J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  In 1808 most of the paintings and drawings he sold were from the gallery, nearly two thousand pounds’ worth. The gallery’s 1809 opening was pompously announced in a newspaper on 23 April: ‘Tomorrow Mr Turner the Academician will gratuitously open to the classes of Dilettanti, Connoisseurs and Artists, his gallery in Queen Ann Street West …’ The catalogue for that year’s show listed the titles of eighteen oils and watercolours, several of which had poetic quotations attached, one being ‘Thomson’s Aeolian Harp’. The gallery seems to have stayed open for about two months, during the RA exhibition season, until the end of June. A note of pride as well as of anxiety was to be detected in a letter of 2 May 1810 to James Wyatt, an Oxford printseller, asking for the swift dispatch of a frame, ‘because my Gallery opens on Monday next’.7 But in 1811 he seems to have had no show; apparently the builders were in and he wrote to Wyatt again, saying he was so surrounded ‘with rubbish and paint that I have not at present a room free’.8

  The gallery was shut down in 1816 because Turner had a new scheme in mind. In 1820 he set to work in Queen Anne Street on a site behind the Harley Street buildings. This new place, an expansion and conversion of a mews cottage into a house and gallery, encroached a little on the land of his Harley Street properties – the gardens of the house he was living in and of the two houses adjacent to it, whose leases he also acquired. (The freehold was owned by the Duke of Portland; in 1823 Turner was granted new leases of sixty years from April 1822.) Turner was his own architect for the Queen Anne Street establishment, though Soane seems to have been an influence. He was also his own contractor and had to spend a good deal of time dealing with workmen.

  On 13 November 1820, at which time he owned a house in Twickenham as well, he wrote from a disrupted Queen Anne Street to his friend Wells, who was then living in Mitcham, Surrey, and who, as a boy, had been a pupil in the school run by a Mr Harper in part of Turner’s Harley Street property. The letter is characteristically full of half-jokes, crowded associations, confused allusions and literary references, for example to King Lear at the end of the first paragraph:

  Dear Wells

  Many thanks to you for your kind offer of refuge to the Houseless, which in the present instance is humane as to cutting you are the cutter. Aladdins palace soon fell to pieces, and a lad like me can’t get in again unsheltered and like a lamb. I am turning up my eye to the sky through the chinks of the Old Room and mine; shall I keep you a bit of the old wood for your remembrance of the young twigs which in such twinging strains taught you the art of wiping your eye of a tear purer far than the one which in revenge has just dropt into mine, for it rains and the Roof is not finish’d. Day after day have I threatened you not with a letter, but your Mutton, but some demon eclypt Mason, Bricklayer, Carpenter &c. &c. &c. … has kept me in constant osillation from Twickenham to London, from London to Twit, that I have found the art of going about doing nothing – ‘so out of nothing, nothing can come.’

  However, joking apart, if I can find a day or two I’ll have a peep at the North Side of Mitcham Common, but when, it is impossible to say. Whenever I have been absent either something has been done wrong or my wayward feelings have made me think so, or that had I been present it would not have occurred, that I am fidgetty whenever away. When this feeling has worn itself away, at least I shall become a better guest. But in whatever situation I may be … believe me to be

  With sincere regard

  Yours most truly

  J. M. W. Turner9

  He was allowed to rebuild the front part of the house to a depth of about twenty feet, so a letter from the Duke of Portland’s office informed him, ‘the front wall of which is to be built with new picked Stocks neatly pointed’.10 The drawing room was upstairs, facing north on to Queen Anne Street, and Turner used it not for ‘withdrawing’, in the conventional after-dinner sense, but for his studio, for drawing and painting. Behind this room a new nineteen-foot-wide gallery extended fifty-five feet to the rear. A fireplace was centrally located in one of the long side walls; the walls themselves were painted dark red. A central skylight, with canopy-like blinds, provided diffused lighting.11 In a sketchbook he had first used at Tabley House in 1808, he drew a diagram of heating pipes in a picture gallery and wrote, ‘Flues from the back parlour or kitchen to warm the Gallery. Ventilation of Gallery – and the blinds to bow and set behind a moulding to exclude the Sun’s rays.’12 Turner’s new house struck most visitors as dark – they suspected that he had designed it with minimal fenestration in order to avoid paying taxes, introduced in 1792, on houses with more than six windows. However, one visitor in the 1840s thought he was first led through darkened downstairs rooms in the house so as to be more responsive to the dazzling pictures in the gallery.13

  The new gallery was opened in 1822 and as time passed Turner encouraged his artist-colleagues to visit it not just in the exhibition season. In a letter to Clarkson Stanfield, he writes, ‘Pray make it any day most convenient to you and your friends to see the Gallery.’14 Whether invited formally or by an impromptu hail in the street, visitors often felt a strange mixture of privilege and bewilderment. Some artist friends, like Charles Leslie, having visited on their own, later took their children to the gallery, as a treat, as to an Aladdin’s cave. Several enthusiasts who were up from the country or newly arrived from abroad made it a prime point of call. Admirers like John Ruskin gained entrée to the gallery for their friends. Cyrus Redding, the journalist who accompanied Turner on parts of a West Country tour in 1811 or 1813,15 encountered Turner some time later in Harley Street. ‘He told me, in his rough way, that if I would come to his gallery in Queen Anne Street, I should see something with which I was acquainted, meaning a scene that I knew. I did not fail to call … I found that the work to which he alluded was his picture so much noticed, since called “Crossing the Brook”. This picture, except the immediate foreground, was taken from a height on the Cornish side of the Tamar, above the Weir Head, and the inclined bridge, yet higher, connecting Cornwall and Devon.’16 For Redding, as for a few others who had been with Turner in the field, the gallery provided a personal view of large-scale work that transfigured outdoor sketches. For many visitors it was an intimate manifestation of the results of what was mostly hidden, the daily industry with oil and watercolour, canvas and paint. They did not see his studio, where he stood at the easel lifting a brush to and from the palette over and over again, gazing, squinting, rarely standing back, following the dictates of eye and hand. And therefore for most who came to the gallery this was the next best thing, a dazzling experience.

  But the gallery’s glory days were soon gone. As the years passed the palace of pictures failed to give visitors a sense of brightness or splendour. ‘Dingy’,17 ‘dusty’, ‘dimly-lit’18 and ‘dilapidated’19 were common descriptions. The neo-classical lines of the exhibition room were gradually obscured by clutter and even wreckage, as the artist seemed to lose interest in how his paintings were presented. Turner was aware that the gallery which had once been new and clean, with a skylight that did not leak, had become ‘a dark abode’,20 but one wonders if he knew the full extent of its reputation. By the second part of his life, when we have most accounts of visits to his gallery, many art-lovers had the impression that it – and the house it was part of – was an ogre’s castle, where a witch assisted with spells, and semi-wild cats, her familiars, stalked among rotting canvases.

  This ‘witch’ was Hannah Danby, Sarah’s niece, his house-keeper and general servant, whom time also treated badly. Elizabeth Rigby, an intellectual young amateur artist and writer on art topics who became the wife of the painter and Academy President Charles Eastlake, called her ‘a hag of a woman, for whom one hardly knew what to feel most, terror or pity …’21 The artist George Lance called by invitation in the 1840s but found entry difficult:

  After knocking and waiting for rather a long time, [the door] was slowly unchained and partially opened, so partially as to reveal only a portion of his servant – an old woman,
one eye bandaged and the other seeming to require the same kind of protection. After some parleying, on my assuring her that I came by Mr Turner’s own appointment, she let me in. Directly my name was announced, the great painter came into the hall, gave me a most hearty welcome, and conducted me at once into his gallery … It was one of those deluging days which we experience now and then … Guess my astonishment and concern to find the floor strewed with old saucers, basins, and dishes, placed there to catch the rain, which poured in from broken panes, cracks and crevices.

  But Lance concealed his anxiety: ‘indeed, so much was I impressed by the pictures which covered the walls that I soon forgot the danger they were subjected to’.22 One picture in particular danger was Turner’s watercolour The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d’Aouste, Piedmont, which the Reverend William Kingsley – a Yorkshire clergyman and friend of Ruskin – saw blocking up a window in an outhouse, ‘no doubt to save window tax’.23

  The thought of meeting the fearsome ogre bothered the Scots painter William Leighton Leitch. In 1842 Leitch had a conversation with one of the daughters of Turner’s good friend and patron Walter Fawkes. Miss Fawkes asked Leitch if he had been to Turner’s gallery, and Leitch said no – in fact, he had heard that Mr Turner objected to artists seeing his pictures. Miss Fawkes replied that this notion arose from Turner once catching an artist rubbing or scraping one of the pictures in his gallery (presumably to see how thick the paint was); his reaction can be imagined. But for Leitch there would be no difficulty, since Turner would know who he was. She would write to Turner that afternoon.

  Leitch said, ‘I would like the answer to keep as an autograph.’

  Miss Fawkes said, ‘There is little chance of that. Mr Turner is a very singular person and very chary of writing now. It appears that he once heard of an autograph of his having been sold for fifteen pence. Rather than let you have such a chance, he’ll come all the way down from Queen Anne Street and leave his answer verbally at your door.’

  Leitch said later that Miss Fawkes turned out to have been right:

  Turner himself came to Wilton Place and left word that he was going out of town, but that his housekeeper would let me see the pictures. Miss Fawkes told me that I was highly favoured, as Turner hardly ever allowed visitors to see his gallery except when he was on the spot himself. She told me that he had a ‘peep-hole’ from his painting-room to the gallery, so as to be able to see what people were doing, and hear what they were saying.

  So I went. I had heard of dirty rooms and of the mysterious house-keeper, and my curiosity was excited. The house had a desolate look. The door was shabby and nearly destitute of paint and the windows were obscured by dirt.

  Hannah clearly was out of touch with Victorian values, possibly at this point because of the disfiguring disease she had, possibly from a bloody-mindedness she shared with her employer. Or was it that having been ordered not to rearrange things in his studio, where he feared the effect of interference under the guise of tidying and cleaning, she had gradually adopted a hands-off policy to the gallery and the rest of the house above stairs?

  When I rang the bell the door was opened a very little bit, and a very singular figure appeared behind it. It was a woman covered from head to foot with dingy whitish flannel, her face being nearly hidden. She did not speak, so I told her my name, and that Mr Turner had given me permission to see the pictures. I gave her my card and a piece of silver with it, on which she pointed to the stair and to a door at the head of it, but she never spoke a word, and shutting the door she disappeared.

  It was a raw, wet autumn day and it still felt like that indoors. Leitch wished he had brought a companion to this weird place. Turner’s hall was not like any that he had seen in other London houses. It was square, empty of furniture, the walls a dingy brown with some casts of the Elgin marbles mounted on them. In the gallery, the rain was coming in through the broken and missing panes of the skylight. He put his umbrella up and kept it up. Although the whole place looked wretched, he was particularly shocked by the state of some of the pictures. In The Rise of Carthage, the sky was cracking, ‘not in the ordinary way, but in long lines, like ice when it begins to break up. Other parts of the picture were peeling off – one piece just like a stiff ribbon turning over.’

  The lone visitor walked back and forth, cold and uncomfortable. Finally he sat down on a dirty chair in the middle of the gallery, his umbrella over his head, and abstractedly contemplated a picture.

  From this state I was brought back to myself by feeling something warm and soft moving across the back of my neck; then it came on my shoulder, and on turning my head I was startled to find a most peculiarly ugly broad-faced cat of a dirty whitish colour, with the fur sticking out unlike that of any other cat. The eyes were of a pinky hue, and they glared and glimmered at me in a most unearthly manner. The brute moved across my chest, rubbing its head and shoulders against my chair. I put up my hand to shove the creature away, and in doing so let my umbrella fall, and this startled four or five more cats of the same kind, which I observed moving about my legs in a most alarming way.

  Leitch took fright, made for the door and dashed downstairs. ‘On looking back I saw the cats at the top glaring at me, and I noticed that every one of them was without a tail. As I could see nothing of the housekeeper, I opened the door for myself and shut it after me with a bang, so that she might hear I had gone.’24

  The cats were on hand one day when Mrs Thomas Rose called to see the gallery. She was the wife of an art lover, Thomas Rose of Cowley Hall, Uxbridge, and had brought along a woman friend. They ‘were shown into a large sitting-room without a fire’, Mr Rose later told Thornbury, and

  lying about in various places were several cats without tails. In a short time our talented friend [so Rose or Thornbury condescendingly refers to the artist] made his appearance, asking the ladies if they felt cold. The youngest replied in the negative; her companion, more curious, wished she had stated otherwise, as she hoped they might have been shown into his sanctum or studio. After a little conversation he offered them wine and biscuits … One of the ladies bestowing some notice upon the cats, he was induced to remark that he had seven, and that they came from the Isle of Man.25

  Turner’s lovely Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide setting in, exhibited in his first gallery in 1809, was one of the stars of the second (Thornbury claimed Turner had refused to sell it to the generally antagonistic Sir George Beaumont); but it didn’t for that reason always get looked after. According to Thornbury, it for a while ‘served as the blind to a window that was the private entrée of the painter’s favourite cat, who one day, indignant at finding such an obstinate obstacle in her way, left the autograph of her “Ten Commandments” on the picture … All Turner said to Hannah Danby was “Oh, never mind.”’26 In December 1851, it was still among the twenty-five pictures in the gallery, one of two pictures, it seems, hanging to the left of the fireplace.

  The stock of pictures in the gallery changed but slowly: some sold, yet some did not; a number of the very best remained, the results of abortive sales or simply too prized by their creator to be let go. The twenty or so paintings were hung close together, in some cases with their frames nearly touching. From the period 1800–10 were The Tenth Plague of Egypt, The Death of Nelson (later known as The Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory), The Garreteer’s Petition, London from Greenwich, Kingston Bank and A Cottage destroyed by an Avalanche – as well as the Blythe-Sand. Lady Pauline Trevelyan made several visits to the gallery in the later years and spoke of seeing, amid the darkness and dust, ‘those brilliant pictures all glowing with sunshine and colour – glittering lagunes of Venice, foaming English seas, and fairy sunsets, all shining out of the dirt and neglect, and standing in rows one behind another as if they were endless’.27

  Some visitors to the gallery never saw the proprietor; he was possibly away, on tour or at one of his homes-from-home, or else was busy in his adjacent studio, the holy of ho
lies into which almost no one was allowed to intrude. A first cousin of his from Devon, Mary Ann Widgery, was shown around the gallery by her uncle, William Turner senior, perhaps in the 1820s, and thought it noteworthy that she did not set eyes on the artist. She later declared that, while in the gallery, her uncle told her that his son was ‘an eccentric person’. (He also told her that his wife, the painter’s mother, had been out of her mind.)28 But once in a while the master made a sudden appearance. In 1822 he pounced, like one of his cats, on a young student. David Scott had been making a little ‘memorandum’ of a Turner picture,

  when a servant entered and said, ‘Master don’t allow sketching.’ I was somewhat surprised, as no one had been in the room, and the door shut. However, I hardly considered what I was doing to be sketching, so I put in the line of the distance, which took two moments. Immediately in bounced a short stoutish individual, the genius loci himself. He said he was sorry I had not desisted, and I replied that what I had done was a mere trifle. He muttered something about memoranda and first principles, whereon I showed it to him and tore it up. He must have a peep-hole. And yet he is really a great painter.29

  Others were luckier: John Sell Cotman managed to sketch a ‘furtive copy’ of Turner’s painting Harvest Dinner, Kingston Bank at the first gallery in 1809; maybe there was no peep-hole there.