Another point of contact may have been the Pantheon, where Danby performed at a concert in February 1791, not long before Turner’s scene-painting stint there. Although Miss Ann Dart told Ruskin that young Turner, when staying with the Narraways, ‘had for music no talent’,33 this may have been because he was too shy to display any; certainly he was interested in music. Some of his sketchbooks have pages that have been ruled for music, a few with notation, and one setting out a ‘gamut for flute’.34 In several sketchbooks of these years, he jotted down ballads he heard and some he may have invented: ‘swains’, ‘longing arms’ and other unoriginal elements are put into play. One lengthy song whose words he laboriously inscribed had to do with a sailor and his Nancy; it must have touched him – perhaps he wanted to share it with a Nancy or Sarah of his own when he returned from his sketching tour.
Sarah was about nine years older than Turner. She was a practising Catholic and if he was attracted to her on first meeting he no doubt had to wait for John Danby’s death before expressing his desire. Danby died on 16 May 1798 at 46 Upper John Street, near Fitzroy Square, on the evening of a concert for his benefit, possibly from the effects of severe rheumatoid arthritis. Since her marriage, Sarah had been busy bearing children: three out of six or seven survived at the time of her husband’s death, and she was a month or so pregnant with another. After the loss of her husband, Sarah went on living for the next couple of years at Upper John Street, not far from Whitfield’s Methodist Chapel, with her daughters: Louisa Mary, born 1792; Marcella, born 1796; Caroline Melissa, born July 1798; and Teresa, born January 1799. She was probably hard-strapped and quickly turned to the Royal Society of Musicians for help. From the Society she received a pension of £2 12s 6d a month, together with a payment of between fifteen shillings and one guinea a month for each of the girls until they were fourteen, when the Society paid for them to be apprenticed as schoolteachers. The laws of the Society provided that a widow’s allowance should cease if she ‘be found in illicit intercourse’. It was evidently to her advantage not to have it known that she was cohabiting, and this fell in nicely with Turner’s keen sense of privacy.
His affair with Sarah Danby remained a love-in-a-corner thing, and despite Farington’s record of Callcott’s comment and several other clues it has been denied by some writers ever since. Thornbury does not mention Sarah Danby. Finberg, referring to ‘Mrs Danby’ without a ‘Sarah’, apparently confuses her with her niece Hannah, who came to work for Turner as a servant in 1809 at the age of twenty-three, and claims this ‘Mrs Danby’ was only a housekeeper, whose ‘children came to be regarded by the gossips as Turner’s offspring’.35 Jean Golt suggests that Hannah, rather than Sarah, was Turner’s mistress and the mother of the two daughters he sired.36 Although this takes us somewhat ahead, in order to establish once and for all the Sarah Danby–J. M. W. Turner connection it is worth stating a few relevant facts.
In Turner’s second will and various codicils to it he referred to Sarah Danby and to ‘Evelina and Georgiana T’, who were ‘her daughters’ or ‘her natural daughters’. Evelina, born about two and a half years after her Danby half-sister Teresa, was baptized in the church of Guestling, near Hastings, East Sussex, on 19 September 1801, where the baptismal register records her as ‘Evelina, daughter of William and Sarah Turner’.37 In a Sussex sketchbook used a few years after this event, Turner wrote on the label, ‘Lewes, Hurstmonceux, Pevensey, G., & Winchelsea’- all the place-names in full except the ‘G.’ Guestling, near Winchelsea, is the only name beginning with a G that is possible. Turner seems to be suppressing some of the evidence, as if he didn’t dare spell out the full name for fear of giving something away, even to himself. But other clues to the link later emerged. When Evelina got married, in October 1817, it was under the name of Evelina Turner; one of the two witnesses was Sarah Danby. In a letter of 15 December 1853, Evelina’s husband refers to his wife as Turner’s daughter, and in a letter of 24 November 1865 to a lawyer acting for Turner’s relatives in claims against his estate, Evelina mentions ‘my father’s will’.38 Despite suggestions by several writers other than Jean Golt that Turner was the lover of Hannah Danby, there is absolutely no evidence to that effect. Sarah’s position, whether as his mistress or as the mother of his children, cannot be challenged. Yet it is not known what he did in the way of keeping her and the girls; probably he did as little as possible.
For a while after Turner started his affair with her, Sarah Danby went on living with the four Danby girls at 46 Upper John Street. But the Danby name disappeared from the rate books at that address in 1800. It seems likely that they moved in that year to 75 Norton Street, not far from John Street, off Portland Road. This is the address Turner gave for publication in the 1801 Royal Academy catalogue; he had vacated his rooms in Harley Street for the time being, whether to avoid the Serreses or to be with Sarah. He took the Norton Street house together with a merchant named Roch Jaubert, a friend of the Danbys, who had been a witness at the wedding of John and Sarah in 1788. Jaubert, a cheesemonger at one stage, published a book of John Danby’s glees after the composer’s death. In May and June 1802 William Turner senior wrote from this address to his brothers Price and John in Devon about their mother’s will. Whatever his attachment to Sarah, Turner was soon back at 64 Harley Street, where he bought a lease of the entire house and planned to build a gallery for showing his pictures.39 It would seem from Callcott’s remark to Farington in 1809 that Sarah and the girls (now five in number, one being his) went with him, at least for a few years, or were brought thereafter to see him from time to time. The Reverend Trimmer visiting Turner’s later residence around the corner in Queen Anne Street occasionally saw a girl whom, ‘from her resemblance to Turner, he took to be a relation’.40
Turner of course looked at women not only as a man but as an artist. A woman was a form of flesh and muscle and bone. In one sketchbook of 1798,41 he drew a female nude with coloured chalk and watercolour: high-lit conical breasts, puppety head lowered, hair falling behind, with one leg and knee raised awkwardly across the other; and on the next page, as if getting closer, he concentrated on a smaller area of the woman, from one shoulder to one knee. A couple of years later a sketchbook42 contains two pen-and-ink and white chalk female figure-drawings on coarse blue paper: one seated, quite chubby, mostly clothed, though her loose dress reveals a breast; the other kneeling, holding a prone man in her arms, his head in her lap. Rightly or not, one thinks of Sarah Danby.
Their relationship was evidently not smooth. In another sketchbook he used in 1799 and 1800, containing drawings of Salisbury and of barges and sunsets, Turner jotted some memoranda about money at one end and at the other several stanzas of a poem:
Love is like the raging Ocean
Winds that sway its troubled motion
Women’s temper will supply
Man the easy bark which sailing
On the unblest treachrous sea
Where Cares like waves in fell succession
Frown destruction oer his days
Oerwhelming crews in traitrous way
Thus thro life we circling tread
Recreant poor or vainly wise
Unheeding grasp the bubble Pleasure
Which bursts his grasp or flies.43
On the stormy seas of life, the poor artist-sailor goes around in circles, vainly seeking pleasure, and, time after time, runs into deep trouble as he does so. With Sarah, he seems to have asked himself now and then, What have I taken on? Turner’s interest in The Aeneid grew in the ensuing years and a particular theme from it that he developed in his works was the passion of Dido and Aeneas – fatal for Dido, whom Aeneas, pushed hither and yon by the gods, abandoned. His painting Dido and Aeneas, probably begun in 1805, was exhibited at his gallery in 1806, and as if to mark an occasion was shown again at the Royal Academy in 1814. Were there several sunderings of his attachment to Sarah?
If Turner’s qualities as a partner were not to be relied on and if – as we shall see �
�� his attributes as a parent were extremely poor, he was a good son to his father. The old man had encouraged him; he would, after his mother’s departure, look after his father. William Turner senior used to tell anyone who would listen that when the Tory government of William Pitt the younger imposed a tax on hair powder in 1795, it drove out wigs and ruined his trade. Fashions were changing, too, and queues and powdered hair were on the way out. As a result of his declining business and possibly of his son’s success, the older Turner gave up his shop and house at 26 Maiden Lane and went to live with William junior – at Harley Street, at Norton Street and then at Harley Street again. He became the odd-job man or factotum, preparing canvases for painting and varnishing them afterwards, running errands, and in his West Country accent chatting with visitors as his son rarely did. However, his free and easy ways did not extend to overlooking the behaviour of his brother Jonathan in regard to their mother’s estate. She died in April 1802 and Jonathan, a baker, who had been caring for her at his house in Walcot, near Bath, claimed most of her money. The four other brothers and their sister Mary didn’t like this at all, and William wrote from Norton Street to insist strenuously that Jonathan be brought to heel and all share alike as their mother had intended. The estate was worth less than £300. After some squabbling, Jonathan was paid his expenses for looking after difficult old Mrs Turner and the remaining assets were split equally among the six heirs. The episode has been seen as indicating the hard-headed, grasping nature of the Turners, but it may well be that they were not unlike most people where family money was concerned.
On 12 February 1802, Turner was elected a full Academician. There had been vacancies as a result of the deaths of several members of the Academy. Farington lobbied for Turner, and he was elected to fill the first vacancy by a clear majority over the opposing candidate, Joseph Bonomi. (Curious that on becoming an Associate Turner had triumphed over his former teacher Malton, and on this occasion prevailed over a presumed part-time employer and possible early contact with the Danbys; but it was a small, competitive world.) Turner sent his 1800 painting of Dolbadern Castle as his Deposit or Diploma picture and on 14 April 1802 received his Diploma as an Academician, signed by the King. Until that time, only one man, Thomas Lawrence, had been elected a full Academician at a younger age. As with Turner’s election to associate status, this success seemed based almost wholly on the other members’ perception of his artistic ability; ‘his manners were not ingratiating’.44 When Stothard suggested to Turner that he call on his supporters to thank them for their votes, Turner bluffly replied that he ‘would do nothing of the kind. If they had not been satisfied with his pictures, they would not have elected him … Why thank a man for performing a simple duty?’45 But Turner himself felt the moment worth celebrating and signalling. ‘W. Turner’ was now replaced in the Academy catalogue by his full name, ‘Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A.’ On election to full membership, the new Academician was expected to make a present to the Academy. Turner gave the Academy twelve silver dessert spoons. In fact, he went on being more generous to the Academy than to any of the women in his life.
Numerous paintings and many drawings and sketches of this time demonstrate what the members who voted for him evidently felt: he was now a master. He was attacking the art world on several fronts, as a maker of history paintings, of landscapes and of marine paintings. He was taking on rivals past (for the most part) and present (where he had few competitors). His first very large painting in oil was called The Fifth Plague of Egypt. It shows a thunderstorm breaking over the pyramids while a pair of Old Testament characters in the heavily shadowed foreground strike attitudes of classic doom and lamentation. In the RA catalogue (for 1800) Turner attached a quotation from Exodus: ‘And Moses stretched forth his hands towards Heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along the ground,’ which suggests that his knowledge of the Bible wasn’t perfect; he was mixing up the fifth with the seventh plague. Two years later Turner painted The Tenth Plague of Egypt and cavalierly set the catastrophe in what looks like an Italian hill-town. In the Fifth Plague, the mood is one of sublime terror owing much to Poussin; the storm is derived from one Turner had experienced in the north Wales mountains the year before. The Morning Chronicle, reviewing the RA show, said the painting gave Turner ‘a new character in his profession’.46 The Monthly Magazine described Turner as a master whose name could be coupled with Claude’s and Gainsborough’s. A patron agreed with the critics: William Beckford bought the picture for 150 guineas and also bought for 35 guineas each five large watercolours Turner had done of Fonthill Abbey, the Gothic extravaganza which Beckford himself was building.
In the following year, however, there were amid the plaudits intimations of criticism to come. In Turner’s The Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desart by a Whirlwind (a painting now lost), viewers had trouble finding the Medes. One writer said that Turner ‘seems to have buried his whole army in the sand of the desert with a single flourish of his brush’. And the Porcupine, Cobbett’s paper, declared, ‘Mr Turner has doubtless heard that obscurity is one source of the sublime, and he has certainly given to the picture a full measure of this kind of sublimity. Perhaps his work may be best described by what a lady said of it – that it is all flags and smoke.’47
No one complained about several seascapes of these years, in which the flags were ensigns and wimpels and the smoke was spume and spray. In 1800 the immensely wealthy coal and canal magnate Francis Egerton, the Duke of Bridgewater, commissioned a seapiece from the painter of the moment to hang in his collection with a painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Willem van de Velde the younger. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1801, the picture was called Dutch Boats in a Gale: fishermen endeavouring to put their fish on board; its dark, louring clouds, breaking seas and nearly colliding boats made a great impression. The picture was the hit of the show, ‘a peculiar favourite of the spectators’.48 Some who would later be less enthusiastic about Turner talked it up strongly. According to Farington, the amateur painter and connoisseur Sir George Beaumont thought very highly of it, though he was aware of Ludolf Backhuysen as an influence and thought ‘the water rather inclined to brown’.49 Beaumont’s protégé John Constable thought highly of it, too, though it seemed to him much in debt to van de Velde. Fuseli told Farington after the Academy dinner on 25 April that Turner’s picture was the best in the exhibition and was reminded of another Dutch painter; the picture, he thought, was ‘quite Rembrandtish’.50
A boat in imminent danger was also the subject of one of his two marine works in the 1802 exhibition. During his sketching tour the previous summer he had gone up the north-east coast making studies of waves, boats and beaches, but earlier experiences as a boy watching the fishermen at Margate, and going out with them in their boats, may have also been invested in Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore, in Squally Weather. The boat being pushed out through breaking surf into ‘waves in fell succession’ is barely under control – will the sea win this little battle? Although this brilliant rendering of the dangers of a leeshore got most of the viewing attention, its companion seapiece now seems the more impressive picture. This was Ships bearing up for anchorage, a more spacious and less melodramatic work than the Bridgewater Seapiece, that its purchaser Lord Egremont took to his great country house at Petworth in Sussex. The impact of the Egremont Seapiece is so all-encompassing that a viewer may neglect to consider the preparatory work that went into its making. A sketchbook of 1800–2 called ‘Studies for Pictures’51 has some of the rehearsing. Four or five drawings in pencil, pen, white chalk and wash on light-blue-grey paper are of ships, some possibly done at sea, some perhaps from a beach. Turner occasionally added a note, for example: ‘2nd ship at a greater distance … wet sand … figures’.52 He catches with a few lines and shadows the scend of the sea, the sense of a ship rolling under bare poles, another heeling in a gust of wind. The essence of ships, sky and water, and a few figures on the shore, delivered with – as Fuseli would have no
ticed, had he seen the drawing – Rembrandtian economy.
Notes
1 Lindsay, p.172.
2 Ibid., p.31.
3 Redding, Past Celebrities, p.57.
4 Delacroix, Journal, quoted in Lindsay, p.174.
5 Century, p.264.
6 Th. 1877, p.39.
7 AR, i, p.205.
8 Gowing, Imagination and Reality, p.42.
9 TB XLVI, f.120.
10 TB XLIII, ff.3a, 5. See Tate catalogue, Turner and the Human Figure.
11 Whitley, Artists and Friends, p.211.
12 Farington, Diary, 24 October 1798. See TB XXXV, 1797.
13 Finberg, p.41.
14 Timbs, Anecdote Lives, p.326; Finberg, p.42.
15 Lord Harewood bought two local landscapes in oil from Turner in 1798. D. Hill, TS 5, 1, p.31.
16 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.4.
17 Monkhouse, pp.44–5.
18 Farington, Diary, April–May 1798, quoted in Lindsay, p.36.
19 Finberg, Sketches and Drawings, pp.32, 31.
20 Turner’s only known comment on the ‘Sublime’ occurs in an 1809 sketchbook (TB CX), where he quotes the radical writer Tom Paine to the effect that ‘the sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime becomes ridiculous and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.’
J.M.W. Turner Page 9