It was a masterpiece. Nobody bought it.
Notes
1 Ruskin, Praeterita, p.276. Ian Warrell points out that this as-it-were immediate record written in the 1880s is much fuller than that actually in Ruskin’s diary. There the meeting is written about on 23 June, concerning ‘yesterday’. The Praeterita entry also seems to include some of Ruskin’s diary entry for 5 July 1841. Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner, p.29 n.12.
2 Ruskin, ibid., p.234.
3 Ruskin, Ruskin Today, p.206n.
4 Hunt, The Wider Sea, p.138.
5 Finberg, p.395.
6 Ibid., p.403.
7 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
8 Lloyd, Sunny Memories, p.34.
9 Fawkes: Gage, Colour, p.225; Kingsley: Ruskin, Works, xiii, p.536.
10 Ruskin, Modern Painters, v, p.252.
11 Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, p.132n.
12 Stillman, Autobiography, i, p.108.
13 Finberg, p.400.
14 B&J, no.402.
15 Letters, pp.202–3.
16 B&J, p.392
17 Whitley, 1821–37, p.213.
18 B&J, no.371.
19 TB CXXIX.
20 One pair of his spectacles, saved by Ruskin, is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Another is in the Tate.
21 Th. 1877, p.292.
22 Gage, Colour, p.40.
23 Falk, p.208, suggests that this was said about Slavers.
24 Trevor-Roper, Blunted Sight, pp.87–90.
25 Monkhouse, p.122.
26 Smith, Nollekens, p.365.
27 Th. 1877, p.246.
28 TB CXI.
29 TB CCXCI a; TB CCLXV; TB CCLXXIX.
30 Letters, pp.147–8.
31 Ibid., p.197.
32 Ibid., p.203.
33 Ibid., p.206.
34 Leslie, Inner Life, p.143.
35 Th. 1877, p.120.
36 TB CCXCI.
37 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
38 Th. 1877, p.310.
39 Ibid., pp.243–4.
40 Letters, p.235.
41 Th. 1877, p.326.
42 Ibid., p.313.
43 MS note in G. Jones’s copy of Th. ii, p.168.
44 Th. 1877, p.314.
45 Ibid., p.352.
46 Trevor-Roper, Blunted Sight, p.120.
47 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.3.
48 Letters, p.186.
49 Th. 1877, pp.323–4.
50 Ibid., pp.279–80.
51 Letters, p.201.
52 Roberts, TS, 11, 1, p.61.
53 IGI; Geese I, pp.10, 115–6.
54 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, pp.542–3.
55 Finberg, p.399.
56 Forster, Dickens, ii, p.86.
57 Bicknell, TS, 9, 1, p.3.
58 AR, i, p.201.
59 TS, 9, 1, p.2.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., p.3.
62 Ibid., pp.3–4.
63 Ibid., p.3.
64 TSN, no.33, p.6.
65 Letters, p.82.
66 TS, 9, 1, p.3.
67 Disraeli, Sybil, pp.245–7.
68 Graves, Leather Armchairs, p.46.
69 Th. 1877, p.352.
70 Frith, i, p.333.
71 Frith, i, p.333; Th. 1877, p.265, has Maclise calling at Turner’s house to tell him of Haydon’s death. George Jones noted in his copy of Thornbury that Maclise ‘utterly denies telling Turner that Haydon had destroyed himself’. But someone evidently did tell Turner, and his response seems in character.
72 B&J, no.415.
73 Wilton, Painting and Poetry, p.180.
74 B&J, no.385. Ruskin, Modern Painters, I, p.404.
75 Letters, p.190.
76 Gage, Rain, Steam and Speed, p.14.
77 Ibid., p.16.
78 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, pp.576–8. The GWR train shown by Turner seems to have open-topped carriages. Third-class GWR passengers were carried in open wagons until 1844. If he was with Lady Simon, Turner, presumably, was travelling first-class.
Caricature of Turner, by F. H. Fawkes, c. 1818
20: Chelsea Harbour
Cramming things in, as if at seventy he knew old time was running out on him, he went twice to France in 1845. In May he was in Margate, presumably with Sophia Booth, and from there he moved on across the Channel to Boulogne, Wimereux and Ambleteuse, drawing busily, trying out broadly brushed watercolour studies. In September he went over again. David Roberts, heading for Brussels, saw him at Dover: ‘Who should stumble into the Coffee Room whilst we were at Breakfast but Turner, windbound on his way to Bologne for it blew a huricane and had been for two days previous. He was as mysterious as usual and of course I did not ask him where he was bound for, although he pumped me.’1
This time he went on to Dieppe and along the Picardy coast to Tréport and Eu, where the elderly Anglophile King Louis-Philippe often stayed in the Orléans family château. Turner carried only his sketchbooks and a change of linen and was looking, he said later, ‘for storms and shipwrecks’.2 When he reached Eu he needed to have his shoes repaired – he went fast through shoe-leather – and put up for the night at a fisherman’s house. According to the Redgraves,
He had not been long there before an officer of the court inquired for him, and told him that Louis-Philippe, the King of the French, who was then staying at the Château, hearing that Mr. Turner was in the town, had sent to desire his company to dinner (they had been well known to one another in England). Turner strove to apologize – pleaded his want of dress – but this was overruled; his usual costume was the dress-coat of the period, and he was assured that he only required a white neckcloth, and that the King must not be denied. The fisherman’s wife easily provided a white neckcloth, by cutting up some of her linen, and Turner declared that he spent one of the pleasantest of evenings in chat with his old Twickenham acquaintance.3
He had last seen the King in 1844 when he went down to Portsmouth to watch him land at the start of a visit to the British Queen, and the King had apparently written to him in the meantime. In Eu Turner made some pencil and watercolour studies of the cathedral and the château. (This same month Louis-Philippe received Queen Victoria and Prince Albert there, when they turned up on the royal yacht.) This was Turner’s last trip abroad.
Turner managed to avoid the census takers in 1841, when the census was made on 6 June, and in 1851, at the end of March. Although he was still to be found in his Queen Anne Street gallery by appointment, he seems to have been spending more and more time with Mrs Booth. (She, according to the 1841 census, was at home that day in Cold Harbour, Margate.) Indeed, in 1846, they had arrived at a decision that she should come up from Kent to London to look after him.
The question was ‘where?’ Clearly Queen Anne Street was out – whatever Hannah suspected, she didn’t know anything in detail about Sophia. Mrs B, aged about forty-eight in 1846, could not have stood it a minute in that run-down house. In September Turner went to look at his colleague Etty’s flat in Buckingham Street, just south of the Strand. It was a top-floor apartment and not far from Maiden Lane where he had begun; maybe a good place to end. Etty, who was going to retire to York in a year or so, said, ‘He liked my view, and seemed a little disappointed I was not going sooner. However, he was very good, drank a glass of wine, and, I believe, sincerely wished me well, wherever I went; said he should be sorry.’4 He looked further afield. An important factor was the river – he needed to be close to it. Out across the market gardens beyond Belgravia and Pimlico, down the King’s New Road and left to the Thames, he and Sophia Booth went looking. It was a long search. But at last they found a cottage that suited them on the Chelsea riverfront, in the area called World’s End. (Mrs Booth – they had this in common – was also a waterfront person.) Chelsea then had a reputation as a resort; Cremorne Pleasure Gardens and Cremorne Pier were a stone’s throw to the west, and to the east the wooden structure of Battersea Bridge spanned this stretch of the river. The address of the cottage,
which was one of a pair, was 6 Davis Place, Cremorne New Road – a road that was not much more than a country lane along the river bank, forming an extension of Cheyne Walk. For neighbours they had a boatbuilder and two shops selling beer, wine and ginger beer.5
They signed up for the cottage in October 1846. There are various accounts of who did the negotiating and paying for the lease. Mrs Booth later told David Roberts that it was she who, for eighteen years, had ‘provided solely for their maintenance and living’ and that she had ‘purchased the cottage at Chelsea from money she had previously saved or inherited … Turner refusing to give a farthing towards it’. Roberts adds, ‘This is a very extraordinary fact if true.’6 Mrs Booth apparently paid cash for a twenty-one-year lease; the rateable value of the cottage was £11 (a mere sixth of that of 47 Queen Anne Street). John Pye, who like Roberts met Mrs Booth soon after Turner’s death, had a slightly different story. In January 1852 Pye visited Chelsea and actually interviewed the owner of the freehold of the cottage. This person told Pye that four or five years before,
a lady and a gentleman who had seen it, came to the wharf with the intention of renting it, that terms were agreed upon between the parties, but that the negotiation failed in consequence of the proprietor having required to know the names of the applicants, and to have references as to character, which they declined to give. That the gentleman afterwards called at the wharf alone and renewed his negotiations for taking the cottage, by proposing, in lieu of making known his name and giving references as to character, to pay in advance any amount of rent that might be deemed necessary to secure the proprietor against the chances of loss by accepting him as a tenant. To this proposition, influenced by the unproductiveness of the property, the proprietor assented, and hence the unknown gentleman and lady became installed in that quiet retreat of their choice.7
The cottage had three floors. There was a low picket fence with a gate to the front garden, an open porch around the front door with trellis sides and a rounded roof, and inside the porch a hanging birdcage for the starling which Turner had caught in the back garden. Virginia creeper grew up the front of the house above the ground-floor window and also around the front second-floor window from a windowbox on the sill. Turner arranged for a railed balcony to be built on the roof at the front, so that he could sit there and look at the river. Mrs Booth told Archer that Turner used to call the prospect westwards his English view, and that downriver or eastwards his Dutch view. Across the road was a small beach that curved round from where the north-west end of Battersea Bridge met the Chelsea shore. In front of Davis Place some steps, covered at high tide, led down to the foreshore, where some skiffs were tied up. On the other side of the river stood the Church of St Mary’s, Battersea, where William and Catherine Blake had been married, where the renegade American General Benedict Arnold and his wife the former Philadelphia belle Peggy Shippen were buried, and where – Chelsea tradition has it – some afternoons Turner went to sit in the vestry under the tower and sketch from another angle his English view upriver.
There was a third member of the Davis Place household, at least some of the time: Daniel John Pound, Mrs Booth’s son by her first marriage, who was now in his twenties. ‘A tall handsome young man’, said Roberts, who also found out that Daniel had studied engraving in Germany,8 perhaps steered towards that profession by his mother’s companion. But Daniel must have been sworn to keep that gentleman’s name quiet, for few in the art world knew that Turner was in Chelsea. Roberts said, ‘In latter years no one, even his most intimate friends, could say how he lived or where he lived.’ Moreover, ‘it was no use calling at Queen Anne Street as he was seldom there.’9 Roberts also told Thornbury, ‘I and others knew he had another home besides Queen Anne Street, but delicacy forbade us prying further. We all knew that whoever he lived with took great care of him, for he was not only better dressed, but more cleanly and tidy, than in former years.’10 From Sophia Booth, Roberts got the impression that Turner and she were thoroughly involved with one another: ‘He, like the great Anthony, seems to have abandoned everything for his Cleopatra, & She, like Cleopatra, seems to have been equaly devoted to him. He would not allow her to see or have communication with any one; they lived & painted together, & to all appearances with the greatest happiness & contentment, the only drawback being that he was jealous of any one approaching her.’ Possessiveness now, with his last mistress! Roberts went on: ‘On one occasion, when he was ill after taking this house at Chelsea, She had to send for this Dr Price from Marget, who had attended him for many years. On his taking his leave after prescribing for him late at night, She wished to go to show him the way to get a Cab, or Bus; Turner would not allow it, But got out of bed, dressed & took him himself.’11
His secretiveness became more obsessive as he grew older. However, his incognito as at Margate remained the surname of his Sophia. ‘In the streets of Chelsea, and all along the shore of the Thames, Turner was known to the street boys as “Puggy Booth”, and by the small tradesmen he was designated “Admiral Booth”,’ Thornbury tells us, ‘for the popular notion was that he was an old admiral in reduced circumstances.’12 The legends of his mysteriousness multiplied. Thornbury again: ‘One evening, during a sharp shower, he took shelter in a public-house, where he sat in the farthest corner with his glass before him, when an artist who knew him came in and began with, “I didn’t know you used the house; I shall often drop in now that I’ve found out where you quarter.” Turner looked at him, knit his brows, emptied his glass, and, as he rose to go out, said “Will you? I don’t think you will.’”13 Someone else recognized Turner on a river steamer going up to town from Cremorne Pier. He was freshly shaved and had well-polished shoes. The man, who was with his son, asked Turner if he had moved to this part of Chelsea. ‘Is that your boy?’ asked Turner, changing the subject.14 But, despite Turner’s efforts to keep a low profile, Mrs Booth could not help letting slip that ‘her husband’ was a ‘notability’.15 She confessed to John Pye that she had been unable ‘to resist the temptation of whispering here and there that “Booth” was a great man in disguise, and that when he died he would surely be buried in St Paul’s’.16 Even so, in the locality, particularly at the ginger-beer shop, they were known as a very quiet and respectable couple.
Less credence should perhaps be given to the account of Leopold Martin, son of John Martin RA. Leopold in his old age recalled going with his father to Queen Anne Street where they ‘found the great painter at work upon his well-known picture, “The Fighting Temeraire”’ – exhibited in 1838, as we know – and then, walking to Chelsea where Turner introduced them to ‘a small, six-roomed house’, with ‘a magnificent prospect both up and down river’, but otherwise ‘miserable in every respect … looking as though it was the abode of a very poor man’.17 John Martin’s visionary paintings showed Turner’s effect, but Turner would have been in an especially friendly and forthcoming mood if he let him into the secret of his Chelsea haven – and even then at a much later date – clearly after 1846 – than Leopold ascribed to the visit.
Turner’s sojourn in Chelsea with Mrs B has more romance than any other stage of his life. Pye, visiting the snug little house at 6 Davis Place in the spring of 1852, found Sophia Booth a ‘good-looking, dark, and kindly mannered’ woman, ‘but obviously illiterate’. Turner, she said, had called her ‘Old ’un’ and she had called him ‘Dear’. But Turner’s last romance had its practical side. She told Pye ‘she used to act as studio boy, cleaning Turner’s brushes, setting his palette, and so on’.18
Not before time he got in more assistance in this realm. He had been thinking for several years that he ought to find someone to perform some of the functions his father had done. He wrote to Thomas Griffith in February 1844 about various large pictures of his that were ‘subject to neglect and dirt’, and continued, ‘If I could find a young man acquainted with picture cleaning and would help me to clean accidental stains away, would be a happiness to drag them from their dark abode.’19 Occasio
nally Turner used to go to a Chelsea barbershop for a shave and a haircut – memories of Maiden Lane. The barber, named Sherrell, one day in 1848 or thereabouts mentioned his young brother Francis, who hoped to be an artist. ‘Let me see his drawings,’ muttered Turner from under the lather. Francis Sherrell then nervously brought along a parcel of drawings. Turner received him kindly and didn’t dampen his hopes. He told young Sherrell that he would give him artistic advice in return for studio services. Francis was impressed by Turner, and later used to tell of how the master used his hands for mixing his chromes ‘in a bucket’ and for laying on his ground work.
Francis was helping out in Queen Anne Street one day when word came upstairs that an artist desired an introduction to Turner.
‘Show him in,’ growled Turner.
A gentleman entered. ‘You’re an artist?’ demanded Turner. The gentleman bowed assent.
‘Show me your hands, then.’
The gentleman obeyed. Turner looked at the outstretched hands and waved his visitor off with the words, ‘Get out – you’re no painter.’20
Turner’s contentment in Davis Place comes through obliquely in a note he wrote to Harriet Moore in June 1847, cautiously headed as from 47 Queen Anne Street. He says he is glad to hear that her father had got over an illness, thanks her for news of the George Joneses, and ends: ‘How we all grumble in search of happiness or benefits for others yet find Home at Home.’21 And it is a man who apparently had personal experience of happiness who wrote in November 1848 from the Athenaeum to young Ruskin, at this point upset about the state of the world and possibly uneasy in his relations with his new wife Effie:
J.M.W. Turner Page 50
