Standing in the Sun
A LIFE OF J. M. W. TURNER
Anthony Bailey
Tate Publishing
To the memory of Cowper Goldsmith Bailey and Phyllis Maud Bailey
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface
Chronology
Map
1 Mere Beginnings
2 Up and Coming
3 Rising Star
4 Fair Winds and Foul
5 Aladdin’s Cave
6 Golden Apples, Silver Thames
7 Boxing Harry
8 The Bite of the Print
9 Deep Puzzles
10 Crossing the Brook
11 Sir George Thinks Otherwise
12 Dear Fawkes
13 The Squire of Sandycombe
14 Southern Light
15 Figures on the Shore
16 Varnishing Days
17 Liberty Hall
18 Home and Away
19 The Rigours of Winter
20 Chelsea Harbour
21 World’s End
22 Turner’s Gift
Appendix
List of Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
List of Illustrations
All photographs of the works illustrated are copyright of the owners, unless otherwise stated.
George Dance Jr (1741–1825), Portrait of J. M. W. Turner, dated 4 August 1792, pencil and watercolour on paper, oval 21.6 × 16 cm. Private collection. Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s Picture Library, London
J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Self-Portrait, c. 1799, oil on canvas, 74.3 × 58.4 cm. Tate
Charles Turner (1773–1857), ‘A Sweet Temper’: Portrait of J. M. W. Turner, c. 1795, graphite on paper, 18.4 × 11.6 cm. The Trustees of the British Museum
J. M. W. Turner, Study of the Head of a Woman wearing a Ruched Cap, Looking Down (probably Mary Turner, Turner’s mother), from ‘Marford Mill’ sketchbook, c.1794, graphite on paper, 15.2 × 9.9 cm. Tate
John Linnell (1792–1882), Portrait Study of J. M. W. Turner’s Father, with a Sketch of Turner’s Eyes, Made during a Lecture, 1812, graphite on paper, 18.7 × 22.5 cm. Tate
John Wykeham Archer (1808–1864), 26 Maiden Lane (Birthplace of J. M. W. Turner) and Entrance to Hand Court, 1852, watercolour on paper 35.5 × 22.2 cm. The Trustees of the British Museum 47 Queen Anne Street. An engraved illustration from the Art-Journal, c. 1852
‘Road Leading to the Fort’, from the book Picture of Margate and its Vicinity, by W.C. Oulton, Esq., illustrated with a map and twenty views engraved by J. J. Shury, from Drawings by Captain G. Varlo, R.M., London, 1820. Margate Local History Museum, Margate. Photo: courtesy Anthony Lee
After William Havell (1782–1857), Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham, Villa of J. M. W. Turner, engraved by W.B. Cooke, published 1814, engraving on paper. Tate
Francis Hawkesworth Fawkes (1797–1871), Caricature of J. M. W. Turner, c. 1818, ink and graphite on paper, 31.8 × 26. Indianapolis Museum of Art
S. W. Parrott (1830–after 1891), Turner on Varnishing Day, c. 1840, oil on canvas 25.1 × 22.9 cm. The Collection of the Guild of St George, Sheffield. (This picture is generally dated to 1846 but Ian Warrell has noted that it appears to record Turner at work on the first of his square canvases, Bacchus and Ariadne, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840). Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library
John Wykeham Archer, Turner’s House at Chelsea, 1852, watercolour on paper, 37.5 × 27.3 cm. The Trustees of the British Museum
After Count Alfred D’Orsay (1801–1852), Portrait of J. M. W. Turner (‘The Fallacy of Hope’), engraved by J. Hogarth, published 1851, lithograph on paper, 32.8 × 22.5 cm. Tate
Turner’s death mask (attributed to Thomas Woolner), 1851, plaster cast, 25.4 cm high. National Portrait Gallery, London
Preface
Turner’s friend and colleague C. R. Leslie remembered him thus:
Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. There was, in fact, nothing elegant in his appearance. He might be taken for the captain of a river steamboat at a first glance; but a second would find far more in his face than belongs to any ordinary mind. There was that peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation.1
Like many keen observers, Turner was not keen on being observed. Friends found it hard to penetrate his domestic existence. Women were sometimes on hand but not introduced. He assumed names that were not his own. Like an animal, he adopted a defensive posture part of the time. He was absorbed by painting, and by making drawing after drawing as raw material for painting; but he also made frequent appearances at the Royal Academy, often to serve dutifully, sometimes – it seemed – to perform flamboyantly. After periods secure in his studio, he emerged to spend days in the country homes of a few good patrons or to go on an afternoon’s excursion with his fellow painters. He was churlish one moment, helpful the next. Some people found him tight-fisted, others extremely (if taciturnly) generous. He was both lonely and gregarious, private and vainglorious. He was a confused speaker, a muddled writer, and an artist – sometimes touchingly precise, sometimes blazingly free – who could with a grunt and a gesture suggest to a colleague what was wrong with his work and how to put it right. His contradictions have puzzled many, but they endear him to me. He was and is a challenge.
Biographers have bounced off Turner. Books about him abound, but the most successful tend to be specialist studies like Cecilia Powell’s Turner in the South and David Hill’s Turner on the Thames. Nevertheless a comprehensive up-to-date biography of Turner has seemed to me worth tackling. I have felt grateful for the labours of Thornbury, Finberg and Lindsay, his main biographers to date, yet I remain greatly dissatisfied by their books. In the last few decades there has been a fine growth of Turner scholarship, visible in the periodicals Turner Studies and Turner Society News, by special exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and in works by, among others, Andrew Wilton, Eric Shanes, Selby Whittingham and John Gage. Gage’s collection of Turner’s correspondence is a tool earlier biographers had to do without.
One feeling prompted by Walter Thornbury’s biography is that he presents much of the material in the wrong place; another is that some of the material has been pirated, and some is untrue. Thornbury’s book was first published in two volumes in 1862 and reissued in a revised second edition in one volume in 1877. (I have relied mostly on the 1877 version, though where necessary I have given references to the first.) Thornbury, a London journalist, recognized Turner as a good story. He had access to many people who had known Turner well, he had Ruskin’s encouragement, and he produced a hodgepodge of a book full of excellent anecdotes and improbable suggestions. It was, as Robert Leslie (son of C. R. Leslie) pointed out, ‘a sort of hashed-up life of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, with badly done bits of Turner floating about in it’.2 A major problem in using Thornbury has been in deciding what is accurate and what is not. I have been considerably helped by access to a copy of the first edition, at the time the property of Professor Francis Haskell, which earlier belonged to Turner’s friend (and executor) George Jones. (This has now been given by Professor Haskell to the Tate Gallery.) Jones collected responses to Thornbury by other friends and colleagues, for example John Pye, Hugh Munro and David Roberts, and inserted some of their remarks at the appropriate places in the work; he also made his own marginal notes. So these denials and dissents and expressions of outrage have been valuable. Where they were missing, I have generally given Thornbury the benefit of the doubt, though remaining aware of his habit of taking a small fact and th
en elaborating it, the result being three-quarters invention.
The rewards (and the problems) of A. J. Finberg’s heroic chronicle biography of 1939 (revised second edition 1961) are different. For Turner’s painting career, his life as an Academician and the reactions of his contemporaries to his work, Finberg’s book is still first rate, though some of the details can now be quibbled with. However, the laborious chronological method tends to leave the reader groping for the major themes – something Thornbury had intended to express in his own book, as shown by his chapter titles, but had failed to deliver. Moreover, Finberg shied away from Turner as a human being with human appetites, and got some crucial biographical facts wrong. (For an academic work, his book is also very sparse with references and notes.) But, as Lawrence Gowing noted, there were benefits in the disadvantages: ‘Finberg’s inclination was philosophical. For enjoyment he would retire to bed with a volume of Hegel, and he appreciated an intellectual grandeur in Turner that is commonly overlooked.’3
Gratitude and exasperation remain the keynotes of one’s response to the most recent critical biography, now thirty years old, by Jack Lindsay. Lindsay has much of interest to say about Turner’s poetry and Turner’s readings in such poets as James Thomson and Mark Akenside. His reflections on Turner’s inner life are sometimes full of insight and sometimes simplistic, expressed in modish psychoanalytic language. Of other biographies: Bernard Falk’s 1938 Turner the Painter: His Hidden Life combines a tabloid style, a prurient approach and much speculation with some nuggets of private history derived from Turner family documents. Cosmo Monkhouse’s deliberately modest brief life of 1979 distils various sources and both uses and corrects Thornbury; it remains valuable. The great Turner biographer manqué was, of course, John Ruskin. Instead the world got the five volumes of Modern Painters, in which Turner was the inspiration for a massive reverie on art, a splendid if somewhat indigestible soup with well-done bits of Turner floating in it.
I have attempted to look at almost all of Turner’s sketchbooks and many of his watercolours and paintings. I have tried to see at first hand the primary documents to do with his life and those close to him: records of birth, marriage, property ownership and death, in rate books and parish registers and family papers. I have found a few facts that seem hitherto to have gone unnoticed – for example, regarding the date of the death of Turner’s little sister – and have, I think, put together some known, previously disparate facts to shed new light here and there. At one point, when looking into the location of Cowley Hall, the home of a Turner host (and Thornbury informant) Thomas Rose, I became aware that well ahead of me in Turner detective work was Selby Whittingham, and I have been consequently grateful for his researches into the nooks and crannies of the Turner, Marshall and Danby families, and into Turner’s various wills and testaments. My aim has been to produce a work of synthesis, one which pulls together material old and new, which juxtaposes facts in a way that creates a better-rounded portrait of the man. It is a project of collaboration, as it were, with the work of my many predecessors and of contemporary scholars, not trying to repeat everything they have said but winnowing and rearranging the many details to make a truthful and evocative picture. I hope the Turner who emerges is a little more living, at one with the elements but with his feet on the ground.
This is the biography of an artist rather than a work of art history. In writing about Turner’s pictures, I have tried to bear in mind what Turner said in response to Ruskin’s writings: ‘He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them I never intended.’4 And there are other voices one should listen to. Among them are those of Claude Debussy, who called Turner ‘the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art’,5 and Walter Sickert, who hailed Turner’s ‘inexhaustible toughness’.6
I am indebted for much advice, help and encouragement. Among the many people I am grateful to are Fred Bachrach, Margot Bailey, David Bromwich, David Blaney Brown, Bernard Carter, Ann Chumbley, William Clarke, Lord Egremont, Gillian Forrester, Carolyn Hammond, Francis Haskell, Luke Herrmann, Nicholas Horton-Fawkes, Ralph Hyde, Samuel Hynes, Peter James, Evelyn Joll, Anne Lyles, Alison McCann, Pieter van der Merwe, Cecilia Powell, Judith Severne, Rosalind Turner, Ian Warrell, Selby Whittingham, Edward Yardley and Robert Yardley.
I have been assisted by the staffs of the archives and local history libraries at Canterbury, Chiswick, Margate, Chichester (West Sussex), Camden and Westminster (Victoria and Marylebone branches), the staffs of the London Library, Cambridge University Library, Guildhall and St Paul’s Cathedral Libraries and the Study Room of the Turner Collection at the Clore Gallery. And I thank the Masters and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for their hospitality.
Illustrations for a book about an artist – especially one as prolific as Turner – pose a dilemma if the book is to be affordable. There are many books in print – for instance, Andrew Wilton’s Turner in his Time – that provide fine coverage of Turner’s work. I have tried to furnish here pictures that have a biographical relevance.
Author’s Note for the 2013 edition
I am delighted that Tate Publishing is bringing out this new edition of Standing in the Sun, especially as Tate Britain is the home of the Turner Bequest, and houses the world’s largest collection of Turner’s work. The text has been freshly typeset but is otherwise unchanged from the 1997 edition except for a very few minor corrections. As before, illustrations have been selected for their biographical interest. However, for readers wishing to look at the artworks referred to, images of all the Turner paintings, watercolours and sketches in the Tate collection, along with many others in museums around the world, can be found on the ‘Turner’ pages of the Tate website (see www.tate.org.uk).
Notes
1 AR, i, p.205.
2 Ruskin, Praeterita, p.544.
3 Gowing, introduction to Finberg, Turner’s Sketches and Drawings, p.xxi.
4 Th. 1877, p.286.
5 Letter to Jacques Durand, March 1908, Debussy, Letters.
6 Sickert, A Free House!, p.200.
Chronology
1775 Baptised 14 May, St Paul’s, Covent Garden. Parents living at 21 Maiden Lane
1783 Death of his sister Mary Ann
1785 To schools in Brentford and Margate
1787 First signed and dated drawings
1789 Admitted to RA Schools
1790 First watercolour exhibited at RA
1791 Travels in West Country
1792 Travels in West Country and Wales
1794 Working at Dr Monro’s
1796 First oil exhibited at RA
1797 Tour of North of England
1798–9 Sarah Danby becomes his mistress
1799 Elected ARA. Moves from Maiden Lane to 64 Harley St
1800 His mother admitted to Bedlam
1801 19 Sept. Baptism of his daughter Evelina
1802 Elected RA. Visit to France and Switzerland
1804 Death of his mother. Opens his own gallery
1805–6 On the Thames at Isleworth
1806–11 On the Thames at Hammersmith
1807 Publication of Liber Studiorum part 1. Elected Professor of Perspective, RA
1808–24 Many visits to Walter Fawkes and family at Farnley Hall, near Leeds, Yorkshire
1811 First professorial lectures. Birth of his daughter Georgiana
1877 & 1813 Tours of the West Country
1813 Twickenham House finished
1815–16 Trips to North of England
1817 Trip to Belgium, Rhineland and Holland. Evelina married
1819 First visit to Italy. Fawkes’s collection exhibited in London
1820–21 At work on his new house and gallery in Queen Anne St
1821 Trip to France
1824 First journey to the Meuse and Mosel. Tours of eastern and southeastern England
1825 Trip to Holland. Death of Walter Fawkes
1825–37 Many visits to Petworth House, Suss
ex
1828 Last perspective lectures at RA
1828–29 Second visit to Italy
1829 Death of his father
1829 & 1832 Tours for ‘Rivers of France’ project
1830 Tour of English Midlands
1831 Trip to Scotland
1833 European journey, to and from Venice
1834 Sees Houses of Parliament on fire
1830s Frequently in Margate with Mrs Booth
1837 Death of Lord Egremont. Turner resigns as Professor of Perspective
1839 The Fighting Temeraire. Second Meuse and Mosel tour
1840 Meets John Ruskin. Trip to Venice
1841–44 Annual trips to Switzerland
1843 Death of Georgiana
1845 Last trip abroad, to northern France. Acting President of RA
1845–50 Continues to visit Kent coast
1846 Moves to Chelsea; ‘Mr Booth’
1850 Last exhibits at RA
1951 19 December: death in Chelsea
1: Mere Beginnings
From high above, the river winding through the city looked like a shining snake sliding under three bridges. The spring sun struck the tiles and slates of a hundred thousand damp rooftops and shimmered on the lead of spires, steeples, domes and belfries. Pigeons and seagulls circled in the hazy air, and a few spiralled down towards a large rectangular space among the buildings crowded on the north side of the river – a paved piazza where market stalls and barrows stood empty. Because it was Sunday, the only clamour came from the bells pealing in the broad-roofed church that stood at the west side of the Piazza: St Paul’s, Covent Garden, London. On the path leading through the churchyard, a man and a woman carrying a well-swaddled baby walked towards the main door.
Sometimes, talking in later days about his origins, Turner bemused people by claiming that he was born in the country rather than the city. During a tour of the west of England in the 1810s, he went sailing on the St German’s river with the journalist Cyrus Redding, and the names of various West Country artists were bandied about. Turner told Redding: ‘You may add my name to the list. I am a Devonshire man.’ And when Redding asked from what part of that county, Turner replied, ‘From Barnstaple.’1 Others heard him say that he hailed from Kent; one man to whom he made this claim believed that Turner did so simply out of fondness for the Medway valley. Some years on, his affection for Kent’s Thanet coast, and particularly for Deal and Margate, was strongly expressed. Then, too, in later life he enjoyed mystifying the curious about his age. Andrew Wilson, a Scots painter, got the impression from Turner that, like Wilson himself, he was born in 1869, the year when Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington had been born. Causing confusion seemed to amuse Turner. It is perhaps not surprising that when he died in December 1851 his executors let him be buried in a coffin inscribed ‘Aged 79’, though he was most probably seventy-six. His death certificate gave his age as eighty-one, which would put his birth in 1770.
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