deliberately wanted to overturn the central assumption about his character – that he was a ‘mistifying’ recluse – Turner for a short period once a year came forth and performed as an artist before his colleagues. The hedgehog turned briefly into a peacock. This occurred at the Royal Academy, on the days before the annual exhibition that were allotted for members to put the finishing touches to their works. The privilege to do this had been slowly built up, particularly by Turner since 1798, when he was twenty-three, and had been given some formality in 1803, when Turner was on the Council; in that year a day was actually set aside for members to varnish their exhibits. In 1809, the RA General Assembly accepted Martin Archer Shee’s proposal that three or more days be granted – ‘previous to the day appointed for the Annual Dinner in the Exhibition Room’1 – for members to retouch or varnish their pictures. It remained an Academy tradition for more than forty years, complained about in the press as a form of favouritism and resented by non-Academician exhibitors who did not have the same opportunity; it was thought unfair that they were not even allowed to dust their pictures. The number of varnishing days expanded at one point to five. Although, towards mid-century, there was a move to get rid of them, they were retained until 1852, largely because Turner so manifestly made use of them.2
Despite some ups and downs in the relationship, the Academy remained at the heart of his professional life. He went on taking his turn on the Council; he served a twenty-three-year term as Auditor, putting his canniness about money to the Academy’s service, and he continued to be a Visitor in the Schools. He took part in debates in the Assembly, though sometimes he
did not speak publicly but – according to his friend George Jones – tried to get acrimonious proceedings peacefully resolved. (Perhaps he had had early practice in this, mediating between his parents.) Occasionally Turner’s confused attempts to speak had a similar effect; heated debates sputtered to an end and matters later received calmer consideration. Farington on 21 January 1819 recorded Callcott’s complaints that ‘little business was done at the Academy Council owing to the improper behaviour of Soane, jeering at what was said by members and treating business with ridicule; added to which the incessant talking of Turner made it impossible to proceed with any dispatch’.
However, Jones also recalled Turner’s ‘exemplary’ conduct and ‘zealous’ attendance; he ‘never made his excursions abroad until the business of the Academy was suspended by vacation … At the great dinner before the opening of the Exhibition and at the Exhibitors’ dinner at its close he invariably attended, deeming the latter a most important opportunity of getting acquainted with the artists likely to become members of the institution.’3 In a typically foggy speech at one such end-of-exhibition dinner, he finally got to his point, which was loyalty to the Academy. Addressing the younger exhibitors, he said, ‘When you become members of this institution you must fight in a phalanx – no splits – no quarrelling – one mind – one object – the good of the Arts and the Royal Academy.’4 And his working year – touring in the summer and autumn, painting hard all winter – generally built to the late spring when the exhibition filled the immediate future. The pictures he intended for it crowded his mind, although they did not necessarily get close to completion; the opening day was his one real deadline.
The Academy remained, increasingly cramped, at Somerset House until 1836. Turner was on the committee set up in 1832 to consult with government officials about the new National Gallery to be built overlooking the new Trafalgar Square, with rooms and galleries for the Academy in the east wing of the structure. But he may not have been happy about the move; he was absent from the farewell dinner in the Great Room of Somerset House on 20 July 1836, with the exhibition pictures still hanging, when Chantrey made a toast: ‘The old walls of the Academy!’5 Did he stay away because he would have been too upset? Was he down in Margate? (He set off with his friend and patron Hugh Munro for France and Switzerland shortly after the exhibition closed, but he was still in London on 26 July.) The Academy exhibition of 1837 was the first to be held in its new quarters. Until the opening of the National Gallery in 1824 in Angerstein’s house in Pall Mall, the Academy show was the chief venue at which the British public could look at art. Yet, whatever Turner’s sense of loss aroused by the move from Somerset House, he was among those members who presented pictures to the Academy for its new quarters: he gave a portrait group by Rigaud of three Academicians, to be hung in the new Council room. He was also on the hanging committee for the first exhibition in 1837 at Trafalgar Square.
Farington in 1803 had remarked on Turner’s behaviour on ‘the day appointed at the Academy for varnishing the pictures’. Wyatt had told Farington how Turner had been seen to ‘spit all over his picture, and, then taking out a box of brown powder, rubbed it over the picture’. Farington knew that picture restorers used tobacco juice to tone a recently cleaned picture and assumed that Turner was using snuff for this purpose.6 As time passed, Turner got more and more out of the concession. By 1819 there were three varnishing days, and in that year he exhibited the Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar and England: Richmond Hill. Farington happily noted the backbiting brought about by the effect of ‘the flaming colour of Turner’s pictures’ on neighbouring paintings. The diarist went on to mention ‘the pernicious effects arising from Painters working upon their pictures in the Exhibition by which they often render them unfit for a private room’.7 Before the curtain went up on the RA show, Turner got his value out of the varnishing days; and, despite what Farington called ‘pernicious effects’, many of Turner’s colleagues got much benefit and amusement too.
By the 1830s, his performance was a virtuoso act, mingling instruction, entertainment and brazen rivalry as he applied scumbles, glazes and impasto to his unfinished sketches. He worked alone, although artists were allowed to bring an assistant to run errands and clean their brushes, and some like C. R. Leslie took their sons. Robert and George Leslie were impressed by what they saw. Robert remembered that around 1832
I first went with my father to the Royal Academy upon varnishing days, and, wandering about watching the artists at work, there was no one, next to Stanfield and his boats, that I liked to get near so much as Turner, as he stood working upon those, to my eyes, nearly blank white canvases in their old academy frames. There were always a number of mysterious little gallipots and cups of colour ranged upon drawing stools in front of his pictures; and, among other bright colours, I recollect one that must have been simply red-lead. He used short brushes, some of them like the writers used by house decorators, working with thin colour over the white ground, and using the brush end on, dapping and writing with it those wonderfully fretted cloud forms and the ripplings and filmy surface curves upon his near water. I have seen Turner at work upon many varnishing days, but never remember his using a maul-stick. He came, they said, with the carpenters at six in the morning, and worked standing all day. He always had on an old, tall beaver hat, worn rather off his forehead, which added much to his look of a North Sea pilot … His way of work was quite unlike that of the other artists … His colours were mostly in powder, and he mixed them with turpentine, sometimes with size, and water, and perhaps even with stale beer, as the grainers do their umber when using it upon an oil ground … Besides red-lead, he had a blue which looked very like ordinary smalt; this, I think, tempered with crimson or scarlet lake, he worked over his near waters in the darker lines.8
Turner used a bench or a tea chest to stand on for dealing with the upper parts of a picture – working, so George Leslie said, ‘almost with his nose close to the picture’.9 It was a podium for conducting his own score. On these occasions his demonic energy was fully displayed. The writer and painter E. V. Rippingille – generally hostile to Turner – saw him working before the opening of a British Institution exhibition in 1836 on a painting of the burning of the Houses of Parliament, a picture which
when sent in was a mere dab of several colours, and ‘without form and void’, like chaos before the creation … Such a magician, performing his incantations in public, was an object of interest and attraction. Etty was working by his side … sometimes speaking to some one near him, after the approved manner of painters: but not so Turner; for the three hours I was there – and I understood it had been the same since he began in the morning – he never ceased to work, or even once looked or turned from the wall on which his picture hung … In one part of the mysterious proceedings Turner, who worked almost entirely with his palette knife, was observed to be rolling and spreading a lump of half-transparent stuff over his picture, the size of a finger in length and thickness. As Callcott was looking on I ventured to say to him, ‘What is that he is plastering his picture with?’ to which inquiry it was replied, ‘I should be sorry to be the man to ask him.’ … Presently the work was finished: Turner gathered his tools together, put them into and shut up the box, and then, with his face still turned to the wall, and at the same distance from it, went sidling off, without speaking a word to anybody, and when he came to the staircase, in the centre of the room, hurried down as fast as he could. All looked with a half-wondering smile, and Maclise, who stood near, remarked, ‘There, that’s masterly, he does not stop to look at his work; he knows it is done, and he is off.’10
C. R. Leslie used to say that Turner looked upon varnishing days as one of the greatest privileges of the Academy; the days gave him a lot of opportunity for his mysterious little jokes and fun with his brother artists. The man who wasn’t above cadging a clean plate and a hot potato on the steamer to Margate, here ‘borrowed’ materials. Richard Redgrave saw him at it:
/> Such was his love of colour that any rich tint on a brother painter’s palette so tempted him that he would jokingly remove a large portion of it to his own, and immediately apply it to his picture, irrespective of the medium with which it was made up. From our own palette he has whisked off, on more occasions than one, a luscious knob of orange vermilion, or ultramarine, tempered with copal, and at once used it on a picture he was at work upon with a mastic magylph. Such a practice, productive of no mischief at the moment, would break up a picture when the harder drier began to act on that which was of a less contractile nature.11
Redgrave knew Turner from the early 1830s and thought that at this stage of his life, from his mid-fifties, he did not look like a genius.
His short figure had become corpulent – his face, perhaps from continual exposure to the air, was unusually red, and a little inclined to blotches. His dark eye was bright and restless – his nose, aquiline. He generally wore what is called a black dress-coat, which would have been the better for brushing – the sleeves were mostly too long, coming down over his fat and not over-clean hands. He wore his hat while painting on the varnishing days – or otherwise a large wrapper over his head, while on the warmest days he generally had another wrapper or comforter round his throat – though occasionally he would unloose it and allow the two ends to dangle down in front and pick up a little of the colour from his ample palette. This, together with his ruddy face, his rollicking eye, and his continuous, although, except to himself, unintelligible jokes, gave him the appearance of that now wholly extinct race – a long-stage coachman.12
J.M.W. Turner Page 39
