My grandfather asked Turner what his price was and he said he could have anything in his studio for £350. My grandfather then turned to my father and said, ‘which do you like best?’ and he pointed to the picture now in my possession. But Turner said: ‘Well, young man, that is the one you cannot have, as I have decided to give that to the nation,’- but my grandfather, who was a hard-headed Yorkshireman, said: ‘No, Mr. Turner, you gave me the offer of anything in your studio at a price and I must hold you to it.’ And so the picture came into the family.39
Fame, Dr Johnson famously opined, is a shuttlecock, and Turner’s celebrity as an eccentric, indeed erratic, genius was heightened by the fact that some critics believed in him and others did not. One writer in Arnold’s Magazine of the Fine Arts in 1833 recalled Fuseli’s verdict – ‘Turner is the only landscape painter of genius in Europe’ – and went on to judge his most recent work as far superior to his earlier; Turner had ‘emerged as a meteor in colouring’.40 The contrary position was put in Blackwood’s three years later, when the Reverend John Eagles denounced Turner’s Juliet and her Nurse as ‘a strange jumble’ and an example of the glare and glitter delighted in by modern British artists (as opposed to the shade and depth of the Old Masters).41 And this brought the seventeen-year-old John Ruskin into the field to defend his hero for the first time – although, as we have seen, Turner dissuaded him from sending on his overwrought reply to Blackwood’s. But that, as time would show, was not going to shut Ruskin up.
In one respect, Turner was an undoubted success: he made money. The new Victorians respected wealth and those who supported themselves by their own efforts. Although some of his big pictures did not sell, others did, for goodly amounts. George Jones detected Turner’s arrival at a level of uniformly ‘large prices’ when he received 200 guineas from Robert Vernon for Bridge of Sighs, Canaletti Painting in 1833, and Turner said to Jones, ‘Well, if they will have such scraps instead of important pictures, they must pay for them.’42 His standard price for three-by-fours was 200 guineas in 1837, but for the larger Fountain of Fallacy he charged twice that price in 1839, ‘exclusive of frame and copyright of Engraving’.43 In 1843 he told a would-be client for a commissioned three-by-four painting that the price would be 200 guineas but that the same work ‘afterwards’, that is bought during the Academy exhibition or at his gallery, would be 250 guineas.44 Cadell paid him twenty-five guineas each for twenty-four designs for the Scott poems in 1831, a total of £630 (roughly £22,000 today).
In these years he was also engaged in providing illustrations for Samuel Rogers’s Poetical Works and for the Findens, whose Byron volumes (1832–4) and Landscape Illustrations of the Bible (1833–6) he illustrated. (For the latter, he worked from drawings and prints by artists who had travelled to the Holy Land; he did not do so himself.) For the series Picturesque Views in England and Wales, for Charles Heath, he got sixty to seventy guineas a drawing. That Turner was ‘doing all right’ was evident in the fact that he could afford to spend £3000 in buying up the remaining stock of this series in 1840, when Heath had financial troubles, in the process outsmarting the publisher and print-dealer Mr Bohn. And he could also afford to lay out over £2500 in fees to engravers for making five large plates of his own work around this time, on top of which he had to pay for the paper and printing costs of the engravings.
While his work and his name were circulating in the form of prints to a large public, those collectors who were buying his larger works had ceased to be the aristocracy or – Munro excepted – great landowners. One of his new patrons was the Bishopsgate coachmaker Benjamin Windus, who put together a celebrated watercolour collection at his house in Tottenham; there, by 1834, he had some fifty Turners – by 1840, around 200. (He went on to buy Turner oils as well.) The watercolours included drawings from Southern Coast, from England and Wales, and many of the Byron, Scott and Bible illustrations. Visitors were welcome to see Windus’s library and drawing room and view the Turners on display. Other patrons of this time were the Leeds clothing magnate John Sheepshanks, who bought St. Michael’s Mount (RA 1834), Line-Fishing off Hastings (RA 1835) and Venice, from the Canale della Guidecca (RA 1840); Henry McConnel, a Manchester textile manufacturer, who commissioned the Venice of 1834 and Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Night (RA 1835); and Robert Vernon, the horse dealer, who bought among others Bridge of Sighs (RA 1833), The Golden Bough (RA 1834) and Neapolitan Fisher Girls (RA 1840). These men were not buying ‘safely’ – there was plenty of more conservative painting around to decorate their houses. They were buying with the panache with which they made money; but they weren’t throwing their money away.
Considering what a lonely grouch he could sometimes be, Turner was from time to time found in distinguished company. He seems sometimes to have been asked to dinners to provide balance, to be the artist. He may sometimes have gone for the meal, for the talk and for the contacts with people who might provide commissions. In March 1835 he dined with his frequent host Samuel Rogers at his house in St James’s Place along with the writer Tom Moore and the editor of the Times, Thomas Barnes, who was one of the most influential men in the country. Talking with Moore, Turner said he had often wanted to go to Ireland but had been afraid to. He never went, but he did four vignettes for Moore’s book The Epicurean, published in 1839.
Yet he was slighted in 1837. The greatest landscape and seascape painter of the age was not on the list of those honoured when Queen Victoria came to the throne and within a month Augustus Callcott, the miniature painter W. J. Newton and Richard Westmacott the sculptor were all given knighthoods. His friend Chantrey had received the accolade in 1835 and David Wilkie in 1836. Why not Turner? His mysterious humour? His lack of social polish? Rumours of unsuitable women? He was perhaps seen simply as too much of ‘a character’, with his Covent Garden origins still clear. And though he was an intimate part of Lord Egremont’s informal court, that apparently didn’t carry weight at the west end of the Mall. His sense of neglect may have shown in one of his paintings of 1838, Ancient History – Ovid Banished from Rome, and in his 1839 Cicero at his Villa. He thought that Cicero had ‘died neglected’, as he told the listeners to one of his 1811 Perspective lectures – Cicero was in fact forced to flee from his villa and was then murdered. Turner’s jocularity may have been clouded for a time but he also may have reflected that British social distinctions broke no bones; they were preferable to cut-throat Roman politics.
He remained staunchly involved with the Royal Academy. He had been on the committee planning the new quarters alongside the National Gallery and in 1837, as already mentioned, he was on the hanging committee for the first exhibition in its new home. He was also on the Council that year along with Chantrey, Leslie and Hilton, though he was not at the meetings that took place through August, September and October – he was away on the Continent, in Margate and at Petworth. After Lord Egremont’s funeral he attended the Life Academy as a Visitor. But one aspect of his Academy life now ended. He finally decided to quit his post as Professor of Perspective (his last lectures had been given in 1828). He was formally thanked by Wilkie in early 1838, in a resolution at the General Assembly that Edwin Landseer seconded, expressing – rather pompously – the ‘extreme regret they feel upon the loss of the services of a Professor who, by precept and example, has done so much to advance the cause of Perspective in the English School’.45
A number of friends never ceased to bear him in mind. Dawson Turner continued to dispatch barrels of herrings to him. John Maw in 1834 sent some Devonshire clotted cream to Queen Anne Street, and Turner twice thanked him for it; once in a formal note that for some reason didn’t get promptly delivered, secondly in a note of apology enclosing the first. (In note 1, Turner thanked Maw for the ‘Clotted Cream’. In note 2, it was the ‘clotid cream’.)46
With Turner, as we have seen, charity began largely away from home. It was an age in which private munificence supported many almshouses, hospitals, dispensaries and free schools, though some larger ins
titutions had other support. The Corporation of London looked after Bedlam (which moved to Lambeth in 1815, eleven years after his mother had died in it); Greenwich Naval Hospital was funded by royal, government and personal gift (and by deductions from seamen’s wages); and Chelsea Hospital for veteran soldiers was also government-backed. Both Chelsea and Greenwich were grand structures, with Wren buildings facing the Thames, greater than any royal palace in London. Although ‘Turner’s Gift’ was obviously not going to be on that scale, he may have thought of his establishment for decayed artists as emulating, in its smaller, Twickenham way, the great charitable foundations. At some point he bought a book by T. F. Hunt, Designs for Parsonage Houses, Alms Houses, etc. (1827), presumably so that he could get ideas for his own charity – which George Jones said ‘he did not like to call … alms houses’, preferring ‘the denomination of “Turner’s Gift”’. Jones also said that Turner constantly talked to his intimate friends ‘of the best mode of leaving property for the use of the unsuccessful’ artists.47
Soane – knighted in 1831 – had got a private bill introduced in Parliament in 1833 to ensure that his property went to establish a Soane museum; an ordinary will would not have been sufficient in law to keep his spendthrift son from getting his hands on the estate. But despite Soane’s example (successful, as it turned out) in thus getting around the priority usually conceded by English courts to private claims over public claims, Turner failed to take such a precautionary step. Perhaps he thought his relatives would never bother to challenge his intentions. He seems to have been entranced by all the legal language and checks and balances he threw into the codicil drawn up in 1832 for his second will, instructing his executors what to do should there be any objection to setting up ‘Turner’s Gift’ after he died. Although such an institution remained his ‘express desire’, he declared that ‘if it be found impossible to fully carry the same into effect within five years from my death’, then he wanted his funds and property used to keep Queen Anne Street going as a gallery, with Hannah as custodian at £150 a year, because a prime object was still ‘to keep my pictures together’.48 A secondary object achieved by this would be to give the faithful Hannah something to do; she had lost some of her raison d’être with his father’s death in 1829, and his own departure would make her jobless. But whether Turner considered this, or was simply using the most knowledgeable, available and indeed only member of his entourage for such a post, is unknown. Hannah by now was well accustomed to the neglect his pictures received at home.
With Soane, Turner was involved in the Artists General Benevolent Institution. For it they held a joint account in trust. Turner seems to have been one of the founding members of this body in 1814 and for fifteen years was highly active on its behalf, helping negotiate a merger with a rival charity, the Artists Benevolent Fund in 1818. He was chairman of the AGBI board and its treasurer at the time. Both penny- and pound-wise, Turner had financial acumen that was useful. As jottings in his sketchbooks showed, he kept a careful eye on interest rates and the returns to be got from government stock. (The National Debt was funded by individuals like Turner, looking for a safe home for, and steady income from, their money.) The interests of the AGBI were often in his thoughts: he got Walter Fawkes to pay an annual subscription of five guineas in 1816, and he talked up the AGBI to Farington at the Academy Club dinner on 4 March 1818. He paid regular dues and made generous donations on top of them. He was a fairly regular attender of the AGBI’s annual dinner. At the dinner in May 1823, at Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street (a building whose reconstruction Soane and Philip Hardwick had overseen), Lord Liverpool, the moderate but unthrusting Prime Minister from 1815 to 1827, was chairman for the start of the proceedings. But when he stepped down the AGBI members unanimously called on Turner to take the chair. The Sun reported, ‘He obeyed the universal desire, and kept up the good humour and conviviality of the meeting.’49 At the following year’s dinner, after the healths of the Secretary and Directors were drunk, Turner – so the British Press wrote – ‘returned thanks in a neat speech’.50 This may have been the only ‘neat speech’ he ever made, and it is a pity no record of it has been found.
David Roberts first met Turner at an AGBI ‘stewards meeting’ around this time at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand. Turner didn’t quite fit the picture that Roberts – then a young scene painter – had built up about him, ‘the mighty painter of the day … whose works were the all-in-all to every young artist’. The AGBI officers were seated around a green-baize-covered table when ‘a little square-built man came in, to whom all paid respect. The business having begun, he joined in the conversation, and made some weak attempts at wit – at least I thought so, for no one seemed to laugh at his jokes but himself! So I asked who this very facetious little man was, and my astonishment on being told it was ‘The Great Turner’ … turned my head.’51
Despite Turner’s dedication to the cause, disagreements arose in the 1820s between him and another AGBI stalwart, the Scottish miniature painter Andrew Robertson, about the purpose of the charity. Turner’s generous feelings ran, as we have seen, more easily in large institutional channels than they did on a personal scale, and this and his tendency to hoard in case of serious future need came up against the belief of Robertson and others that the AGBI ought to spend more now on widows and orphans. Turner’s inflexibility in the face of present individual need had been seen in 1811, when Farington recorded that Mrs Richards, the impoverished widow of John Richards RA, the Academy’s former Secretary, had applied to the Academy for help and in the process had, she complained, ‘been harshly treated by Turner’.52 (Was he smarting from the break-up of his own relationship with the widowed Mrs Danby?) According to Thornbury, at the time of Turner’s row with Robertson the architect C. R. Cockerell RA went to Queen Anne Street to put the point of view in favour of liberal giving. Turner ‘would hardly see him; he growled; he would not relent even when he was warned “that he would one day have to answer to the widows and orphans to whom he had refused bread”’.53 Turner, we remember, had had some of the benefit from the pension the Musicians Society had given Sarah Danby – there had been less financial pressure on JMWT.
In any event, in 1829 Turner decided to abandon the fight against the majority opinion and secede from the AGBI. He sent a letter to W. L. Roper, the Assistant Secretary, asking leave to resign as Chairman, and despite a quick reply from the Directors, trying to mollify him, his resignation as Chairman and Treasurer was accepted on 24 December 1829, with regret, and with the hope that he might be reinstated in both offices ‘at some future time’.54 Unmollified, in June 1830 he revoked his 1829 bequest of £500 to the AGBI; he seems to have felt that his own charity or Gift was going to require all his spare change. Yet he remained a trustee of the AGBI’s funds until 1839, when he failed to respond to a request from the Directors that he continue to act as such and was replaced. But he eventually made up with Andrew Robertson. George Jones at one point told Turner that Robertson regretted their estrangement, and Turner said, ‘“Let us meet.” They did so, and all the past dissatisfaction was forgotten. Turner’s heart was replete with charitable feeling, though his manner was not inviting to the prosperous or the poor.’55
The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who crossed the Atlantic several times in these years (and in 1848 went to Turner’s gallery), thought England was ‘the best of actual nations’. It was like a ship anchored in a very effective position ‘at the side of Europe, and right in the heart of the modern world’. Emerson saw how the English were tugged two ways, by the past and by the present: ‘Everyone of them is a thousand years old, and lives by his memory: and when you say this, they accept it as praise.’ And yet the up-to-date was also in evidence if you looked, or listened, hard enough: ‘the voice of their modem muse has a slight hint of the steam whistle’.56
Turner’s love of the English past – and its castles, countryside, sailing ships and heroes – was as great as any Englishman’s, but the steam w
histle sounded for him too. The man born on St George’s Day was ‘English-minded’, as his young admirer John Ruskin was to observe,57 in many ways an old-fashioned patriot, and yet he was open to much that the mid-nineteenth century put in his way. This is not to say that all that was happening was reflected in his work. One doesn’t see any of the new omnibuses, drawn by two or three horses, that were beginning to trundle along London streets (there were 400 of them in 1837). The gas lamps in town don’t show in his pictures. As he walked from the new quarters of the Academy, overlooking what was becoming Trafalgar Square, to the new premises of the Athenaeum Club on the corner of Pall Mall and Waterloo Place – in other words from one great war-memorial site to another – he was passed by cabs, gigs, private carriages and drays jostling each other over the cobbles. He couldn’t help but feel the pace of the metropolis of which he was a part, but his artistic interest remained fixed on waves breaking on Kent beaches, palazzos standing alongside the canals of Venice, compositions of trees and people, ships and water, arrangements of colour and light.
Along with steampower at sea, he was interested in lighthouses and life-saving marine innovations, which he drew and painted; but not all the new forms of travel that intrigued him got into his paintings. In late 1836 he heard of a balloon expedition that had been made from London to the Continent by three men, one being Robert Hollond, who was to become member of Parliament for Hastings. Turner wrote to Hollond, with whom he had apparently talked: ‘Your Excursion so occupied my mind that I dreamt of it, and I do hope you will hold to your intention of making the drawing, with all the forms and colours of your recollection.’58
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