‘I have travelled a great deal in the East, Mr Turner,’ Westall ventured, ‘and therefore know of what I am speaking, and I can assure you that a palm-tree is never of that colour: it is always green.’
‘Umph!’ grunted Turner, almost transfixing Westall with his glance. ‘Umph! I can’t afford it – can’t afford it.’ And with those words he walked away.39
Turner wasn’t only respected by people who were influenced by his kind of painting; artists who worked in quite different ways admired him too. Haydon, unsympathetic to most Academicians, was impressed by the fact that Turner dropped in to see his Solomon, when Haydon exhibited it to the public in 1814 – the ardent paranoiac wrote, calmly for once, ‘Turner behaved well and did me justice.’40 The following year Haydon took the celebrated Italian sculptor Antonio Canova round town to ‘show him the lions’. They went to Turner’s gallery and Canova as he looked at the pictures kept exclaiming ‘Grand genie!’41 Another artist who took to Turner’s work was Thomas Lawrence, the handsome and fashionable portrait painter, who was knighted by the Prince Regent in 1815 and elected President of the Academy in 1820 in succession to West. It was after his visit to Turner’s gallery in 1809 that Lawrence had tried to interest a Yarmouth collector named Penrice, who wanted to acquire some Old Masters, in buying the work of a living artist instead: Turner, he told Penrice, being ‘indisputably the first landscape painter in Europe’. The picture Lawrence had in mind – which Penrice didn’t buy – was Near the Thames Lock, Windsor, which Lawrence described as ‘full of sentiment, and certainly of genius … It is in his own peculiar manner, but that at its best.’42 Turner, as we shall see, had his loyal way of returning such gestures.
The engraver and writer John Landseer had visited Turner’s gallery in 1808 and had been bowled over by the new lightness of key. He wrote, in his quarterly Review of Publications of Art, ‘The brightness of his lights is less effected [sic] by the contrast of darkness than that of any other painter whatever, and even in his darkest and broadest breadths of shade, there is – either produced by some few darker touches, or by some occult magic of his peculiar art – a sufficiency of natural clearness.’43 And four decades later, John Burnet declared, ‘The light key upon which most of our present landscape painters work owes its origin to Turner; the presence of his pictures on the walls of the Academy engendered this change from the darker imitations of Wilson and Gainsborough, or the contemplation of the landscapes of the Dutch school’44 – though he went on to wonder whether the English school wasn’t ‘extending this principle to excess’.45 The light key had a brilliant adherent in John Constable, who was finally making an impression in 1815. Constable, who in conversation now and then made envious remarks about Turner, once exclaimed to C. R. Leslie, a friend he had in common with Turner, ‘Did you ever see a picture by Turner and not wish to possess it?’46 In the battle against the White Painters, Sir George couldn’t win.
It was curious that the influential baronet did not attack more effectively what really might have been Turner’s artistic Achilles’ heel: his depictions of human beings. As we have seen, a critic in the Examiner, after viewing Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar in 1808, thought that all the crew members of the Victory had been ‘murdered’,47 and Farington had described the figures in the same painting as ‘miserably bad’.48 And yet in Dido building Carthage the figures are successfully done: naturally arranged, anatomically drawn, doing their bit in the picture. His trouble seemed to be not that he couldn’t draw and paint the human figure, as some critics complained, but that he wasn’t consistent in this respect. Sometimes he seemed to want to get his figures right, sometimes he gave the impression he didn’t care.
Turner – it is clear – never gave up practising his figure-drawing. ‘Academy studies’ from nude models appeared from time to time in his sketchbooks, among the sketches of boats and trees and country houses. The ‘Lowther’ sketchbook of 1809–1049 contains several accomplished drawings of female nudes: one woman, wearing only a head scarf, is lying on her back with one knee raised, one hand to her turned-aside face, and there is a suggestion of something more intimate than a life-class study – is this Sarah posing for William? (The fact that the following four pages of the sketchbook were torn out prompts thoughts that he went on to draw even more intimate sketches, which someone later removed.) In the ‘Hastings to Margate’ sketchbook of the years 1815–16,50 there are several simply drawn nudes that are first-rate – one, done from the back, in which the woman has her left hand touching the top of her head, hair piled high; another, from the front, in which the drawing is equally direct and convincing, though the thick rendering of pubic hair might not have been regarded as academically proper. His colleagues presumably felt he was competent in figure-drawing, because they continued to appoint him as a Visitor to the Life School, giving him the opportunity to draw from the model while monitoring the students. He was still a Visitor there at the age of sixty-nine. But though much of his life-drawing was skilful in the disposition and moulding of the body, it could seem careless or uninspired, with a too-regular line for the curves of arms and thighs.
Now and then he sketched clothed figures in a way that showed he could respond to the human frame with empathy: barefooted Scottish girls in big shawls, seen in Edinburgh; the family group in an early Brighton sketchbook51 with a weariness in the way they walk. At Cowes in 1827 he drew the women in big hats and long dresses; he painted Mrs Nash at the piano, no face, vague in detail, but – in terms of the painting – right. The figures in many of his paintings work as part of the scene to which they have been assigned: fishermen in boats, shepherds on hillsides, Carthaginians on a quay, children on a beach. In such paintings as The Country Blacksmith and Pope’s Villa, the figures are perfectly serviceable and don’t draw attention by looking wrong. The Redgraves believed ‘his effort is rather to give the right treatment to his figures – the true effect of light and sun and air, their true keeping in the picture, and the indefinite mystery of sunshine upon them – than to define their forms or to complete their outline’.52
Yet close attention was not sought. Expressiveness was often wanting in faces; people seemed denied an individuality by being drawn without a look of their own. He drew human beings much of the time the way he drew animals – cows or pigs, say, and certainly granting them less uniqueness than he gave to crop-eared horses. People if not anonymously wooden might be grotesque, with bodies as cartoonish lumps or sticks, eyes like currants. The reviewer for the Monthly Magazine in 1803 declared that the Joseph (who was shown bald) in Turner’s Holy Family looked like a Chinese mandarin. Striking a similar note, the St James’s Chronicle of 12–15 May 1804 said that the sailors in Boats carrying out anchors and cables to Dutch men of war in 1665 were ‘all bald or like Chinese’.53 His increasingly conservative contemporary Wordsworth, seeing Turner’s Jessica at the Academy in 1830, thought the artist had painted it after he ‘had indulged in raw liver when he was very unwell’.54 Viewers of other Turner pictures with figures in them were reminded of stuffed fish; dummy heads like those in the window of the Maiden Lane barbershop; bags of potatoes; Punch and Judy characters …
The same painter who did the figures in Dido building Carthage produced such a freakshow as What you Will!, another Watteau-influenced picture, this time a study of characters from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that he exhibited in 1822; here the figures look like ill-made puppets. The statuary in the garden where Turner has placed them seems a lot more life-like than the purported people. His great exemplar Claude was no help in this respect: Claude’s weirdly elongated figures often look as if they have their heads on backwards. At the beginning of Turner’s career, many of the figures in his paintings had an affinity with the low-life characters of Teniers and Rowlandson, but as time goes on other less down-to-earth models come into play, and his figures often have a gnome-like or goblin-like appearance reminiscent of Bosch, or seem unearthly like Blake’s. Many are short. Dido and Aeneas are exceptions. Someth
ing there was in Turner, surfacing at least some of the time in his work, that didn’t love people – their personality, their feel, their human nature – and didn’t want to look at them too closely.
There is indeed a curiously detached quality to the few ‘erotic’ drawings that survived excision by the executors and destruction approved by John Ruskin, and which we will consider again. A voyeurism – a sense of looking on rather than involvement – is evident, as in that drawing of the Swiss girl in bed with a companion, her costume on the floor. Of course, the artist is perforce a watcher and recorder, but Turner does not convey any affection or pleasure of the sort Rembrandt did in his etching showing a couple making love, Het Ledekant. Ruskin justified ‘the want of drawing’ in his hero’s representation of people as being a proper ‘indecision’, faithful to the way the eye at a distance takes in partial impressions of forms and figures in a landscape.55
Certainly, ‘indecision’ was in the air. It was possibly an aspect of the times that offended Sir George Beaumont, though it didn’t seem to bother him in the sister art of poetry. Turner was both captive and master of it, aiming to be extraordinary, and catching reverberations of ‘the first chaos of the world’. Despite the Congress of Vienna’s attempts to restore many features of the pre-revolutionary status quo in Europe, some crowns would never be put back on heads; some crowned heads were off altogether. Nineteenth-century steam was filling cylinders, pushing pistons, moving machinery, turning wheels and paddle-wheels. The reform of franchises and the redistribution of legislative power were being demanded. The deep distress of many city and country folk after the end of the long war helped produce an unstoppable force. The old order was crumbling, and Sir George – a member of Parliament for a rotten borough which had but one elector – was part of that structure. He must have sensed in Turner, despite his early sublime and picturesque trappings, a support for the forces of change.
Notes
1 Finberg, p.218. The picture is Distraining for Rent.
2 Hazlitt, ‘On Imitation’, Works, i, p.76n.
3 Farington, Diary, 5 June 1815.
4 TS, 1, 1, p.31.
5 Farington, Diary, 26 April 1799.
6 Century, p.4.
7 Farington, Diary, 3 May 1803.
8 Ibid., 1 April 1804.
9Ibid., 26 April 1806.
10 Ibid., 3 June 1806.
11 Ibid., 8 June 1811.
12 Ibid., 21 October 1812.
13 Th. 1877, p.432. Thornbury calls the baronet Sir John Beaumont.
14 Farington, Diary, 8 April 1813.
15 Ibid., 4 June 1815.
16 Figures collated from provenances listed in B&J.
17 Farington, Diary, 9 October 1809.
18 Greaves, Regency Patron, p.99.
19 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, p.49.
20 AR, i, p.157
21 Farington, Diary, 25 May 1806.
22 Greaves, Regency Patron, p.114.
23 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, p.421.
24 Greaves, Regency Patron, pp.154–5.
25 Ibid., pp.121–3.
26 Ibid., p.100.
27 Finberg, p.248.
28 Lindsay, p.96.
29 Farington, Diary, 5 July 1809.
30 Lindsay, pp.130–1.
31 Ziff, TS, 8, 2, p.18.
32 Finberg, p.208.
33 Farington, Diary, 12 June 1815.
34 Ibid., 6 May 1806.
35 Brown, Callcott, p.22.
36 Th. 1877, p.353.
37 TB CXXXV.
38 Finberg, pp.246–7.
39 Gage, Colour, pp.19, 226.
40 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, p.200.
41 Ibid., p.265.
42 Whitley, 1800–20, pp.150–1.
43 Finberg, p.143.
44 Burnet, Turner and his Works, p.61.
45 Century, p.262.
46 Swinburne, Turner, p.204.
47 Finberg, p.142.
48 Farington, Diary, 3 June 1806.
49 TB CXIII.
50 TB CXL.
51 TB XXX, f.96v.
52 Century, pp.254–5.
53 Finberg, p.109.
54 Gage, Rain, Steam and Speed, p.89.
55 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, p.201.
47 Queen Anne Street, from the Art-Journal c. 1852
12: Dear Fawkes
If Devon was one focal point in Turner’s world, Yorkshire was another, even more important – the magnetic North to which, when he wanted to get out of town, he felt himself pulled. Almost every year between 1808 and 1824 he went north to Yorkshire, to Farnley Hall, to be with the Fawkes family and to stay in the rooms they kept ready for him. From there he made sketching expeditions in the vicinity and further afield. Going to Farnley in summer or autumn was often both a working trip and a holiday. He went to breathe deeply the air of the river-furrowed Dales, in the North Riding of Yorkshire; how much he enjoyed himself was to be seen in the work he did there.
By 1816 he had known Walter Fawkes for some fourteen years. Fawkes, enthusiastic about the Alps, had commissioned three watercolours that arose from Turner’s 1802 Swiss tour.1 Turner went to Farnley for the first time in 1808 after staying at Tabley Hall in Cheshire, and Fawkes made this visit particularly memorable by ordering twenty watercolours: ten of the Alps, ten of Yorkshire. Between 1804 and 1810 Fawkes also bought six oils from Turner, setting aside his resolution only to buy watercolours from contemporary artists. These oils included the painting showing three views of the Victory coming up the Channel and the misty prospect of London from Greenwich. Slowly the relationship changed from being simply one between generous patron and favoured artist to one between good friends.
On 4 November 1812, at the Academy Council, Turner told Farington that he had ‘a nervous disorder, with much weakness of the stomach. Everything … disagreed with him – turned acid. He particularly mentioned an aching pain at the back of his neck. He said he was going to Mr Fawkes’s in Yorkshire for a month.’ Farington in his avuncular way told Turner that ‘air, moderate exercise and changing his situation would do most for him’.2 Turner had not made a summer tour in 1812. He was involved in building his new house in Twickenham, close to the Thames. Builders; his work; the split with Sarah; another impending course of perspective lectures – all may have brought on dyspepsia or an incipient ulcer, or have excited his hypochondria, which was probably aggravated by the fact that he was without a wife or lover to complain to. A month at Farnley would set him up for the rest of the smoggy London winter.
If you judge a man by his closest companions, Turner does well. The friend of Wells, Trimmer, Holworthy and Fawkes appears in a different light from when seen in the lonely gloom of Queen Anne Street. At Farnley Hall he was almost extrovert: ‘merry’ and ‘playful’ were words used to describe him there.3 What brought him out of his shell was in great part the personality of his host, Walter Ramsden Hawksworth Fawkes. Fawkes, of an old Yorkshire landowning family, had inherited Farnley from his father in 1792, at the age of twenty-three. Six years older than Turner, he had an income of some seven to eight thousand pounds a year. After being a happy-go-lucky undergraduate at Cambridge, he settled down to running the Farnley estates, marrying, becoming a father (with eventually four sons and seven daughters) and collecting art. He also held left-of-centre political views; as an ‘advanced’ Whig, he represented Yorkshire in Parliament from 1802 to 1807; at one election in 1806 he defeated the Tory candidate and Turner’s previous patron Edward Lascelles. Fawkes successfully bred short-horn cattle and helped run the local agricultural society. He not only painted and drew, as many country gentlemen did, but wrote on various historical and political topics. His Chronology of the History of Modern Europe, published in 1810, was a meticulous compilation of crowned heads and rulers, including the Carolingians, Ostrogoths, Mercians, and Moors in Spain, ‘from the Extinction of the Western Empire AD 475 to the Death of Louis the Sixteenth’. John Varley did a pencil portrait of Fawkes a few ye
ars later that showed his double chin, compressed lips and heavy eyebrows. Fawkes looked like a bulldog.
Farnley Hall was the right sort of house for such a man, multi-faceted, time-encrusted, sweetly placed. Onto a rambling late-sixteenth-century manor an elegant neo-classical mansion had been recently attached by Fawkes’s father; the architect of the new 1786–90 addition was John Carr of York. Both sections were built in the local millstone grit, the old part a rough grey, the new more smoothly dressed and gold in colour, with quartz adding to its sheen. Farnley, not far from the little market town of Otley, was set in well-treed parkland with open prospects of the River Wharfe to the south, green pastures and, from the upstairs rooms, the moors around Ilkley.
Fawkes was turning the old part of the house into a private museum for his collection of things from the seventeenth-century English Civil War. He had a number of items that had belonged to Thomas Fairfax, who had lived at nearby Menston Hall and served as a general in Cromwell’s army. Fairfax’s sword, boots, candlestick and wheelchair were kept in an oak-panelled room with a mullioned bay window. Parliamentary banners and pikes were hung among antlers and stags’ heads on the old staircase. In Carr’s balustraded Palladian building the rooms were larger, with high ceilings, elaborate plasterwork and fancy fireplaces, but still gave a feeling of domestic intimacy and, despite the large staff, privacy. Two sets of finely made double doors were hung in each doorway in the three-foot thick interior walls. The skylit grand staircase had columned landings and fine friezes. A small upstairs drawing room was octagon-shaped – a Carr feature. Turner’s big bed-sitting-room and adjoining smaller room, a suite which Fawkes insisted the artist use at any time, whether or not he and Mrs Fawkes were in residence, were at the south-east corner of the new house – the smaller room, for painting in, looked east towards the stables.
J.M.W. Turner Page 28