It was mid-November when he reached Farnley and found Mr and Mrs Fawkes away. When they got home, Turner was installed in his rooms. He had been working on a series of fifty watercolours of the Rhine, which Fawkes saw and immediately agreed to buy. A colourful account of this transaction has Turner arriving out of the blue one night ‘when dinner was ready; he was greeted with delight. “Where have you been?” “Up the Rhine.” “Have you done any work?” “Oh yes, a lot.” “Where are they?” “In my greatcoat.” “May I get them?” said Mr Fawkes, but Turner said “No,” went out to the coat – which was described … as one of the sort old hackney coachmen used to wear, [with] any number of capes, one over the other, and a lot of pockets – brought a roll out of one pocket and re-entered the drawing room and began to flatten out the drawings.’ Fawkes, ‘wild with delight’, bought the lot for £500.25
Turner seems to have felt he had travelled enough this year and been away too long from his own studio. He wrote to Holworthy from Farnley on 21 November, apologizing for not having been in touch, bemoaning the muddy weather once again and declaring, ‘I do wish to be in town … the day of the season is far spent, the night of winter near at hand; and … Barry’s words are always ringing in my ears: “Get home and light your lamp.”’ He was remembering a passage from a lecture James Barry had given in 1793, eulogizing Joshua Reynolds, in which Barry had said to the Royal Academy students and his colleagues, ‘Go home from the Academy, light your lamps, and exercise yourselves in the creative power of your Art, with Homer, with Livy, and all the great characters, ancient and modern, for your companions and counsellors.’26
The Fawkeses also had a splendid house in town – at 45 Grosvenor Place, Belgravia, looking out across the grounds of Buckingham House (as yet unmodernized by Nash). Turner often visited the family there. He did a watercolour of the extensive view eastwards from the upstairs windows, showing Buckingham House, the twin greystone towers of Westminster Abbey and, in the misty distance of the city, the dome of St Paul’s. He got involved in many Fawkes family occasions. In June 1818 he went with them to see two of their sons at school. Mrs Fawkes wrote in her diary: ‘Thursday, 4th June. Went to Eton to see the boat-race. Dined and slept at Salt Hill. Little Turner came with us.’ Her ‘Little Turner’ suggests not just Turner’s lack of height but the affection in which he was held. Turner took the opportunity to make a sepia drawing of another royal residence, Windsor Castle from Salt Hill – a drawing which was engraved for the Liber but never published.27 In June 1820 he again went with the Fawkeses and two of their daughters (and a family friend, the amateur artist Edward Swinburne) to the Eton boat-race. The following month he was with a Fawkes party that went downriver to Greenwich and then came back to tea at Grosvenor Place. As time passed, he was invited to Fawkes weddings. When their youngest, Anne, married Godfrey Wentworth, of Wooley Park, Yorkshire, on 20 June 1822, he was one of twenty-three guests who were invited to the dinner after the ceremony. Mrs Fawkes’s diary: ‘Anne and Godfrey married. A very long day. Had a large party to dinner. All tipsey.’ In the first part of 1825 he often had Sunday dinner with the Fawkeses at their new London house in Upper Harley Street, a short walk from Queen Anne Street; he was there on 2 March for Walter Fawkes’s fifty-sixth birthday, and he was there again on 6 April for the entertainment – which included harp-playing by a four-year-old girl prodigy – after Hawksworth’s marriage.28
Whether Fawkes and Turner ever got on to Christian-name terms is unlikely. Fawkes, the wealthy landowner, was patron as well as good friend to the professional artist. In one sketchbook of these years, the ‘Farnley’ of 1816–18, Turner jotted down some dimensions for ‘Mr Fawke’s Frame’.29 But Fawkes was certainly a wonderful patron. He bought from Turner works large and small, impromptu studies, studio watercolours and highly worked oils. He subscribed to the print of The Shipwreck in 1805. In 1809 he bought the London from Greenwich and Shoeburyness Fishermen. In 1810 he bought Lake of Geneva from Montreux. That year Turner noted in a sketchbook30 figures indicating that Fawkes owed him £1000, and their friendship didn’t stop him recording their business dealings. For example, in late 1821 he wrote in a sketchbook the prices of pictures Fawkes had recently bought: some watercolours of Italian scenes for twenty-five guineas each; the watercolour of the Farnley oak cabinet (with opening doors) for ten guineas; a drawing of swords for five guineas.
Thomas Uwins wrote a little later: ‘Fawkes buys from his own feelings. He is a man of sound good sense, with a long purse and a noble soul.’31 Fawkes bought Turners at the Academy exhibitions and commissioned Turners while walking around Farnley with him – for instance, the watercolour showing him and his dog getting out of his carriage at the east front of the Hall. On another occasion Fawkes and one of his sons, out shooting, overtook Turner with his sketching equipment. One of the Fawkes girls told W. L. Leitch that ‘they all walked a little way together, and came to a place where a dead buck was lying. The keepers had shot it, and they and their firelocks made a very striking group. Mr Fawkes said, “Turner, I wish you would make a note of that for me. It is very picturesque.” Turner pulled a tiny sketchbook from his waistcoat pocket, and quickly made what Mr Fawkes desired. At night Mr Fawkes said, “Mind, Turner, don’t forget to give me the sketch you made for me today.”’ Leitch said that Fawkes again paid ten guineas – though, as Marcus Huish noted when recording Leitch’s memories, this may have been for a more important sketch he worked up from the first slight one.32
Fawkes’s twenty-first birthday gift to his son Hawksworth in 1818 was Turner’s large pellucid Dutch scene of boats and water and immense sky, Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed. Henry Thomson, a fellow Academician, saw it at that year’s exhibition and told Farington that it was ‘very splendid’, with such brilliant colouring ‘it almost puts your eyes out’.33 On 4 May, Farington recorded the fact that Fawkes had bought it for 500 guineas and that William Owen RA had told him Turner could paint such a picture in a month. The painting was hung in the place of honour at Farnley, over the main mantelpiece in the drawing room. Turner had been on the waterway north of Dordrecht in August of the previous year and had sketched the crowded Rotterdam ferry waiting for wind; one word, ‘cabbages’, was written on the sketch. In the painting, a cabbage drifts on the calm water, and the painter had put his signature on a floating log in the way that seventeenth-century Dutch painters used to do. He was obviously paying tribute to Aelbert Cuyp, whose works included View of Dordrecht and The Rotterdam Ferry – Turner’s packet boat flies the same flag as Cuyp’s ferry. The painting was also a reaction to his friend and ‘follower’ Callcott’s 1816 Pool of London. The Dort’s brilliance and ‘raised key’ seemed unnatural to a few critics but Walter Fawkes’s (and Hawksworth’s) choice gave great pleasure to the artist.
The private buyer was the mainstay of painters at this time. There were few individual dealers with galleries, and no great museums buying modern art. For his sales, Turner depended on a small number of wealthy landowners and country gentlemen like T. L. Parker, Sir John Leicester, John Fuller and Fawkes. And Fawkes – whom Turner recognized as such by frequent invitations to the annual Royal Academy banquet – was his patron par excellence, who bought more than 200 watercolours and half a dozen important oil paintings at a cost of at least £3500. In 1819, a month after Sir John Leicester had put on show eight Turner oils at his London home, Fawkes mounted an exhibition in Grosvenor Place of his own collection of watercolours. This included drawings by John Varley, Peter de Wint, David Cox and Joshua Cristall, but the majority – sixty of those displayed – were by Turner: twenty Wharfedales, forty Alpine and varied British subjects. Perhaps influenced by his wife’s concern for their fine furniture and carpets, Fawkes had a warning printed on the entrance tickets, which were good for Tuesdays only: ‘No admission if the weather be wet or dirty.’ Visitors gave up their tickets in the front hall and were then directed up an ornate staircase, past marble statues standing in niches, to the
reception rooms.34 Eventually, six weeks after the opening, a catalogue was on hand, with a dedication from patron to painter.
For engraving in the catalogue, Turner did a frontispiece with a stone tablet showing the names of the artists and an illustration of the drawing room depicting the furniture, the carpets, the cut-glass chandelier and the pictures displayed. He embellished in watercolour the cover of Fawkes’s copy. The novelty of being able to see so many Turner watercolours led to much enthusiasm in the press, and Fawkes included in the catalogue a selection of comments. One reviewer hailed Turner as the best of all living artists – ‘For design, for colouring, for strength of conception, for depth of feeling and felicity of execution – for originality, truth, and variety’.35 The artist was a frequent visitor to the exhibition. W. P. Carey, a writer on the arts, saw him there on several occasions: ‘He generally came alone; and while he leaned on the centre table in the great room, or slowly worked his rough way through the mass, he attracted every eye in the brilliant crowd, and seemed to me like a victorious Roman General, the principal figure in his own triumph. Perhaps no British Artist ever retired from an exhibition of his own works, with so much reason for unmixed satisfaction, or more genuine proofs of well deserved admiration from the public.’36
Turner and Fawkes got on well with each other not only because of art. They shared political sympathies. Farington claimed that Fawkes held ‘republican principles’.37 Although that was an exaggeration, Fawkes was descended from Guy Fawkes, who in the early seventeenth century was an agent in the Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament; in May 1812, some years after he ceased to be a Whig member of Parliament, Fawkes spoke at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London at an anniversary celebration of the election to Parliament of Sir Francis Burdett, an ardent reformer. Fawkes demanded the restoration of the country’s constitution, ‘so long and loudly extolled in theory, and so strangely perverted in practice’. The Luddite movement was gathering force at this time: the government had enacted legislation that enabled the judiciary to sentence to death those who destroyed machines. There were riots brought about by food shortages. Twelve thousand troops had recently been sent to keep order in Nottinghamshire, where looms had been wrecked. Fawkes in his speech saw revolution approaching, brought on by ‘perseverance in this corrupt and inadequate system of government’.38
Turner’s radicalism was less articulate and less consistent. The youth who had attended Mr Coleman’s Methodist school in Margate, and who had grown up in Covent Garden, where various dissident printers lived and worked and members of the London Corresponding Society met, seems as an adult to have developed reformist connections. His friend Callcott’s father and half-brother were supporters of the reformer Horne Tooke and the Corresponding Society. By the time he was forty Turner had become interested in the cause of Greek independence: a drawing of the mid-1810s39 had as one of its two titles Attalus declaring the Greek States to be free. He had read the poems of Lord Byron, champion of Greek liberty, and made a watercolour to illustrate Byron’s The Giaour, showing two enslaved Greek girls with a Turkish guard, which was bought by Fawkes. Another ‘Byronic’ watercolour which took Fawkes’s fancy was that which Turner did of the field of Waterloo, the day after the battle, showing the dead and the dying, friend and foe, ‘in one red burial blent’.40
One provocative result of Turner’s Teesdale slog in August 1816 was the watercolour Wycliffe, near Rokeby. This showed Wycliffe Hall, which was believed to have been the birthplace of the fourteenth-century religious reformer and Bible translator John Wycliffe. John Pye, who engraved this picture for the History of Richmondshire, had two questions for the artist. One concerned a burst of sunlight Turner had introduced when touching a proof. Turner explained, ‘That is the place where Wickliffe was born, and there is the light of the glorious Reformation.’ The engraver then asked, ‘But what do you mean by those large fluttering geese in the foreground?’ Turner replied, ‘Oh, those – those are the old superstitions which the genius of the Reformation is driving away.’41 In another version of this conversation, Pye declared that the geese seemed large. Turner said, ‘They are not geese, they are overfed priests.’42 Turner’s friends were often unsure whether he was pulling their legs or had serious allegorical intentions. In this case, it is significant that, perhaps prompted by Fawkes, he introduced into several proof stages of the print the longer title ‘The Birthplace of John Wickliffe (The Morning Star of Liberty) near Rokeby, Yorkshire’, and added a long inscription which informed the viewer of Wycliffe’s work translating the Bible into English and of the religious and political persecutions which had ensued to the present day in 1822. However, for publication the title was shortened, the inscription dropped.
Another hint of sympathy with religious dissent is to be found in the watercolour of Launceston, Cornwall, which he painted in the mid-1820s for the Picturesque Views of England and Wales series. Launceston Castle had been used as a prison during the Cromwellian Protectorate and George Fox, shoemaker, preacher and founder of the Quakers, had been imprisoned there. The Quakers refused to take oaths, respect judges or remove their hats in court. Turner had several Quaker acquaintances, including the Edinburgh engraver William Miller. The tiny figure of a man in this picture, riding towards Launceston Castle, wears a broad-brimmed black hat of the sort Quakers wore. He is seen from the rear, boots sticking out, his light-grey horse plodding down a stony track and the long ascent to Launceston still ahead of him: nothing assertive; a diminutive pilgrim’s progress; maybe even – along with the allusion to Fox – something of a miniature self-portrait. If Turner was a radical, he was a cautious one.
There were later indications that Turner felt strongly about Hungarian independence. His friend George Jones, whom he called Georgey, had a sort of namesake in Görgei, one of the leaders of the movement for a free Hungary. When Görgei betrayed his cause, Turner said to Jones, ‘I shall not call you Georgey any more!’43 This may be a better example of Turner’s humour than of his political sympathies. However, more public demonstrations of where he stood came during the struggle for the passage of the great Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832. A watercolour of Northampton the previous year showed the entry into that town of Lord Althorp, Lord Grey’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was a devoted reformer and was seeking re-election. And in 1832 Turner produced a painting showing William of Nassau, the Prince of Orange, arriving in Torbay in 1688 ‘after a stormy passage’ from the Netherlands – an action which led to the bloodless Glorious Revolution or Dutch takeover of that year.44
For Fawkes, passionately interested in the struggles between Parliament and Crown in the seventeenth century and in the restoration of constitutional guarantees that followed, Turner was a more than willing illustrator. During several visits to Farnley Hall in the early 1820s he made drawings for his host’s Fairfax collection. Among some ‘Historical Vignettes’ were several entitled ‘REVOLUTION 1688’. One showed a crown, swords, a Book of Statutes and parchment scrolls inscribed ‘King William’s declaration for restoring the liberties of England’, ‘Magna Carta’ and ‘Bill of Rights’ – the latter with a text that declared ‘Parliaments ought to be Full, FREE and FREQUENT.’ A great amount of close work was involved for the artist, whose heart must have been in it. And talking with Fawkes about such matters, Turner would have kept his end up; his interest in Magna Carta had been evident in his British Itinerary poem of 1811, in which he wrote:
Thus native bravery, Liberty decreed,
Received the stimulus act from Runnymead.45
At Farnley for Christmas 1821, Turner made sketches of other Fawkes relics: Oliver Cromwell’s watch; General John Lambert’s sword; and the seal of the Commonwealth. He copied various emblems and wrote down political catchphrases of that period: Bad Advisers; Arbitrary Measures; Forced Loans; the King’s Will; the Law; Resistance to Oppression; Petition of Rights; and Commons Remonstrance.46 Fawkes and Turner seemed to have thought that Britain at the present moment had sim
ilar problems, and needed a similar radical shake-up.
Fawkes also supported campaigns for the abolition of slavery and for Catholic emancipation. However, he was in no way a Jacobin: reform, not revolution, was his belief. He never ceased to be a member of the county establishment and in 1823 was appointed High Sheriff of Yorkshire – a largely ceremonial post involving the entertainment of circuit judges.
With his Scottish preoccupations, among others, Turner had not managed to get to Farnley in 1822; but in 1823 he was there when Byron’s friend the writer and reformist member of Parliament John Cam Hobhouse visited. Hobhouse was amazed to find ‘the most celebrated landscape painter of our time’ working humbly on designs for Fawkes’s Fairfaxiana collection.47 In 1824 he arrived there on 19 November and stayed until 14 December. While at Farnley he worked on an engraver’s proof for George Cooke and made a number of sketches for two watercolours. These were to be his last work for Walter Fawkes; it was to be his last visit to Farnley Hall. Fawkes had been ill a few years before; Turner in a note to Clara Wells Wheeler on 4 May 1820 explained that Fawkes was ‘very unwell’ and entry to the exhibition this year at Grosvenor Place was therefore restricted: he sent a private invitation for the Wellses and Wheelers. In June 1825 Fawkes was confined to bed in Upper Harley Street by his doctors, and he told his wife he knew he ‘never more should get out of it’.48 However, Turner dined with the Fawkeses twice in August before heading off on a Low Countries tour. In mid-September Fawkes’s condition deteriorated, and he died on 25 October. Turner was devastated. In the midst of a long letter to Holworthy a few months later he burst out: ‘Alas! my good Auld lang sine is gone … and I must follow; indeed, I feel as you say, nearer a million times the brink of eternity.’49
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