Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  By his mid-twenties Turner had reached the happy state of being able to ignore this convention and to serve whatever he wanted to his millionaire clients, in the knowledge that they would gobble it up. By 1799 he had orders for sixty watercolours, and had to build a special rotating table to speed up the process of composition.

  It would be wrong to say his style emerged from nowhere but his own cockney head. He learned deeply, not just from the Old Masters that were brought to London, but from his fellow Academicians, especially Romantic watercolourists like John Robert Cozens and Richard Wilson. He was in fact a phenomenal sponge of ideas and influences, endlessly looking for new landscapes and new atmospheres. He not only travelled throughout Britain, but as soon as the Peace of Paris was signed in 1802, he raced to the Continent, where eyewitnesses describe this funny little man who would shout for the coach to halt so that he could capture that particular aspect of the dawn or dusk. He spent days at the Louvre, feverishly copying the artistic treasures that Napoleon had assembled from the rest of conquered Europe. By 1803 he was a full Academician and already a master of oil as well as watercolour.

  He had sold so many paintings that he was able to build his own house near Harley Street, complete with an exhibition gallery—allowing him to exhibit simultaneously at home and at the Royal Academy. With success he grew ever more confident and more adventurous in his style. Some critics attacked his “dynamic composition” and “shocking colours.” What they could not fault was his appetite for work and technical mastery.

  We have a celebrated insight into his powers of memory, from the niece of one of his patrons. In 1818 he was staying at Farnley Hall near Leeds, the seat of one Walter Fawkes—a descendant of the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and himself a noted liberal reformer. At one stage he had even held republican views. But like Turner, Fawkes was a patriot and deeply gripped by England’s recent seafaring triumphs.

  One morning at breakfast Walter Fawkes commissioned a painting—a rare event, since he normally allowed his famous guest to take it easy. In an age before television, and fifty years before the first photograph, he wanted to be able to feast his eyes on one of the great ships that had beaten Napoleon’s admirals. “I want you to make me a drawing of the ordinary dimensions that will give me some idea of the size of a man-of-war.”

  As Fawkes’s niece relates: “The idea hit Turner’s fancy, for with a chuckle he said to Walter Fawkes’ eldest son, then a boy of about fifteen, ‘Come along, Hawkey, and we will see what we can do for Papa,’ and the boy sat by his side the whole morning and witnessed the evolution of A First-Rate Taking in Stores. His description of the way Turner went to work was very extraordinary. He began by pouring wet paint on to the paper till it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos—but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia, came into being and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph. I have heard my uncle give these particulars dozens of times. . . .”

  Have a look at the map of England. You will see that Farnley Hall, Leeds, is nowhere near the sea. Then look at the detail with which he has reconstructed A First-Rate Taking in Stores—the mass of rigging, the exact number of gunports and spars on the masts, the shape of the prow, the light playing on the waves.

  This was a kind of Rain Man, an eidetiker, a human camera, blessed with such creative energy that according to another account “he tore up the sea with his eagle claw of a thumbnail.” By 1818 he had drawn and painted the sea so many times—and was so gripped by the ships of the line—that he was able to download his brain onto paper in a vast belch of self-expression; and yet the result was harmonious and accurate, and just what his patron wanted.

  It must have been an unforgettable experience for that child to sit and watch Turner paint, and the artist loved to show off. Verbally incoherent he may have been, but with his brushes and sponges he was a master, an orator, who could turn the very act of painting into an exhibition in itself.

  Perhaps his most famous “Can you see what it is yet?” moment took place in February 1835. Early in the morning the fifty-nine-year-old Turner had arrived at the royal institution to find his canvas on the wall—virtually blank except for an indistinct outline of some kind of river scene. A crowd gathered round him, and he started to go through his act, squeezing great gobs from the tubes, chucking them on with his knife, smearing them around with his fingers.

  It wasn’t long before they had worked it out. On 16 October of the previous year the Clerk of Works of the Palace of Westminster had finally decided to get rid of the tally sticks. These were the medieval systems for recording the payment of taxes—notching two ends of a hazel stick and then splitting it, taxpayer and sheriff each keeping a piece, so that the deal could afterwards be verified by matching the unique irregularities of the split stick. Over the centuries the exchequer had accumulated zillions of these now pointless objects, and it was decided to burn them.

  A bonfire would upset the neighbours, so two workmen, Joshua Cross and Patrick Furlong, were ordered to use the underfloor coal furnaces that heated the House of Lords chamber. All day long they went about their work, and soon the furnaces were roaring with the pitiful tax returns of long-dead Englishmen. By 5 p.m. someone noticed that the floor of the Lords was getting warm, and by the evening the copper flues of the chimney had succumbed to the heat.

  The joists of the floor caught fire, the soft furnishings of the Lords went up like paper and that night London was treated to the most spectacular conflagration since 1666. Prime Minister Melbourne was watching, along with the rest of the cabinet, as St. Stephen’s Chapel—where Wilkes and Pitt had done their stuff—was consumed; Turner was there, too.

  He watched from Waterloo Bridge and then he walked round to the south side of Westminster Bridge, recording frame after frame in the photographic cell of his memory. Now the crowd stood behind him to watch the disaster unfold again: he was the nearest thing to the television news. He worked all day, as if oblivious to his audience, and when he had finished he didn’t even step back to squint and admire his work. He just shoved his paints back in their box, and keeping his gaze turned to the wall, he just sidled away. Daniel Maclise, an Irish portrait painter, was watching, and he recognised a master. “He knows it is done, and he is off,” he commented as Turner scuttled out.

  Turner painted several views of The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, and there is a striking feature of all of them. You could not say there is any particular sense of horror. We see no arms being waved in despair—as there are, for instance, in the image of Hannibal’s army being engulfed by a snowstorm as it crosses the Alps. It is a rather jolly bonfire, with a blue evening sky and fleecy clouds lit up as if by a spectacular sunset. Which is perhaps how Turner thought of it. He was always an advocate of reform, and if you want parliament reformed, burning it down is a good way to start. Turner’s patrons may have been rich Tories, but his instincts were reformist, libertarian. He backed the Greeks in their struggle for independence, with a fine painting of the massacre at Chios. And nowhere did his generally libertarian character show itself more clearly than in his domestic arrangements.

  He never married, and seems pretty regularly to have found himself in the arms of prostitutes and other ladies of negotiable affections, both at home and abroad. We have a bawdy poem that he wrote in his thirties to a girl named Molly, who was his “passport to bliss.”

  For a long time he had a relationship with Sarah Danby, the widow of a noted songwriter and chum of Turner’s. Mrs. Danby was ten years older than he, and scholars used to believe that her two daughters, Evelina and Georgiana, were by Turner. But it has recently been suggested that Sarah Danby’s daughters were in fact sired by Turner’s father, William. Ever since the death of his wife, the old boy had been an important part of the Turner ménage, helping to stretch canvases and
varnish paintings. Whether his duties included servicing Turner’s mistress we will probably never know, but it was certainly not a conventional household.

  In middle age J. M. W. Turner had pleasant flirtations—and possibly more—with the twentysomething daughters of friends, and by the time he was knocking on a bit he found Sophia Booth, who ran a boardinghouse in Margate. Here in this agreeable Kentish resort he enjoyed terrific views of the sea and wonderful light, and by means of that new marvel of technology, the steamboat or steamer, it was possible to make fast and regular trips from London.

  He would hang over the back of the boat to watch the roiling water, and when Sophia’s husband died, Turner pursued the Widow Danby strategy—and infiltrated himself into her bed. His arrangements now became surreal. When people arrived at his house near Harley Street, they found a Dickensian air of decay. One visitor thought “it presented the appearance of a place in which some great crime had been committed,” paint peeling from the door, “the windows grimed with successive coats of dust and rain.” The door was opened by a mute servant, her face covered with bandages. The picture gallery itself was in a state of alarming disrepair, with so many holes in the roof and windows that viewers were advised to use an umbrella in case of rain. But the funny thing is that Turner himself was not there. He had taken Sophia Booth to a small riverside cottage in Chelsea, and here he would parade up and down with this buxom illiterate widow twenty-five years his junior—she tall and imposing, he stumping along like a bowlegged old sea dog.

  Neighbours and tradesmen in Chelsea learned to call him “Mr. Booth,” or “Puggy Booth,” or—as he preferred—“Admiral Booth,” in deference to his nautical air. No one realised that this red-nosed old codger was England’s greatest artist, and such was Turner’s lust for privacy that he would always make sure, on leaving the Royal Academy or his club in Pall Mall, that no one heard him give his address to the taxi driver.

  This was his relationship with Sophia Booth—secret but more obviously satisfying than any previous affair. So it was that by 1839 we find him chugging back from Margate aboard the steamer, and looking idly to starboard as London came into view. If Turner’s genius was a canvas, it is now varnished and complete. Layer upon layer of experience and insight has been applied to one of the most receptive imaginations the world has known.

  He has copied the Old Masters, struggled with them, bested them, and forged his own revolutionary and lucrative style. He has absorbed the changes in the landscape of London, changes faster and more shocking than those seen by any previous generation. The population has trebled or even quadrupled in his lifetime, and people’s assumptions and way of life have been convulsed by a technological revolution of unprecedented speed and ferocity. He has seen all human life, from the madrigals in the drawing room of Petworth House to the obscene cavortings of sailors’ women in the pubs of Wapping. As much as any painter before him, and probably more, he has stared at the impact of sunlight on natural objects, and in London he has seen how that light has become filtered—and its colours made more astonishing—by the smoke and steam of the Industrial Revolution.

  He has produced thousands of paintings in oil and watercolour of thousands of objects and people, but none has done more for his reputation than the thing he now glimpses. It is the hulk of a once great ship, in the dock at Rotherhithe. She has no sails and no masts, but with his piercing eyes Turner can make out the writing on her side. She is the Temeraire. For a man of his generation, the name was like a bell.

  Called after a French 74-gunner that had been captured at the Battle of Lagos in 1759, HMS Temeraire had fought at Trafalgar, and with famous gallantry. She had been badly beaten up as she struggled to protect Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. She had helped to force the surrender of the French ship Redoubtable and to capture the Fougueux—the flagship of Napoleon’s fleet. He was looking, in other words, at one of the most heroic vessels in all the heroic history of English naval warfare.

  When he was thirty this boat had helped settle the course of history and cement the place of England as the greatest maritime and commercial power on Earth. From that engagement, and from the terrestrial victory at Waterloo, there followed the uninterrupted rise of England as the workshop of the world. Everything Turner could see around him from his vantage point on the Thames steamer—the docks, the factories, all the sprawl of human habitation and work—was in a sense the product of the audacity of that ship. And now look at her. Mutilated, about to be ripped up by the forces of capitalism, her brave timbers turned to lumber and scrap. It was like seeing an old broken-down Derby winner being carted off for dog food. Click went the shutter in Turner’s retina. Click click click as his steamer chugged round and off upriver; and over the next few weeks and months he meditated a fitting send-off for the Temeraire, a funeral pyre of red and gold.

  It was only a couple of years since Queen Victoria had come to the throne, in 1837, and her reign had begun with an insult. Constable was dead, and Turner had no rival in English art; and yet the Queen’s first honours list included Newton, the miniaturist, Westmacott, the sculptor, and Callcott, a disciple of Turner—but not Turner himself. “I think it possible he was hurt,” said Academician C. R. Leslie. That was an understatement; but the trouble was the Queen apparently thought Turner was barmy.

  From the 1820s on he had become more and more controversial. In his refusal to do what people thought an artist should do, that is, represent people and objects in a recognisable way, and in his egotistical obsession with how the light appeared to the eyes of J. M. W. Turner, he was starting to seem perverse. There were some who said he was a con man, toying with the credulity of the public. He was acquiring the same sort of reputation as Damien Hirst. “Soapsuds and whitewash” was one sniffy response to his unorthodox insistence on so much white paint. There was a theatrical skit in which a baker’s boy dropped some red and yellow jam tarts on the floor, put a frame round the mess, called it a Turner and sold it for £1,000. It would not be surprising, then, if Turner was in a mood to silence his critics, and avenge his reputation, with a painting that was both obviously representational and yet soaringly Turneresque.

  So he took that image of a knackered old prison hulk and added some inaccuracies. The ship he saw in the dock had no mast or sail. It is doubtful that he saw her being pulled by a tug, and in any case, if she was being tugged from Chatham to Rotherhithe, then the sun is in the wrong place. And her crew didn’t know her as the Fighting Temeraire; she was called the Saucy Téméraire. But you can see why “Saucy” didn’t quite hit the note Turner wanted.

  As soon as she was unveiled, his Téméraire was a colossal hit with the public. He liked the painting so much himself that he called it “My Darling.” Turner had triumphantly fulfilled the precept of Joshua Reynolds. He had created a poem.

  As you look at the Fighting Temeraire, you are struck not just by the effect and the composition: the sunset on the glassy surface of the water, with the ship and tug off to the left in an artful triangle of blue, and the sinister buoy downstage right—a use of space Turner learned as a teenager, when he painted sets at the Pantheon Theatre, Covent Garden. You sense instantly that there is an argument, a theme, a statement. There was no point in asking the artist what his painting meant, and in any event Turner was famously unintelligible in matters of interpretation.

  In the words of George Jones, RA, “Turner’s thoughts were deeper than ordinary men can penetrate, and much deeper than he could at any time describe.” There was once a lively discussion in Turner’s presence about the identity of a brightly coloured object lying in the water of his painting The Ducal Palace, Dogana and Part of San Giorgio, Venice (1841).

  Was it a buoy? his acolytes asked him. Was it a gorgeous turban? Was it a seaman’s cap? After one or two twitches of his lips, and as many half hmms, he replied: “Orange—orange . . .”

  You don’t need any crib from the artist and you don’t n
eed the slightest grounding in art history to see the symbolism of The Fighting Temeraire. It is about age and youth, the old hero reduced to dependency, blinded Oedipus led by a boy, or perhaps (since all artistic feeling is to some extent autobiographical) it was even about sixy-four-year-old Admiral Turner being tugged up the seafront at Margate by smart, bustling Sophia Booth.

  But it is most obviously about transition, about the passing of the great age of sail in favour of the age of steam. On the right-hand side the sun is going down, just above the buoy where Temeraire will be moored for the last time. On the left we see the silvery light from a waxing moon—a symbol, some say, of the new age of technology.

  The legacy of HMS Temeraire was a period of unrivalled peace and prosperity for Britain, in which hundreds of thousands of country dwellers came to work in the shops, factories and docks of what had become the greatest manufacturing centre on Earth. In 1824 the Bank of England ended its monopoly of joint-stock banking, and soon great palazzos of finance were being constructed in the City, with Barclays and the Midland among the first.

  Banks and insurance companies needed clerks. The hackney carriages of the rich were replaced by large horse-drawn omnibuses, groaning with the weight of everyone who could afford the fare. The concept of the commuter was born. And as soon as mass transit was feasible, the suburbs started to explode. The cartoonist George Cruikshank lived in Amwell Street, Islington, and in 1824 he drew a terrifying vision of urban sprawl. London Going out of Town—The March of Bricks and Mortar shows files of chimney pots forming up to savage the fields, while regiments of houses hurl volleys of bricks, gouging and churning the defenceless turf.