Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  Turner had known John Constable since at least 1813, when the two men had sat together at dinner. Constable had always been kind to the great lion—in public, at any rate—and praised his “visionary qualities.” It was only a few years earlier that Turner had personally informed the younger man of his election to the Academy (though there is some doubt about which way he actually voted); and now Constable had used his position on the Hanging Committee to perform this monstrous switcheroo. It was, as they say, a hanging offence.

  Turner let rip. In the words of one witness, David Roberts, RA, Turner “opened upon him like a ferret.” Constable did his best to clamber back onto the moral high ground. My dear Turner, he protested. He was completely disinterested. He was simply anxious to discharge his sacred duty to hang the Academy’s paintings to best advantage. It was all a question of finding the best light, and doing justice to Turner’s work, and so on. But no matter how much Constable wriggled and twisted, said David Roberts, Turner kept coming back with his zinger. “Yess,” he hissed at Constable, “but why put your own there?”

  “It was obvious to all present that Turner detested Constable,” Roberts reported. “I must say that Constable looked to me, and I believe to everyone, like a detected criminal, and I must add Turner slew him without remorse. But as he had brought it on himself, few if any pitied him.”

  Turner was furious for a mixture of reasons. There was certainly an element of chippiness. Constable was the good-looking heir of a well-to-do Suffolk corn merchant, who had privately declared that Turner was “uncouth,” which in those days meant strange or out of the ordinary. Turner was a defiantly self-made cockney, born above a barber’s shop in Maiden Lane, who dropped his aitches all his life.

  Constable was a conventionally pious and uxorious fellow, who by that stage was wearing black in memory of his wife. Turner was known to be scornful of the married state, and once exploded, “I hate all married men!”—a generalisation thought to have been aimed at Constable. “They never make any sacrifice to the arts,” he went on, “but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families or some rubbish of that sort.”

  No, Turner and Constable were not cut out to be chums. But what drove Turner wild that day was not just the underhanded manner in which Constable had promoted his own painting, but the disagreeable reality that the canvas in question—Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows—was a stunner. As Turners go, Caligula’s Palace is in the not-half-bad category, but over the last 180 years I am afraid it has been beaten hollow for a place on the biscuit tins by Salisbury Cathedral. Turner was a shrewd enough judge of a painting’s commercial potential to see that he had been not only cynically bumped by his rival, but bumped in favour of an arguably superior product. He thirsted for revenge, and the next year he got it.

  In 1832 Constable exhibited his Opening of Waterloo Bridge, a painting to which he attached great importance and on which he laboured, apparently, for ten years. Everyone knew he could do clouds and trees, and sky and haywains, and little kids lapping water from the stream, but could he do the grand occasion?

  Turner was an acknowledged master of the pastoral watercolour, but he had also done colossal and portentous canvases of Dido founding Carthage, or Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, or the Battle of Trafalgar. Now it was Constable’s turn to compete in that genre, and he was vulnerable.

  A great painter once told me that every painting must have a “hero,” a point of light or colour or interest to which the eye is drawn before wandering over the canvas. The trouble with Constable’s Waterloo Bridge is that there is certainly a lot going on—crowds of spectators, waving bunting, flashing oars, soldiers in busbies; and yet for all the glints of silver and gold and vermilion and crimson lake, there is no focal point. There is no hero.

  It is a bit of a jumble, and it was hard luck that it was exhibited in a small room next to a very simple Turner seascape. According to C. R. Leslie, RA, who saw what happened next, Turner’s effort was “a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it.” As was the custom of the day, Constable was working on his own picture on the very wall of the gallery—titivating the decorations and the flags of the barges with yet more crimson and vermilion, each fleck of colour somehow detracting from the others.

  Then Turner came into the room and stood behind him. He watched as Constable fiddled away. Then Turner went off to another room, where he was touching up another picture, and returned with his palette and brushes. He walked up to his picture and without hesitation he added a daub of red, somewhat bigger than a coin, in the middle of the grey sea. Then he left.

  Leslie entered the room just as Turner was walking out, and he saw immediately how “the intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake [crimson] of Constable to look weak.” Constable turned to him and spoke in tones of despair.

  “He has been here,” he said, “and fired a gun.” Turner did not bother to come back to the painting for the next day and a half—and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture and shaped it into a buoy.

  It wasn’t just a blob of paint; it was a bullet across his rival’s bows. It was war. What we have here—and not beforetime—is a proper old rivalry between English painters. We have already seen how London works as a cyclotron of talent: drawing bright people together and then bouncing them off each other in a chain reaction of energy and emulation until—pow!—there is an explosion of genius. Fame is the spur, said Milton, and London is fame’s echo chamber.

  It was the struggle for reputation between Elizabethan playwrights, and the struggle between theatre companies to put bums on seats, that helped to produce the millennial flashpoint of Shakespeare. It was the coffeehouse rivalries of the natural philosophers that helped to encourage the inventions and conjectures of Robert Hooke. Now in the Royal Academy the English had found an arena in which men (and I am afraid it was almost always men) could do battle for fame as painters; and we must be honest and confess that London was pretty slow to get there—certainly by comparison with Paris.

  Londoners may have been world leaders in drama; they were no slouches at science; but for centuries painting was an art form in which the greatest English exponents had embarrassingly foreign names. Hans Holbein, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller—all the greatest names of the Tudor and Stuart period seem to have been born abroad. Cardinal Richelieu founded the French Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1648, about 120 years before George III got around to founding the Royal Academy.

  The first president of that Academy was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the friend of Johnson’s, and in 1788 he made a speech introducing Thomas Gainsborough, in which he wondered wistfully “if ever this nation should produce a genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English school.” There was no English School. There was a cultural cringe, an intellectual subservience before the triumphs of French, Dutch and Italian art.

  When rich young men came back from their grand tours, they wanted Canalettos, to remind them with postcard accuracy of where they had been. They wanted works either by or in the style of the Old Masters—and for years Turner had himself laboured to imitate the great continentals. In 2009 the Tate Gallery put on a show called “Turner and the Masters,” in which we were invited to see how Turner took on the giants of the past. It was a curatorial triumph, in which Turner’s versions were hung next to the Old Masters who had inspired him. There was even an interactive website where you could vote on who came off better from the comparison. Sometimes—when he was up against Van de Velde or Poussin—you felt Turner more than held his own.

  Sometimes he looked distinctly second best. When Turner went to see the Rembrandts in the Louvre, he came away declaring with his customary confidence that they were “miserably dr
awn and poor in expression.” He was going to out-Rembrandt Rembrandt, and in paintings such as Pilate Washing His Hands he has a crack at it. Critics have been scathing ever since. He can’t seem to do faces. His versions of the human form are lumpy and indistinct. A lot of the characters seem to have their backs to us, perhaps because he found them easier to do that way round. Rembrandt he ain’t.

  Turner did not succeed as an imitator or pasticheur. His triumph was in his original work. His energy and aggression produced a new style of painting that combined the translucence of watercolour with the savagery and grandeur of oil. When I was a child I used to stare for ages at the cover of my Penguin edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, not just because I was summoning up the will to read it, but because I was absorbed by the painting.

  It was a sunset on a river, with the sun as a ball of flame unlike anything I had ever seen rendered in paint. In the foreground was a curious brown boat or buoy. I was looking at a detail of the right side of The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up.

  I appreciate that this painting is now a visual cliché. We have all stared at it for so long that we can hardly take it in. But it is worth looking at again because it is a supreme English masterpiece—indeed, in 2005 it was voted by listeners of the BBC’s Today programme (and who am I to fault their taste?) to be the single greatest painting now hanging in a gallery of the United Kingdom.

  In emotion and style it is part of a revolutionary body of work, the product of a London genius who was decades ahead of the Continent. He was more than just a painter. He was a poet and a thinker. He has summed up in one canvas the volcanic transition of his time, a revolution in technology and society that he echoed in paint.

  Let us trace that journey from a Covent Garden barbershop to The Fighting Temeraire. Let us imagine Turner’s mind as a painting, and his mature genius as a vast canvas that has been covered—in true Turneresque fashion—by wash upon wash of colour and ideas and sensory impressions.

  We begin with the priming of the canvas, the famous birth above the barber’s shop at 21 Maiden Lane. Turner later claimed that his nativity had taken place on 23 April—Shakespeare’s birthday, and the most auspicious day in the English calendar; and though we have no proof that either Turner or Shakespeare (let alone St. George) had anything to do with this particular day, Turner’s claim is an assertion of cultural primacy: what Shakespeare had done for English poetic drama, he would do for painting.

  His father, William Turner, had been a wigmaker who had been reduced to cutting hair after wigs went out of fashion in the 1770s (Pitt the Younger imposed a tax on the powder). So it was not exactly the lowest form of barber’s shop.

  We must imagine a clubby atmosphere in which the infant Turner first gazed about him, with gentlemen coming in for coffee or leafing through the pages of the Spectator and even gazing at the paintings on the wall. Turner himself was emphatically not a gentleman. He grew up amid the oaths of costermongers and the calls of whores, and all his life his cockney accent was the subject of mockery—even when he was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.

  He never turned into one of the toffs who bought his paintings. He never showed any such pretensions. He remained psychologically rooted in the backstreets of Covent Garden, and if his patrons were lace-cuffed Tory dandies, Turner remained emotionally and politically a radical. He was chippy and insecure to the end, and no wonder, really, when we consider that he had what we would now call a disturbed childhood. His mother was mad, and subject to “ungovernable rages.”

  Poor Mary Turner never recovered the balance of her mind after the death of her daughter, and when Turner was in his early twenties, she was committed to the Bedlam asylum in Moorfields. If you want a vision of this hell on Earth, think of Hogarth’s image of the Rake’s final progress into madness; and yet it doesn’t look as if her son even visited her until she died.

  By the time he was ten, things were so bad at home that he went to stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford, Middlesex—the same Brentford where Wilkes had fought his famous campaign, and where the cries of “Liberty” still echoed in the air—loudly enough, some say, for Turner to have picked up their echo. It was here that he employed the sublime displacement for his unhappiness: painting what he saw, and developing a habit he had discovered at the age of eight.

  The Thames in those parts was (and to some extent still is) an Arcadian landscape, full of lush meadows and woodland scenes, and from a very young age he drank in ideas—light breaking behind a tree, the play of the sun on water—that he was to reference all his career. Better yet, he went to school the next year in Margate, and now the images of the sea crashed in like breakers on his imagination, and that experience generated so many drawings that his proud father was able to mount an exhibition in the barbershop window.

  At the age of twelve he sold his first painting and discovered the joy of making money from art. This was the epoch in which Jane Austen heroines were supposed to knock off watercolours in the longueurs before luncheon, while waiting for Mr. Darcy to show up. The boy Turner gave them a hand by doing the background skies, which he sold from a stall in Soho.

  His father’s barbershop patrons would be offered “something for the weekend”—a river scene from his manic teenage brush. At the age of only fourteen he had found a job in an architect’s firm, colouring in the drawings, and almost certainly through this contact he arrived at this precocious age at the portals of the Royal Academy. On 11 December 1789 he was personally interviewed and admitted by the sixty-six-year-old Sir Joshua Reynolds. Turner was to remain devoutly loyal to the institution and to Reynolds, and he later asked to be buried next to the man who had spotted his talent.

  Reynolds had a theory about painting—that it should be like poetry. A great painting, he said, should have the “profound humanism, mellifluity of utterance, the aptness of language, measure and imagery, the grandeur of scale, and moral discourse of the most exalted poetry and poetic dramas!”

  In other words, a painting was more than just a souvenir depiction of some place or person. It was meant to engage and lead the emotions, as a poem does. It was a statement. More than any other English painter before or since, Turner tried to turn pigment into pure feeling, and though he was later to shock his fellow Academicians with his techniques, he was always essentially following the ideology of Joshua Reynolds.

  But Reynolds was sensible enough to see that you couldn’t just invite young ragamuffins into the Royal Academy and hope that they would become the English equivalent of Rembrandt or Poussin. They had to learn to draw. Under his scheme, pupils spent two years drawing from a sculpture cast gallery; and only then, if they were any good, were they allowed to draw the human form in the nude. Turner was good, and developed a lively interest in drawing naked women that was to last all his life. Even at the age of seventy he was doing graphic close-ups of copulation—hundreds of erotic or just porno images that later sent his great champion, John Ruskin, into a spin.

  Ruskin, however, had famously fainted at the sight of his wife’s pubic hair (which slightly took the snap out of their honeymoon), and when he opened his hero’s notebooks he was so flabbergasted that he pronounced them evidence of Turner’s mental frailty, and claimed—falsely, thankfully—to have destroyed them all.

  In this desensitised digital age, with electronic images strobing away in the palms of our very hands, it is easy to forget the impact of two-dimensional representational art on the eighteenth-century mind. London was a “paper culture,” in which prints—including erotic prints—sold in the thousands. But for the vast majority of Londoners there was something supernatural in the ability of people like Turner to take a fugitive event—a shipwreck, a frosty morning, a snowstorm engulfing Hannibal as he crosses the Alps—and make them feel that they were in some sense witnesses.

  That is partly why
they valued these paintings so highly. By the 1790s Turner was beginning to get good money—and he acquired the habit of hard bargaining.

  In fact, he was to become something of a Scrooge. When Walter Scott later asked him to do some engravings of Edinburgh history, he was amazed at the bill. “Turner’s palm is as itchy as his fingers are ingenious,” he wailed. “He will do nothing without cash, and anything for it. He is the only man of genius I ever knew who was sordid in these matters.”

  Sordid or not, the twenty-five-year-old had achieved a circle of rich patrons. These were men with money to blow from the proceeds of empire, and we must imagine their frustration. They might want a Poussin or a Canaletto to go in the drawing room, but for years the Napoleonic Wars had made it difficult or impossible to source them from the Continent.

  They had to make do with homegrown talent; and indeed you could argue that the emergence of Turner in the late eighteenth century—with the Continent effectively cut off by the Royal Navy from trade with the British Empire—was one of the world’s great examples of import substitution. A painting by the French master Claude might cost £6,000—a stupefying sum—and they were hard to find. But a French-style Turner could be procured for a mere £150.

  The young Turner so venerated Claude that he was once found standing in front of one of his paintings with tears running down his cheeks, in despair that he would never be able to paint like the French Old Master. And yet the last time a big Claude was on the market it fetched a couple of million pounds. The last big Turner fetched £29 million. It’s no more after you, Claude.

  Already by the end of the eighteenth century Turner was starting to do what all artists yearn to do: set the trends himself. A commercial painter is generally engaged in a compromise between what he is interested in painting and what his clients want. On the whole people liked to pay for pictures of themselves, or their estates, or their dogs/horses/wives, or possibly a pastoral view in the manner of some attested foreign artist.