J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  The identity of the culprit in the ‘stolen proofs’ drama later came to light. Pye wrote:

  The great painter having threatened with an action the dealer in whose shop-window the proofs had been exposed for sale, he [the dealer] brought forward a woman of whom he had bought them. She proved to be the person the great painter employed to stitch together the prints of the Liber in numbers. This person declared that the prints she had sold were her own, for that Mr Turner had given them to her instead of money, when she pressed him for the amount due to her for the labour she had performed, and that she sold them to enable herself to get bread.26

  In other words, the villain of the piece was ‘the great painter’ himself.

  However, it was eventually revealed that Charles Turner did keep a large stock of Turner proofs. He explained to John Pye how he had come by them: ‘While I was engraving the plates of the Liber, the great man often called upon me. When my first plate was finished, and I showed my great namesake a proof of it, he said, “I like this, Charley, you must get me a dozen proofs of it.” Several times he said, “Charley, I should like to have a dozen proofs of that plate.” Of course I got the proofs, and paid for them, and also the like number of all the other plates which I engraved for the work. But, some years afterwards, when I quarreled with him, I asked for the money that I had paid for the printing of the proofs. He said, “I shan’t pay you, for I never ordered ’em.” So they remained in my hands.’27 And Charles Turner eventually was well repaid for the money he had laid out. In 1852 he sold some Liber and Shipwreck proofs to the dealer Colnaghi for more than £800. At this point he was cross with himself, since in time past he had (so he claimed, not altogether plausibly) let his servants light fires with such proofs, when they didn’t seem to have any resale value. He exclaimed to Pye, ‘How unconscious was I that I was robbing my children of a fortune!’28

  Other engravers found relations with their taskmaster equally tricky. For Thomas Lupton, who had just served an apprenticeship with George Clint, the engraver of Liber plates 41 and 45, work on a plate took nearly two months and the materials cost over a pound – Lupton’s fee of five guineas did not go far. Clint himself, who received six guineas a plate, gave up the commission because the fee was not enough. And though one might have thought that, once Turner had got the Liber and all his responsibilities for it out of his system, he would mellow, his relations with the engraver and publisher W. B. Cooke proved the contrary.

  Cooke was the publisher of The Southern Coast and various other riverine and coastal subjects done by Turner; engravings continued to meet the curiosity of armchair travellers, and Turner remained the artist of choice for publishers of topographical series. Cooke bought or rented the use of Turner drawings. In the case of The Southern Coast the rental fee was to be £7 10s each for fifty or so drawings; in addition Turner wanted twenty-five sets of proofs. By the end of 1826 some heat had been engendered in communications between artist and engraver. On 1 January 1827 Cooke wrote to regret that Turner was persisting in his demand for the twenty-five sets of proofs. He pointed out to the artist that The Southern Coast was his – Cooke’s – original idea and that he had invested much in it, including a commission of more than £400 to Turner. He had persuaded him to take a share in it, which brought Turner profits on top of his fee. And although he had recently offered to pay for further drawings in the series at twelve and a half guineas each, Turner had shown his gratitude by demanding two and a half guineas more for the drawings already done. The artist had come into Cooke’s office and in front of several members of the staff had declared, ‘I will have my terms! Or I will oppose the work by doing another “Coast”!’ Cooke quoted this declaration back to Turner, ‘These were the words you used; and everyone must allow them to be a threat.’

  Cooke recalled an earlier injury. Turner had given him, so he thought, a drawing called Neptune’s Trident,29 used on the wrapper of Marine Views, of 1825 – a drawing which the engraver had presented to Mrs Cooke. ‘You may recollect afterwards charging me two guineas for the loan of it, and requesting me, at the same time, to return it to you; which has been done.’

  Cooke, thoroughly wound up by now, concluded:

  The ungracious remarks I experienced this morning at your house, when I pointed out to you the meaning of my former note … were such as to convince me that you maintain a mistaken and most unaccountable idea of profit and advantage in the new work of the ‘Coast’; and that no estimate or calculation will convince you to the contrary. Ask yourself if Hakewill’s ‘Italy’, ‘Scottish Scenery’ or ‘Yorkshire’ have either of them succeeded in the return of the capital laid out on them … There is considerable doubt remaining whether they will ever return their expenses, and whether the shareholders and proprietors will ever be reinstated in the money laid out on them. So much for the profit of works.

  I assure you I must turn over an entirely new leaf to make them ever return their expenses.

  To conclude, I regret exceedingly the time I have bestowed in endeavouring to convince you in a calm and patient manner of a number of calculations made for your satisfaction; and I have met in return such hostile treatment that I am positively disgusted at the mere thought of the trouble I have given myself on such a useless occasion.30

  About this same time, the engraver Edward Goodall was involved in a quarrel Turner had with W. B. Cooke’s brother George, who had engraved many plates after Turner’s work in the previous years. Turner encountered George Cooke at a meeting of the Artists’ Conversazione, a discussion society that met at the Freemasons’ Tavern; Turner said he wanted the return of some touched proofs that Goodall – who had been working for the Cookes – was hanging on to. Cooke declined to press Goodall to do this. According to Thornbury, ‘Turner grew white with rage, and Cooke red as fire; and presently Cooke came up to Mr Goodall and said, “If you give them up, I shall call you a mean fellow.” Next day Mr Goodall went to Turner’s house about a plate, when the storm commenced. Turner lamented that the Conversazione should have no more pleasure for him since these quarrels, and demanded the proofs. Goodall [who for some reason had the proofs with him] refused to give them up, and even half thrust them into the fire, when the blaze caught them. In terror of fire, Turner, whose chimney was never swept, ran with shovel and tongs to save the house, exclaiming, “Good God! You’ll set the house on fire!”’31

  But relations with Goodall were also patched up. In 1842 he had the immense job of making a plate from Turner’s painting Caligula’s Bridge (RA 1831). For this Goodall was paid the goodly fee of 700 guineas by the artist (for what, however, might be several years’ work of line engraving). In the course of Goodall’s labours, Turner asked for a number of alterations – to the size of the engraving and to the buildings and people in the design. At one point Turner made some quick chalk marks and said, ‘Mr Goodall, I must have two more boys in here, and some goats. You can put them in for me.’ Goodall replied that he could not engrave from such slight indications, and Turner therefore painted in what he wanted in watercolour over the oils of the painting.

  Turner dug his heels in when an arrangement suited him, and he was quick to push an advantage, even retroactively, as in the price of the Southern Coast drawings, when an opportunity appeared. What he did not seem to take into account was the riskiness of the print business – although his own experience with the Liber should have showed him how slow a profit might be in coming. It may well have been craftiness that sometimes led him to wrap himself in his fame and temperament as an artist and thereby stand aloof from the commercial reality that affected others. But of course he knew that print publishers went broke. (He was personally affected, in money terms, when the Finden brothers became insolvent in 1842, while working on several large plates after his paintings; he wrote to Clara Wells, now Mrs Wheeler, ‘Woe is me.’)32 Although Charles Heath was thrilled to bring Turner into a series called Picturesque Views in England and Wales in the 1820s and 1830s – for which the artist was to be
paid thirty guineas each for 120 drawings – the series was not a financial success. Heath’s partners, Hurst and Robinson, who put up all the capital, went bankrupt.

  As an example of what the publishers were up against with Turner, George Cooke used to talk about another occasion when Hurst and Robinson’s profit margins had been threatened. After some haggling, Turner agreed to ‘make them a series of drawings for a topographical work at the rate of twenty-five pounds a piece, and he went away expressing his entire satisfaction with the arrangement. He came back, however, a few minutes afterwards, and thrusting his head in at the door of the room he had just left, ejaculated “Guineas.” “Guineas let it be,” responded the publishers, and he once more retired. He soon returned, however, and added, “My expenses.” “Certainly,” was the answer. This facility of disposition he seemed determined to test to the utmost, for he came back a third time to remind them that he must have in addition twenty-five proofs.’33

  Avarice and respect for an old friend seemed to go hand in hand on an occasion in the 1820s. For a new Cooke series, The Rivers of England, Turner’s work was to be joined by designs by Thomas Girtin and William Collins. Turner was asked to work on some of the prints made after Girtin’s watercolours. According to Thomas Miller, Turner said to W. B. Cooke,

  ‘I’ll touch them for Poor Tom. Poor Tom!’ and he continued repeating the words ‘Poor Tom’ as if to himself. Cooke took the proofs to him, and [Turner] worked upon them for a long time, bestowing great care and ‘making them’, as Cooke said, ‘quite his own’; and, at last, after holding them individually at arm’s length, throwing them on the floor, turning them upside down, and flinging them in every direction, he said, ‘There, Poor Tom! That will do. Poor Tom!’ and Cooke was about to take the impressions away, when Turner, clapping his arm upon them, exclaimed – ‘Stop! You must pay me two guineas apiece first.’34

  Part of the money problem with the England and Wales series was that Turner resisted Heath’s plea that it be printed from steel plates, which would have allowed a longer run, that is more copies. To begin with, he was not keen on steel engraving. Thornbury suggested that this was because Turner didn’t want to supply prints ‘by the million’. Talking with Sir Thomas Lawrence one day about engraving, Turner was said to have declared that he hated steel.

  ‘Why?’ asked Lawrence.

  ‘I don’t like it. Besides, I don’t choose to be a basket engraver.’

  ‘A basket engraver? What’s that?’

  Turner mischievously explained that, when he had got off the coach in Hastings not long before, a woman had come up to him with a basketful of prints of Lawrence’s portrait of Mrs Peel, and wanted to sell him one for sixpence.35

  Something about engravers – or the print business – seemed to bring out Turner’s most prickly reactions. When Heath discontinued the England and Wales series in 1838, after its twenty-fourth part, the stock of unsold prints and the copper-plates were put up for sale for £3000. The printdealer H. G. Bohn offered £2800, but this wasn’t enough, so the prints and plates were sent to auction. Many looked forward to buying various items, but when the day came Turner bought the whole lot at the reserve price of £3000. As Thornbury recounts the story, Turner said to Bohn, ‘So, Sir, you were going to buy my “England and Wales” to sell cheap … But I have taken care of that. No more of my plates shall be worn to shadows.’

  Bohn replied that he was not interested in the plates, only in the stock of prints. Turner perked up at this and said he only wanted the plates. He invited Bohn to breakfast the next day to talk about it. Bohn came to Queen Anne Street and found the offer of breakfast no longer stood. Nevertheless, he offered Turner £2500 for all the prints, on the understanding that the plates and the copyright – which had been valued at £500 – were to remain with the artist. But Turner, obdurate, wanted £3000 for the prints and to keep the plates. ‘Thus’, says Thornbury, ‘the interview closed.’36

  Frith told of a ‘superior’ printseller in Rathbone Place who greatly appreciated the Liber Studiorum. He acquired prints of it whenever he could. On one occasion he purchased a print that had been damaged by stains and rough use, and, feeling that it could not be much further injured, displayed it in his shop window. Turner came by, saw the damaged print and bounced into the shop. He said crossly, pointing to the window, ‘It’s a confounded shame to treat an engraving like that! What can you be thinking about to go and destroy a good thing – for it is a good thing, mind you!’

  ‘I destroy it!’ said the shopman in a rage. ‘What do you mean by saying I destroyed it? And who the devil are you, I should like to know? I didn’t ask you to buy it, did I? You don’t look as if you could understand a good print when you see one. I destroy it! Bless my soul, I bought it just as it is – and I would rather keep it till Doomsday than sell it to you. Why you should put yourself out about it, I can’t think.’

  ‘Why, I did it,’ said Turner.

  ‘Did what! Did you spoil it? If you did, you deserve—’

  ‘No, no, man! My name’s Turner, and I did the drawing, and engraved the plate from it.’

  ‘Bless my soul!’ exclaimed the printseller. ‘Is it possible you are the great Turner? Well, sir, I have long desired to see you. And now that I have seen you, I hope I shall never see you again. A more disagreeable person I have seldom met.’37

  A printdealer named Halstead had a story with a happier ending:

  Turner and I had many a quarrel. He used to be so angry with me because I broke up many of his ‘Libers’, and sold the plates [prints] separately. He could not stand that. One day in my shop in Bond Street we had a worse quarrel than ever, and he went out furious, having used very strong language. I had a corner by my window which commanded the street, and from whence I could see all that passed. Being much overcome by what had happened, I crept into that with a paper, and tried to read. He saw me from the outside, and presently came running back into the shop and said, ‘Well, God bless you! God bless you!’ ‘Your words come very pleasantly, sir,’ said I, ‘after a most unpleasant morning!’ ‘God bless you!’ said he once more, and ran off.38

  *

  Turner’s pride in his own work was, with prints as with paintings, most often immense. Now and then, he ceased to be painstaking; but he had a better right than anyone else to decide whether care or neglect was the order of the day. Generally his perfectionism prevailed. Indeed, it has been suggested that money may have sometimes been merely the excuse for terminating arrangements with engravers about whose skills he had doubts. He occasionally tried to balance with compliments any requests for improvements he wanted made. In 1824, when he was in Yorkshire, he received from the then publishers of the Southern Coast, J. and A. Arch, an early proof of the plate George Cooke was making from his picture Hythe. Turner did some pencil corrections, made a note in the margin for Cooke and added a postscript:

  P.S. You ask me for my opinion. First I shall say in general very good, secondly the Figures and Barracks excellent; but I think you have cut up the Bank called Shorne Cliff too much with the graver by lines [another diagram] which are equal in strength and width and length, that give a coarseness to the quality, and do not look like my touches or give work-like look to the good part over which they are put – The Marsh is all a swamp. I want flickering lights upon it up to the sea, and altho’ I have darkened the sea in part yet you must not consider it to want strength … Get it into one tone, flats, by dots or some means, and let the sea and water only appear different by their present lines.39

  Two more proofs passed back and forth between Cooke and Turner, being touched and commented upon, before the plate was put through the press for prints.

  In another piece of correspondence from this time, Turner wrote to one of the Arches about the Scottish engraver William Miller, who was also engraving a plate for the Southern Coast: ‘There is so much good work about Miller and it would [be] but justice to tell him so from me if you like.’ Miller saw another result of Turner’s acut
e perception one day at W. B. Cooke’s house, when, among others, Turner and Thomas Lupton were on hand. Turner was talking to an artist named Hugh Williams about an engraved scene, when, ‘differing in opinion as to the forms of some lines in the subject, a piece of paper was produced, upon which each artist made a slight sketch in pencil to elucidate his views. At the conclusion Lupton was somewhat slyly appropriating the sketch, a proceeding which Turner’s keen eye disappointed by transferring it to his own pocket, notwithstanding Lupton’s claim of property as having furnished the paper.’40

  The painter William Leighton Leitch claimed that Turner ‘got his things so beautifully engraved by terrifying the men out of their wits … [J. C.] Allen and Lupton have both told me what a fright they used to be in when Turner appeared.’41 But some engravers, enthusiastic about Turner’s work from the start, stuck with him through thick and thin. Heath declared that in spite of Turner’s ‘exactions and the difficulty of bringing him to any reasonable terms, he had greater satisfaction in dealing with him than any other artist … Once he had pledged his word as to time and quality, he might be implicitly relied on.’42 According to Thornbury, Turner returned a thousand pounds Heath had advanced to him for work on an issue of The Keepsake, one of the then popular annuals that were issued around Christmas, suggesting that Heath pay him when his business picked up. Hugh Munro of Novar, amateur artist and friend of Turner, told of an occasion when, far from harassing an engraver, an engraver harassed Turner. Munro had visited Turner on a Sunday afternoon, ‘when the painter was often at leisure’, and one of the Cookes had burst in on them. The engraver, ‘with all the air of a bullying tailor come to look after a poor sweating journeyman, wanted to know if those drawings of his were never to be finished. When the door closed behind him, the big salt tears came into Turner’s eyes, and he murmured something about “no holiday ever for me”.’43