J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  What Ruskin called Turner’s ‘infidelity’68 was his despair. He saw mankind ending in an all-consuming fire. It is the merciless light of this solar furnace that blazes behind the Angel.

  But he kept going nevertheless. At least he did not have the ill fortune that drove Haydon to kill himself in June 1846, and he found shreds of hope as well as of despair in the Bible. Around this time he painted a watercolour that has since been given the title The Angel Troubling the Pool. His underlying text was from the Gospel of St John, where an angel stirred the waters of a pool near Jerusalem and sick people who stepped into it were cured. Turner took a watercolour he had done of Alpine landscape and added the helpful angel and the sick; one man supports himself on a stick. The Holy Land comes to Switzerland!

  His ‘range of mind’ continued to intrigue those who encountered him. The anthologist F. T. Palgrave met him at a party and was impressed by his ‘eminent sense and shrewdness’, talking-once he warmed up – ‘of the mysteries of bibliography and the tangle of politics’. Palgrave asked Turner about a star in a Liber print called From Spenser’s Fairy Queen – a star that had disappeared from later states of the print – and Turner said, with an ironic laugh, that the stars and their ways were beyond his control. When he left, Palgrave helped Turner into his ‘rough and old-fashioned great coat’. Turner must have felt he had been too abrupt with Palgrave before, because ‘he pointed to Jupiter keenly shining in the cold upper sky and gaily said I might ask that star why it pleased to shine’.69

  He took an interest in novel ways of representing nature. The young American daguerrotypist J. J. E. Mayall had a studio in the Strand. On several occasions between 1847 and 1849 a small, elderly, dark-suited man visited Mayall’s establishment, and the pioneer photographer got the impression that his visitor, a Mr Turner, had to do with the law – was possibly a Master in Chancery; and Turner did not dissuade him from this idea. Mayall’s visitor was inquisitive about the way light worked on iodized silver plates, and he got Mayall to explain how images were copied. They talked about magnetism and about light. Mayall made several daguerrotype portraits of Turner and was paid for them; one of these Turner ‘presented to a lady who accompanied him’ – presumably Mrs Booth. Turner was particularly interested in Mayall’s views of Niagara and the rainbow that spanned the great falls. ‘He told me he should like to see Niagara, as it was the greatest wonder in Nature.’70

  One evening in May 1849 Mayall met his Master in Chancery at a soirée of the Royal Society:

  He shook me by the hand very cordially, and fell into his old topic of the spectrum. Some one came up to me and asked if I knew Mr. Turner; I answered I had had that pleasure some time. ‘Yes,’ said my informant, rather significantly; ‘but do you know that he is the Turner?’ I was rather surprised, I must confess; and later on in the evening Iencountered him again, and fell into conversation on our old topic. I ventured to suggest to him the value of such studies for his own pursuits, and at once offered to conduct any experiments for him he might require, and, in fact, to give up some time to work out his ideas about the treatment of light and shade. I parted with him on the understanding that he would call on me; however, he never did call again.71

  Mayall, to begin with gloomy about prospects in London, was grateful to Turner for his support. Turner once said to him, ‘You are sure to succeed; only wait. You are a young man yet. I began life with little, and you see I am now very comfortable.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mayall replied, ‘and if I were on the same side of Chancery you are, perhaps I might be comfortable also.’72

  Mayall said later that at one stage in this period he was having money problems because of litigation over patent rights. Turner, ‘unasked, brought him a roll of bank notes, to the amount of £300, and gave it to him on the understanding that he was to repay him if he could. This, Mr Mayall was able to do very soon.’73

  As for the spectrum, one recalls that Turner had been reading Eastlake’s translation of Goethe on the theory of colours and making crabbed, often inscrutable notes in the margins. Some of those that are legible suggest that he differed with Goethe, who was not sufficiently practical for him: how a writer thought painting was done could be different from how it was done.

  The sketchbooks tail off. What Ruskin called Turner’s ‘Actually Last Sketchbook’ is from 1847 or thereabouts and has few drawings in it. In one sketchbook from the mid-1840s, children play on a seashore, perhaps at Margate, and there is a little note in Turner’s hand: ‘The lost vessel’. In the same sketchbook he wrote: ‘May 30 – Margate. A small opening along the horizon marked the approach of the sun by its getting yellow.’74 And the poetic urge still seized him; there are in this sketchbook some late attempts at verse, partly illegible:

  Then on the lonely shore the bold wave

  … who crowd the many hills

  … by love

  And even some nature notes, in a terrible hand:

  May. Blossoms. Apple Cherry Lilac

  Small white flowers in the Hedges

  in Clusters, D. Blue Bells,

  Buttercups and daisies in the fields

  Oak. Warm. Elm. G. Ash yellow.75

  He and Mrs Booth continued to go down to the Kent coast after the Academy exhibition had opened or if he was feeling particularly run down. From Deal he looked out to the Goodwin Sands, scene of many a wreck. He made a few watercolours now of these shallow waters. The sun set. He added a word or two: ‘Lost to all Hope’.76 His depression pervades these studies of often peopleless beaches, the waves rolling in and withdrawing again and again, the high skies. But for him these Thanet skies were still the loveliest and many of his late informal coastal studies – of the sand, the sea, the sunsets and storm clouds – done with bold sweeps of watercolour, are stunningly beautiful.

  Some of his sketches were done on the beaches of the North Foreland and around on the Channel coast at Folkestone. He took a few jaunts afloat and sketched from offshore. Some studies, in watercolours or oil, were perhaps painted in the front room of Mrs Booth’s house, looking out to sea. A few have fishy creatures or sea monsters lurking within them. A stranded whale is certainly real and the scene is inscribed by Turner, ‘I shall use this.’77 He was in Folkestone in 1845 and entitled his roll sketchbook ‘Ideas of Folkestone’.78 Twenty-three out of the twenty-four drawings in it are watercolour studies of clouds, cliffs, waves, boats and the harbour. Although his health had been bad this year, after his deputy presidential duties, it is not evident from this sketchbook: there is rather a sense of an artist moving his brush across the paper with untrammelled freedom and panache. While he worked, the impending conclusion – the loss of all hope – was wonderfully held at bay.

  Notes

  1 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.3.

  2 Century, p.253.

  3 Ibid., pp.253–4.

  4 Lindsay, p.197.

  5 Falk, Turner, p.204.

  6 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.7.

  7 Armstrong, Turner, p.179.

  8 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.7.

  9 Ibid., pp.3, 6.

  10 Th. ii, p.46.

  11 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.7. Here and elsewhere, Roberts’s spelling and punctuation retained.

  12 Th. 1877, p.360.

  13 Ibid., p.361.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Falk, Turner, p.204.

  16 Armstrong, Turner, p.182.

  17 Finberg, p.376.

  18 Armstrong, Turner, pp.181–2.

  19 Letters, pp.195–6.

  20 Feret, Isle of Thanet Gazette, 23 September 1916.

  21 Letters, pp.217–18.

  22 Ibid., p.221.

  23 Ruskin, Praeterita, p.310.

  24 NPG archive; TS, 3, 1, pp.29–30.

  25 Frith, Autobiography, i, p.137.

  26 Redgrave, Memoir, p.58.

  27 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.3.

  28 Letters, p.216.

  29 AR, i, p.199.

  30 Leslie, Inner Life, p.144.

  31 Ruskin, Works, xiii, pp.478–80. Ia
n Warrell points out that Ruskin wrote this account when suffering one of his nervous breakdowns. Warrell, Through Switzerland, p.149.

  32 Letters, p.187.

  33 Pye-Roget, pp.73–4.

  34 Ibid., p.97.

  35 Th. 1877, pp.278–9.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Eastlake, Journals, i, p.189.

  38 Ibid., p.322.

  39 Ruskin, quoted in B&J text, p.83, letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 7 August 1870. The painting, restored, is now in quite good condition.

  40 Ruskin, Modern Painters, v, p.366n.

  41 Emerson, Collected Works, v, pp.75–6,260 n.75.

  42 Stillman, Autobiography, i, pp.113, 115.

  43 Frith, Autobiography, i, pp.134–6.

  44 Ruskin, Notes, p.10.

  45 Ruskin, Modern Painters, iii, p.v.

  46 Finberg, p.416.

  47 Ibid., pp.437–8.

  48 Geese I, p.34; Will 2, p.13; Geese III, pp.115–21 and 127.

  49 Letters, p.220.

  50 Ibid.

  51 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.

  52 Letters, pp.222–3.

  53 Ibid., p.205.

  54 Ibid., p.223.

  55 Ruskin, Works, xiii, p.99.

  56 Ibid., xxxvi, p.595.

  57 B&J, no.401.

  58 Pye, quoted in Falk, Turner, p.220.

  59 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.8.

  60 TB LXXXV.

  61 TB CXIII.

  62 Ruskin, Works, xxii, p.490.

  63 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, pp.174–5.

  64 The Tempest, I, ii, line 198.

  65 TS, 9, 2, p.49.

  66 Revelation, xix: 17–18.

  67 Ruskin, Works, xiii, p.167.

  68 Th. 1877, p.xi.

  69 Finberg, p.434.

  70 Th. 1877, pp.349–51.

  71 Ibid., p.350. MS note on Haskell copy of Th. ii, pp.259–62: Hugh Munro doubted this story because of Turner’s dislike of being portrayed; but it seems more likely than not, if one discounts a few of Thornbury’s embellishments.

  72 Th. 1877, pp.350–1.

  73 Monkhouse, p.132.

  74 TB CCCLXIII, ff.2, 6.

  75 Ibid., f.41.

  76 Wilton, Life and Works, nos.1425, 1426.

  77 Brown, Turner and the Channel, p.12.

  78 TB CCCLVI.

  Turner on varnishing day, by S. W. Parrott, c. 1840

  21: World’s End

  From January to April 1850 Turner worked on four three-foot-by-four-foot paintings for the Academy exhibition – his fifty-seventh, sixty years after he had first shown there. He worked at Davis Place, in his small painting room facing the river, sometimes concentrating on one, sometimes retouching one after another. He had always liked series, and this was a modest sequence; the theme was Carthage once again and Aeneas’ sojourn there, with the Trojan hero ensnared (almost) by Dido to the point of giving up his search for a new homeland in Italy. The Aeneid had been a favourite source of picture matter for Claude in his later years. It had been Turner’s own longest-running subject: Aeneas had made his first appearance in his work in 1798 with the Cumaean sibyl at Lake Avernus. And here he was again, though in a less definite, even less physical form; all was haze and suggestion, glow and iridescence.

  The titles of these paintings were Mercury sent to admonish Aeneas, Aeneas relating his Story to Dido, The Visit to the Tomb and The Departure of the Fleet. That resourceful manuscript ‘The Fallacies of Hope’ provided short tags for each painting. His musings in the Aeneid, perhaps his bedside reading, gave him three of the subjects, while that of The Visit to the Tomb seems to have been an idea or dream of his own. He interpolated in Virgil’s scenario an excursion by the lovers to the mausoleum of Dido’s late husband Sychaeus – by remembering him, the Carthaginian Queen had attempted to diminish her passion for Aeneas. Did the Dido story still have for Turner reverberations of Sarah Danby, or did Sophia sometimes give him cause for jealousy by regretting the loss of Messrs Pound and Booth? Sychaeus’ point of view seems inherent in Turner’s ‘Fallacies’ line for this picture: ‘The sun went down in wrath at such deceit.’1

  He let Mrs Booth look at the paintings before he sent them up to the Academy; but she later recalled that he told her she was not to comment on them.

  Despite George Jones’s friendly letter about Turner’s ‘glorious effusions of mind’, these pictures had an uneasy reception at the exhibition. Some critics wanted to be kind but could not follow the artist in his deviations from nature, his carelessness with form and his eccentricities of manner, though they acknowledged the brilliant light and suggestive power. Possibly beyond the radiance there were hints of irradiation: the sunlight had become fatal. None was sold.

  He was seventy-five in April 1850. He was still going out to dinner, for instance to Roberts’s in Fitzroy Square, where a young artist who was a fellow guest found him very agreeable: ‘his quick bright eye sparkled, and his whole countenance expressed a desire to please’.2 He continued to make short trips on the river. A local boatman named Greaves rowed him up- and downstream and across to Battersea. If the weather was poor, he would say, ‘Well, Mrs Booth, we won’t go far.’3 But his health was shaky. At the end of the year he wrote to Hawksworth thanking him for an excellent pie, recalled days at Farnley, and went on: ‘Old Time has made sad work with me since I saw you in Town. I always dreaded it with horror now I feel it acutely now whatever – Gout or nervousness – it having fallen into my Pedestals – and bid adieu to the Marrow bone stage.’4

  He was ‘too unwell’ to attend the David Roberts party on New Year’s Day 1851, to go to the Eastlakes on 8 January, or to be with the Ruskins at Denmark Hill on 8 February for the birthday ‘of the talented Mr. J. Ruskin’.5 Ruskin at this point did not know about Turner’s Chelsea ménage. For a time in 1846 there had been some sort of disagreement between artist and writer, possibly to do with Turner’s objection to Ruskin’s Switzerland trip in 1845 or because Ruskin was offended that same year when Turner thought of raising the prices of his Swiss watercolours from 80 guineas to £100. Perhaps, too, Turner may have sensed that Ruskin thought his hero’s mind was failing. Turner’s interest in what was going on in the world seemed undiminished. The same end-of-1850 letter to ‘Hawkey’ told him about the Crystal Palace going up in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition, and in another letter at the end of January, thanking Hawksworth this time for a brace of Longtails and a brace of hares, Turner described the huge glass cathedral, looking ‘very well in front because the transept takes a centre like a dome, but sideways ribs of Glass frame work only Towering over the Galleries like a Giant’.6 It was the year in which this ‘worlds fair’ – as he parenthetically complained to Griffith in May – appeared to be taking all the attention, to the detriment of the sales of Turner prints.7

  He had nothing he wanted to offer the RA exhibition this spring. But he called in during the varnishing days and stopped to chat with Maclise about his painting Caxton’s Printing Press. Jones saw him call for a chair and sit for a while there, ‘expressing his pleasure by his odd and jocose remarks’.8 Maclise no doubt was relieved that the great man this year refrained from competing rainbow with rainbow. Turner also attended the Private View, though he looked frail; the writer Peter Cunningham thought Turner was ‘breaking up fast’ and ‘would hardly live the year out’.9 The Times wrote on 3 May, ‘We miss those works of inspiration.’ This led Ruskin to write:

  We miss! Who misses? The populace of England rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington, little thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and prancing amazons, and goodly merchandize of precious stones and gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been, but that the light which has faded from the walls of the Academy is one which a million Koh-i-Noors could not rekindle, and that the year 1851 will, in the far future, be remembered less for what it has displayed than what it has withdrawn.10

  Prince Albert, chief promoter of the Great Exhibition, was the princi
pal guest at the Academy’s annual banquet. The painter T. Sidney Cooper was about to leave when he saw Turner sitting by himself near the door:

  He called out to me and said: ‘Come and sit down, Cooper, and have a glass of wine with me.’

  I replied that I had taken as much as I required, and that I was anxious to get away, as I was going elsewhere; but he pressed me, and I agreed to stay with him for a short time. He soon wished to leave himself, and asked me to give him my arm down the stairs, which I willingly did. Sir Edwin Landseer and Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, were in conversation together near the entrance, and I heard the former say to Lord John, as we passed:

  ‘There is Cooper, leading out the “Nestor” of the Royal Academy.’

  ‘Never mind them,’ said Turner to me – ‘Never mind them. They shan’t lead me out.’11

  He had not been a regular at the Academy Club for some time. His fraternal feelings were at the mercy of his age and health. But in early May Solomon Hart – on his way to a Club dinner at the Thatched House tavern – met Turner, who quizzed him and found out his destination. Hart thought Turner seemed depressed. Turner said he was sorry that he wasn’t going too. So Hart took him along and, leaving him for a moment outside the room where the Club members had assembled, told them he wanted to bring in a stranger. ‘They all objected, as it was against the rule to admit any one save the members. I replied that they on that occasion would gladly break the rule, if I produced my friend. Turner was cordially welcomed. He was placed on the right of the chairman, and was the hero of the evening.’12

  On this occasion, Turner had apparently been up in town on art business, hoping to see Griffith about drawings and watercolours that might be sold. But Griffith was away. Turner dropped him a note from the Athenaeum to ask ‘How shall we meet? I am yet very unwell and unable to walk much.’13 He was up from Chelsea again a few weeks later and called on his long-time engraver Charles Turner, who recorded in his diary for 28 May: ‘Mr Wm. Turner. The last time I ever saw him.’14 He was too ill to attend the ‘soirée’ held when the Academy exhibition closed at the end of July, and some of his friends now began to worry in earnest. Roberts knew that