Even when illustrating, Turner was an artist; and, whatever his reportorial instincts, he didn’t confront his times. He lived through industrial revolution, agricultural depression and political reform; but his expression of interest in such matters was an artist’s, properly oblique, or so combined with historic compost, painterly reference and artistic innovation that the impact of the modern never seemed journalistically sensational. The social and political ramifications of a subject almost always remained incidental to what he was trying to achieve in a picture by way of colour and light.
By 1835, when he was sixty, he had seen a lot of changes in English life. Parts of an empire may have been lost but the bulk was still growing, was further flung than any in human history, and produced vast wealth for the mother country. There, hard roads and fast coaches were followed by iron rails and locomotives. More and more people filled the British Isles and tumbled out overseas; the population of Britain had nearly doubled since the turn of the century and about a tenth of it – nearly two million – was making London burst at the seams. The old market gardens and marshes towards Chelsea and Wapping were being covered with new streets, new houses. A contemporary, Sydney Smith, remarked on all that had happened since he was born in 1771, including smooth streets (which saved him £15 a year on repairs to his carriage springs), gas lighting, effective policing, cheap cabs, medicines like quinine, umbrellas, the penny post and savings banks. And then there were all the effects of Watt’s steam engine.
One has the impression that Turner took on most elements of his time quite happily: cotton mills and steam engines produced colourful effects; he enjoyed the contrast between factory fires and rural greenery, such as he had recorded at Dudley around 1832 and was to paint in watercolour and gouache in Liege, Belgium, around 1839. Darwin – still a believer in the biblical account of Creation – went to sea on HMS Beagle in 1831 for nearly five years and though neither his 1839 volume on the voyage, which led him to the theory of evolution, nor Sir Charles Lyell’s influential Principles of Geology appeared on Turner’s bookshelves, he had the fifth volume (concerning fishes) of Sir John Richardson’s Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Erebus and Terror, 1845. It was an age of aggressive enquiry, with religious faith in question and a growing awareness of the immensity of natural processes.
Turner went with his time, taking in its facts through his senses and daily needs. But often in his art other things rose to the surface: his dreams superseded the realities of the day. They could be dreams of Carthage or Venice, of past or present. They could be intimate glimpses, say of Petworth or the Seine, that had an inherent buoyancy, or larger views – some of his oils, for example, of the Kent sea coast – within whose brilliance one detects a dark centre. Man was a puny thing, dwarfed by time and nature. And yet the despair at the heart of this vision did not stop him. If he didn’t have hope, he had energy; in late-middle age that energy was stupendous still.
He enjoyed being a journeyman – travelling to fulfil his commissions to illustrate books for armchair tourists. So he went on crossing the Channel, listening to the paddle-wheels thrash and smelling the gritty smoke and salt air; getting up early to catch a coach or train; walking and sketching and arriving tired out late in the day at an unknown inn. But in 1836 he had company – he made his summer tour with Hugh Munro, wealthy landowner and laird of Novar in Easter Ross, Scotland, who had been collecting Turner pictures for at least a decade, and whose vocation as an amateur artist Turner had done much to foster. When John Green’s collection in Blackheath was sold by Christie’s in April 1830, Munro bought Turner’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1803–5) and his Bonneville (exhibited 1803). According to Alaric Watts, they were ‘among the most attractive lots, though neither important in size nor of his best time. In those days their market value might have been about eighty guineas each. They would, however, have been knocked down for considerably less, but for the impetus given to the biddings by one of Mr Turner’s agents, whose personal appearance did not warrant the belief that he was in search of pictures of a very high order. He was, in fact, a clean, ruddy-cheeked butcher’s boy, in the usual costume.’18
Munro had a different story. Turner, he recalled, had alerted him to the Green sale:
He then knew I had bought anything of his which had come to the hammer. He asked me, if I meant to bid for these pictures, for said he it would be most inconvenient & impossible for me to go there during the varnishing days. I said I should. He asked me how far I should go; as far as I recollect I said £200 for each, probably more for the large one ‘Adonis leaving the couch of Venus’. He seemed much pleased – [he said] ‘then I shall leave it entirely to you …’ I was at the sale but did not bid in person. The agent who bid for me said his only opponent was a boy & he could not find out who he was. A long time after, Peacock, a dealer of much taste in Marylebone St. said to me ‘Had I been able to be at Blackheath you would have had to pay more for those Turners but I could not go myself & sent my boy.’ I got the pictures for £75 each. (Turner’s prices were then as you know £250 for 3f. by 4f.) On my return to town I called at Somerset House to tell Turner what I had done. He shook his head & said I had got them too cheap – but thanked me for what I had done.19
Munro had also gone down the river to Greenwich with Turner and Holworthy in the early 1830s. It was Turner’s idea, though he appointed Munro ‘commodare’ of the jaunt.20 It seems to have been on this occasion that they visited the Painted Hall of the Naval Hospital after dinner and looked at Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar, and while they were doing so the forthright pensioner said the picture looked like a carpet and that they should look at the de Loutherbourg Glorious First of June instead. Munro was a shy man, not the sort to bid at an auction. Turner had written to Holworthy about him a few years before: ‘He has lost a great deal of that hesitation in manner and speech, and [when] spoken to [, does] not … blush as heretofore.’21 Turner was to be seen at Munro’s house in Park Street, where David Roberts now and then encountered him. At one point Munro was being pressed by Scottish friends to take up politics, but he didn’t have the outgoing qualities. In 1836 he was depressed, and Turner out of friendship ‘proposed to divert his mind into fresh channels by the expedient of travel’.22
They set out after the Academy exhibition closed – it was the last to be held at Somerset House, and Turner, feeling the loss, an old tie broken forever, may have been glad to have Munro along. From Dover they travelled to Calais, and then to St Omer, the old market town on the road south. There, Munro later told Ruskin, Turner sketched ‘with great eagerness … I especially remember an old abbey [St Bertin] which he was sketching in a remarkable way with a bit of plumbago [graphite].’23 On their way to the Alps Turner wanted to call at places he had not seen before as well as to revisit places like Bonneville. They went through Arras and Rheims, Dijon and Dole, before reaching Lausanne. Munro said of Turner, ‘All along, whenever he could get a few minutes, he had his little sketchbook out, many being remarkable, but he seemed to tire at last and got careless and slovenly. I don’t remember colouring coming out till we got into Switzerland.’24 Near Salanches, at the bridge of St Martin’s, when Munro was having difficulty with a coloured sketch, Turner asked to borrow a block of paper. ‘He reappeared in about two hours and throwing it down, where he had taken it up, said he could make nothing of my papers. I expressed my regret that he had thrown away his time. But it was some days before I had occasion to open the block again (so little did I expect to find what I did, viz. the 4 sketches in it). He never asked me for them or ever said a word about them.’25 Was this an object lesson or a gift – or both, furtively expressed? As Ruskin later remarked, Turner had ‘a curious dislike to appear kind’.26
Munro saw Turner in various moods on this trip. He got to know his aloof way of concentrating, rarely talking, never rhapsodizing about the Alpine scenery; but, once used to that taciturn manner, he found it easy to get on with him. Sometimes Turner was evidently disgruntled: he didn’t like the way
a coloured sketch had turned out and wished he had used a pencil. He often preferred a higher viewpoint to the one Munro chose. For a sixty-one-year-old, this meant a lot of climbing. In the Aosta valley, many of Turner’s sketches were made from spots on the mountains that were reached by arduous ascents. The companions parted in Turin, with Turner intending to return alone by the Rhine route, but before they did so Munro tried to buy from Turner some of his Aosta drawings. Turner would not sell them. Munro felt a little hurt by this. But somehow or other, the sketchbook that Turner had partly used on his last visit to Farnley in 1824 – and was perhaps too saddened by to want to use again – got into Munro’s luggage before Turner left. Another mysterious present from one inhibited person to another.
In the course of the 1830s Turner went into Central Europe by way of Copenhagen, Berlin, Dresden and Prague.27 As mentioned, he went again to Venice. Other than when calling on Delacroix in Paris, he seems to have avoided meeting notable people on these trips and travelled with his usual quiet concentration. An inn-keeper in the Jura had an unfavourable impression of his guest. An English traveller who knew Turner saw his name in the inn’s visitors book and asked what sort of man had registered. The patron answered, ‘A rough clumsy man, and you may know him by his always having a pencil in his hand.’28 During his journey home from Venice in 1840, he paused on the Danube near Regensburg, sometimes called Ratisbon, and drew a tower built on a rock, writing next to it ‘Tom Girtin’. So far from home, so many years on, his old friend and challenger came to mind.29
In 1837, following the deaths of John Soane and Constable, King William IV died, not long after opening the new National Gallery and Royal Academy buildings, and the young Victoria became queen. Turner, like the rest of the country, evidently felt that the throne was safe beneath that plump and tidy form – he took wing for the Continent again. He was away from late July until 5 September, leaving few marks to blaze his trail.30 In 1839 he made his second long Meuse–Mosel–Rhine expedition – a five-sketchbooks tour into the country Wordsworth had called ‘War’s favourite playground’.31 He was invited to Hastings for Christmas by J. H. Maw and he replied on 11 December that he could not come because he had been ‘so idle all summer’.32 In fact he remained busy all winter, finishing his lovely blue-paper gouaches – about eighty in all – that captured the essence of his recent river travels. He also painted hard: seven oils were shown at the Academy exhibition the following May. Idle indeed!
They were busy years, but he had time for Britain too; not only for Petworth and Margate, but for Scotland – two trips in 1831 and 1834 – and Oxford, which he visited on the way to the Midlands in 1830 and again in 1834 to see James Ryman, successor to the print-dealer James Wyatt. Sketches for watercolours which would be the basis of engravings were the reasons for these trips: a typical product the watercolour he did of the Merton Street façade of Merton College, with some workmen cutting timber and dressing stone; a splendid by-product five radiant colour studies or ‘colour beginnings’ he did of Oxford High Street. The 1831 Scottish trip was the one which took him to Staffa on the Maid of Morven, but its main purpose was Cadell’s commission to him to illustrate Scott’s Poetical Works. Turner, as noted, went reluctantly, feeling out of sorts, and believing that he had enough Scottish material already; but Cadell paid his expenses. Scott, although seriously ill, was hospitable at Abbotsford and had Turner shown around various historic and picturesque sites; but Turner seems to have been an awkward guest. Cadell wrote to Sir Walter afterwards: ‘I am sorry that Mr Turner should have annoyed you all so much – it was most absurd to be in such a pother.’33 He had presumably calmed down by the time he visited Hugh Munro at his Novar seat on the east coast of Scotland, overlooking Cromarty Firth. Back home in October 1834 he was involved in outside work much closer to Queen Anne Street.
Turner’s interest in the elements – air, earth, fire and water – was life-long, but in several pictures of this time it was fire that preoccupied him. Blazing rockets and fireworks took his fancy on the English coast and over the Venice rooftops. The fires of industry and the flames of hell figured in several watercolours (Dudley and Satan Summoning his Legions, a preliminary study34 for a vignette for Milton’s Poetical Works). His act of genial Rembrandtesque rivalry with George Jones, the Burning Fiery Furnace, showing Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego within, was exhibited in 1832. Two pictures of the mid-1830s were an oil, Fire at Sea, and a watercolour, Fire at Fenning’s Wharf. Fenning’s was a timber yard next to the Thames that caught fire on the night of 30 August 1836 – and Turner’s watercolour makes it look as if he had been an eye-witness. But it isn’t clear whether he was in fact back by then from his Swiss trip with Munro (in the course of which a conflagration in Lausanne caught his eye); the seemingly on-the-spot spontaneity of Fenning’s may have been the result of his veteran artifice. However, he was certainly present at the great fire of the decade. On the night of 16 October 1834, he hurried along with many other Londoners to Westminster: the Houses of Parliament in the old Palace of Westminster were burning.
The blaze broke out in the House of Lords shortly after 6 p.m. and spread rapidly in the strong wind. A stock of ancient wooden tallies – notched sticks on which exchequer receipts were once recorded – was being burned in the Lords’ furnaces, and the heat became so intense that timbers adjacent to the chimneys ignited. The medieval palace was full of woodwork – beams, rafters, laths, panelling – and much of it went up in flames and smoke, though the great structure of Westminster Hall, which dated from Norman times, was saved. Turner was among a number of members and students of the Royal Academy who were drawn to the fire. One student named John Waller wrote in his diary that some of his fellows were ‘on the river in the same boat with Turner and Stanfield … it must have been a magnificent study for them’.35 (Poor Waller missed it and regretted it.) Turner’s shorthand sketches, done at night by the light of the blaze, were indeed sketchy. He drew the scene not only from a boat but from Westminster Bridge and from the far Surrey riverbank. But back in his studio he put his memories and reactions into a number of watercolour studies, most of them quick, but a more considered one shows the firefighters in Old Palace Yard and a crowd of spectators.36 He then painted not just one oil but two of the disaster. The first was the painting he was seen working on before the opening of the British Institution exhibition in February 1835. Among the admiring reviewers, the Spectator’s writer thought it ‘wonderful’ – a picture that ‘transcends its neighbours [including Chalon’s view of the same fire] as the sun eclipses the moon and the stars’.37 His second fling at the subject was shown at the Academy in May. In this he viewed the inferno from the southern end of Waterloo Bridge, further downstream, which was from a greater distance. There was more water in this picture and hence the great fire was redoubled by its reflection on the surface of the Thames. The fiery colour struck some as almost celebratory, if not inflammatory, and the Morning Herald suggested that ‘the Academy ought, now and then … to throw a wet blanket over either this fire king or his works’.38
Turner may have felt, as many did, that this calamity was poetic justice: Parliament was being punished for its tardiness in reforming the franchise and for the moderation of its efforts in that respect two years before. He may have been happy to see this headquarters of the old regime of rotten boroughs and the landowner-dominated place-system go up in smoke. (But England was still two nations, and Parliament spoke most directly for just one of those two.) He may have wondered wryly what his Radical friend Walter Fawkes would have said as the buildings his ancestor Guy Fawkes had failed to blow up were now so dramatically incinerated. But the reporter of the Pantheon’s morning-after was more likely in the first instance to have been thrilled to witness and record so catastrophic an event – heat and flames consuming the accretion of centuries, and the firemen (still working for private insurance companies) unable to do more than confine it by hosing down, for instance, Westminster Hall, which they saved with the help of a win
d shift that blew the fire back towards the riverside buildings. (In his second oil Turner showed the floating fire-pump, labelled ‘Sun Fire Office’, arriving rather late; because of low water in the Thames, it had run aground on the way; this was the sort of detail that stuck in his mind.) His pictures of the occasion certainly underline his belief that man, faced with great natural forces and human folly, was going to be in deep trouble. But it was the fire itself – its shape, movement and colour – that was his subject, and the associations were condiments to the main course. (Turner also wanted to visit the Tower of London after a serious fire there on 30 October 1841. The Duke of Wellington curtly declined to assist Turner in gaining entry.)
He was still having trouble in the mid-1830s in selling many of his most ambitious pictures. In stock, in his gallery, were Dido building Carthage; Crossing the Brook; Bay of Baiae; Ulysses deriding Polyphemus; Palestrina; Staffa, Fingal’s Cave and Helvoetsluys, among others. Some friends remained faithful purchasers. Soane bought Admiral van Tromp’s Barge for 250 guineas in 1831 and Hugh Munro took the Rotterdam Ferry Boat in 1833 and Juliet and her Nurse in 1836. If, in the public eye, a painter is only as good as the reception of his last picture, his fame was tottery. But the two Houses of Parliament paintings struck a chord and sold quickly: the close-up was bought on the last day of the British Institution show by a Mr Chambers Hall and the more distant view of the fire by a Leeds collector, James Garth Marshall. Marshall’s grandson (who inherited the picture) later described a visit his grandfather and father made in 1835 to Queen Anne Street:
J.M.W. Turner Page 45
