J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  Turner and those who backed him both deserved congratulation: Turner for his success in concealing what might have been seen as selfish characteristics; his supporters in recognizing the overwhelming strength of his art (which outweighed any doubts about his personal charm and acceptability as a member of their club). Turner at this stage could readily manifest different attributes on different occasions, an ability that was not necessarily consciously directed but was simply a part of his natural shrewdness and drive. To Angerstein he no doubt appeared a man wonderfully moved by great painting. To Farington he seemed not prickly and surly but ‘modest and sensible’.18 Turner’s protective colouring was also to be seen in his work, which – despite Hoppner’s strictures against its brownness – continued sombre in tone, as if reflecting the dark and desperate times: naval mutinies; war with France; rebellion in Ireland; more and more talk of a French invasion. His pictures also reflected the aesthetic prognostications of Edmund Burke, the author, orator and member of Parliament, and of Sawrey Gilpin, the animal painter who had supported Turner in his first attempt to become an Associate in 1798 and had written an influential essay on landscape colouring.

  The northward thrust of Turner’s sketching tours at this time fitted this tendency. His works from the fells of the Lake District, from the River Tweed in Northumberland, and from the mountains of north Wales met contemporary demands for art that prompted mysterious evocations and profound thrills, and for which the term ‘Sublime’ made a convenient label. Observing ‘fearful sights’ and striking a note of ‘gloomy grandeur’,19 Turner even while fitting the fashion (if not slavishly following the theory) began to capture landscapes that embodied deeper human aspirations.20 In writing, Wordsworth and Coleridge were treading the same mountainous paths in search of the powers immanent in high places. The rather tight, ceremonious eighteenth-century world of witty cliques and classical learning was giving way to a more expansive, ‘romantic’ time. Meanwhile across the Channel the divine right of kings was being supplanted, to the accompaniment of bloodshed and terror, by the natural rights of the people.

  During the 1790s, the members of the London Corresponding Society held their meetings at the Bell Tavern, in Exeter Street, a hundred yards or so from Hand Court. Over a supper of bread, cheese and porter they discussed the hardness of the times, the dearness of all the necessities of life, and the business before them: Parliamentary Reform. The Society helped organize provincial groups that shared its goal, worked to spread the revolutionary ideas of Tom Paine, and corresponded with members of the French National Assembly and Jacobin Clubs. They terrified the British government, which in the course of the decade became so fearful of revolution that it suspended Habeas Corpus and prohibited ‘seditious’ meetings. In 1799 it banned the Society and other radical groups. By the Combination Act of that year, the formation of trades unions was prohibited and summary trials were allowed. The journalist William Cobbett, returning from eight years in the young United States to what he thought was Merry England, was soon enlightened. In 1800 he set up the offices of his newspaper the Porcupine in Southampton Street and began to cast his fierce eye on government corruption, on place-mongering and other features of what he called the deadweight system.

  Turner’s politics cannot be inferred from the proximity of this radical activity. It is not known if he read the short-lived Porcupine or its long-lived successor, Cobbett’s Political Register. But there are grounds for suspecting that the barber’s son – Mr Coleman’s pupil – hid a quirky dissidence under the deference and sensibleness that Farington was shown. Farington at this time thought that a number of Royal Academicians and Associates had radical sympathies. William Beckford was one of the earliest of a line of Turner’s patrons who had forward-looking political inclinations. Now, at the end of the century, Turner was interested in the story of the extermination of the Welsh bards by King Edward i: the artist-performers who were the guardians of the language and hence the spirit of a small nation, wiped out by an absolute monarch. Thomas Gray had given this theme an airing in his poem ‘The Bard’, and other painters had also taken it up as a subject. Turner didn’t finish either of the watercolours he started on this theme, but his Caernarvon Castle watercolour of 1799–1800, shown at the RA in the latter year, has in the foreground a bard prominently chanting under a Claudean tree. The lines of verse the painter attached to this picture referred to Edward I as ‘the tyrant’. (The verse is doggerel enough to be by Turner, as we shall see; and if it is his, it is among the first of his poetic effusions to be put before the public.)

  In the same year, he exhibited the darkly brooding Dolbadern Castle, also a north Wales subject, and the verse – from the cloudy syntax and random punctuation presumably also by him – struck the note of the tremulous sublime once again, while making a less oblique reference to political freedom:

  How awful is the silence of the waste,

  Where nature lifts her mountains to the sky,

  Majestic solitude, behold the tower

  Where hopeless OWEN, long imprison’d, pin’d

  And wrung his hands for liberty, in vain.

  The Welsh prince Owain ap Gruffydd was held captive in Dolbadern Castle from 1255 to 1277, but the man who kept him there was his brother Llywelyn – to the Welsh ‘the Last Prince’, but to Owain no doubt a tyrant, too. And while it alludes sadly, even romantically, to the difficulty individuals have in effecting political change, the painting’s most powerful and most fatalistic suggestion concerns the power of nature. This puny, ruined castle doesn’t match up to the surrounding mountains.

  Turner made his own leap to freedom at this time. The hints Farington had been receiving from the younger artist about looking for his own establishment in the expanding area north of Oxford Street were not just idle talk. In late 1799 Turner moved to lodgings in Harley Street. The house, number 64, stood on the south-west comer of Harley Street and Queen Anne Street. His landlord was the Reverend W. Hardcastle, who had recently taken over the lease from Robert Harper, a schoolmaster. Harper’s school in a garden building had been attended by Turner’s friend William F. Wells, the watercolour painter and drawing master, when a boy. Wells, a friend for the last seven years or so, may have alerted him to the possibility at 64 Harley Street, but the rooms were not problem-free. Turner dropped in to see Farington on 16 November. He talked with unusual forthcomingness about painting – ‘Turner has no settled process but drives the colours about till he has expressed the ideas in his mind’ – and also about his new quarters, where much painting was going on. Farington noted, ‘J. Serres is to have the use of a parlour and a room on the 2nd floor in the house in which Turner lodges in Harley St., which he much objects to as it may subject him to interruption. Serres to use these rooms from Ten in the forenoon till 3 or 4 in the afternoon, when the Rev. Mr Hardcastle is to have the use of them … Serres’ wife etc. are in other lodgings where his family concerns are carried on.’21 John Thomas Serres was the son of Dominic Serres, a Frenchman who had been marine painter to George III. John Thomas followed him in this job and also became marine draughtsman to the Admiralty, using a specially provided boat to sketch the French coast. But Turner’s worries probably centred less on the marine painter, whose interest in the sea he shared, than on Serres’s wife, Olivia. Turner wanted a house where he could work without distraction. Even though Mrs Serres was in ‘other lodgings’, these were not very far away at 81 Wimpole Street, and she might well invade his life at Harley Street. Olivia Serres was a tall, well-built and most often heavily rouged woman who claimed to be the daughter of the Duke of Cumberland, brother of the King; she believed that she therefore deserved the title of princess. As a young girl she had been Serres’s student and had fallen for him. Turner, having moved out of Maiden Lane, did not need another disturbed woman in his life.

  W. F. Wells’s daughter Clara was about twelve years old at this point and an altogether less disconcerting member of the fair sex. She later recalled Turner’s ‘constant an
d almost daily’ visits during this period. Her father was regarded by Turner ‘as an able counsellor in difficulties’ and the Wells house as ‘his second home, a haven of rest from many domestic trials too sacred to touch upon’.22 The Wellses had a London residence in Mount Street, off Grosvenor Square, a fifteen-minute walk from Harley Street.23 They also had a tile-hung country cottage at the village of Knockholt, on the North Downs in Kent, where Turner studied the beeches and the northward views back to London; on a clear day you could see the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the hills of Hampstead. In town, Turner ‘usually spent three or four evenings in every week at our fireside’, Clara said, more than half a century later. ‘I can still vividly recall to mind my dear father and Turner sketching or drawing by the light of an Argand lamp, whilst my mother was plying her needle and I, then a young girl, used to read aloud some useful and entertaining work.’ Clara added that ‘Turner loved my father with a son’s affection; and to me he was as an elder brother.’ When at Knockholt, ‘many are the times I have gone out sketching with him. I remember his scrambling up a tree to obtain a better view, and there he made a coloured sketch, I handing up his colours as he wanted them.’24

  His move out to his own separate lodgings and his eagerness to spend time with the happy Wells family may have been prompted by the implosion of the Turner household in Maiden Lane. His once pre-eminent need – expressed to Farington – to be of help to his parents seems to have been set aside for the sake of self-preservation and undisturbed work a little while before the final calamity. This occurred on 27 December 1800, when his mother was admitted to Bethlehem Hospital for the insane. It must have been a terrible Christmas. Mary Turner was said to have led her husband William ‘a sad life’,25 and this was the saddest moment in it. At the crunch, neither husband nor son appears to have wanted to take full responsibility, for the petition to the hospital governors to admit Mary Turner was made not by William senior or junior but by one of the hairdresser’s brothers, Joshua. (Joshua had also made the jump from Devon to London, where he worked in the Storekeeper’s Department of the Excise Office.)

  The petition may not have been entirely truthful; it stated that Mary Turner ‘has been disordered in her Senses – about 9 months, was not so before, is in a healthy condition, has not attempted Mischief’. But if, as some believe,26 her problem was schizophrenia, she may well have been violent. A security bond for Mrs Turner was given by Robert Brown, an upholsterer from Bedford Street just around the corner from Hand Court, and Richard Tremlouw, a wig-maker from Air Street off Piccadilly.27 These bondholders pledged that they would remove the patient if the hospital governors asked them to. However, after a year in Bethlehem, or Bedlam as it was familiarly called, Mary Turner was moved to the ward for females considered incurable. Mary Turner remained in the incurable ward for over two years. She did not leave Bedlam alive.

  Bethlehem Hospital – originally the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem – was an elegant building in Finsbury Circus, backing on to the north side of London Wall and facing out on Moorfields. On the piers of its gates were carved two figures – one representing ‘Raving’, the other ‘Melancholy’ – sculpted by Gabriel Cibber, the Danish artist who settled in England and fathered Colley Cibber, the playwright. But the site and the architecture were the only magnificent features of this ghastly institution. Patient-care was primitive. Although by this time the hospital had ceased to allow visitors on Sundays and holidays to gaze at the inmates, a popular mid-eighteenth-century leisure activity at a charge of a penny, the therapeutic regime at Bedlam still involved cages, chains, beatings, blood-lettings and straitjackets. Fuseli blithely told Farington not long after this that he had learnt from a medical man that ‘the greatest number of those confined there were women in love, and the next greatest class was Hackney and Stage Coachmen, because of the effect on the pineal gland of constant shaking they are subject to’.28 Roughly 120 patients in various states of dementia, peaceful and violent, were managed by four keepers. A Parliamentary report on the hospital not long after this revealed that a ‘resident’ apothecary visited at the most for half an hour a day. The steward and the matron were both seventy years of age and let the servants run everything. The sole physician came infrequently and recommended such remedies as ‘bleeding, purging, and vomit’, though not in winter, ‘when the house is excessively cold’29 – so cold, indeed, that some inmates lost fingers and toes from frostbite.

  The admission of Turner’s mother to this snakepit was facilitated by a special relationship. The hospital physician was Dr Thomas Monro. The job, which he held from 1791 to 1816, was a cushy sinecure that had been handed down from his grandfather to his father and then to him. Thomas Monro, a specialist in mental disorders, was, as noted, called in early during George III’s reign to look at the King, and consulted again in 1811–12 when he is said to have prescribed a hop-pillow for the uneasy royal head to rest on. After a Parliamentary enquiry in 1815–16 into the running of Bethlehem Hospital had determined that there were gross inadequacies, Dr Monro was compelled to retire. Among the faults, at least as far as the doctor was concerned in the case of Mary Turner, seems to have been a free-and-easy way with the hospital admission regulations.

  She was of course the mother of his star protégé. That may have been the main criterion governing her admission to Bedlam, for she appears to have met none of the other qualifications. ‘She was not violent, dangerous, or suicidal,’ writes Cecilia Powell, though this is taking the possibly biased word of her sponsors. ‘She was not in the position of having nobody to care for her, since she had a husband six years her junior who was so strong and healthy that he outlived her by over a quarter of a century; and she had an equally healthy son aged 26. She was not a pauper.’30 William Turner senior was working as a hairdresser until 1801. William Turner junior was doing extremely well as an artist and already had money invested in Government Funds. Father and son could have afforded to put Mary Turner in a private asylum, at a cost of roughly a pound a week, and there she might have had more considerate care than in Bedlam. It would seem that, thanks to Dr Monro, she was confined at no cost to her husband and son. We have no sure way of entering their minds and hearts on this matter. Maybe they were at the end of their tether and grasped – without much thinking – Dr Monro’s offer to have Mary looked after. Maybe they acted like poor people and Bedlam was the destination they would have expected for one of their kind if mentally ill. But it is doubtful whether the Marshalls, worthy tradespeople, would have been happy with this. They might well have considered that the Turners were being cheap, mean-spirited and unloving.

  Maybe, too, Mary’s son was scared that he would also become mad – feeling, as many did then, that madness was infectious or ran in the family. Did he think of J. R. Cozens, also a Monro patient, and other demented artists, waiting for him to join their benighted group? Perhaps he felt he had ‘assisted’ on the domestic scene long enough. Or it could be that the rising star was simply ashamed of his mad mother. Hereafter Turner seems never to have mentioned her. Indeed, he reacted badly if others mentioned her. Some years later a Dr Shaw, who believed he was related to Turner on his mother’s side, paid him a visit; he said, ‘May I take the liberty of asking you whether your mother’s name was Marshall?’ Turner immediately looked furious. ‘His manner was full of majesty, accompanied with a diabolical look.’ He replied that the liberty Dr Shaw had taken was unwarrantable and his presence was an obtrusion.31 Yet Dr Shaw managed to quieten the fiery artist with an apology, and the doctor was invited to make another visit.

  Some anguish persisted. Long after, he told John Ruskin that the young writer’s first duty in life was to his mother. When with the Wells family, he seems to have warmed in the convivial atmosphere and to have realized that much of it was due to his friend Wells’s wife, Clara’s mother. He noted in a sketchbook in 1806, for no benefit but his own memory: ‘There is not a quality or endowment, faculty or ability, which is not in a superior degree posses
st by women. Vide Mrs. Wells. Knockholt. Oct.’32 Turner’s mother died in Bedlam on 15 April 1804. From the start his relations with women were characterized by loss: his sister; the Margate girl; and now his mother. In many respects, he seems never to have got over her.

  As one woman was moving away from him, another was moving closer. We don’t know how and when he met Sarah Danby. It took Farington, the diligent busybody, until 11 February 1809 to find out about her. On that date he recorded that the artist A. W. Callcott had commented to him in regard to Turner, ‘A Mrs. Danby, widow of a musician, now lives with him. She has some children.’ As far as his Academy colleagues were concerned, Turner had been successfully covering his tracks for the previous nine or ten years.

  He may have met Sarah by way of her husband John Danby. Danby was a Catholic, a composer of songs and masses, who held the post of organist at the Chapel of the Spanish Embassy in London and perhaps also at the Sardinian Chapel. He married Sarah Goose in Lambeth in April 1788; she was about twenty-two, with Lincolnshire connections. The Spanish Chapel, in Manchester Square, was designed by Joseph Bonomi around 1793. Possibly as a result of doing work on the backgrounds of Bonomi’s drawings, Turner was introduced to Danby. The Danbys were Covent Garden residents, for some years after their marriage living at 26 Henrietta Street, a block away from Maiden Lane. Another link may have been through the Callcotts. The brother of Turner’s friend and follower Augustus Wall Callcott was a musician, John Wall Callcott, who like Danby composed glees – short, serious and not always gleeful choral pieces for unaccompanied male singers. Danby’s glees won prizes; he received a medal for one of his best known, ‘Awake, Aeolian Lyre’. In 1789 his second collection of glees was published and in the list of subscribers is a ‘Mr Turner’.