Turner was taken by the notion of seeing the Channel from high above, the beam of the South Foreland lighthouse on the waters of the Straits, the clouds ahead like battlements, the scattered fires and lights below that gradually formed into a town, and the blackness of night – darker when seen from on high – with the stars ‘redoubled in their lustre’, shining ‘like sparks of the whitest silver’, as Monck Mason, one of Hollond’s companions, wrote in his account of the trip.59
But he was at sea level or rather river level for the one British exhibit he sent to the Academy in 1839 along with four Italian-subject entries, ancient and modern. The title ‘Professor of Perspective’ after his name was missing from the catalogue this year and would not appear again. He called his riverscape The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838. He showed the old warship, a Trafalgar veteran, being towed upriver – a scrimshaw ship with slim ivory masts, bound for the next world and already radiating a magic ghostliness. The Temeraire was plucked onward by a thoroughly modern paddle-wheel tugboat, its tall black stack shooting forth a plume of flame and white smoke like a moving pyre, its round-topped black paddle-wheel boxes reminding one of the wheels of a hearse. The tug seems to vibrate with the energy it is using to pull the great corpse of a ship to the breaker’s yard. The river is calm. A barge sails gently downstream; a white-canvased square-rigged ship hangs in the distance; a hulk floats near the horizon; and the low sun fires the sky and then, in reflection, the river-surface towards which the Temeraire and its tug remorselessly move. They are heading into the flames. It can’t be helped.
He saw this in his mind in colourful fragments, in remembered images, that cohered upon the canvas. He stacked his palette with his most ferocious pigments: lemon yellow, chrome yellow, orange, scarlet, vermilion and red lead, hot paints that he laid over an already warm ground of earth colours. A coal fire glowed in the studio grate. Outside, the grey and gritty winter fog swirled along Queen Anne Street. He had glanced at his ship models and some of the hundreds of sketches of warships he had done in the past, including the Temeraire when she was laid up in the Medway in the 1820s. Schetky had offered him a drawing of the Temeraire when he was working on his second Trafalgar painting in 1823. Turner had been down to Margate in September and he had presumably read in the papers about the old ship being towed from Sheerness to Beatson’s yard at Rotherhithe on the 5th and 6th of that month. It was undoubtedly a subject. That the Temeraire herself had been denuded for this slow tide-assisted voyage, her masts lifted out, her spars and sails stripped from her, didn’t affect his way of telling the story. He had always had a dream of ships in his head; ‘floating bulwarks’ and ‘the saviour of the world’ were words of verse he had written in a sketchbook used in 1814 when he watched the Prince Regent and assorted monarchs view the fleet at Spithead.60 So he left her masts in, her yards aloft, her sails bent on; but no flags or ensigns. There was a fatality to be recorded and the poignant fact that the Admiralty had already sold off this ship for her worth in scrap timber, iron, copper and lead. The Temeraire at this point was no longer part of the Royal Navy. He told them to put in with the exhibition catalogue entry two lines, adapted or semi-borrowed in his way from Thomas Campbell’s poem ‘Ye Mariners of England’:
The flag which braved the battle and the breeze,
No longer owns her.
The Fighting Temeraire made a great splash at the 1839 Academy exhibition, only eight months after the ship’s last voyage. It tugged at the emotions of many viewers. It evoked the end of the age of fighting sail, the wooden walls and hearts of oak, and the onset of the age of steam and iron. It elicited explication and panegyric. It was, many thought, a splendid poem by the greatest master of the age. ‘A magnificent national ode or piece of music,’ declared Thackeray, a fluent spokesman for the enthusiasts. In Fraser’s Magazine he called the Temeraire ‘a noble river-piece … as grand a picture as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter’. And he continued with a description of ‘the little, spiteful, diabolical steamer’ and with a patriotic paean that responded to the ship’s service history and battles past:
We Cockneys feel our hearts leap up when we recall them to memory; and every clerk in Threadneedle Street feels the strength of a Nelson, when he thinks of the mighty actions performed by him.
It is absurd, you will say … to grow so politically enthusiastic about a four-foot canvass, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, and a sunset. But herin surely lies the power of the great artist. He makes you see and think of a good deal more than the objects before you …61
The Fighting Temeraire indeed made many imaginations work frenetically. The Academicians swapped stories of its origins. One had it that Turner and Stanfield were on an excursion on the Thames, going to Greenwich for a whitebait dinner, when the Temeraire came by and Stanfield said, ‘There’s a fine subject, Turner,’ and Turner painted it.62 But Stanfield himself said this was ‘an invention and a lie’.63 Another theory was that Turner and W. F. Woodington, the sculptor of one of the reliefs at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, were coming back from Margate on a steamer and saw the Temeraire in ‘a great blazing sunset’, at which Turner at once made some ‘little sketches on cards’.64 It was elsewhere claimed that Turner saw the warship go by while he was sitting on Cherry Garden Pier in Bermondsey.
Sooner or later some viewers had problems, and questions, about the mis-en-scène: Where on the Thames had Turner placed his ship and tug? Is that Sheerness or Greenwich on the right-hand bank? Is the Temeraire being towed southwards in the big U-bend of the river round the Isle of Dogs? Are we looking west or east – in other words, is that a sunset or a sunrise? If the latter, was he trying to make us think of the adage ‘Red sky in the morning, sailor’s [or shepherd’s] warning’? Was the picture of the breaker’s-bound vessel ‘a wry comment that he had been passed over’ for honours?65 Once more, the Fallacy of Hope! Ruskin was in no doubt of the sunset and its portent. Stoked up to full steam he wrote: ‘Under the blazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue, deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold deadly shadows of the twilight are gathering through every sunbeam …’66
It should be pointed out that téméraire means bold; and Turner had got bolder with time. Moreover, he knew that tugs had their masts in front of their funnels but he put his tug’s funnel foremost, and to hell with what marine experts would say. Indistinctness was his fault and his forte, and the facts were sometimes what became indistinct as he wrestled to capture an artistic truth. Here, too, he walked a tightrope of sentiment and got to the other end without falling in. The ovations were deserved.
His picture had a price-ticket at first but soon was priceless. A letter from him – of 12 June 1839 – to a potential purchaser of his exhibits at the Academy stated, ‘The only picture in east Room unsold is the Marine subject / Price 250 guineas.’67 In a slightly later letter to Charles Leslie, who had been enquiring what he wanted for the Temeraire, Turner wrote that two gentlemen were making up their minds about the picture. Maybe one of the minds to be made up was his own and it was tending toward the idea of not letting the painting go. Rumour had it that the Duke of Northumberland wanted to buy it around 1847 and Turner refused. In 1848, James Lenox, the New Yorker for whom Leslie acted in the purchase of Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, tried to buy the Temeraire. The dealer Thomas Griffith took Lenox to see Turner, and Lenox offered the artist £5000, which Turner turned down, and then a blank cheque, which Turner also rejected. By this stage the painting had become too precious to its maker to be sold or even lent. He had allowed it to be engraved and let the print-publisher J. Hogarth exhibit the painting in 1844. Some time after this he wrote, it seems to Hogarth: ‘Dear Sir I have received your note via Margate … no considerations of money or favour can induce me to lend my Darling again.’68
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Notes
1 Letters, pp.174, 275.
2 Ibid., p.152.
3 Dates given to some sketchbooks of this period by Finberg in his Inventory are very approximate. Tours listed in some chronologies – e.g. in Wilton’s Turner Abroad and Turner in his Time – should be checked against more recent studies, especially Powell’s illuminating Turner’s Rivers of Europe and Turner in Germany.
4 Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, i, p.296.
5 Lindsay, p.174. Several years after this, Delacroix wrote to Theophile Silvestre: ‘Constable, an admirable man, is one of England’s glories … He and Turner were real reformers. They broke out of the rut of traditional landscape painting. Our school, which today abounds with men of talent in this field, profited greatly by their example.’ Paris, 31 Dec 1858. Eugene Delacroix, Selected Letters 1813–63, ed. J. Stewart, London, 1971.
6 TB CCL f.10.
7 TB CCVIII 0; Warrell, Turner: The Fourth Decade, pp.30–1.
8 TB CCXLVIII.
9 Van der Merwe, TSN, no.57, pp.11–13.
10 Egerton, Fighting Temeraire, p.68.
11 TB CCLIX f.104.
12 TB CCXI.
13 Watts, p.xxxv.
14 Ibid.
15 TB CCXLIX.
16 Th. 1877, pp.102–3.
17 Ibid., p.99.
18 Watts, p.xxx.
19 MS note on stationery in G. Jones’s copy of Th. ii, p.148. Turner’s interest in his own work was also evident in July 1833, when Dr Monro’s collection of drawings was sold at Christie’s. He bought thirteen lots containing drawings attributed to him, as well as two drawings attributed to Rembrandt, and some studies by Hoppner (Finberg, p.342).
20 Letters, p.141.
21 4 December 1826, Letters, p.103.
22 Th. 1877, pp.103–4.
23 Finberg, p.360.
24 Ibid.
25 MS note in G. Jones’s copy of Th. i, p.230.
26 Ruskin, Works, vii, p.446n.
27 Powell, Turner in Germany: 1833, 1835, 1839 and 1840 tours.
28 Wilton, p.177.
29 Powell, Turner in Germany, p.66; TB CCCX f.68.
30 Wilton, p.207, says that Turner was in Paris and visited Versailles; Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe, pp.61–2 n.18, says nothing is known of this tour.
31 See Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe, pp.14, 18, 48.
32 Letters, p.174.
33 Finberg, p.332.
34 TB CCLXXX 78.
35 Solender, Dreadful Fire!, p.42.
36 TB CCCLXIV 373.
37 Finberg, p.352.
38 Solender, Dreadful Fire!, p.61.
39 Ibid., p.62.
40 Finberg, p.343.
41 Ibid., p.363.
42 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.5.
43 B&J, no.376.
44 Letters, pp.192–3.
45 Finberg, p.369.
46 Letters, p.154.
47 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in ibid., p.7.
48 Will, 1, pp.28–9.
49 Finberg, p.280.
50 Ibid., p.284.
51 Th. 1877, pp.353–4.
52 Farington, Diary, 4 July 1811.
53 Th. 1877, p.355.
54 Letters, p.134.
55 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in ibid., p.8.
56 Emerson, Collected Writings, v, pp.169, 21–2, 141.
57 Ruskin, Journal, 22 June 1840.
58 Letters, pp.163–4.
59 Ibid.
60 Finberg, p.213.
61 Egerton, Fighting Temeraire, pp.88–90.
62 Th. 1877, p.458.
63 MS note by Munro in G. Jones’s copy of Th. i, p.335.
64 B&J, no.377.
65 Wilton, p.176.
66 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, pp.162–3.
67 Letters, pp.172–3.
68 Ibid., p.211.
Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham, by W. B. Cooke after William Havell c.1814
19: The Rigours of Winter
On 22 June 1840 John Ruskin, aged twenty-one, first met his hero J. M. W. Turner, aged sixty-five. The meeting took place at the house of the art dealer Thomas Griffith in Norwood, where Turner talked ‘with great rapture of Aosta and Courmayeur’. Ruskin wrote:
Introduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge; at once the painter and poet of the day, J. M. W. Turner. Everybody had described him to me as coarse, boorish, unintellectual, vulgar. This I knew to be impossible. I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentleman: good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of his mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.1
Young Ruskin had first come across Turner’s work in an annual Friendship’s Offering – an engraving of his Vesuvius Angry – and had been thrilled. A later gift of Rogers’s Italy had given him the chance to look carefully at Turner’s work. In 1836, as noted, he had tried to reply to the Blackwood’s attack. By 1840, his father, a prosperous sherry merchant, had begun to collect Turner watercolours, and Ruskin, a highly strung mother’s boy with a disdain for the ordinary delights of life, felt that ‘whatever germs of better things remained in me, were then all centred in this love of Turner’2 The prevailing critical hostility to Turner’s work was exemplified by the Literary Gazette’s comment of May 1842, that his pictures were produced ‘as if by throwing handfuls of white, blue, and red at the canvas, and letting what would stick, stick’.3 Such hostility prompted Ruskin this time into more than a letter, more than a pamphlet. What came into being was Modern Painters, at once an impassioned defence of Turner and an intricately wrought – possibly overwrought – five-volume sermon on landscape art. When the first volume, by ‘A Graduate of Oxford’, was published in May 1843, its author called on Turner. The artist, as if catching Ruskin’s desire for anonymity, didn’t say anything directly about it but seemed gracious. Ruskin said, ‘I think he must have read my book, and been pleased with it, by his tone.’4
But Turner waited eighteen months before – at a dinner given by Godfrey Windus – he actually thanked Ruskin for the book, which Ruskin had described to Samuel Prout as ‘the hurried writing of a man in a rage’.5 The Ruskins, father and son, drove Turner home that night. Although it was very late, Turner asked them in for some sherry. ‘We were compelled to obey, and so drank healths again, exactly as the clock struck one, by the light of a single tallow candle in the under room – the wine, by the way, first-rate.’6
Turner often gave the impression that Ruskin saw more in his work than he himself did. David Roberts once asked Turner ‘what he thought of Ruskin’s reviews’, and Turner assured him that ‘he had never read a page of any of his works; this may or may not be’.7 Mary Lloyd wrote: ‘One day Turner took me down to dinner at Mr Rogers, and he said, “Have you read Ruskin on me?” I said, “No.” He replied, “but you will some day,” and then he added with his own peculiar shrug, “He sees more in my pictures than I ever painted!” but he seemed very much pleased.’8 On other occasions Turner laughed off Ruskin’s compliments to him and told him that he was too hard on many contemporary artists because he did not know how difficult painting was. (Turner knew that painting was hard work, and both Jane Fawkes and William Kingsley recorded him on the subject: ‘The only secret I have got is damned hard work’ and ‘I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.’)9
Ruskin was curiously able to extol Turner while disliking Claude and while thinking that Claude had had a ‘hurtful influence’ on Turner.10 Ruskin thought Turner’s Liber print Severn and Wye, a lovely Claudean scene, was ‘quite useless’.11 Moreover, Ruskin sometimes seemed oblivious to the facts of Turner pictures. W. J. Stillman had to point out to Ruskin that Juliet and her Nurse was a moonlight painting. Ruskin hadn�
��t noticed this and indeed disputed it. Stillman therefore called his attention to the fireworks display on the Grand Canal, and Ruskin then ‘admitted that it was not customary to let off fireworks by day, and that it must be a night scene’.12
However, Turner was undoubtedly charmed by Ruskin’s enthusiasm and buoyed up by the patronage of the Ruskins; soon he was dining frequently at their Herne Hill house. He attended family occasions such as John’s birthday. The Ruskins sent fruit, vegetables and eggs from their huge garden to Queen Anne Street. John often visited the gallery, bringing his father or friends. Father and son called on Turner on 28 April 1844, not long after a second edition of the first volume of Modern Painters had come out. Ruskin wrote that Turner was ‘kinder than I ever remember. He shook hands most cordially with my father, wanted us to have a glass of wine, asked us to go upstairs into the gallery. When there, I went immediately in search of Sol di Vinezia [RA 1843], saying it was my favourite. “I thought”, said Turner, “it was Saint Benedetto.” It was flattering that he remembered I had told him this.’13 It was pleasing for Turner to have a young champion – one of a new generation, who might open the eyes of an as yet untapped public to his merits, and enable him to sell some of his stock of decaying masterpieces.
Like many people in old age, Turner became ‘more so’. He did so in his usual contrary fashion. To some he seemed more and more isolated, the gruff recluse of Queen Anne Street. To others, who saw him by the Ruskins’ fireside or on Thomas Griffith’s lawn, he seemed more sociable than he had ever been, more agreeable and good-natured. And he kept working, working. From 1840 to 1846 paintings continued to pour out of him. Every summer from 1840 to 1845 he went abroad. His energy seemed unabated.
In 1840 he went to Venice again, by way of Rotterdam and the Rhine. He was accompanied part of the way by a married couple, known only by the initials ‘E. H.’ with which the husband signed a newsy affectionate letter to Turner in Venice. This E. H. wrote from Rome as if to a close friend. It was in Venice that William Callow met Turner, who was staying at the Hotel Europa, and making Callow feel idle by his hard-working habits, out after dinner in a gondola, sketching. Some wonderful watercolours came from this trip, as did nineteen further Venice oils that made their appearances at the Academy over the next six years. One of these was The Sun of Venice going to Sea, the Sol di Venezia so admired by Ruskin (who got ejected from the Academy for ignoring the regulations and making a sketch of it). The picture was of a sun-dazzled lateen-rigged fishing boat – the Sun of Venice – running towards the viewer. Turner had some verse for the Academy catalogue to go with it, lines from his ‘Fallacies of Hope’, with help from Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’:
J.M.W. Turner Page 47
