When the Club failed to organize a jaunt in 1821, Turner stepped into the gap. He sent out invitations. That to Abraham Cooper RA, postmarked 7 August 1821, read:
Dear Sir
The second meeting of the Pic-nic-Academical Club will take place at Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham, on Sunday next, at about three o’clock. Pray let me know in a day or two that the Sec[retar]y may get something to eat.
Yours truly,
Jos. Mallord Wm. Turner
For map, turn over to the other side.
(His sketch map showed Sandycombe in relation to the roads leading to it from Twickenham, Isleworth and Richmond Bridge.15)
He saw a lot of the Trimmers, who were then four miles away at Heston; Henry Scott Trimmer was the vicar there from 1804 until he died in 1859. His son Henry Syer Trimmer was encouraged in his drawing efforts by Turner – the vicar, as an amateur painter, would have been happy about this, though the boy preferred drawing pictures of armed men, ‘all swords and plumes, men slashing and horses kicking’. Turner suggested there wasn’t much call for military painting, and later dissuaded him from becoming an artist.16 As already noted, the elder Trimmer was a grandson of Joshua Kirby, friend of Gainsborough and writer on perspective. After visiting Osterley House to look at the painting collection with the Trimmers, Turner in the evening drew from memory a sketch of a Gainsborough they had seen, and also, a sketch of a woman gathering watercress whom they had seen on the way, on which he wrote ‘Checked blue apron’. ‘These’, said Mrs Trimmer, seeing the finished drawings, ‘are for me.’ ‘If you take them,’ Turner said, ‘I must do two more.’ But according to Henry Syer, and despite Thornbury’s remark that Turner was ‘by no means a member of “the give-away family”’,17 Turner actually did give the drawings to Mrs Trimmer, and made copies for his essential store.18 Moreover, on another occasion Turner did a watercolour of two small cousins of the Trimmer children playing on the floor, which he gave to the parents of the children he had drawn.
Young Trimmer thought Turner liked coming to Heston to fish and talk with his father and also to be close to his old haunts at Brentford. He was remembered for standing in the vicarage garden under his umbrella for two days in pouring rain, fishing with a long rod in a small pond, ‘without even a nibble’.19 While staying at Heston, Turner also respected his friend’s occupation and went to church. (This was a change from his behaviour in 1798, when he refused to go to church when staying with the Reverend Robert Nixon, since he was involved in painting.) Henry Syer thought a church interior in the Liber was based on the Heston church, where Turner pondered light, shade and architectural detail while listening to the sermon. For a short time he gave the Reverend Trimmer drawing lessons in return for instruction in Latin and Greek; the vicar said Turner ‘sadly floundered in the verbs, and never made any progress – in fact, he could not spare the time’.20
From Heston, there were sketching expeditions. Henry Syer remembered going out with his father and Turner in Turner’s gig, pulled by the temperamental Crop-ear. ‘His sketching apparatus was under the seat … We went at a very steady pace, for Turner painted much faster than he drove. [Perhaps this was particularly true after the Farnley overturning.] He said, if when out sketching you felt at a loss, you had only to turn round or walk a few paces farther, and you had what you wanted before you.’21 On one excursion Henry Syer went with his father, Turner and Henry Howard to Penn, ‘all of them in search of the picturesque … We came to a halt in a grove or copse where luxuriated wild flowers in profusion. It was a charming day; and, though so many “years bygone”, I can now see vividly before me my father and Howard, both standing legs a-straddle, and Turner at a little distance in a ditch, all hard at work at the aesthetical. After a while Turner emerged from his retreat with a capital water-colour, with which Howard and my father were in raptures. He said he got into the ditch to avoid the sun, but Howard whispered to my father that it was to avoid showing his modus operandi.’22 Certainly it was unlike Turner to avoid the sun.
As for Crop-ear, the old bay was variously described as a horse, a pony and a cross between the two. Turner used to say proudly ‘it would climb a hill like a cat and never get tired’. However, friends noted that, although he was attached to his model for the horses in Frosty Morning, ‘the restive creature was always at issue with him. Once, when the pony was ill, Turner prescribed for him himself, having a great objection to farriers’ bills. In struggling one night to free himself from his toils, for he had to be fastened up with chains, he got strangled. Turner grieved over him sincerely, and gave him decent burial in his garden.’23
The Sandycombe garden was large enough to handle the interment of Crop-ear and cope with much besides. Blackbirds nested in the bushes and small boys crept in to steal their eggs. Turner chased the boys away; they took their revenge by calling him ‘Blackbirdy’.24 The young intruders may also have introduced a young pike or ‘jack’ into the garden to eat the trout that Turner carried back in a can from the Old Brent for stocking purposes. The pond had figured in his dreams of Sandycombe, recurring on the site plans among the house designs. As extended, the pond was roughly square in shape, the home of many water-lilies as well as fish. In a sketchbook memo he set down the cost of planting trees and digging out the pond at £100 – a lot more than the £40 he had originally estimated for pond works. Another memo25 suggests that he may also have broken down and bought for £2 some trout to put in it.
Turner’s father loved the garden. There, according to the Trimmers, he was to be found at work on many days ‘like another Laertes’.26 Not on Tuesdays, though, for that was market day in Brentford, ‘when he was often to be seen trudging home with his weekly provisions in a blue handkerchief, where I have often met him, and asking him after Turner, had answer, “Painting a picture of the Battle of Trafalgar”.’27 The old man looked very much like his son, ‘particularly as to the nose’, and being short, thin and common-looking; but was chattier and more cheerful than JMWT.28 He was less fond of his son’s willows, which, he complained, made the property look like an osier bed. The retired hairdresser kept the grass trimmed, grew vegetables for home consumption and tried to hold the plaguey weeds at bay. By one account, he also did some empire-building: he ‘made great exertions to add to his son’s estate at Sandycombe by running out little earthworks in the road and then fencing them round. At one time there was a regular row of these fortifications, which used to be called “Turner’s Cribs”. One day, however, they were ruthlessly swept away by some local authority.’29 On Sundays Turner senior was a regular attender at Twickenham parish church.
On top of his provisioning and gardening duties, the old man still had responsibilities in town in spring and early summer, when he went up daily to look after the Queen Anne Street gallery. Sometimes, in fine weather, he made his way on foot, as Farington discovered on 24 May 1813, when he and Constable called to look at Turner’s exhibition for that season. ‘Turner’s father was there, who told me that he had walked from Twickenham this morning, eleven miles; his age 68. In two days the last week he said he had walked 50 miles.’30 Like his son, William Turner was, in Cyrus Redding’s term, ‘a good pedestrian’. Occasionally he took the Twickenham–London coach, but the cost of this pained him. One day a friend who knew how disconsolate he was made by the expense encountered him in Queen Anne Street looking particularly happy. Asked about his good mood, William Turner explained that he had found an inn near Sandycombe where the market-gardeners baited their horses. He had made friends with one. ‘Now, for a glass of gin a day, he brings me up in his cart on top of the vegetables.’ The Covent Garden connection may have helped.
In 1812 the old man had written in his clumsy hand to a nephew in Devon:
Dear Nephew I did not have your letter till the 25 was in Queen Ann street 10 Days Return here the Day you wrote your letter I came to town yesterday but Could not Return as it is so far your Uncle J and Wife was very well yesterday I have not heard some time since that Brother
Price wife was dead Jonathan sent to Joshua saying nothing would give him more pleasure for to se[e] all his Brothers. But at one time as he thought you would be their as to Mathews the[y] are Brush makers not Merchants I went to Cartwright & Co in Hatten gardens 22 the[y] said that the[y] might be 30 next week I am glad you are all well as we are Ditto I remain yours W. Turner.
Foggy writing ran in the family.
In 1821, he wrote from Sandycombe to the same nephew. His penmanship had improved in the intervening nine years of being factotum to his son.
Dear Nephew I cannot come to London haveing so short notice I have seen the Coach this morning and I find the[y] Change Horses at the Kings Arms Hounslow the coachman Comes Every Day but Sundays on Friday I will be at the Kings Arms Ready to see please God I am till then yours W. Turner.
If you dont on Friday send me word I only Read yours Last Night31
In September 1826 the old man was evidently worried about his son, who was travelling on the Continent; he knew young William planned to come through Ostend, where the powder magazine had exploded, killing several, and, not having had a letter from him since the explosion, feared for his safety. He evidently talked about his worries, contriving – as the artist wrote to Holworthy afterwards – ‘to stir up others in the alarm’. But it seems that a provincial newspaper, the Hull Advertiser, reporting the explosion in sensational fashion, had first spread the concern, perhaps to the Fawkes family, who enquired of Turner senior – though the news didn’t get as far as the Holworthys in Derbyshire.
Father and son shared a number of interests. There is no evidence that Turner senior did any of the simple surgical jobs, like bloodletting, that barbers were accustomed to, but he was – like JMWT – attached to herbal remedies. Turner wrote to his friend Wells in September 1823:
My Daddy cannot find the recipe, but I have puzzled his recollection out of two things … Poppies and Camomole … ½ a cup of poppy seeds to a good handfull of Camomile flowers simmer’d from a Quart of Water to a pint in a glazed vessel … and used by new flannel as hot as can be … alternately one piece soaking, while the other is applied … to keep up equal warmth.32
What Wells needed the compress for – a sprain, a bad back? – we aren’t told.
When he was twenty-three, Turner had been given directions by Miss Narraway for making an ointment for cuts that he noted in a sketchbook.33 In the ‘Chemistry’ sketchbook of 1813,34 he wrote down a way of tackling the Maltese plague. In verses jotted in the ‘Woodcock Shooting’ sketchbook of 1810–12,35 the word ‘oculist’ occurs several times, suggesting that he may have been consulting a specialist for sight problems. Turner seems to have had another sort of problem in 1820, which led to him calling off his summer tour; he may have snapped an Achilles tendon. ‘I only come to town once a week,’ he wrote from Twickenham to W. B. Cooke, ‘owing to my accident and rebuildings’.36 (The rebuilding was of his gallery in Queen Anne Street.) But by this time concern for his father’s health was generally larger than for his own. Sandycombe had the reputation of being damp, and ‘Poor Daddy’, as Turner called him in a letter to Trimmer,37 was often catching cold. The old man was now his only family; as a time approached when his father might not be around, the son may have begun to realize how valuable was his father’s pride in him. At Sandycombe they lived like two bachelors or two widowers.
Did such a life suit the younger man? His friend Trimmer believed that Turner’s domestic arrangements were ‘founded on the models of the old masters’.38 The Old Masters were not well known for their marriages; it was almost an academic convention that such ties and the painting life did not sit easily together; housekeepers and mistresses (who were perhaps models) were to be preferred. A happy marriage could swamp your creative powers. Worrying about how to support a wife and children could be distracting or destructive. Wives went mad – think of Mary Turner. As time would show, getting married didn’t help poor Haydon. Sir Joshua – the great role-model – had never bothered with marriage (a long-suffering sister and then a niece looked after him for a number of years). There were also dangers in marrying too well: Nathaniel Dance gave up painting altogether on wedding a rich widow. The engraver J. T. Willmore once heard Turner declare: ‘I hate married men. They never make any sacrifices to the Arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort.’39 At a certain point, too, one gets used to the life one has been leading and fears to change it.
In a letter to Holworthy of 4 December 1826 Turner referred to arrangements that made a visit, and angling, difficult: ‘I am fixt by Exhibition’s log; in the summer I have to oil my wings for a flight, but generally flit too late for the trout, and so my round of time. I am a kind of slave who puts on his own fetters from habit, or more like what my Derbyshire friends would say an Old Batchelor who puts his coat on always one way.’40
Another letter to the well-married Holworthy followed in April the next year, when Turner was no longer in Twickenham. He wrote: ‘What may become of me I know not what, particularly if a lady keeps my bed warm, and last winter was quite enough to make singles think of doubles.’41 Sandycombe may have been absorbing enough for a while, but he seems to have been tiring of the entirely single life. As we shall see, after a stay in Margate, he was thinking of ‘doubles’, maybe not for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but at least for keeping his bed warm.
At first, while he was the master of Sandycombe, his painting output stayed high, but in the second half of his proprietorship, from 1819 to 1826, the production of oils slackened. Chantrey told Farington in April 1821 that ‘Turner has no picture for the Exhibition this year, and … has not a single commission for a picture at present.’ He added, alluding to [Turner] being in good circumstances, “He can do very well without any commission.”’42 Travel to new fields was taking up much time, and there was his work for the printmakers, but he may have felt the need for new patronage. In 1819 he had exhibited a grand painting that exploited his local scene and seemed to be making a push for royal favour. This was England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday. It showed the winding Thames; Twickenham (and Sandycombe) hidden in the trees on the further bank; a distant field with a game of cricket going on; and, in the foreground, on the summer-shadowed slope under well-spaced tall trees, a genteel crowd of partying people, seemingly borrowed en masse from Watteau. Turner presumably knew that the Prince Regent had come from Kew and ridden up Richmond Hill on 10 August 1818, two days before his birthday; and it so happened that the Prince’s ‘official’ birthday and name-day was St George’s Day, 23 April, which was of course Turner’s birthday. A rapport, therefore, and why not a connection?
The picture was king-size – roughly six feet by eleven. Turner attached some lines from the ‘Summer’ section of Thomson’s Seasons that precede some possibly more appropriate lines about ‘the matchless vale of Thames; / Fair-winding up to where the muses haunt / In Twit’nam’s bowers …’43 A few viewers found Turner’s pastoral hymn to England a bit unEnglish. The writer for Bell’s Weekly Messenger (16 May 1819) admired the painting but qualified his praise: ‘The distance, the foreground, the trees and the figures are all Italian. On Richmond Hill, and on such a day, John Bull with his dame, with the rustic lads and lasses of the village, sporting under the sturdy oak, would have been more characteristic of England.’44 But this was to request a different nostalgia. Turner had not yet been to Italy and was – if not simply reverting to his ideal Claudean scenery – perhaps looking forward to that country in paint.
Another large picture (over five feet by eight) exhibited that year had different princely associations: Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, going to Pieces; Brill Church bearing S.E. by S., Masensluys E. by S. In this the painter looked at events from water-level; the viewer feels as if he is about to be soaked by the wind-against-tide chop. Some scavengers in a pulling boat in the foreground are fishing up oranges – part of the cargo of the wrecked Dutch sailin
g-vessel Turner has placed so precisely (with compass bearings) on a shoal and burdened (in lieu of its spilt cargo) with one of his puns, the ruling house of the Netherlands being that of Orange-Nassau, which at this time was having financial problems. And there may be other more personal associations here. A duck, if not a mallard, is flying out of the picture to the right. The elderly man who is improbably standing up in the boat, leaning slightly forward and to the left, without holding on to anything despite the pitching and lurching of the craft in the short seas, has that high-foreheaded, gnomish, Punch-like look that we have seen before, and which has a ‘familiar’ feeling – something of the Linnell sketch of William Turner from 1812. The old man must have made a handy model on occasion. The act of standing up in the boat may be a reference to Turner senior’s ‘habit of nervously jumping up on his toes every two or three minutes … which rather astonished strangers’.45 But the picture, one of Turner’s most marvellous seascapes, is also a tribute to the old Dutch painters, with a vast sky – more than three-quarters of the canvas – like that in a Philips de Koninck, though with clouds, which Turner had been collecting in various sketchbooks, that are all his own.
One seascape that was less successful was the result of the former Prince Regent, now King George IV, finally bestowing a commission on Turner – which kept him busy in late 1823. This was the Battle of Trafalgar which the Reverend Trimmer heard about from Turner’s father when meeting him on the way home from Brentford market, and which those in the art world knew was to be part of a scheme for displaying great British victories in St James’s Palace, along with a de Loutherbourg of the Glorious First of June 1794 naval battle. Lawrence, royal portrait painter, as already noted, had helped get him the job. Turner did his usual thorough research and borrowed sketches of ships from John Christian Schetky. At eight and a half feet by twelve, it was the largest picture he ever painted, and he laboured hard over it. It succeeded in showing what a confusing bloody mess a naval battle could be – sailors drowning, waves tinged with blood, smoke billowing, spars and sails and rigging falling. As with his earlier picture of the Death of Nelson he wanted to compress the events of the battle into a single moment; he showed Nelson’s pre-battle signal ‘England expects …’ still flying, while fragments of Nelson’s motto Palman Qui Meruit Ferat loom mysteriously in the sea. While the battle is still going on, some sailors have their hats raised in signals of victory.
J.M.W. Turner Page 32