J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  The gallery, despite its grimy reputation, was still on the list of places cultured people tried to visit when in London. Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend George S. Hillard, a lawyer, were taken to Queen Anne Street on 28 June 1848 by the distinguished zoologist Richard Owen. Several days earlier Emerson had met Clarkson Stanfield at a dinner and been taken by him to Tottenham to see B. G. Windus’s Turners. Stanfield told Emerson that Turner had confided that he would not ‘suffer any portrait to be taken of him, for nobody would believe such an ugly fellow made such beautiful things’. Turner’s face, Emerson learnt, ‘resembles the heads of Punch’. In 1856 the American published his book English Traits, in which he considered the character of the English, their moroseness and taciturnity, their cheerfulness and mildness – in fact their great range of moods: ‘They hide virtues under vices, or the semblence of them.’ ‘The Englishman is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and your thanks disgust him.’ And Emerson presents an example:

  Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly, resembling in countenance the portrait of Punch, with the laugh left out; rich by his own industry; sulking in a lonely house; who never gave a dinner to any man, and disliked all courtesies; yet as true a worshipper of beauty in form and colour as ever existed, and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his countrymen creations of grace and truth, removing the reproach of sterility from English art, catching from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into their galleries every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies; making an era in painting; and, when he saw that the splendor of one of his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival’s that hung next to it, secretly took a brush and blackened his own.41

  A younger visiting American who actually met the cross-grained miser was W. J. Stillman, who later became a correspondent for the London Times. In 1850 Stillman was twenty-two, an art student and a passionate admirer of Turner’s work. He heard that Turner was ill and through Thomas Griffith offered to nurse him. Turner declined the offer, but, Griffith told Stillman, was not unmoved by it. One day, after he had recovered, Stillman heard from Griffith that Turner was coming to his gallery at a certain hour on a business appointment. If Stillman happened in just before the time fixed for it he might see him.

  At the appointed hour Turner came and found me in an earnest study of the pictures in the farther end of the gallery, where I remained, unnoticing and unnoticed, until a sign from Griffith called me up. He then introduced me as a young American artist who had a great admiration for his work, and who, being about to return home, would be glad to take him by the hand. It was difficult to reconcile my conception of the great artist with this little, and, to casual observation, insignificant old man with a nose like an eagle’s beak, though a second sight showed that his eye, too, was like an eagle’s, bright, restless, and penetrating. Half awed and half surprised, I held out my hand. He put his behind him, regarding me with a humorous, malicious look, saying nothing. Confused, and not a little mortified, I turned away, and, walking down the gallery, went to study the pictures again. When I looked his way again, a few minutes later, he held out his hand to me, and we entered into a conversation which lasted until Griffith gave me a hint that Turner had business to transact which I must leave him to. He gave me a hearty handshake, and in his oracular way said, ‘H’mph – (nod) if you come to England again – h’mph (nod) – h’mph (nod)’ and another handshake with more cordiality and a nod for good-bye. I never saw a keener eye than his, and the way that he held himself up, so straight that he seemed almost to lean backwards, with his forehead thrown forward, and the piercing eyes looking out from under their heavy brows, combined to make a very peculiar and vivid impression on me … In the conversation we had … I alluded to our good fortune in having already in America one of the pictures of his best period, a sea-coast sunset in the possession of Mr. Lenox, and Turner exclaimed, ‘I wish they were all put in a blunderbuss and shot off!’ But he looked pleased at the simultaneous outburst of protest on the part of Griffith and myself.42

  Stillman apparently did not notice – or think worth mentioning – the decay or the cats. Hugh Munro, after a Sunday afternoon visit to Queen Anne Street, told Frith that ‘the very look of the place was enough to give a man a cold. I found Turner an hour ago crouching over a morsel of fire in the gallery, with a dreadful cold upon him, muffled up and miserable.’

  ‘Yes, here I am,’ said Turner to Munro, ‘with all these unsaleable things about me. I wish to Heaven I could get rid of them; I would sell them cheap to anybody who would take them where I couldn’t see them any more.’

  ‘Well,’ said Munro, ‘what will you take for the lot?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know; you may make me an offer if you like.’

  Munro did a quick calculation and offered to write a cheque for £25,000. This made Turner’s eyes glitter for a moment. He looked at the fire, thought for a while, and then told Munro to take a walk and come back in an hour. Munro did so. He may not have known that Turner was said to have refused offers of £100,000 for the contents of Queen Anne Street and £5000 for his two Carthages. When Munro returned, he found that Turner seemed to have forgotten their conversation. His first words were: ‘Hullo! what, you here again? I am very ill; my cold is very bad.’

  ‘Well,’ said Munro, ‘have you decided; will you accept my offer?’

  ‘No, I won’t – I can’t. I believe I’m going to die, and I intend to be buried in those two’ – pointing to the Carthage and the Sun rising through Vapour. ‘So I can’t; besides, I can’t be bothered – good evening.’43

  Bad colds were the least of it. Ruskin believed that in 1845 Turner’s mind failed ‘suddenly with snap of some vital chord’.44 His works towards the close of that year, Ruskin thought, ‘showed a conclusive failure of power; and I saw that nothing remained for me to write, but his epitaph’.45 That he had in fact gone mad would have been credible to the many critics who considered his work touched with insanity, or to those with long memories, who had heard talk of Turner’s mother in an asylum. However, the Reverend Kingsley placed the failure of Turner’s powers two years later. The cause, Kingsley said, was ‘the loss of his teeth. Cartwright did his best to make him a set of false ones, but the tenderness of the gums did not allow him to make use of them; so his digestion gave way and he suffered much from this to the end of his life.’46 Kingsley also wanted to care for Turner and invited him to stay with him in Cambridge. ‘He told me he could not, because he “was so nasty in his eating, the only way in which he could live being, by sucking meat”.’47

  It was in December 1846 that Turner told Hawksworth that being deputy to the President of the Academy had destroyed his happiness and appetite. In the summer of 1847 he was seriously ill for six weeks and a Chelsea surgeon, Dr Frederick Gaskell, attended him in Davis Place; on the way to Margate by land to see Dr Price, he was seized by a fit at Rochester and fell down. Mrs Booth later complained that it was she who paid Dr Gaskell’s bill and that she had not been reimbursed. But despite her claim to David Roberts that Turner had, with the exception of their first year together, never contributed one shilling to their mutual support, she later said he occasionally gave her small sums, though never more than two pounds, and never more than twenty pounds in a year. Turner, she said, never used to have any money with him, and when he came home in a cab, she paid the fare.48 The next year, 1848, was not much better. In a midsummer-day’s letter to Ruskin senior he said that he had been ‘laid up with a broken knee-pan’,49 and in a note to Ruskin junior on 5 November 1848 ‘ill-health’ was mentioned.50

  This could have been the result of cholera. Around this time, so David Roberts believed after talking later with Dr Price of Margate, Turner had ‘a most severe attack of cholera’ while in Deal; and if ‘he had not had the most extraordinary constitution, with his habits as he [Dr Price] termed it, he could never have got over it’
.51 (His habits, presumably, were drinking too much.) Cholera caused vomiting, diarrhoea, severe cramps of the stomach and limbs, and often death. The epidemic of 1847–9 in Britain killed 53,000 in England and Wales, 14,000 of these in London. Croydon was badly hit by the visitation in 1849, when the marine artist J. C. Schetky was struck by the illness, but recovered. On Christmas Eve 1849 Turner wrote to Hawksworth, with a typical misspelling: ‘I am sorry to say my health is on the wain. I cannot bear the same fatigue, or have the same bearing against it I formerly had – but time and tide stop not.’52

  Many friends let him know they were thinking of him. Those letters to ‘Hawkey’ often began with thanks for a care package from Farnley: goose pie, pheasants and hares in 1849, or in 1847 what he called the ‘three PPP viz. Pie Phea[sant] and Pud’. The Ruskins sent eggs and pork ribs with ‘Portugal onions for stuffing them included’.53 Dawson Turner sent his customary barrel of herrings. And George Jones before the opening of the Academy exhibition in April 1850 wrote a kind letter:

  I saw your pictures this morning for the first time, and more glorious effusions of mind have never appeared – your intellect defies time to injure it, and I really believe that you never conceived more beautiful, more graceful, or more enchanting compositions, than these you have sent for exhibition – God bless you & preserve you as you are for your affectionate and admiring Friends –54

  There were fewer paintings now. Six at the RA in 1845, five in 1846, one in 1847, none in 1848, and only one again in 1849. Unlike Jones, Ruskin thought these late works were ‘of wholly inferior value’55 and he claimed (in a letter to George Richmond) that Turner burst into tears when his hands ceased to obey him.56 There were also fewer watercolours, though he made two for Ruskin in late 1847, The Brunig Pass and Descent of the St. Gothard. The other collectors who had supported him seemed to be dropping away. His reputation was unstable. Not only had his Opening of the Wallhala been knocked about during its return to him from a Congress of European Art in Munich in 1845, with payment due, but its reception had been unpleasant. His large celebration in oil of Ludwig of Bavaria’s new Doric ‘Temple of Fame’ was taken by Bavarian viewers as a lampoon or satire and its artist as a ‘dauber’, whose talent had degenerated, and whose works were now ‘seen only as curiosities of the art of painting’.57 Perhaps some were curiosities; perhaps some were magnificent. Some undoubtedly were sad, like the drawing he had done of a drowned girl whose body was brought ashore at Chelsea near his cottage,58 or like The Wreck Buoy, an old painting of his that he reworked for the exhibition in 1849. Despite the rainbow that arches over the sailing craft, the effect was – once more – of an approaching and perhaps final deluge, in which the sailors (and the oarsmen in several rowing boats) are going to go full fathom five, joining whatever is below the strange little bomb-shaped buoy marked WRECK.

  Out of nostalgia or need, he was looking through old pictures. His sole 1847 exhibit was another reworking: The Hero of a Hundred Fights. This was the year, so George Jones reported, that one of their colleagues approached Turner on a varnishing day and said, ‘Why, Turner, you have but one picture here this year.’ And Turner replied, ‘Yes, you will have less next year.’59 Like The Wreck Buoy, The Hero of a Hundred Fights had originally been painted some forty years before – in the first decade of the century when he was about thirty. It began apparently as a picture of a forge or factory. Now, it seems on varnishing days, he turned it into a revelation scene: an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington appearing in the mouth of a blazing furnace. (Such a statue had been cast in 1845, and the sculptor Wyatt had invited a group of artists to watch the process.) Turner had as a hanging neighbour Maclise’s Sacrifice of Noah, and having helped Maclise with the rainbow in that picture, he decided to paint up ‘such a blaze as to extinguish Noah’s rainbow’ – thus the Literary Gazette, a rare admirer, on 8 May 1847. The paper continued, ‘It is a marvellous piece of colouring. If Turner had been Phaeton, he must have succeeded in driving out the chariot of the sun.’

  The darker the days, the more he craved brightness. In Davis Place, he got up to watch from his roof-top balcony the sun rise downriver, a blanket or dressing gown over his shoulders. There was an early-morning sun in Norham Castle, Sunrise, painted during the mid-1840s, an oil painting that looked in many ways like a watercolour. In this he returned to one of his lucky places: the castle on the Tweed that he had first sketched and done in watercolour in the late 1790s. Norham had thereafter figured in the Liber and in numerous engravings, watercolours and colour studies. In the late painting, a solitary cow, standing shin-deep in the calm waters of the Tweed, is an almost calligraphically rendered survivor of several cattle in the Liber engraving. As noted previously, Turner had doffed his hat to Norham when he was there in 1831, and had explained to a companion that drawing and painting Norham Castle had set him on the road to being a successful artist. In this last painting on the subject, ‘the powerful King of Day’ – the sun celebrated in the Thomson lines he used with his Norham watercolour in 1798 – has risen just above the castle. Light penetrates the pale colours which form the misty structures of everything: hill, castle, riverbanks, cow, river. The castle and its hill are done with continuous strokes of cobalt blue on top of a warmer ground, producing a surprising cornflower colour. Substances are gossamer-light. One feels that the sunlight itself is a blessing that can suddenly fade or be withdrawn.

  The painter for the Sun Fire Office (Chantrey’s joke) was no closet sun-worshipper. In various poetic borrowings and quotations he had called the sun ‘Prime Cheerer’ and ‘Fairest of Beings’. The Divine Light was of course the Fount of all Colour. He had tried to sketch an eclipse of the sun around 1804;60 he had noted in a sketchbook of 1809–10 the presumed distance of the sun from the earth.61 Apollo – the God of Light – confronted darkness in his Apollo and Python of 1811. Viewers of his paintings were forced to use words such as blazing, fiery and resplendent. Ruskin called him ‘a Sun-worshipper of the old breed’, a veritable Zoroastrian in his solar enthusiasm.62 And in 1843 Ruskin saw that Turner’s works were distinguished from those of other colourists

  by the dazzling intensity … of the light which he sheds through every hue, and which, far more than their brilliant colour, is the real source of their overpowering effect upon the eye, an effect so reasonably made the subject of perpetual animadversion; as if the sun which they represent were a quiet, and subdued, and gentle, and manageable luminary and never dazzled anybody, under any circumstances whatsoever. I am fond of standing by a bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the crowd – ‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’ ‘Don’t it hurt your eyes?’ – expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking the sun full in the face with the most perfect comfort and entire facility of vision.63

  Once, like Ariel in The Tempest, Turner had ‘flamed amazement’.64 Now his yellows were becoming white, as in white-hot. He wanted to paint pure light, the ultimate measurement and the final unity. The sun had given and the sun would take away. The sun, in seven billion years or so, will burn us up, we now know; man and his achievements, including all his art, will have been consumed and our earth will be a dead cinder. It is as if Turner already felt dread and despair from this: the horrible pointlessness that formed the backdrop to human striving and to his own compulsions and hard work. And yet he also felt a common gratitude for existence. He continued to get up early to watch the sun rise, making use of the light of every day he had. W. J. Stillman recorded an occasion in these closing years when ‘Callow, the water-colour artist, happening to be in the early morning train with him, and seeing him at sunrise look at the full risen sun unflinchingly, expressed his wonder. Turner said, “It hurts my eyes no more than it would hurt yours to look at a candle.”’65 Despite that boast, one wonders, thinking of Regulus: were his eyes injured by so much looking at the sun? Or did his presumed cataracts protect them?

  In 1846 one of his Academy e
xhibits was a painting called The Angel Standing in the Sun. This was a harder subject than Norham Castle. It seemed to be an attempt to paint the unpaintable. The Angel of the Apocalypse stood with uplifted sword in a vortex of light, with birds flying in the upper left and a serpent and various human beings below, among them Adam and Eve, alive, and Abel and Holofernes, dead. Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation:

  And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, both free and bond, both small and great.66

  To reinforce the note of voracious doom, he added two lines from Samuel Rogers’ Voyage of Columbus:

  The morning march that flashes to the sun;

  The feast of vultures when the day is done.

  And perhaps he also had in his well-stocked mind Byron’s poem Cain, which concluded with the appearance of the Angel of the Lord.

  The painting got a mixed response. Ruskin thought it ‘indicative of mental disease’.67 The press wavered between those who – like the Athenaeum – considered it an aberration of talent (9 May 1846) and those who approved it, like the Times, which (6 May) called it ‘a truly gorgeous creation … It is all very well to treat Turner’s pictures as jests; but things like these are too magnificent for jokes.’