J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  Turner and Girtin struck people as dissimilar characters, Turner ‘reticent of his knowledge, and close as to his methods of work; Girtin … of an open, careless, and sociable disposition’.51 However, Girtin complained to Cornelius Varley of Monro’s habit of making him do outlines, while Turner got to do the tinting, which did not give Girtin the same chance of learning to paint. But Girtin did paint his own watercolours as well as collaborate with Turner on joint productions. William Henry Pyne, a watercolourist, engraver and critic, later noted:

  The water colour drawings of Turner and Girtin, which Dr Munro [sic] possessed, were very remarkable for a strong resemblance to each other; and it is only after a severe search and scrutiny of both, that it becomes perceptible how to mark the difference. Turner’s are distinguished by an elaborate and careful detail of every object, whether of buildings, figures, trees, or distant scenery; yet combining altogether exquisite taste, breadth, harmony, and richness. Some of Girtin’s are almost as careful, but he seems to have soon launched out into that free and bold style which carries with it an imposing effect, by its being executed with apparent ease. Turner never seems to have aimed at this seductive style of execution; all his drawings display the utmost feeling for finish and detail, but at the same time preserving the breadth and harmony of nature.52

  Another, slightly younger artist, William Havell, considered the Girtin–Turner phenomenon and decided that both were

  great experimentalists in rendering paper and water-colours subservient to the expression of light, which they found to be chiefly dependent on gradation … In such matters, there was no trick they were not up to. Turner used to cut out figures in paper and paste them on his drawing. If his experiments spoiled one part of a drawing, he would paste the good part upon another piece of paper, rub down the edges of it, and work on the new surface till he brought the whole into harmony. He and Girtin would also seek to create gradation by pumping water upon their drawings.53

  Girtin is thought to have discovered how to ‘wipe out lights’ in a watercolour when he accidentally spilled water on a drawing and then sopped it up with a handkerchief. The places where the water had lain were left white, the colours removed. According to Pyne, Turner worked out how to do the same thing by using pieces of bread as mops.

  Various people then and since have wondered what so talented a young artist as Turner got out of his three years or so of Friday evenings at Dr Monro’s art-factory. One scholarly biographer believed it ‘taught him little, for it only exercised the skill he already possessed’, though he also admitted that ‘the regular performance of these academical exercises was probably beneficial at first’, and noted a ‘marked access of confidence noticeable in his work in the latter half of 1795’, when he was twenty, that may have been due to his ‘pictorial gymnastics’ at Monro’s.54 At the time William Turner senior thought his son could have been doing more profitable work; he ‘often grumbled’ about ‘Him making drawings for Dr Monro for half a crown’.55 A drawing, perhaps done by the doctor–patron, shows the young Turner earning his half-crown, seated at a desk, long hair tied in a sort of queue or pony-tail, cravat wrapped around his rather truncated neck, his gaze concentrated down his long nose, and pen or watercolour brush poised over the paper. Two candles set on a shelf above the desk provided light as Turner worked, copying perhaps a drawing by one of the many ‘professional Picturesque tourists’ of the time.56 Dr Monro eventually owned several hundred ‘Turners’, most based on the works of other artists, some done in collaboration with Girtin. Many were of places in Switzerland, France and Italy, where neither he nor Girtin had yet gone.

  Yet Turner was not forced to go to Dr Monro’s, and he must have felt he needed the apparently humdrum experience. There was something to be said for the fact that he was absorbing – by copying – works of art, rather than working from nature, in company with fellow students, and doing so for pay. The painter Walter Sickert thought that

  The habit thus early forced upon him, of regarding himself as an actual producer, i.e. as a maker of articles with a definite market value, must have been beneficial to him. The existence of a class of real patrons, whose tastes had to be consulted, and whose pockets contained actually interchangeable coin of the realm, must have placed some insistence upon the social aspect of art, and have helped the boy from making the mistake which so many subsequent artists have made, of considering their work merely as a means of super-individual or universal communication.57

  In later life, when colleagues expressed amazement that he had spent all that time at Dr Monro’s for mere pocket money, Turner said, ‘Well, and what could be better practice?’58

  But it was not just indoor copying work at the Adelphi. ‘Dr Monro also encouraged the young artists to sketch from nature, and to bring their sketches and to work them into pictures at these evening meetings.’59 Turner and Girtin sketched at the nearby ruins of the old Savoy Palace and on the Thames, from boats. The river banks were still mostly ragged, with here and there the bones showing through of old hulks and ancient wharves. Watermen, bargemen and lightermen steered their craft under sail or sweep, up and downstream, past the anchored artists. The doctor was keen on landscape – hence the many picturesque pictures he bought, executed by his friends Hearne, Dayes and de Loutherbourg. John Linnell, a younger artist later taken up by Dr Monro, said that the doctor himself led Turner and Girtin on drawing trips in the country, probably while they were staying at his cottage at Hadley, in Surrey.

  At some point in the mid- to late-1790s Turner found the parental home uncongenial enough to cause him to move out. But he did not go very far. At first it was only to separate studio space and living quarters, which he could now afford, along Hand Court.60 His mother’s mental disorder may have been a crucial factor. Moreover, the once welcome habit of barber-shop customers extending their largess to the young artist must have become irksome. Well-intentioned people would keep barging in, like the Reverend J. Douglas, a chaplain to the Prince of Wales, who lived in Rochester but stayed with a bookseller in the Strand when he came up to town on court occasions. Douglas would have his hair dressed at William Turner’s, and once found young Turner drawing in the back sitting room behind the shop. He looked at Turner’s work and invited him down to Rochester to paint – which Turner did. (A resulting watercolour of Rochester Castle, with fishermen drawing boats ashore in a gale, is now untraced.)

  On another occasion, in the spring of 1798, also in Kent, he stayed with another clergyman and barber-shop customer. This was the Reverend Robert Nixon, who had introduced him to J. F. Rigaud and hence to the Royal Academy. His fellow Schools pupil Stephen Rigaud was already at the Nixons’ in Foots Cray when Turner arrived unexpectedly and was heartily welcomed at the little parsonage – though he declined to go to church. Two days later they set off on a sketching party. Rigaud later recalled:

  It was a lovely day, and the scenery most delightful. After having taken many a sketch, and walked many a mile, we were glad at length to seek for a little rest and refreshment at an inn. Some chops and steaks were soon set before us, which we ate with the keen relish of appetite, and our worthy friend the Clergyman, who presided at our table, proposed we should call for some wine, to which I made no objection, but Turner, though he could take his glass very cheerfully at his friend’s house, now hung his head, saying – ‘No, I can’t stand that.’ Mr Nixon was too polite to press the matter further, as it was a pic-nic concern; so, giving me a very significant look, we did without the wine. I mention this anecdote to show how early and to what extent the love of money as a ruling passion, already displayed itself in him, and tarnished the character of this incipient genius; for I have no hesitation in saying that at that time he was the richest man of the three …61

  Turner’s refusal to share a bottle with his pious companions may not have been plain churlishness. He may have been impelled by the thrift he had got used to on his own longer sketching tours; he may also have not wanted to drink while working �
�� a constraint which, as the years went by, did not seem to matter so much. His already entrenched custom of concentrating on his art, even at the expense of friendliness, was once again demonstrated. And although his ability, whether inherited or nurtured, to put by money seems strongly attested here, one should remark, as is often the case with Turner, an opposing tendency: in a sketchbook of around 1795 is to be found a note, ‘Lent Mr Nixon 2.12.6.’62

  Apart from all his hackwork for architects, magazine publishers, country-estate owners and Dr Monro, Turner was now earning by giving instruction. Although a student, he was a teacher. In fact, one of his pupils in landscape painting was Reverend Nixon, whom young Rigaud taught figure-drawing. In 1798 Nixon sent Turner an ink-and-wash sketch of some buildings, seen through an arch, and Turner wrote back apologizing for not having been able to walk out to Lewisham to see him – eight miles – because he had fallen and hurt his knee. He advised Nixon to be sparing with his colours till Turner was able to see him again. Below the sketch he added helpful instructions for his amateur pupil: ‘Get all the Shadows in Ink – except the Sky, Blue and Ink. The Arch was’ht with Bistre after the Shadow of Ink.’63 Although Nixon lived in Foots Cray, he perhaps met Turner in Lewisham, half-way between them, as Turner had another Lewisham pupil. In the mid-1790s, from about the age of nineteen to twenty-three, Turner had numerous pupils who paid him between five and ten shillings a lesson,64 quite a large sum at a time when printing compositors, for instance, earned fourpence an hour. The names of some of his pupils were jotted in his sketchbooks, such as the ‘Marford Mill’ sketchbook of 1794, where on the back of one drawing one finds ‘Major Frazer. April 6. 1 hour & Half. 8 lessons.’65 In the ‘Smaller South Wales’ sketchbook of 1795 he has written ‘Teaching’ alongside a squad of names: Mr Murwith; Mr Jones of Lewisham; Mr Davis ditto; Miss Palin; Miss Hawkins; and Mr Goold.66 Another name is that of William Blake, though this is not the great poet and illustrator but a gifted amateur who lived in Portland Place, London, and commissioned a watercolour of Norham Castle, in Northumberland, from Turner in 1797.

  Thornbury in 1860 wrote of ‘old people still living who remember Turner in 1795 or 1796 … when he taught drawing … One of them describes him as “eccentric, but kind and amusing”.’67 This informant was possibly Lady Julia Gordon née Bennet, the widow of Sir John Willoughby Gordon, former Army Quartermaster General. As a young woman – a few months younger than her teacher – Julia Bennet took watercolour lessons from Turner. Two watercolours showed their joint handiwork. One, of Cowes Castle, is inscribed ‘First with Mr Turner, 1797’. Another, larger, is of Llangollen Bridge, and has written on the back ‘Julia Bennet – with Mr Turner. May 1797’. The background looks like Turner’s work, the foreground is very amateurish. Like Catherine in Northanger Abbey, Julia Bennet may have ‘confessed and lamented her want of knowledge’ as she learnt of foregrounds, distances, perspectives, lights, and shades, and ‘soon began to see beauty in everything admired’ by her teacher.

  Yet he did not want to let such work dominate his life. He apparently wasn’t very talkative as a teacher; he told Farington on one occasion that his practice ‘was to make a drawing in the presence of his pupil and leave it for him [or her] to imitate’.68 Although he continued to teach throughout the next year, in November 1798 Farington reported that Turner was ‘determined not to give any more lessons in drawing’. ‘Mr Turner’ evidently didn’t need the status of teacher or the extra income. Perhaps, too, he was making such artistic advances of his own that dealing in fairly basic terms with beginners and hobbyists exasperated him. However, in the years to come he went on helping RA students as a Visitor in the Schools, and he often gave tips to colleagues on sketching trips or when preparing canvases for exhibition. Even so, he always seems to have found it easier to show rather than tell someone what to do: articulating the problem and the solution was more difficult.

  One pencil drawing he did in 1798 shows the interior of Covent Garden Theatre. The view, with figures, is from the gallery, presumably while Turner attended a performance there. But his interest in theatre was not only that of a spectator and had been evident for some years. At the age of sixteen he had been recruited as an assistant to the Academician William Hodges, who was the designer and scene painter at the Pantheon, the domed assembly rooms-cum-theatre-cum-opera house in Oxford Street. Turner is missing from the RA Schools attendance registers from 22 April to 18 June 1791, and the name of William Dixon, one of his classmates, is listed as a Pantheon assistant. The signature ‘Wm. Turner’, similar to that in the RA registers, appears on Pantheon receipts of that time. At the Pantheon Turner would have helped paint the backcloths with clouds, city walls, village houses and stormy seas. He must have been particularly dismayed on the freezing cold morning of 14 January 1792 to hear that the Pantheon, overnight, had been gutted by fire. His reportorial instinct was strong – and quickly aroused by catastrophe – and he dashed up to Oxford Street to sketch the scene. The upsetting rumour was that the fire had started in the scene room, where he had worked: musical scores, instruments, costumes and scenery had been destroyed.

  Despite the bitter cold, Turner drew the façade of the wrecked building and the adjacent shops, whose names he noted. Back home he squared the sketch69 to make it easier to transfer to a larger size as a watercolour, The Pantheon, the morning after the fire, which he showed at the RA exhibition in the late spring.70 The scene is done in his best Malton-derived manner, though with icicles from the frozen fire-extinguishing water hanging from the cornices, and the devastated interior visible through the windows with their broken sashes. Several firemen with their hand-pump are still emptying buckets in the foreground, while small bunches of spectators gawk and gossip. Their conversation is indicated by a few rather stilted gestures. But the morning light slants in cleverly from the upper-right back (of the stage, as it were), which allows the artist to render the front-facing undamaged windows of several neighbouring buildings in solid black, without highlights or reflections, in a manner some of his architect employers would approve.

  Turner’s experience in the theatre made a lasting impression on him. It was to be demonstrated in paintings in the following decades in which he indulged his fondness for bright lights and flaring colours. Even his first exhibited oil (RA 1796), Fishermen at Sea, has a moonlit mood of melodrama about it, although the motion of the fishing boats rolling in a heavy swell off the Needles, at the western end of the Isle of Wight, is brilliantly observed. The influence of the seventeenth-century Dutch painters is to be detected in the sea, and that of the Strasbourg-born, London-resident, eighteenth-century scene painter and RA Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (whom Turner may have met at Dr Monro’s) in the rather stagy moonlit clouds. One wonders if as a boy Turner went to not only the nearby Spectacle Mecanique but to de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon in Spring Gardens. The name means more or less ‘same-as-nature image’, and the Eidophusikon gave the viewer the impression that he was watching a sort of moving picture, displayed within a stage about six feet wide and eight deep, and depicting calm and storm, on land or sea, with accompanying sound and light effects produced with tambourines and sheets of copper, Argand lamps and stained glass. Thornbury repeats a tale that ‘Mrs Loutherbourg grew very jealous of Turner’s frequent visits to her husband [in Hammersmith], and … at last, suspecting the young painter was obtaining all her husband’s secrets from him, she shut the door in his face and roughly refused him admittance.’71 Moonlight and water also figure prominently in the oil Turner showed at the RA in 1797, as the title indicates: Moonlight – a study at Millbank.

  Although his early oils suggest that Turner knew he had to prove his worth as a painter in that medium to be accepted as a potential member of the Royal Academy, through most of this period of apprenticeship his reputation was that of a rising and innovative watercolour artist. The rather flatly washed pencil outlines he did to begin with gave way to much bolder work. The boundaries of the craft were technically and eve
n physically pushed back. He started to use coloured paper or paper stained with dark washes and to employ gouache or bodycolour, an opaque watercolour paint thickened with gum or clay. He worked out ways of preserving areas of white paper as white through his technique of blotting and ‘stopping out’, and he built up complicated structures with layers of wash, opposing warm and cool colours, defining lights and shadows with dampenings, abrasions and scrapings. He learnt idiosyncratic short-cuts for fluently conveying the bits which some artists make obviously tedious work, like leaves of trees and waves at sea. The ‘tinted drawings’72 which were – though precocious – a bit finicky in the totality of the record they made (e.g. The Cathedral Church at Lincoln, RA 1795) were supplanted by work that was altogether more free and truly assured. The ‘mappy’73 topographical illustrations are replaced by an energetic autobiographical art.

  The boy was now a man. At the age of twenty-one, in the summer of 1796, he went to Brighton, perhaps to recuperate from sickness, from overwork or from family turmoil in Maiden Lane. He also went to Margate again. In both places he sketched and painted, but only thirty in the hundred pages or so of his small leather-bound Brighton sketchbook74 were used, and some of those are tentative sketches that to Finberg ‘look like the work of an invalid’.75 Others, however, in simple pencil and colour, have a thrilling sense of discovery about them: the ribs and planking of a beach-boat, seen from inside; a litter of pigs; suckling their mother; and a labouring couple, seen from behind, walking rather wearily with various burdens, a small girl in a striped dress grasping her parents’ hands. As with the pigs, there is a fond or maybe rueful observation of family solidarity. Moreover, a slightly later sketchbook,76 which he used from the autumn of 1796 into 1797, and which is known as the ‘Wilson’ sketchbook after the copies of some Richard Wilson pictures in it, is full of marvellously confident coloured drawings that make bold use of the book’s small red-brown pages; despite its tiny format, it reveals – as do some of the Brighton sketches – a more emotional, less constrained artist than we have seen before.