CHAPTER ELEVEN
1833–1844
In 1833 he exhibited two paintings of Venice, Ducal Palace, Venice and, most impressively, Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom House, Venice; Canaletti painting. This work was executed in homage to Canaletto, who is indeed seen painting the scene in the left-hand corner, but the critics seemed to agree that it was superior to the Italian artist’s own paintings of his native city. The light, reflecting from an azure sky on to the calm surface of the water, was considered to be incomparable. This was in fact the first occasion when Turner had exhibited oil-paintings of Venice but he must already have known that he had chosen a highly appropriate and amenable subject. Even before the exhibition had closed, he was travelling back to that city after an absence of fourteen years. His introduction of Canaletto into his composition may also have been an indication that he wished to compete with the Italian artist on Canaletto’s own ground.
He arrived in Venice at the beginning of September, having previously travelled to Vienna and Verona, and then spent little over a week there. He managed to work quickly, however, and completed some two hundred sketches in pencil. He had a way of snatching at impressions, noting in a flash what was necessary or significant, before moving on. He had a nervous dread of wasting time, and must have considered that he needed only to refresh his visual memory after the first visit.
On his return he completed Venice which was exhibited in the exhibition of 1834. It is perhaps significant that he charged £350 for this work, as compared with two hundred guineas for the Canaletto painting. When that had sold he had said, “Well if they will have such scraps instead of important pictures they must pay for them.”
Some works of his were evidently not selling, and Turner considered that the “important pictures” were those consigned to his gallery. The “scraps” were those works which found purchasers. There was a definite sense, in other words, in which he felt himself to be estranged from public taste. He was obliged to paint only for himself, according to his own preoccupations and perceptions, and accept the fact that his productions would be looked upon with incomprehension or disfavour by the general world. He was in advance of the taste of his time, but it might have seemed appropriate to him that he would only be fully appreciated and understood by subsequent generations. He might even be seen as a forerunner of the “modern movement” in art, in the role of Cezanne or Van Gogh, treading his own lonely path.
This romantic picture is only slightly altered by the fact that he was acquiring new patrons in this period. With the death of supporters such as Fawkes, his clients came less from the members of the aristocracy than the serried ranks of commerce. Fifty of his water-colours were purchased by a Bishopsgate coach-maker, Benjamin Windus, who exhibited them at his house in Tottenham. Among other patrons were a horse-dealer, a whaling tycoon, a textile magnate, a clothing manufacturer and a brewer by the name of William Whitbread. Turner appreciated commercial acumen and financial success, so he would not have been at all averse to the new owners of his work. His most vociferous supporter, John Ruskin, was after all the son of a sherry merchant. Turner was also greatly in demand from publishers who knew that his contributions to a text could help increase sales. He illustrated the work of Byron and Scott as well as such minor luminaries as Samuel Rogers and Thomas Moore.
And so he hired an agent to protect his interests. There was a time when he thought that he could supervise such matters for himself, but increasing age—as well as increasing fame—meant that he had neither the time nor the inclination. The commercial ramifications of the engraving work, for example, had become very complicated indeed. So Thomas Griffith of Norwood became his representative. Griffith was himself a collector, with an unrivalled knowledge and appreciation of contemporary art, and quickly their acquaintance changed into friendship. Another artist declared that Griffith behaved “like a prince” in all his dealings; this was exactly the dealer that Turner now needed.
John Ruskin was 21 in 1840 when he first met the 65-year-old Turner. The young man became the champion of the older artist, continuing to defend his reputation even after his death. Turner neglected to leave Ruskin any of his paintings, but in his will named him as one of his executors, so that he could implement Turner’s wish to leave his work to the nation.
Ruskin’s silhouette of Turner dressed to visit the Royal Academy.
At the Royal Academy exhibition in this year, 1834, he exhibited five oils, among them The Fountain of Indolence and The Golden Bough. He was still possessed by a visionary imagination, and saw in the classical world intimations of immortal splendour. Alas the painting itself of the legendary bough was not immortal. The purchaser discovered that one of the figures was coming away from the surface of the canvas. He called in Turner who, on seeing this, exclaimed, “Why, this is only paper!” It seems that he had made a sketch of a nude figure at the Life class of the Royal Academy and, noting that it was the right size and proportion, had simply pasted it on the painting. He had intended to paint the figure properly when it was hanging at the exhibition “but I forgot this entirely, and do not think I should have remembered but for you.” This was the only apology the purchaser received.
He travelled to Oxford and Brussels in the summer of 1824, once more in search of subjects for the engraver, but in fact one of his greatest themes was much closer to home. On the evening of 16 October a fire broke out in the old buildings of the Houses of Parliament, leading quickly to a general conflagration which was enjoyed by the crowds of Londoners who assembled on the banks and the bridges of the Thames. Turner was there, too, feasting on these scenes of flame and destruction. He made sketches at the time, from Westminster Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. In his studio he worked these up into two separate oil-paintings. He used the report in The Times for some general effects. When The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons was exhibited at the British Institution in the spring of 1835, however, it was praised not for its fidelity but for its magnificence. It was a visionary scene of glorious incandescence. Turner then exhibited the second painting at the Royal Academy in the same year, a painting in which a flaming sheet of fire billows across the canvas. The critic of the Morning Chronicle observed that “the Academy ought, now and then, at least, to throw a wet blanket or some such damper over either this fire King or his works . . .” But Turner was an elemental artist; fire, and water, and air, were his divinities.
He had by now become an inveterate traveller, and in the spring of 1836 he sailed from Dover to Calais for a painting trip through France. He took a companion, H. A. J. Munro, a Scottish landowner and amateur painter with whom Turner sensed an affinity. Munro recalled later how “wherever he could get a few minutes, he had his little sketch book out, many being remarkable, but he seemed to tire at last and got careless and slovenly.” But he was not careless on his friend’s behalf. Turner realised that Munro was having trouble with the colouring of his sketches. He said “in a grumbling way—‘I haven’t got any paper I like; let me try yours.’ ” He worked on it for an hour and a half and then returned the sketchbook, saying, “I can’t make anything of your paper.” In fact he had gone through his friend’s work, and cleared up every difficulty of colouring.
The anecdote was recorded in the last volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and it was in fact during this year that the then young critic emerged as Turner’s most eloquent and knowledgeable supporter. Turner had exhibited at this year’s Academy exhibition three paintings; they were entitled Juliet and Her Nurse, Rome from Mount Aventine and Mercury and Argus . They then became the object of a vitriolic attack in Blackwood’s Magazine, in which an anonymous reviewer described them variously as “a strange jumble,” “absurdities,” “a most unpleasant mixture” and altogether “childish.” Ruskin, then only seventeen but already gifted with a preternatural alertness to art akin to genius, was enraged by the criticisms. He drafted a reply, and sent a copy of it to Turner himself. Turner thanked him for the “zeal, kindness and the troub
le you have taken in my behalf ” but added that “I never move in these matters.” He pretended never to notice criticism, in other words, and dismissed the article as of “no import.”
Yet the young man and the old artist had forged an association which would last long after Turner’s own death. Ruskin became the principal advocate of Turner’s art, and it can be said with some certainty that no artist has ever had a more profound and articulate explicator. Turner’s subsequent reputation, in fact, owes not a little to Ruskin’s persistent and clamant advocacy. Turner professed himself unmoved by the young man’s attentions. “Have you read Ruskin on me?” he asked one admirer. “He sees more in my pictures than I ever intended.” This is the standard reply of the artist to the critic, but there can be no doubt that Turner was secretly very pleased by his admiring attention.
The artist and his young disciple did not actually meet until a later date. It seems that on this occasion Turner scarcely noticed Ruskin at all, but the young man was keenly observant. He wrote, that evening, in his diary that 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 look.
It is probably the best short description of Turner ever written.
By 1837 Turner was suffering from bad health; he was now in his early sixties, and at an age when the human body of the nineteenth century seemed to run down. In March he complained that he had “the baneful effects of the Influenza hanging upon me” and confessed that “the lassitude the sinking down and yet compelled to work the same is not to be expressed.” Here he touches upon his compulsion to work, even in the most trying circumstances, which was so integral a part of his nature. In this period, too, old friends were dying around him. W. F. Wells died, and reduced Turner to a paroxysm of sorrow. Clara Wells wrote that “He came immediately to my house in an agony of grief. Sobbing like a child, he said, ‘Oh Clara, Clara! These are iron tears. I have lost the best friend I ever had in my life.’ ” She added “what a different man would Turner have been if all the good and kindly feelings of his great mind had been called into action; but they lay dormant, and were known to so very few.” Lord Egremont died that winter, and of course Turner attended the funeral of his great benefactor. But by the end of that year he called himself “an invalid and Sufferer” who could not stir out of doors. The world was beginning to wear him down. He felt further aggrieved in this year, when a number of eminent artists were knighted but he, arguably the most eminent of them all, was left out of the list.
His pre-eminence had already been proved in the spring of this year, when he prepared four large canvases for exhibition in the new galleries of the Royal Academy. They were to be opened by the king, and so an especial display of painting was desired. Turner produced The Grand Canal, Venice and Snow Storm, Avalanche and Inundation but reserved his truly grand manner for two depictions of classical subjects—The Story of Apollo and Daphne and The Parting of Hero and Leander. His technique in these works was compared to the great violinist Paganini, “something which no one ever did or will do the like,” and in particular his range of prismatic colours was admired. The quality of his light was unequalled, but it went largely without remark.
He was in fact now dwelling in his own realm of radiance, where few people could reach him. He was also moving effortlessly between the past and the present, in that enchanted space where his vision could encompass alternative realities. In the following year, 1838, he exhibited a painting entitled Modern Italy—the Pi ferari with a companion piece entitled Ancient Italy—Ovid Banished from Rome. Any number of interpretations have been offered on the theme and composition of these paintings but, as always, Turner preferred to leave the spectator in a state of quickened mystery as to what, if any, ultimate meaning was to be granted to them.
At the beginning of this year he resigned his post as Professor of Perspective, a resignation that was no doubt received without regret by the members of the Academy; he had been dilatory and surprisingly unprofessional in his discharge of these duties. It had become a burden rather than an honour.
It may have been with some fellow-feeling, then, that he watched a warship, the Téméraire, being towed by small tugs to a ship-breaking yard at Rotherhithe. Some friends say that he watched the spectacle while returning on the packet-steamer from Margate, a sure indication that his relationship with Mrs. Booth was still satisfactory. Other friends, however, believe that he was returning from a day trip to Greenwich when he observed the arresting sight of this grand vessel being towed along the Thames to her last destination.
The Fighting Téméraire has become one of his most famous paintings. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839 it was greeted with universal acclaim, and did much to erase the unsatisfactory impression his most recent canvases had produced. It was regarded as a work of genius, and for John Ruskin it became “the last thoroughly perfect picture [he] ever painted.” William Makepeace Thackeray called it “as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter.” Further comment is perhaps superfluous except to note that Thackeray expressed regret that there was no “art of translating colours into music or poetry.” That is the secret of The Fighting Téméraire: the art of colour itself is taken to the highest possible pitch. It is deployed, like music or the language of poetry, for its own sake without any recourse to some ultimate reality. The light is not of this earth but has the effulgence of a vision.
There is some dispute over whether Turner is depicting a sunrise or a sunset, but in this context it does not matter. He never sold the painting and it was found among his effects after his death.
He was on his travels again in 1839, and revisited the three rivers that he had explored before—the Rhine, the Meuse and the Mosel. He seems to have remained an eager and indefatigable traveller, and on this extended painting expedition he sketched most of the notable cities and towns along his route.
He still relished his trips on the continent—“on the Wing,” as he put it—and from 1841 he journeyed to Switzerland over four successive years. He travelled along the Rhine on each occasion and, remarkably, tended to reproduce the scenes and images that he had captured on his first journey in 1817.
In these years, too, he continued exhibiting at the Royal Academy. He displayed no less than six canvases in 1840, among them the controversial Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and the Dying—Typhoon coming on, a painting of great turbulence, with the masses of water and air billowing out into the most vivid colours. It is as if the sea and the sky had become thrones of blood. Ruskin declared that “if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this,” although the more conventional critics reacted with the usual horror to the artist’s “absurdities.” He was in fact now becoming the subject of popular satire. The humourous magazine, Punch, invented a catalogue entry which included “A Typhoon bursting in a simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway, with a Ship on fire, an Eclipse, and the Effect of a Lunar Rainbow.” In a London pantomime of 1841 there was a scene in which a boy with a tray of jam tarts falls through a window in which a Turner painting is being displayed; the shop owner dusts down the broken tarts, puts a frame around them, and sells them for a thousand pounds.
There is one anecdote, again from Ruskin, that suggests something of the artist’s temperament. Turner was sitting at dinner, almost directly opposite his painting of the slave-ship, and throughout the meal “his eyes never turned to it.” He ignored one of his greatest creations. It was a question of reticence and self-restraint.
But he had truly become the most famous artist of his day. Certainly he seems to
have sensed the full power of his achievement. The figures are in themselves impressive. In the four years 1841 to 1844, he exhibited no less than twenty-three large oil-paintings. This was a high rate of productivity, even by his standards, but the steady flow of composition in no way impeded his mastery. He relished labour, too, and used to repeat the same confession that “The only secret I have got is damned hard work” complemented by “I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.”
Among the labour of these years emerge some of his finest paintings, among them Rain, Steam and Speed—the Great Western Railway and Snow Storm. The latter painting had probably the longest, and certainly the most eccentric, title ever recorded in the catalogue of the Royal Academy—Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich. Turner always insisted that he had been involved in the entire incident. One acquaintance reported him as saying, “I did not paint to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture.” It all sounds a little too extraordinary to be true but the painting itself is worth all of his putative endeavours, with the ship in the middle of a great funnel of charged forces. The picture evoked the usual reactions. One critic described it as “soapsuds and whitewash,” to which Turner was heard to respond: “Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like? I wish they’d been in it.”
J. M. W. Turner Page 11