Turner felt at home at Farnley. The Fawkes girls recalled seeing the door to one of his rooms open one day, ‘with cords spread across the room as in that of a washerwoman, and papers tinted with pink, and blue, and yellow, hanging on them to dry’.4 He felt free to shoo the girls off if they pestered him when sketching in the grounds, saying to them ‘Go away, you little baggages!’ Did they – girls were bothersome – remind him of his own daughters? However, he helped illustrate a five-volume ornithological scrapbook for the Fawkes children, making watercolour studies of birds for them to stick in opposite the pages on which feathers from similar birds were fastened. His bird portraits tended to be most effective, even most ‘life-like’, when the birds were dead; his watercolours of a live robin and goldfinch have a slightly hesitant touch. But he went to some lengths for the bird collection. When seven-year-old Richard Fawkes – later a military man – asked especially for a cuckoo, Turner got one for the purpose; he remembered in 1851, ‘A Cuckoo was my first achievement in killing on Farnley Moor in ernest request of Major Fawkes to be painted for the Book.’5
For Fawkes senior he did watercolours of the house and grounds, his training as an architectural draughtsman never put to better use, though Hardwick and Malton might not have approved his informal touches: a sash-window open at the bottom to reveal a woman looking out into the side garden; a carriage halting in the drive, to allow Fawkes and one of his dogs to get out; and two girls sitting in the drawing room, sewing or reading, while a third is playing the piano, and three Turner oils are shown hanging on the end wall around the fireplace. In the Oak Room, General Fairfax’s wheelchair seems to be awaiting an occupant. At the foot of John Carr’s staircase a footman bears a tray into the dining room. In the Conservatory, Chinese lanterns hang over an assortment of plants. He also drew the flower garden, the carriage drive, the old dairy, the Avenue, the Wood Walk, and the summer house seen from the Wharfe riverbank. (He went fishing along the Wharfe, which provided excellent angling up to Bolton Abbey.) He got involved in his host’s enthusiasms – particularly Fawkes’s antiquarian obsession. One coloured drawing was of the oak cabinet in which many of these relics were housed, and in this drawing Turner, like a small boy making a model, cut cupboard doors which could be opened so that they revealed the interior of the cabinet – this, and the items in it, were painted on another piece of paper stuck on the back of the first. He and Fawkes evidently had fun.
At Farnley Turner got more than moderate exercise; his appetite picked up. Years later he recalled the ‘culinary exploits’ of Hannah Holmes, a cook there.6 There were frequent picnics. He went grouse-shooting with his host on Hawksworth Moor and made his usual sketchbook record of the guns and dogs and dead game. After one such occasion, Turner was allowed to take the reins of a tandem carriage for a rough passage over some fields on the way back to Farnley, and the carriage capsized – no one hurt, much laughter, and the driver celebrated as ‘the Over-Turner’.7 (Walter Fawkes may have known that Turner, as we have seen, had already been given this nickname by the True Briton in May 1803.)
For his host, Turner also put to work his talent as an architect; he designed a pair of neo-classical lodges for the east gate of the Hall, and made a watercolour to commemorate the finished product. Turner was to be bumped into in the house or grounds at any time of day, sometimes down by the river with his rod, but most often with a sketchbook and pencil in hand, sketching, say, one of the peacocks. (He identified with peacocks perhaps even more than with mallards, putting one in the frontispiece of the Liber and another on a chunk of classical masonry in The Thames at Weybridge, painted c. 1807–10; there was something about their searching eyes and hooked beaks that may have reminded him of what he saw in the mirror when shaving.) Young Hawksworth, the eldest son, came across him on one of his sketching prowls and drew a funny caricature of the honoured guest.
Turner’s secretiveness about his working habits was undermined at Farnley. Perhaps emboldened by seeing his ‘laundry-line’, one of the Fawkes girls sought hints on painting watercolours and was told to first soak the paper in a jug of water. Hawksworth always remembered one stormy day when, he said, ‘Turner called to me loudly from the doorway, “Hawkey! Hawkey! Come here! Come here! Look at this thunderstorm. Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it sublime?” All this time he was making notes of its form and colour on the back of a letter. I proposed some better drawing-block, but he said it did very well. He was absorbed – he was entranced. There was the storm rolling and sweeping and shafting out its lightning over the Yorkshire hills. Presently the storm passed, and he finished. “There, Hawkey,” he said. “In two years time you will see this again, and call it Hannibal crossing the Alps.”’8 Out of his experience of a Wharfedale thunderstorm and his knowledge of Alpine scenery, Turner contrived the elements that began to shake up his classical compositions: swirl and vortex. Claudean serenity and certainty hit the fan of change and doubt. The ‘first chaos of the world’ was revisited.
On hand at the first day of creation of Hannibal, Hawkey also had the good fortune to be there at the making of a watercolour masterpiece – seeing it all, from start to finish. As Edith Mary Fawkes – Walter Fawkes’s great-niece – related, at breakfast one morning Fawkes said to Turner,
‘I want you to make me a drawing of the ordinary dimensions that will give some idea of the size of a man of war.’ The idea hit Turner’s fancy, for with a chuckle he said to Walter Fawkes’s eldest son, then a boy of about fifteen, ‘Come along, Hawkey, and we will see what we can do for Papa,’ and the boy sat by his side the whole morning and witnessed the evolution of The First Rate taking in Stores. His description of the way Turner went to work was very extraordinary; he began by pouring wet paint till it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos – but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia, came into being and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph.9
At Farnley Hall, about sixty miles from the sea, Turner drew a sea picture, retrieving from his memory the towering sides of the ship and its immense tumblehome, and prompting a sense of its spars and rigging mostly out of sight above.
Hawksworth saw Turner on another morning, watching a housemaid at work pipeclaying some outside steps. He talked her into giving him some, which he carried off to his rooms, and afterwards said it made a ‘capital white’ in a drawing.10
In July 1816 Turner took one of the coaches he by now knew well that went to Leeds, with names such as Lord Nelson, Highflyer and True Briton. The fare for an outside seat behind the coachroof was two guineas, with a few extras for tips and porters’ fees; he saved about a guinea by not travelling inside. At 10 m.p.h. the coach thundered up the now hard-surfaced Great North Road to Grantham, where passengers spent the night. On the journey, hunched down in the wind and rain, Turner may have thought of earlier trips north. His first tour to Yorkshire had been in the summer of 1797, following hard in Tom Girtin’s tracks; then, among other things, he had gone to paint watercolours of Harewood House, the home of the Lascelles family, five miles east of Farnley. That year young Edward Lascelles had bought his St Erasmus and Bishop Islip’s Chapels for three guineas – a sum he didn’t scorn at the time. He had gone on from Harewood to other parts of the north: north-eastwards to the Tees, the Tweed and Berwick; over to the Lake District; across the sands of Morecambe Bay to Lancaster at low tide; across to York, Harewood again, and Beverley. Six results of that tour had been displayed at the RA in 1798, including views of Kirkstall Abbey and Norham Castle on the Tweed (the second of these Edward Lascelles also bought).11 Turner thereafter associated the north with his rapid success; in 1831 he would come again to Norham Castle and be seen taking off his hat and bowing low to it. A companion asked him what all this was about. Turner said: ‘I made a drawing of Norham Castle several years since. It took. And from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute.’12
> He had also gone north in 1799, when he went to Whalley on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire to make drawings for Dr Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s History of that place. He seems to have been introduced to Whitaker by a bookseller and artist in Halifax, Thomas Edwards, who also knew Walter Fawkes, and may have introduced Turner – ‘the draftsman’ – to him as well.
Sixteen years later, memories of being irritated by Whitaker were no doubt far from Turner’s mind as he was borne north. He now had an immense commission for another Whitaker project: a History of Yorkshire, the first part of which was to be a History of Richmondshire, and all to be illustrated with engravings after his watercolours. Farington, ever agog for such news, noted that Turner was to be paid 3000 guineas for 120 drawings, though he shortly scaled down the fee to 2000 guineas – still a tidy amount. Farington added, ‘After making his agreement with Messrs Longman & Co he returned to them and told them he had omitted to mention his expences in travelling. They replied that they considered that expences to be included in the agreement, but he would not allow it. It ended in their proposing to give him twenty pounds which he assented to, but added that it must be made guineas.’13
On the second day of his 1816 journey north he travelled from Grantham to Doncaster to Leeds and finally reached Otley before nightfall. There was a hearty welcome at Farnley, and then three days to get over his coach ride before the Fawkeses took him along on a family holiday, westward, up into the Pennines. Mrs Fawkes wrote in her always sparsely worded diary an entry for 17 July: ‘Left Farnley with Walter, Maria, Amelia, Ayscough, Richard and Mr. Turner.’ The four children rode with her in a carriage; Turner and Fawkes rode on horseback.14 They stayed the night in Skipton and then journeyed on to Browsholme, near Clitheroe on the Lancashire border. Browsholme was the home of Thomas Lister Parker, an old friend of Fawkes and another patron of Turner; it was a large old house, three storeys high, with a lovingly preserved interior. Mrs Fawkes’s diary records days of rain, for example: ‘Fri. 19th. Rained all day. Sat in the house. Late in the evening walked a short way with John Parker and Mr. Turner … Tues. 23rd. Heavy rain. Drove with Walter. Obliged to take shelter in a farmhouse. Walter bought a print of the Prodigal Son … Thurs. 25th. Went to see Gordale Waterfall. Returned home. Heavy rain. Turner went on a sketching tour.’15
1816 went into the records as ‘the year without a summer’. Mount Tambora, a volcano in the South Pacific, had erupted the year before, its ash clouds affecting the world’s climate. But Turner had his Longmans commission to fulfil, and he put up with the rain. After his final jaunt with the Fawkes family to see the great gorge and waterfall at Gordale, he set off for more than two weeks on his own, covering some 500 miles on horseback, exploring market towns like Richmond and Kendal, staying in small inns, clambering up fells and trekking round peatbogs, looking into caves and potholes, visiting more waterfalls or ‘forces’ as they were called up there, sketching castles and abbeys, the Lake District mountains, Yorkshire moorlands and dales – all picturesque enough, all hard, wet work; three sketchbooks-full.
One day at Mill Gill falls, near Askrigg in Wensleydale, he dropped a sketchbook he was using and got it muddy; he turned the page and kept sketching. A day’s ride with halts for drawing was often followed by a quick excursion from his inn for an evening sketch or two. At High Force on the upper Tees he stayed out so long that it grew dark and for a while he was astray, but eventually found his inn. He crossed the sands of upper Morecambe Bay at low tide, presumably in the company of one of the carriages that made the journey (and sometimes got bogged down), their passengers keeping an apprehensive eye on the fast-flooding tide. From Richmond, on 31 July, he dropped a line to his friend the watercolour artist James Holworthy, to tell him that he found it impossible to meet him at a mutual acquaintance’s as they had arranged, and added the postscript: ‘Weather miserably wet; I shall be web-footed like a drake, except the curled feather; but I must proceed northwards. Adieu!’ The weather did not improve; as he wrote to Holworthy a little later, it was still ‘Rain, Rain, Rain, day after day … a most confounded fagg, tho on horseback … the passage out of Teesdale leaves everything far behind for difficulty – bogged most compleatly Horse and its Rider, and nine hours making 11 miles …’16
He was back at Farnley on Sunday, 11 August. He had made 450 sketches and was glad for a bath, a drying fire and the convivial company of the Fawkes family. Perhaps he recited to Walter Fawkes a song he had heard during his tour and written down in a sketchbook:17
Here’s a health to Honest John Bull
When he is gone, where will ye find such another
So with Hearts as with Bumpers quite full
Here’s a health to Old England his mother.
He was back in time for the Glorious Twelfth, when the grouse-shooting season began, and Fawkes held a shooting party. ‘All the gentlemen’, Mrs Fawkes wrote in her diary, ‘went to the moors.’18 Turner recorded the scenes in several sketchbooks, one larger than usual:19 the bare moors; loose clouds drifting over a valley; the beaters with dogs; the sportsmen on their horses or standing with their guns; the well-organized after-shoot refreshments. He also made several watercolours of the event. One was called Grouse-Shooting, Beamsley Beacon – Beamsley Beacon was out on the moors about six miles north-west of Farnley, towards Bolton Abbey. In another watercolour, Shooting Party on the Moors, three marquees have been erected, a barrel of ale is waiting to be broached, and dead birds are lying ready to be grilled over a fire. Walter Fawkes stands holding a bird he has shot. The painter has inscribed on the nearby canvas of a tent: W. FAWKES FARN.
But the holiday mood was shattered next day. Richard Hawksworth Fawkes, Walter’s youngest brother, was injured by a shotgun blast. He seemed ‘pretty well’ the following day, according to Mrs Fawkes, but on the evening of the 15th was said by a doctor to be failing. On the 16th Mrs Fawkes wrote: ‘Poor Richard died 5 o’clock in the morning.’20 The shooting-party guests left the stricken house over the next day or so, though Turner, John Parker and a Miss Coates stayed on a little longer. Then Turner went off for another sketching excursion. He wrote to W. B. Cooke from Farnley on 28 August, acknowledging the receipt of a letter from Cooke and explaining that he had been away again. Richard Fawkes’s death had ‘made it better for me to leave for a few days’.21 Though close to the Fawkeses, he felt the need to let them be on their own to mourn, without having to worry about him as a house-guest.
He made a cover for a sketchbook used at this time out of a tract, on which were printed some Old Testament lines from Exodus; the Lord tells Moses to make coats for Aaron’s sons. Perhaps he picked it up on his travels and remembered his schooldays with Mr Coleman. The sketchbook contained a sketch that formed the basis of a drawing for an unpublished Liber plate, The Stork and Aqueduct. Inside one cover he wrote a poem, first in pencil, then in ink:
Sweet Independence, rough is thy nature, hardy, sincere,
Thou gives the humble roof content, devoid of fear
Even of tomorrow’s fate, and adds a blissful joy
To its perhaps lone inmate, even without alloy.22
The Fawkeses, drawing together at this sad moment, made him feel his essential solitariness.
Yet he remained based at Farnley through the first two weeks of September, writing several times to Holworthy to try to arrange a meeting on his way back to London, and sympathizing with his friend, who had been suffering from rheumatism, which Turner called ‘the Rumaticks’.23 Despite the grief at Farnley, despite the weather, it had been a successful summer tour: at least three crammed sketchbooks and a number of preparatory watercolours – some of those ‘beginnings’ made up of broad washes of colour that he used for setting down the tonal structure of pictures to come, and which the Fawkes girls may have seen hanging from his laundrylines. Twenty finished watercolours became his contribution to the History of Yorkshire, a project which remained incomplete; Dr Whitaker died in 1821. In them, with an occasional nod to the sublime and
frequent genuflections to the picturesque, he evoked a landscape which moved him: limestone scars, meandering rivers, tumbling waterfalls, distant valleys.
At some point during this Yorkshire visit he seems to have found time to call on a Leeds bookseller and printdealer, a Mr Robinson, to whom Longmans had given him a sealed letter of introduction. This apparently ‘recommended’ the artist in unflattering terms, Longmans having experienced the artist’s hard bargaining. The letter concluded, ‘Above all things remember that Turner is a GREAT JEW.’ According to Thornbury, Mr Robinson (no anti-Semite) took this injunction literally and, since it was a Sunday when Turner called, suggested that he amuse himself with some books while he, Robinson, went to church. Later the printdealer apologized when ham was served for dinner.24
Turner was at Farnley Hall again the following year, several months after returning to England from a trip up the Rhine and after his intervening expedition to Durham and Raby Castle. He was apparently somewhere in the north on 31 October 1817, when his daughter Evelina married Joseph Dupuis in the fashionable church of St James’s, Piccadilly. She was seventeen; he was twenty-eight – an ‘older man’ and consular official, perhaps met through her mother’s musical friends. Sarah Danby was at the wedding and was entered in the marriage register as one of the witnesses. Even if her father was absent, Evelina didn’t hide her paternity; she was married in the name of Evelina Turner. But she may have liked the idea of a husband who would also be a father to her; she accompanied him to his next post in West Africa, where they survived the climate of the White Man’s Grave but became parents of a child who died in infancy. (They went on to have four other children who lived. Joseph Dupuis was apparently a touchy man, who never became more than a vice-consul in distant posts, though his book, Journal of a Residence in Ashantee, published in 1824, was seriously reviewed.) Clearly Evelina didn’t need to go to the Gold Coast, far from Turner’s sight, to be out of Turner’s mind.
J.M.W. Turner Page 29