J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  Turner, as we have noted, was also thinking about Lord Egremont while in Rome, making his first brush con amore for him and helping to arrange the shipment of the Dionysus torso to him. But the Earl didn’t return any love for Turner’s Palestrina; it may not have struck him as the companion he had expected for his Claude. Perhaps to make up for his failure to buy this, he bought Jessica, which was exhibited at the Academy in 1830. There is nothing Claudean about this picture, the last he was to buy from Turner – a woman at an open window. Rembrandt comes to mind. Despite having sold one family picture, A Philosopher, said to be by that master, in 1794 (for £1 9s), Egremont still had several reputed Rembrandts, one – a real one – being the 1633 Lady with a Fan, which Turner seems to have been brooding about when he painted Jessica.

  Indeed, his stays at Petworth seemed to provoke an interest in the great Dutch painter – though there may have been other things in his life that also made him susceptible to this influence just then. One curious picture of 1827 was direct about the interest. Rembrandt’s Daughter shows Turner not only thinking about Rembrandt but thinking about a father breaking in on the relationship between his daughter and a young man – the father being a painter, though at that point in 1827 it wasn’t known that Rembrandt actually had had a girl child. Turner seems to have made an imaginative leap. His heart was also in the painting as regards the figure of the daughter: so much more alive and anatomically well rendered than his figures often were. Did some past incident with Evelina, now ten years married – or some more recent one with Georgiana, still single – fire his fancy? And the Rembrandtian theme and chiaroscuro of this picture were followed by further Rembrandtian reverberations in the 1830s, in pictures with biblical or Jewish subjects, such as Pilate Washing his Hands, and a number of works done apparently at Petworth or East Cowes Castle (occasionally his next stop after Petworth), in which red and black were boldly used and the lighting was highly dramatic. The Music Party, Dinner in a Great Room and Figures in a Building suggest that Rembrandt played a part in Turner’s Petworth liberation.

  The Jessica qualified in this respect in subject matter and composition, but hardly in colour. An Egremont family story has it that, when Turner and some other artists were at Petworth on one occasion, a painter who did figure-subjects told Turner (still famed for his fondness for yellow) that a yellow background was ‘all very well in landscapes, but would not be possible in our kind of pictures’. Turner, with a nod to their host, replied, ‘Subject pictures are not my style but I will undertake to paint a picture of a woman’s head with a yellow background if Lord Egremont will give it a place in his gallery.’ Lord Egremont did give Jessica such a place, despite almost unanimous abuse from the commentators who saw it at the Academy. The Morning Chronicle declared (3 May 1830): ‘It looks like a lady getting out of a large mustard pot.’ The Athenaeum thought (5 June) that Turner was afflicted with ‘jaundice on the retina’. And, as we have noted, Wordsworth grumbled, ‘It looks to me as if the painter had indulged in raw liver until he was very unwell.’19 Sounder criticism might have been levelled at Jessica’s physique: the strange foreshortening of her left arm; the wooden nature of the right; the troubling spread of her shoulders. But the head – for a Turner head! – was well done. Something in the gaze reminds us of the way Turner addressed the viewer in his c. 1800 self-portrait.

  Turner, with the freedom of the house, was to be seen everywhere at Petworth, prowling through the rooms and along the corridors, poking around in the huge cellars, drawing paper in hand. He made sketching excursions through the meadows around the town and in the parkland of the house, where deer browsed on the swards among the old oaks, beeches and chestnuts. He frequently fished in the little lake – the upper pond. This is where young Robert Leslie saw him at sunset one September evening in the early 1830s, with a fine pike that he had caught lying on the bank, but het up because his line was snagged. And this is where Turner gave Robert ‘an early lesson in seamanship by rigging scraps of paper, torn from his sketchbook, upon three little sticks stuck in a board to represent a full-rigged ship, which, to my great delight, he then launched upon the lake.’ Robert Leslie later remembered that Constable – who had also been at Petworth some days before – had stuck a sail on the same toy ship: ‘I must have mentioned this to Turner, as I have a recollection of his saying, as he rigged it, “Oh, he don’t know anything about ships,” or “What does he know about ships? this is how it ought to be,” sticking up some sails which looked to my eyes really quite ship-shape at that time.’20 Robert went on to become not only a painter but an amateur boat-builder and a passionate but unpretentious yachtsman, and was always grateful to Turner for this early encouragement.

  When he wasn’t to be seen indoors or out, it was because he was tucked away in the Old Library, over the chapel. Other artists like Leslie and Beechey used this room from time to time, but once Turner had got into the habit of visiting Petworth after 1827, it was his to work in when he was there, with the door locked from inside, and only Lord Egremont allowed the privilege of interruption. Chantrey had been one of the guests at Petworth when Turner was occupied with his paintings to hang on the Carved Room panels. The sculptor decided to check on what Turner was doing in the Old Library. ‘He imitated Lord Egremont’s peculiar step,’ wrote George Jones, ‘and the two distinct raps on the door by which his Lordship was accustomed to announce himself; and the key being immediately turned, he slipped into the room before the artist could shut him out.’21 The two friends enjoyed the joke.

  Turner and Lord Egremont got on well. They were both in their own ways old bachelors, nonconformists, uninhibited by many of the conventions of the day. They had their own types of generosity, one narrowly focused, one nobly expansive. Turner admired Egremont, one imagines, for his style of living and directness, and Egremont admired Turner for his painting ability and determination. They talked and argued on equal terms. On one occasion they had a dispute about the number of front windows in a local house. ‘Seven,’ said Lord E., ‘Six,’ maintained Turner, at which point Egremont ordered a carriage and they went to count the windows; Turner was found to be wrong.22 On another occasion their argument was whether Turner had been right to show some vegetables floating in his painting for the Carved Room, Brighton from the Sea. Egremont maintained that carrots wouldn’t float, Turner that they would – and this time Turner was proved right.

  The liberties Turner took at Petworth included using parts of a cupboard door to paint on when he hadn’t got a suitable canvas or panel; one result was Watteau study by Fresnoy’s rules (1831), a rather weak picture of an artist painting among several spectators. Once in a while he took on the mantle of host. Jones recalled that, when he hurt his leg during a visit to Petworth, Turner’s ‘anxiety to procure for me every attendance and convenience was like the attention of a parent to a child; his application to the house-keeper, butler, and gardener for my comfort and gratification was unremitted’. Indeed, thought Jones, ‘Turner’s tenderness towards his friends was almost womanly; to be ill was to secure constant attention and solicitude from him towards the sufferer.’23 In October 1837 Lord Egremont said to Turner, ‘I have written to Jones to join us but he won’t come.’ Jones reported later: ‘Turner felt this remark as important to me and wrote instantly to tell me of the generous Earl’s observation. Of course I did not hesitate, but went. Fortunately I did so, for in three weeks the kind and hospitable nobleman ceased to be.’24 Once when Samuel Rogers and his sister were staying at Petworth, probably in 1827, Rogers at breakfast asked Turner to make him a drawing of a terrace overlooking a lake, bordered by cypress trees. At lunch Turner handed him the drawing, which Rogers later had engraved as a vignette in his book Italy. The night before the banker–poet and his sister left, they said farewell to Lord Egremont, as they planned an early departure. Rogers recollected that next morning, ‘to my surprise I found Turner at the door, ready to see me off. “How kind of you,” I said. “I could not think of letting two such old
friends go away without saying Goodbye,” he replied.’25

  Egremont was good at giving his guests the feeling that the house and grounds were, for the time being, their own; in Turner’s case, the largess paid off in some of his finest work. It was all the finer for being unencumbered by the need to compete or dazzle. (His competitive instinct was perhaps satisfied by such incidents as beating Chantrey at fishing.) The Petworth effect was felt in full in a series of coloured drawings made, it seems likely, in the late summer of 1827 – more than a hundred, done in gouache or bodycolour, in other words watercolour made opaque with lead or Chinese white, on small rectangular sheets of coarse blue sugar-paper.26 These were for no client but himself. One word that seems to describe them is ‘happy’ – not a word that always suits Turner, though it does so when as here he is immersed, with his ambition and its sometimes florid results set aside. Here the economy he had discovered in Venice was again to the fore: a few dabs of colour, a few broad brushstrokes; the solid colours contrasting vividly with the coarse paper; indications rather than outlines; unplanned, done then and there; small epiphanies.

  Wandering through the ‘pleasure grounds’ – to use the term with which one Petworth plan describes the land outside the house – he took pleasure in the views. Walking, breathing, seeing and brushing the colours on paper were, if not quite a single act, a continuous process in which movement, perception and enjoyment became creation. He noted oxen drawing a wagon; some of Egremont’s spaniels barking at a pair of donkeys; the Petworth hunt forming up; some deer – almost calligraphically rendered. He captured the evening sky over the park, a Ulysses deriding Polyphemus sort of radiance around the sun. He sketched the lake at twilight, with the silhouette of a nearby hillside reflected in it: the reflected hillside darker and shallower than the hillside itself. He produced the strokes that meant a boat on the lake, two men in it. This was a true garden of the Hesperides, English landowning variety.

  When he came indoors, he caught with similar boldness the atmosphere of the ground-floor rooms. Some sketches he did with more detail, though never fussily. The much used White Library featured in seven drawings. He showed the bookcases, a piano, busts of philosophers, paintings (including portraits by Thomas Phillips), a cradle, the candelabra. Egremont in his later years used an adjacent room as his bedroom, with a concealed door in a bookcase. For one sketch, Turner stood in the alcove at the southern end of the White Library and looked through it and through all the doorways that linked the seven grand rooms along the western side of the house. The picture-crowded walls of the Somerset Room and Square Dining Room were shown with banners of sunlight streaming across their carpets from the high windows. He noted the massive billiard table that stood in the marble hall and placed at it two dark figures, one wielding a cue. Musicians played in the Little Dining Room, while in the Carved Room next door a banquet was taking place, many people seated at a long table. In the North Gallery he chose to sketch Flaxman’s immense marble sculpture St Michael and Satan, the scale suggested by two much smaller figures looking up at it.

  In some of these blue-paper studies his attention was given to objects, like the large porcelain vases set around a gilt table in the Carved Room. In others, what attracted him were people – talking, playing backgammon or cards, listening to music, waiting for dinner. A young woman plays a spinet. Three women sit at a table while three dogs lie on the floor near by. A man sits with one leg up on a sofa – George Jones convalescing, perhaps. In one, Spilt milk, a young woman in a blue dress is wiping her lap. Turner, it seems, knocked over a milk jug at breakfast, and some of the contents landed on Egremont’s niece, Mrs Julia Hasler. Two drawings, this and a parkland study, given to her at lunch, were his way of making amends. The humour inherent in the Spilt milk drawing and the fact that he actually gave away two sketches shows Turner less socially constrained than he often was.

  The figures in many of these gouache drawings are simply sketched, rough silhouettes, cartoons almost; but they give a far better sense of physique and personality than Turner’s usual grotesques or even his ‘ideal’ Claudean forms. Although mostly without obvious features of countenance, these are human beings, with plenty of stance and shape. In their presence, the jumble of life in the great house comes through, with its formality and informality. In some groups one can make out Egremont, white-haired, wearing black evening attire, in the centre of things; his son Colonel Wyndham in his scarlet military uniform, standing near a fireplace; or the tall gawky form of the Petworth rector, the Reverend Thomas Sockett. Sockett began as tutor to Lord Egremont’s sons and, since ordination required a degree, was sent to Oxford by the Earl when he decided to make Sockett a clergyman. For many years Sockett enjoyed the opulent Petworth living (at least £1700 per annum); he catalogued the Earl’s art collection and ran his assisted-emigration scheme. But finally, after a row about politics, he ceased to be on speaking terms with his patron. There may also have been religious difficulties: Egremont seems to have been less of a practising Christian than the Reverend Sockett might have hoped. Arthur Young, the agricultural reformer, noted while staying at Petworth, ‘In the chapel, no worship.’ However, Egremont spent over £16,000 on improving Petworth parish church, including the building of a new spire.27

  Upstairs the mood changes, the intimacy intensifies. Turner painted the bedrooms as warm refuges of privacy: four-poster beds with curtains; fires burning in fireplaces; figures clothed and unclothed; a woman in a black low-cut evening gown at her dressing table, absorbed by what she sees in her mirror; a woman seated at the foot of a bed, doing her hair – she is naked from the waist up. Who are these women who allowed Turner to sketch them at such moments? Was he granted the freedom of Egremont’s alleged harem as well as of the house? It seems unlikely that, given the way Turner kept much of his life in separate compartments, he would have brought a woman to Petworth. But there are hints of eventful goings-on in some of these sketches: a glimpse of a bare body above the sheets; red satin bed-curtains parted as if in amorous invitation; the bed-curtains of what seems to be the same room now green, now yellow, lovingly lingered on. One little pencil sketch in a sketchbook of this time shows a woman who may also be seen in these Petworth bedrooms. Turner has written alongside the pencil sketch the two words, ‘Brown Eyes’.28 Who had brown eyes?

  Also upstairs, above the chapel, was the Old Library. A large east-facing semicircular topped window brought in plenty of daylight. Except when Egremont – or Chantrey, on at least that one occasion – wanted to see what he was up to, he had here all the privacy he needed. But, at least in his imagination, this room was populated once by three women who watched as the artist, facing the morning sun, applied his brush to a canvas on an easel.29 He has turned the window into a great fanlight. In another gouache done in the same room, he concentrated on a vase of lilies, dahlias and other flowers that stands on a table, with a print and some books lying beside it, and in the background a plaster-cast of the Seated Venus by Joseph Nollekens. This vase of flowers and the pile of books appear in a third drawing, which showed the portrait painter Sir William Beechey busy with his picture of Egremont’s niece, Mrs Hasler as Flora. The flowers were a prop in this, and Turner appropriated them as he eventually did the Old Library.

  Most years Lord Egremont gave a feast for his tenants and the needy of the area on his birthday, 18 December. Church bells rang to celebrate the occasion. Fireworks concluded it. But in 1834 His Lordship was ill at the time and the feast was put off until the following spring. Charles Greville was there and – a touch condescendingly – recorded in his diary what a fine sight it was:

  fifty-four tables, each fifty feet long, were placed in a vast semi-circle on the lawn before the house … Plum puddings and loaves were piled like cannon-balls, and innumerable joints of boiled and roast beef were spread out, while hot joints were prepared in the kitchen, and sent forth as soon as the firing of guns announced the hour of the feast. Tickets were given to the inhabitants of a certain district,
and the number was about 4000; but, as many more came, the Old Peer could not endure that there should be anybody hungering outside the gates, and he went out himself and ordered the barriers to be taken down and admittance given to all. They think 6000 were fed … Nothing could exceed the pleasure of that fine old fellow; he was in and out of the windows of his room twenty times, enjoying the sight of these poor wretches, all attired in their best, cramming themselves and their brats with as much as they could devour, and snatching a day of relaxation and happiness.30

  The next great event at Petworth was the last of the third Earl’s epoch. Eighty-six years old, he was ailing in early November 1837; in the presence of the sculptor Carew he declared, ‘I feel myself likely to go this time – I shall slip through.’31 Soane had died in January, Constable in March. Lord Egremont died on 11 November. On the 15th, Thomas Phillips wrote to the Reverend Sockett – who, despite the row over politics which had led to him being banned from the house, was in charge of the funeral – to tell him that he and Turner would attend: ‘Pray in your arrangements reserve a mourning cloak for me, and another for Mr Turner who is deeply affected.’32 The Brighton Patriot reported at the end of the month that on Tuesday, 21 November, ‘the remains of the deeply lamented and sincerely beloved Earl of Egremont were consigned to the silent tomb. The body had not lain in state, but all who desired were permitted to view the remains of one who will be long remembered as a liberal benefactor …’ The Patriot listed the mourners in their categories, including churchwardens, gamekeepers, clergymen, chaplains, the Earl’s physician, artists, servants, head groom and head gardener, valet and steward, bailiffs, surveyors, clerks, chief mourners and their servants, tenants, school children, teachers, friends. The hearse was pulled by sixteen men. Turner walked at the head of the group of artists, and saw the third Earl’s body buried in a family vault.