His friends generally admired his perseverance at the sport. He fished in all weathers. George Jones went fishing with him at Petworth and on a visit to Sir J. Wyattville at Windsor Castle on the Thames. Jones said, ‘His success as an angler was great, although with the worst tackle in the world. Every fish he caught he showed to me, and appealed to me to decide whether the size justified him to keep it for the table, or to return it to the river. His hesitation was often almost touching, and he always gave the prisoner at the bar the benefit of the doubt.’26 The Trimmers went fishing with him – the eldest son recalled as a boy accompanying him one day when he went fly-fishing from the banks of the Thames: ‘He insisted on my taking the fish, which he strung on some grass through the gills, and seemed to take more pleasure in giving me the fish than in taking them … He threw the fly in first-rate style.’27
His tackle was not always poor; a favourite rod in his later years could be assembled out of ten sections, with a brass reel and hefty line. Clearly Turner’s ambition was to catch fish, not to break records by using lightweight line. However, according to Thomas Rose of Cowley Hall, Uxbridge, Turner on one visit brought along an umbrella that didn’t contain a bayonet but became ‘by some contrivance’ a fishing rod. Rose saw him with this ‘sitting patiently for hours by the side of a piece of water belonging to the property … perhaps without even a single nibble’. But when he got a bite, he ‘appeared as much pleased as a boy from school’.28
As a boy in the early 1830s, Robert Leslie was at Petworth with his father when, walking in the park, they saw a solitary man pacing to and fro, watching over his lines strung out beyond the water-lilies that grew near the bank.
‘There’, said my father, ‘is Mr. Turner, the great sea painter.’ He was smoking a cigar, and on the grass, near him, lay a fine pike. As we came up, another fish had just taken one of the baits, but, by some mischance, this line got foul of a stump or tree root in the water, and Turner was excited and very fussy in his efforts to clear it, knotting together bits of twine, with a large stone at the end, which he threw over the line several times with no effect. ‘He did not care,’ he said, ‘so much about losing the fish as his tackle.’ My father hacked off a long slender branch of a tree and tried to poke the line clear. This also failed, and Turner told him that nothing but a boat would enable him to get his line.
Charles Leslie, the day before, had seen Chantrey trolling for jack, rowed about by a man in a boat. Thinking it hard that Turner should lose his fish and a valuable line, Leslie and Robert went across the park to a keeper’s cottage, where the key of the boathouse was kept.
When we returned, and while waiting for the boat, Turner became quite chatty, rigging me a little ship, cut out of a chip, sticking masts into it, and making her sails from a leaf or two torn from a small sketch-book, in which I recollect seeing a memorandum in colour that he had made of the sky and sunset. The ship was hardly ready for sea before the man and boat came lumbering up to the bank, and Turner was busy directing and helping him to recover the line, and, if possible, the fish. This, however, escaped in the confusion. When the line was got in, my father gave the man a couple of shillings for bringing the boat; while Turner, remarking that it was no use fishing any more after the water had been so much disturbed, reeled up his other lines, and slipping a finger through the pike’s gills, walked off with us toward Petworth House.
Young Robert walked behind, admiring the great fish, and noticing as Turner carried it
how the tail dragged on the grass, while his own coat-tails were but little further from the ground; also that a roll of sketches, which I picked up, fell from a pocket in one of these coat-tails, and Turner, after letting my father have a peep at them, tied the bundle up tightly with a bit of the sacred line. I think he had taken some twine off this bundle of sketches when making his stone rocket apparatus, and that this led to the roll working out of his pocket. My father knew little about fishing or fishing-tackle, and asked Turner, as a matter of curiosity, what the line he had nearly lost was worth. Turner answered that it was an expensive one, worth quite half a crown.
Turner’s fish was served for dinner that evening; and, though I was not there to hear it, my father told me how old Lord Egremont joked Chantrey much about his having trolled the whole of the day without even a single run, while Turner had only come down by coach that afternoon, gone out for an hour, and brought in this big fish … I have often thought that Turner went out to catch that pike because he knew that Chantrey had been unsuccessful that day before.29
While he fished alone, his mind free-wheeled over many subjects, but it was not so relaxed that useful ideas didn’t swim through it. Lines of verse came to him and were sometimes written down. It was while looking at the River Dee, for instance, when at Tabley Hall, that he had noted the effect of ripples on reflections. He acquired a good deal of angling lore: he knew that while fishing you should sit facing the sun, so that your body didn’t cast a shadow out over the water and alert the fish. He owned a copy of The Compleat Angler and sometimes took it with him on his travels. Isaak Walton’s book, first published in 1653, conveyed the obsessive quality of angling and the dreaminess that an angler is subject to. It gave all sorts of handy tips – about, among other things, the making of fishponds, which he seems to have taken note of when digging one at his new house at Twickenham, on which he started work in 1812. The book told the reader how to make and then colour – for camouflage purposes – a fishing line, using a pint of strong ale, half a pound of soot, some walnut-leaf juice and a little alum, the sort of recipe that Turner was fond of. It also described times and places for catching particular fish, surveyed types of hooks and bait, and suggested ways of cooking one’s catch. It is a book of homespun wisdom and reflection, interspersed with poetry, and Turner no doubt approved of it on that score too.
Like John Donne, whose love poem ‘The Baite’ makes good use of fishy metaphor, Turner enjoyed figures of speech derived from angling. He evidently had rod as well as pencil and sketchbook in hand in 1809 when making drawings for his Perspective lectures and jotted down the words:
Below the Summer Hours they pass
The water gliding clear as glass
The finny race escapes my line
No float or slender thread entwine.30
Other doleful lines from this time include a lament from a ‘hapless’ fisherman driven by rain under a tree ‘in doubtful shelter’, while ‘the anxious angle trembles in his hands’. This is in a long screed that ends with a true cri de coeur: ‘Written at Purley on the Thame rainy morning no fishing.’31
Particularly when corresponding with his good friend (and fellow fisherman) James Holworthy, after Holworthy moved to Hathersage in Derbyshire in 1822, Turner’s language was coloured by their common interest. In the freezing January of 1826, and in the wake of a financial collapse in the City of London which had helped precipitate the failure of his printsellers Hurst and Robinson, Turner wrote to Holworthy; he compared Holworthy’s position in the country with his in town, where the Thames
is impeded below bridge; St James’ and Serpentine both frozen in spight of every attempt to keep them open by folly and rashness; so the advantage is by the side of the trout stream in more ways than one. Look at the crash in the commercial world of mercantile speculation, and the check which must folow, but the trouts will be found in the pool and the gudgeon in the shallow, but everyone seems to have had a nibble, and experience so bought will last longer than a day or its day …32
And at the end of the same year, in a letter to Holworthy, Turner alluded to wild talk that he, Turner, had been blown up in the explosion of a powder magazine that autumn near Ostend, where he had planned to stop, and notes that the rumour does not seem to have reached Holworthy in his quiet valley at Hathersage: therefore ‘the lake babbled not or the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not …’33
Even though addicted to angling, Turner was not the sort of fi
sherman who when doing it excluded all else. As noted, sketching and verse-writing went well with fishing. He could put down his rod, as at Petworth, to make the model boat for young Robert Leslie. He could even talk: again at Petworth, he was sitting by the pond one day fishing with J. E. Carew, the sculptor who did restoration for Lord Egremont, when Carew broke the companionable silence to say, interrogatively, ‘Turner – they tell me you’re very rich.’
With a chuckle, Turner replied, ‘Am I?’
‘Yes – everybody says so.’
‘Ah. Well, I’d give it all up to be twenty-five years of age again.’
‘What? Do you like it so well as all that?’ Carew asked ironically.
‘Yes, I do.’34
Fish and fishing got into his work. There were the fishermen off the Needles, by moonlight; flounder-fishing at Battersea; fishing off the Blythe Sand; Dutch fisherfolk cleaning and displaying their catch; fishing boats off Hastings; eel hooks and smelt catching and crab pots … He was interested in those who made their living out of fish. Personal, amateur fishing too: a rod that looks to be waiting for its owner to show up lies in the foreground of his painting The Fountain of Indolence (RA 1834). One of the Liber subjects was The Young Anglers; the boys in this are shown fishing in the pond of Marylebone Fields, a short walk from Queen Anne Street – Turner no doubt was reminded of himself at that age, happily hoping to hook a chub with improvised tackle. He sketched anglers whenever he saw them, with fellow-feeling, a nice example being those who reappear in Trout Fishing in the Dee, a mountainous–pastoral painting that resulted from his Tabley Hall stay and was exhibited in 1809. The look of fish – the iridescence and translucence; the shine and wetness of scales; the aggrieved appearance of eye and mouth – was captured in a study of four fish, a sort of still-life, he did in pencil and watercolour, maybe at Farnley in the early 1820s.35
Turner’s ‘piscatory propensities’36 were a source of humour for his friends and patrons. Elhanan Bicknell, whose art collecting was funded by his whale-oil business, bought a painting, the Ehrenbreitstein, from Turner in the early 1840s but had trouble taking delivery because John Pye was engraving a plate from it. Bicknell wrote to Pye in June 1845:
My getting the painting appears as distant now as it was in March 1844. I thought I had only to send to Queen Ann St. to have it – but the grim master of the Castle Giant Grimbo shakes his head and says he & you must first agree that all is done to the plate that is necessary, & the picture will be wanted to refer to. Now as I know he goes out a good deal fishing at this season – & then leaves town for some months tour in the Autumn, I hope you will do what is required while he is in town. He is at home today and tomorrow, for he is to dine with me tomorrow – he said he should then get off after fish.
Pray fasten your strongest hook into him before he fairly takes water again or he may get so far and so deep that even a harpoon will not reach him …37
Turner, writing to Bicknell in January 1845, fell into the same cosy mode, on one occasion telling him to call at Queen Anne Street at his earliest convenience, ‘for I have a whale or two on canvas’.38
Turner painted fish, wrote fish, thought fish and dreamt fish. Some of his dream fish were the sort he would have loved to catch; some, as he grew old, were monsters, spawned by nightmares. A misshapen fish, seen head on, appears to have popped up out of the sea, at the water’s edge, as the artist stood looking out from Margate or Deal beach. One painting he entitled Sunrise with Sea Monsters (c. 1845). The fish that devour the human food in Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying (RA 1840), beneath a lurid tropical sky, are not so much sharks as chub and goldfish grown to fiendish size, avenging representatives of all the fish he had sought and caught. He would have read in Izaak Walton ‘of the monsters, or fish, call them what you will’, to be found in various rivers and seas, and of the strange marine creatures collected by John Tradescant and Elias Ashmole in the seventeenth century and to be seen in London in their private museum of natural curiosities. Like Walton, Turner seems to have felt ‘that the waters are Nature’s store-house, in which she locks up her wonders’.39
A waterbound place in southern England to which he returned in the 1820s was the Isle of Wight. He had been a little-known young artist when he sketched there in 1795, visiting the western end of the island, and storing impressions for what would be his first oil exhibited at the RA, Fishermen at Sea, the following year. In 1827 he went back as a famous painter at the invitation of the most celebrated architect of the time, John Nash. The island was a place for admiring the picturesque rather than the sublime, but Turner by his second visit was less in thrall to such concepts. However, Nash, aged seventy-five, had built his own picturesque creation, East Cowes Castle, in which his castle-loving guest must have had a happy time. It was a hilltop mansion-cum-folly, with towers and battlements, overlooking the waters of Cowes Roads and the Solent. Nash was brilliant and unorthodox – the sort of man who took to Turner, possibly because Turner responded to him. Nash since just before the turn of the century had been a member of the Prince of Wales’s set. By 1827, with royal backing, he had changed the face of central London: laid out Regent’s Park (named after his good friend and patron) and its surrounding terraces of grand houses; converted Buckingham House into a palace; developed St James’s Park; and was now preparing to reshape the top of Whitehall and the old Royal Mews into Trafalgar Square.
Turner went on to the Nash castle after a short visit to Petworth, and was treated as a valued guest. Nash set aside a room for him to paint in. Boats and the water were on hand. Cowes Regatta, started by the Royal Yacht Squadron the year before, took place while he was there, and he went afloat to sketch the big white-sailed cutters and ketches fretting like racehorses around the starting line. (On several days he listed the names of yachts and their owners, perhaps prodded by his reportorial instinct, perhaps foreseeing a possibility that the wealthy yachtsmen might buy ensuing pictures.) He had a productive time. He filled three sketchbooks, did a large number of ink-and-chalk drawings on blue paper and painted several oils. In the pencil sketches a few lines suffice to suggest the slant and tilt of masts and sails, as the boats heel to the wind and hobby-horse over the Solent chop. For his sugar-paper drawings he stalked the grounds by day and night, sketching the battlements and bastions in the August sunlight and the statuary set in and around ornamental basins under a new moon.
That he was enjoying himself was shown by the fact that he made a gift of a pencil drawing of the Medina river, showing ships at anchor and a lady sitting in the stern of a skiff; he gave this to Miss Harriet Petrie, then a guest at the castle, and embellished the present with his initials: JMWT. He got on so well that he stayed from late July to early September, longer than he had meant to. On three occasions he wrote to his father, who was looking after things in Queen Anne Street, asking him to send more clothes – ‘Light Trouzers’ and ‘White Waistcoats’ – and painting materials – a ‘canvass’, six feet by four, to be sent rolled up, without a stretching frame; ‘some scarlet lake and dark lake and burnt Umber’, from James Newman’s shop in Soho Square; and, as an afterthought, ‘1 ounce of Mastic’, all to be sent by the Southampton or Portsmouth coach.40
Two of the paintings he did for Nash of Cowes Regatta were on view at the RA in 1828; one of the chalk drawings was worked up into another subject with nautical overtones (and a long title), Dido directing the equipment of the Fleet, or The Morning of the Carthaginian Empire. It was intended for a collector called John Broadhurst, but it remained unsold, in the artist’s gallery. Turner’s Carthaginian fantasies overlapped with those of being at the helm of a racing yacht. While at Nash’s castle, he painted on two lengths of the canvas his father had sent down nine vibrant oil sketches of yachts competing out in the Solent. Figures from a sketch at the castle also came in handy for a painting he called Boccaccio relating the Tale of the Birdcage, a Watteauesque scene that puzzled Boccaccio readers, the Decameron having no birdcage tale in it. His real
power was shown in a slightly later painting, never exhibited in his lifetime, called The Music Party. This apparently shows a small evening party in the castle’s Octagon Room, with long red drapes hanging in a window embrasure, and a piano being played by a lady in an off-the-shoulder black dress; Mrs Nash was a skilful pianist.
He also made time on the Isle of Wight to catch up with an old friend and former pupil, Julia Bennet. Now married to Sir James Willoughby Gordon, who owned a house at Niton, near the southern tip of the island, she and her sister had inherited a manor house called Northcourt, near the island village of Shorwell. The previous year he had shown at the Academy a painting titled View from the Terrace of a Villa at Niton, Isle of Wight, from Sketches by a Lady; so it may be that Julia Gordon, by getting him to work up her sketches, had reinterested him in the island. The fact that he did for her something that he would not have done for most hostesses suggests that an affection persisted for his pupil. Moreover, in one of the sketchbooks he used on the island is found a draft of a note: ‘Give my love to Miss Wickham. Hopes that windows are now fully squared, and seen through in. Perspective JMWT.’41 Was Miss Wickham a friend of Julia Gordon’s who had also studied with him, in particular how to draw houses? However, it seems dismal that he felt the need to write a trial version of such a message. At the Gordons on the island he painted Near Northcourt in the Isle of Wight, a limpid landscape showing two women washing clothes at a stream beside a sunken lane, with a black dog in attendance. Perhaps down at St Catherine’s Point, below Niton, he sat on the beach and absorbed the empty Channel for the oil Study of Sea and Sky, Isle of Wight, painted on a section of his roll of canvas, which was never exhibited in his lifetime but was the precursor of many similar shipless marine paintings that expressed the immensity of the elements, the smallness of man – all part of crossing life’s brook. Then he went back to the bustle of the house-party at the Nashes overlooking the crowded Solent.
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