Sometimes, on social occasions, he was immersed in himself. At a dinner in Greenwich given for Charles Dickens by his friends, before the novelist set off for Italy in the summer of 1844, Turner went with Clarkson Stanfield and sat next to John Forster, Dickens’s biographer, who later recalled Turner on that hot day as having his throat wrapped ‘in a huge red belcher-handkerchief which nothing would induce him to remove. He was not otherwise demonstrative, but enjoyed himself in a quiet silent way, less perhaps at the speeches than at the changing lights on the river’.56 At a dinner at the Bicknells’ in February 1845, Turner sat next to Clarkson Stanfield’s wife, but, according to David Roberts’s daughter Christine Bicknell, Turner was ‘not in spirits’ and Rebecca Stanfield, who could be fairly forbidding, did not enliven him.57 Yet – as Charles Leslie once observed – ‘his nature was social’.58 There were occasions when he was definitely in spirits. A young artist who met him one evening at David Roberts’s house in Fitzroy Square wrote that Turner was ‘very agreeable, his quick bright eye sparkled, and his whole countenance expressed a desire to please. He was constantly making, or rather trying to make, jokes; his dress, though rather old-fashioned, was far from being shabby.’ Roberts often saw Turner at the Bicknells’, at the Reverend Daniell’s, at General Phipps’s and at meetings of the Academy Club, which were then generally held at the Thatched House club in St James’s Street, and he concluded that Turner was ‘in reality “a jolly toper’”.59
At one dinner chez Roberts, Turner was called on to propose his host’s health: ‘He accordingly rose, hurried on as quickly as possible, speaking in a highly complimentary manner of Roberts’s worth and talents, but soon ran out of words or breath, and dropped down on his chair with a hearty laugh, starting up again, and finishing with a hip, hip, hurrah!’60 At Roberts’s on 4 July 1845, so Christine Bicknell wrote in her journal, ‘Turner came in after the dinner having dined at Greenwich which was rather visible in his appearance. Upon his health being given he amused them with a very funny speech (& funnier grimaces filling up the pauses) about his whalers, mixing up Mr. Bicknell & fish & ending by proposing his health.’61 In fact, Christine’s father-in-law, the whale-oil magnate, bought Turner’s Venice paintings and Palestrina (the latter for 1000 guineas in 1844) rather than his whalers. Although he may have commissioned one of the four whaling pictures Turner did, his second Whalers of 1845, Bicknell apparently returned it to the artist, angry because some watercolours came off the supposed oil painting when he rubbed it with a handkerchief.
Roberts said that he could ‘always get up a pleasant party’ for Turner from ‘those who loved Art as well as that of men who’s profession it was and where the lion of Queen Ann Street was the lion of the party … Turner liked to be amongst men who, like Brackenbury and Ruskin, looked upon him as an inspired being, forgetting the usual accompanyments of the gentelmen, to which Turner did not even pretend; he was uncouth in his manners and curt in reply, until after a good dinner and … wine, he became like other men, always and excepting Keeping up that Mistery, and never, as far as he could help, allowing you to fathom any subject he may have begun if he thought you listened for the purpose of ascertaining his meaning.’62
It was Roberts who noted an instance of Turner’s secretiveness when he accompanied the old man into the street one night in 1850 after a party. Midnight had struck, Turner was the last to leave, and Roberts went with him to hail a cab. As he helped him up into his seat, Roberts asked Turner where he should tell the cabbie to take him. Turner, not to be caught out so easily in regard to his current domicile (which was no longer in Queen Anne Street), replied with a knowing wink, ‘Tell him to drive to Oxford Street, and then I’ll direct him where to go.’63
Although his connection with the Trimmers seems to have become attenuated, and Hannah Danby appears to have thought the Reverend Trimmer had died some time before 1851, his link with the Wells family, via Clara, remained strong. He frequently visited Thomas and Clara Wheeler’s house in the City. He was invited to the wedding of their son James to his cousin Maria Wheeler in February 1844. He wrote:
Monday night
My dear Clara,
I have been expecting a note for some time and [am] now very awkwardly placed for the 20th. – but I beg to give the Wedding-Cake –
Mammy’s heart I trust will jump for joy and accept my good wishes for the health felicity and prosperity of the young folks and if I should not be present (but which I mean if possible to be) – give them my love and sip a drop of wine to the better state of Salus Lodge.
Believe me most truly
Dear Clara
your sincely
J M W Turner
Please Don’t order the Cake at Birch’s its not a good name for the present occasion.64
Eighteen years had passed since he had sold Solus or Sandycombe Lodge, and the reference seems to have been to himself, still solus in respect to lawful matrimony (if not to his coastal arrangement with Mrs Booth) at the age of sixty-nine; and perhaps there is a tinge of regret that he had never proposed to Clara (who was now fifty-six). But it was sweet of him to buy the cake – whatever his drawbacks as a father, he had in him the right, as it were, godfatherly impulses. The jocular reference to the cakemakers named Birch was presumably an allusion to the now almost historic fact – in Turner–Wells circles – that Clara’s father W. F. Wells had gone to school at Mr Harper’s establishment on the site of Turner’s Queen Anne Street house and, also presumably, had been ‘birched’ while there.65
Christine Bicknell continued to see Turner in a happy light. She and her father and her three-year-old son known as ‘the Binny’ called at Queen Anne Street to collect Turner on 4 January 1845, to take him out to Herne Hill for dinner, and although Turner was at that point out of temper with Academy matters, ‘he insisted on our coming in to have a glass of wine! and then toddled off & returned with a piece of cold plum pudding for the Binny!’ However, after this act of post-Christmas hospitality, he got into the fly and proceeded to grumble about Eastlake and Roberts ‘for attempting Reforms in the Academy’.66
A number of Turner’s letters of these years were written or posted from the Athenaeum, the club of which he had been member since it was founded in a 1824. Turner might not have struck one as a ‘club-man’, but there were clearly times when he needed cronies and a firm social structure; the Academy, of course, provided some of this. The Athenaeum started as a notion of John Wilson Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty, to provide a meeting place for leading scientists, artists and politicians. It began in a back room at John Murray’s, met for a while in the quarters of the Royal Society at Somerset House, and then moved to Waterloo Place. Its neo-classical building, designed by Decimus Burton, rose at the west end of the site of the demolished Carlton House and opened in 1830, providing good food, wine and a magnificent library to read or doze in. Turner seems to have dropped in occasionally at the end of a painting day, as Disraeli’s character the lonely lawyer Baptist Hatton did, liking the ‘splendour and the light and bustle of a great establishment. They saved him from that melancholy which after a day of action is the doom of energetic celibacy. A luxurious dinner, without trouble, suited him after his exhaustion.’67 Turner used the free club stationery to write to Clara Wheeler or Thomas Griffith. He consulted the periodicals in the library, such as the Edinburgh Review. Club lore has it that he ‘used to dine alone and then insist on the candle being removed from the table while he finished off a bottle of vintage port by himself’.68 Thornbury, with a similar story, wrote: ‘Latterly, Turner was always to be seen between ten and eleven at the Athenaeum, discussing his half-pint of sherry. As his health failed, he became very talkative after his wine, and rather dogmatic.’69 At least he wasn’t wallowing at his Wapping pub.
Frith reported Turner was at the Athenaeum in 1846, reading a newspaper, when Maclise encountered him.70 Maclise said, ‘I have just heard of Haydon’s suicide. Is it not awful?’
Turner, without looking up f
rom his paper, said, ‘Why did he stab his mother?’
‘Great heaven!’ exclaimed Maclise. ‘You don’t mean—?’
‘Yes. He stabbed his mother.’71
It took Maclise a moment to realize that Turner was speaking metaphorically; he was alluding to Haydon’s assaults on the Academy, where Haydon had been a student – assaults which had so overbalanced his career as to help, so Turner thought, bring on his ruin. Turner may also have been speaking from the heart as someone who felt remorse about his failures with and his neglect of his own mother.
Despite Ruskin’s championing and despite buyers like Bicknell, Vernon, Windus and Munro, it was evident in the 1840s that the critics and the market generally had gone off Turner’s work. It was too hazy, too ‘poetic’, too imprecise, too romantic, too subjective … ‘Finish’ was wanted. Perhaps viewers also sensed in even his loveliest visions a dreadful hopelessness. Thackeray noted that, looking hard at one of his Whalers, you could see that the ‘beautiful whale’ had ‘just slipped a half-dozen whale-boats into perdition’.72 In Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on (RA 1840), the slave ship seems to be sliding sternwards into a watery chasm, as the tormented sea opens up along the fault line of the setting sun. All is about to be lost. His appended verse from the notorious ‘Fallacies of Hope’ ran:
Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon’s coming.
Before it sweep your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains.
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?73
The picture was a passionate presentation of ideas that had been seething in his imagination. Slavery by now was on the way out: in British ships the slave trade had been made illegal by Parliament in 1807 and the institution itself abolished within the British Empire in 1833. Turner may have read the 1839 reprint of Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808), which described the incident twenty-five years earlier when Captain Collingwood of the sailing ship Zong ordered sick slaves to be thrown over the side; he could claim insurance on those drowned at sea but not on those who died of disease. But Turner also seems to have had in mind his favourite poet Thomson, whose ‘Summer’ has a typhoon, a slave ship and sharks waiting for bodies. A biography of the anti-slaving crusader William Wilberforce had been published in 1839 and a Conference of the Anti-Slavery League was opened, by Prince Albert, soon after the RA exhibition in 1840. This was a sort of shipwreck picture for him, though this time the potential wreck seemed particularly encompassing: nature, in the form of the typhoon, had the power as it did in Thomson’s poem to destroy the ship, symbol of the tyrannical slave-owners and slave-dealers, as well as the hapless slaves.
Many of the critics thought it a crazy painting. They took note of the bizarre fish and bloody sea, the upraised arms and legs of the slaves with manacles and chains that somehow remained well above the surface although made of iron. The Art-Union was put in mind of ‘the occasional outbreaks of the madman’. Thackeray could not make up his mind whether the picture was sublime or ridiculous but was certain that it was ‘the most tremendous piece of colour that ever was seen; it sets the corner of the room in which it hangs into a flame’. But John Ruskin a few years later was in no doubt that it was the ‘noblest sea that Turner has ever painted … the noblest certainly ever painted by man’. He felt that ‘if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this’. Ruskin’s father bought it for 250 guineas and gave it to John as a New Year’s present in 1844. Ruskin owned it for twenty-eight years, but finally he found it too painful to live with.74
In a letter from the Athenaeum of late November 1842, after thanking Dawson Turner for some more Yarmouth herrings, Turner wrote: ‘You ask me what “are you doing” “answer endeavouring to please myself in my own way if I can for after all my determination to be quiet some fresh follery comes across me and I begin what most probably never to be finish’d” alas too true.’75
Turner’s punctuation continued to be idiosyncratic but his pessimism was not totally well founded. Other artists – one thinks of Rembrandt – have pleased themselves in old age, and although fashion may have passed them by, some works have got finished and some have survived to be seen as more than ‘follery’. Turner remained on his feet in front of his easel on most days of late autumn, winter and spring, putting paint on canvas. Paintings – particularly of Venice and the sea – came from his studio. There were other productions too, with more rarefied subject matter: follery they might well seem in some eyes. There was his strange Napoleon painting of 1842, for instance – War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet. In this the exiled Emperor (looking as if he was on black stilts) stood on a beach pondering the limpet’s freedom ‘to join his comrades’, as the snippet from ‘Fallacies’ put it. Also thought absurd by many of the art-writers were his 1843 Academy contributions, Shade and Darkness – The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses writing the Book of Genesis. These maelstroms of colour suggested that he had been reading both the Bible and Goethe; as noted, he had a copy of Charles Eastlake’s translation of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, and seemed to have been brooding on the German polymath’s idea of a circle of colours in which reds, yellows and greens had to do with warmth and happiness, and blues, blue-greens and purples prompted ‘restless, susceptible, anxious impressions’. The two Deluge paintings also made evident that watery catastrophe – the end by inundation – was much in his thoughts, even as the London rain dripped through his gallery sky-light and the cats scampered around the stacks of dusty canvases. Yet the Athenaeum magazine (17 June 1843) worked up a reluctant sympathy for these pictures. One could see, it declared, ‘a poetical idea dimly described through the prismatic chaos, which arrests the attention and excites the fancy’.
He was indeed pleasing himself. In 1844, aged sixty-nine, he produced seven paintings for the exhibition – a heroic total. There were three Low Countries coastal seascapes (Ostend, a second Port Ruysdael and a Van Tromp), three Venice pictures and, boldest of all, Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Western Railway. The latter was not flamboyant in size – it was one of his customary three-by-fours – but flaunted the power now abroad in the land: steam harnessed with rail by man, and shown in the natural circumstances of a showery day. The engine, the rail equivalent of the tug in the Temeraire, was thundering towards the viewer along a bridge – Maidenhead bridge – over the Thames. A hare could be made out sprinting in front of the locomotive – why doesn’t it jump aside and save its life? And below, in Old Masterish calm, some female figures in Claudean costume stand at the river’s edge, a man ploughs behind two horses, and a fisherman in a skiff peacefully holds his rod above the limpid water. As noted, George Leslie remembered watching Turner at work on this picture during the varnishing days, nose close to the canvas, wielding his short brushes. Turner pointed out the hare to him:
This hare, and not the train, I have no doubt he intended to represent the ‘Speed’ of his title; the word must have been in his mind when he was painting the hare, for close to it, on the plain below the viaduct, he introduced the figure of a man ploughing, ‘Speed the plough’ (the name of an old country dance) probably passing through his brain.
Thackeray in Fraser’s Magazine responded with all his empathetic talent blazing. Here, he wrote, is
a picture with real rain, behind which is real sunshine, and you expect a rainbow every minute. Meanwhile there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite. All these wonders are performed with means not less wonderful than the effects are. The rain … is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on to the canvas with a tro
wel; the sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps of chrome yellow. The shadows are produced by cool tones of crimson lake, and quiet glazings of vermilion; although the fire in the steam-engine looks as if it were red, I am not prepared to say that it is not painted with cobalt and pea-green. And as for the manner in which the ‘Speed’ is done, of that the less said the better – only it is a positive fact that there is a steam-coach going fifty miles an hour. The world has never seen anything like this picture.76
Unlike that other great creative spirit of the time, Rossini, who rode a train in Antwerp in 1836 and was so upset he never rode one again, Turner did not turn his back on the locomotive age. There may have been a slight shudder as he watched the Great Western Railway throw a bridge across his beloved river, but the violation was accompanied by a thrill. Moreover, his picture had a participatory feeling to it: it was as though he had been there, as he had claimed to be in Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, lashed to the mast, or in this case running like the hare. Although there are doubts about the accuracy of its details, the story Lady Simon – a friend of Mrs Ruskin senior – gave to the painter George Richmond and to John Ruskin was of a kind that people could easily believe about Turner. She had got on a train at Exeter, she told Richmond, and in the coach seated opposite her ‘was an elderly gentleman, short and stout, with a red face and a curious prominent nose. The weather was very wild, and by-and-by a violent storm swept over the country, blotting out the sunshine and the blue sky, and hanging like a pall over the landscape. The old gentleman seemed strangely excited at this, jumping up to open the window, craning his neck out, and finally calling to her to come and observe a curious effect of light.’77 Lady Simon went to the next Academy exhibition, saw Rain, Steam, and Speed, and realized that the old gentleman, who had had ‘the most seeing eyes’ she had ever come across, was Turner. And when, standing by the painting, she overheard another viewer exclaim, ‘Who ever saw such a ridiculous conglomeration?’ she turned and quietly replied, ‘I did. I was in the train that night, and it is perfectly and wonderfully true.’78
J.M.W. Turner Page 49
