J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  A gatekeeper tells Cobbett that the whole area of enclosed parkland is ‘nine miles round’. As for the owner, says Cobbett, ‘Lord Egremont bears an excellent character. Everything that I have ever heard of him makes me believe that he is worthy of this princely estate.’2

  The house itself was an immense greystone edifice, twenty-one windows wide, three high. The total effect from the park was monotonous. It sat with its back pressed against the western edge of the town, with a grassy slope in front running down to the lake, or ‘upper Pond’ as it was called. On the ground floor lay a sequence of splendid rooms; these included the White Library, the Marble Hall (which had a billiard table in it), the Carved Room (with lime-wood panels by Grinling Gibbons), the Square Dining Room, the Red Room and the North Gallery, where many items of the great Egremont art collection not placed elsewhere in the house were displayed. There were two staircases, one called Grand. It was a house so large it made for the unexpected; the inhabitants never knew whom they might encounter in one of the long corridors or going up and down stairs. Visitors were invariably amazed. One such was Thomas Creevey, former member of Parliament (for the rotten borough of Thetford), and Treasurer of Greenwich Hospital for Seamen, who often had no home of his own but went from friendly house to house. In August 1828, he visited Petworth with his friends the Earl and Countess of Sefton, and wrote in his diary:

  Nothing can be more imposing or magnificent than the effect of this house the moment you are within it, not from that appearance of comfort which strikes you so much at Goodwood [where he had just been staying], for it has none … Every door of every room was wide open from one end to the other, and from the front to behind, whichever way you looked; and not a human being visible … but the magnitude of the space being seen all at once – the scale of every room, gallery, passage, &c., the infinity of pictures and statues throughout, made as agreeable an impression upon me as I ever witnessed. How we got into the house, I don’t quite recollect, for I think there is no bell, but I know we were some time at the door, and when we were let in by a little footman, he disappeared de suite, and it was some time before we saw anybody else. At length a young lady appeared, and a very pretty one too, very nicely dressed and with very pretty manners. She proved to be a Miss Wyndham, but, according to the custom of the family, not a legitimate Miss Wyndham, nor yet Lord Egremont’s own daughter, but his brother William Wyndham’s, who is dead …3

  The owner of this establishment showed up after Creevey and the Seftons had been looking at pictures for half an hour:

  In comes my Lord Egremont – as extraordinary a person, perhaps, as any in England; certainly the most so of his own caste or order. He is aged 77 and as fresh as may be, with a most incomparable and acute understanding, with much more knowledge upon all subjects than he chuses to pretend to, and which he never discloses but incidentally, and, as it were, by compulsion. Simplicity and sarcasm are his distinguishing characteristics. He has a fortune, I believe, of £100,000 a year, and never man could have used it with such liberality and profusion as he has done. Years and years ago he was understood to be £200,000 or £300,000 out of pocket for the extravagance of his brother Charles Wyndham, just now dead; he has given each of these natural daughters £40,000 upon their marriage; he has dealt in the same liberal scale with private friends, with artists, and, lastly, with by no means the least costly customers – with mistresses, of whom Lady Melbourne must have been the most distinguished leader in that way.4

  A descendant of the Percys, the Earls of Northumberland, Lord Egremont inherited Petworth – which stood on the site of an old Percy castle – at the age of twelve. In time he became a dashing young man about town and a great catch; but his engagement to Lady Maria Waldegrave was broken off – her uncle, Horace Walpole, called George Egremont ‘a most worthless young fellow’.5 The third Earl lived for some years with Elizabeth Iliffe, whom Farington described as a farmer’s daughter who had been ‘with his lordship at 15 years of age’.6 She was known as Mrs Wyndham, and although he finally married her in 1801, the marriage – never made public – did not legitimize the six children she had given him by then. The marriage in fact seemed to upset their relationship; he needed a mistress rather than a wife. By 1803 the Countess was jealous, Farington thought, since she ‘apprehends that his Lordship is not faithful to her … at present they do not cohabit’. After separating from her, Lord Egremont did not marry again. (In London, after selling Egremont House in Piccadilly, he took a house in Grosvenor Place, not far from the Fawkeses, but his heart always seemed to be in Sussex.) As Lady Melbourne’s lover, he was thought to have been the father of William Lamb, who became Lord Melbourne and Prime Minister. Lady Blessington, staying at Petworth in 1813, wrote to Earl Granville: ‘Nothing will persuade Lady Spenser that Lord Egremont has not forty-three children, who all live in the House with him and their respective Mothers; that the latter are usually kept in the background, but that when any quarrels arise, which few days pass without, each mother takes part with her Progeny, bursts into the drawing room, fights with each other, Lord E., his children, and, I believe, the Company, and makes scenes worthy of Billingsgate or a Madhouse.’7 Lord Egremont’s nose was as much a feature of his face as Turner’s, though perhaps a little less hooked; in any event, because of the Earl’s amorous propensities, it was said to have become ‘a distinct feature of the locality for miles around’.8

  In these years of agricultural depression, Lord Egremont’s liberality sustained the Sussex countryside. He had a strong sense of noblesse oblige as well as of droit de seigneur. Although he appeared rarely in the House of Lords, he was a stalwart member of the Society for the Betterment of the Conditions of the Poor, set up in 1799. He invested in canals. Like Walter Fawkes, he was a radical land-improver. He planted turnips as a rotation crop instead of leaving the land fallow and grew opium and rhubarb for medicinal purposes. The size of Petworth eggs astonished visitors who had them for breakfast. He bred prize cattle and race-horses – he won the Derby five times and the Oaks the same number, more than any other owner. Cobbett admired the black Petworth pigs, which were kept in an up-to-date piggery built surprisingly close to the house. At one point a sow and her litter got in and galloped through the great rooms. Over 500 deer grazed in the well-managed park.

  He was good with his people too. C. R. Leslie noted that at one point Lord Egremont closed the main entrance gate to Petworth, because the gatehouse porter and his wife were both old and ill, and he didn’t want them disturbed. He spent about £20,000 a year on charitable work; he helped finance a new County Hospital at Brighton and an Infirmary at Chichester; in Petworth he set up a surgeon–apothecary and paid for the training of a midwife and an inoculation nurse. He also assisted impoverished farm folk to emigrate to Canada, by paying for their passages. (However, he had one blindspot: he opposed Catholic emancipation.) A visiting Frenchman was shocked that local people were allowed into the grounds to play cricket and bowls on the lawn between the house and pond.

  The house itself under Lord Egremont’s benign rule, according to a family chronicler, ‘was like a huge inn with visitors coming and going as they pleased: they were welcome without notice. There was no leave-taking either: you didn’t say goodbye, you just left. Guests found themselves confronted with nurses and babies, girls exercising the pianoforte, boys exercising ponies. Nobody was sure whose children they were. There were artists all over the place, some doing original works, others copying Vandycks.’9 It was a ‘strange medley’, thought Lady Holland in 1828 – wealthy guests, poor relations; painters and politicians. C. R. Leslie brought his wife and children to Petworth on the first of many visits in the autumn of 1826 and stayed a month. Leslie admired his host for the complete lack of ostentation that went with his munificence. ‘Plain spoken, often to a degree of bluntness, he never wasted words, nor would he let others waste words on him. After conferring the greatest favours, he was out of the room before there was time to thank him.’10 His servants wore plain l
ivery or none at all; some were as venerable and distinguished-looking as Lord Egremont in his old age. The maid of one lady visitor, crossing the hall one evening as the bell rang for the servants’ dinner, took the arm of an elderly man and said, ‘Come, old gentleman, you and I will go to dinner together, for I can’t find my way in this great house.’ Lord Egremont gave her his arm and took her to the servants’ dining room where he said, ‘You dine here. I don’t dine till seven o’clock.’11

  Charles Greville, a political diarist and frequent visitor to Petworth, was staying there at Christmas 1832 and found Turner among the guests, along with ‘the Cowpers … Lady E. Romney, two nieces, Mrs Tredcroft a neighbour, Ridsdale a parson, Wynne … and a young artist of the name of Lucas’. Lord Egremont, noted Greville,

  liked to have people there who he was certain would not put him out of his way, especially those who, entering into his eccentric habits, were ready for the snatches of talk which his perpetual locomotion alone admitted of, and from whom he could gather information about passing events; but it was necessary to conform to his peculiarities, and these were utterly incompatible with conversation, or any prolonged discussion. He never remained five minutes in the same place, and was continually oscillating between the library and his bedroom, or wandering about the enormous house in all directions: sometimes he broke off in the middle of a conversation on some subject which appeared to interest him, and disappeared, and an hour after, on a casual meeting, would resume just where he left off.12

  (Turner had probably been at Petworth for Christmas 1831 as well; Hannah and Queen Anne Street could evidently manage without him.)

  The bedrooms at Petworth excited comment from several guests. Creevey in 1828 measured his and found it ‘to be 30 feet by 20, and high in proportion. The bed would have held six people in a row without the slightest inconvenience to each other.’ Benjamin Haydon had occupied the same room two years before, on his visit in 1826, when he was in raptures at the splendour of his surroundings and at the ‘Live and let live’ atmosphere engendered by Lord Egremont. He admired the portraits in his room (which included one of ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary), the velvet and satin bed curtains and the view of the park out of the high windows. Always the outsider, he felt a grateful wonder:

  There is something peculiarly interesting in inhabiting these apartments … which have contained a long list of deceased and illustrious ancestors. As I lay in my magnificent bed, and saw the old portraits trembling in a sort of twilight, I almost fancied I heard them breathe, and almost expected they would move out and shake my curtains. What a destiny is mine! One year in the Bench, the companion of gamblers and scoundrels – sleeping in wretchedness and dirt, on a flock bed low and filthy, with black worms crawling over my hands – another, reposing in down and velvet, in a splendid apartment, in a splendid house, the guest of rank, and fashion and beauty! As I laid my head on my down pillow the first night I was deeply affected, and could hardly sleep. God in heaven grant my future may now be steady. At any rate a nobleman has taken me by the hand, whose friendship generally increases in proportion to the necessity of its continuance. Such is Lord Egremont. Literally like the sun. The very flies at Petworth seem to know there is room for their existence, that the windows are theirs. Dogs, horses, cows, deer and pigs, peasantry and servants, guests and family, children and parents, all share alike his bounty and opulence and luxuries. At breakfast, after the guests have all breakfasted, in walks Lord Egremont; first comes a grandchild, whom he sends away happy. Outside the window moan a dozen black spaniels, who are let in, and to whom he distributes cakes and comfits, giving all equal shares. After chatting with one guest, and proposing some scheme of pleasure to others, his leathern gaiters are buttoned on, and away he walks, leaving everybody to take care of themselves, with all that opulence and generosity can place at their disposal entirely within their reach. At dinner he meets everybody, and then are recounted the feats of the day. All principal dishes he helps, never minding the trouble of carving; he eats heartily and helps liberally. There is plenty, but not absurd profusion; good wines, but no extravagant waste. Everything solid, liberal, rich and English. At seventy-four he stil shoots daily, comes home wet through, and is as active and looks as well as many men of fifty … I never saw such a character, or such a man, nor were there ever many.13

  Lord Egremont commissioned two paintings from Haydon – Alexander the Great taming Bucephalus and Eucles – but unfortunately that was Haydon’s only visit to Petworth.

  Among other artists who enjoyed Lord Egremont’s hospitality were Thomas Phillips, the portrait painter and an especial favourite; William Beechey; Sir Thomas Lawrence; David Wilkie; Sir Richard Westmacott; Augustus Callcott; George Jones; and John Constable. (For some reason Lord Egremont didn’t buy any of Constable’s work.) The sculptors Francis Chantrey and J. E. Carew were often there. Indeed, Carew – with whom Turner had an enigmatic conversation by the pond one day about money and age – once admitted that during the 1830s he ‘lived more at Petworth House than with my own family’.14 Lord Egremont said of Carew, ‘When I am gone, he will be a beggar.’ And the Earl was right. Carew was ungrateful enough after Egremont’s death to sue his former host’s executors, lost his case and was declared bankrupt. Leslie – who brought his family to Petworth most autumns in the early 1830s – wrote to Constable on 5 September 1834: ‘Today 40 people dine here, most of them magistrates, and the house is as full as it can hold. Among them is the Duke of Richmond. I have just been looking at the table as it is set out in the Carved Room, covered with magnificent gold and silver plate … Callcott has been here, and went today.’15 On several occasions the banker-poet Samuel Rogers was also a guest at the same time as the Leslies. ‘One evening, all the young ladies in the house formed a circle round him, listening with extreme interest to a series of ghost stories which he told with great effect.’16

  Turner came to Petworth for a number of stays in the decade after 1827. Lord Egremont and his ‘Liberty Hall’, as some called it, gave a further liberating boost to Turner’s art. With Walter Fawkes and – a few years later – his father both dead, and only Mrs Booth to serve as a sheet anchor through the lonely storms of his fifties and sixties, Petworth provided a place where he could be himself, could enjoy himself and could produce some of his most original and most moving work.

  Lord Egremont, with his eye for the best, had taken him up early on. In the first years of the century he bought Turner’s 1802 Royal Academy exhibit, the tremendously dramatic Ships Bearing Up for Anchorage, which became known as the Egremont Seapiece. Over the next ten years the Earl seems to have been a regular visitor to Turner’s gallery; many of the further dozen or so oil paintings he purchased – he never bought any Turner watercolours – were exhibited at Harley Street and only three at the Academy. (Two direct commissions from Lord Egremont in 1809 were for views of his properties, Petworth House and Cockermouth Castle in Cumberland.) The sort of Turner pictures that Egremont fancied were for the most part those that had a classical flavour – elevated pastoral, as it were. Indeed, even in 1827, when Turner had in many ways moved on, Egremont showed his fondness for the poetic landscapes of the earlier period by buying at the de Tabley sale in that year the painting Tabley House and Lake – Calm Morning of 1809, which Turner had painted for Sir John Leicester, as he then was.

  Turner had passed through Petworth town in 1792, drawing the church, but he apparently first stayed at Petworth in the summer of 1809, when Egremont asked him down to make the portrait of the house. He had a happy time poring over the family collection, including works by van Dyck, Titian, David Teniers the younger, Paul Bril and Cuyp. Claude’s Landscape with Jacob, Laban and his daughters seized his attention. Paintings by English masters such as Reynolds, Gainsborough and Richard Wilson were also to be seen. Lord Egremont went on buying Old Masters until a few years before his death in 1837, when he told Thomas Phillips that he was resolved to buy only contemporary works thenceforth. At his death the Egremont col
lection contained 170 paintings and twenty-one pieces of sculpture.

  But after that first decade of patronage, something happened between artist and Earl. From 1812, there was a strange gap of thirteen years or so when Lord Egremont seemed to take no interest in Turner’s work, and Turner – of course busy with Sandycombe, absorbed by the Fawkeses, discovering Italy and getting on with many engraving commissions – didn’t visit Petworth. Was Lord Egremont cross because Turner made such direct use of the Petworth Claude in his Apullia in search of Appullus of 1814? This picture, as we have seen, Turner submitted to the British Institution (of which Lord Egremont was a governor), although too late to qualify for the annual prize. Lord Egremont, as it happened, failed to show up for duty on the award jury. Moreover, he was generally known for his equanimity. Yet he could lose his temper when he felt he was being taken advantage of. Leslie wrote that Egremont occasionally ordered people to leave his house who ‘encouraged by his good nature and the easy footing on which they found themselves … had forgotten where they were, and behaved as if that noble mansion were but a great hotel’17 – a hotel where no bills ever had to be paid.

  Turner probably visited Petworth after long absence in 1825. And he and Lord Egremont may have run into one another at Christie’s in July 1827, when the late Lord de Tabley’s pictures were sold. Turner often showed up when his pictures came back on the market, to see how they did, even to bid for them. At any rate, he was once again at Petworth in late October that year; he wrote a letter from there to George Cobb about his Wapping property. He also seems to have been there on 18 December, when he wrote to Cobb again, this time about a Harley Street tenant. In the next year, before he set off for Rome, he started work on a large new commission from Lord Egremont: four paintings to be hung in long rectangular spaces in the Grinling Gibbons panelling of the Carved Room. For these he made four full-sized oil sketches. Creevey seems to have seen one sketch and one finished painting in the Carved Room in August 1828; he wrote: ‘in one of these compartments you have Petworth Park by Turner, in another Lord Egremont taking a walk with nine dogs, that are his constant companions, by the same artist’.18 Egremont may have taken an active interest in these pictures for – perhaps at his behest – some details in the finished oils have been changed from those in the sketches (which Turner kept): a cricket match was introduced in one in place of what Creevey saw, Egremont in fact returning across the park and being met by a stream of dogs. The oils that stayed at Petworth were largely painted in a golden tone which harked back to Turner’s earlier work and which the artist may have thought more agreeable to the Earl, as well as suiting the pictures’ rather low positions amid the dark panels.