Bits of the picture are indeed successful: in the dark lower-left-hand corner, beyond a buoyant stump of a mast, in a ship’s launch collecting the wounded a man stands, in black silhouette; disembodied hands reach from the surrounding water as if to hang on to an immense horizontal Union flag. But the main impression is that the Victory is a vast piece of scenery that has been trundled into the middle of a stage. The tumbled-together masts and sails look like so many tangled sheets and collapsed laundry-poles.
Very few people liked it. Haydon heard from a member of Parliament that ‘the Government was not satisfied’ with Turner’s performance, and he thought that the chances of getting further state sponsorship for historical painting had been damaged.46 George Jones, painting two military scenes, worked alongside Turner for nearly a fortnight at the Palace, giving their pictures finishing touches, and said that Turner ‘was criticized and instructed daily by the naval men about the Court, and during eleven days he altered the rigging to suit the fancy of each seaman, and did it with the greatest good-humour’.47 Some naval persons didn’t like Turner’s scheme of showing different moments of the battle all rolled together. Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s captain, declared the picture looked ‘more like a street scene than a battle’.48 An old Greenwich pensioner said, ‘It’s more like a brickfield. We ought to have had Huggins’ – Huggins being a more or less competent painter of ships.49 Turner told H. A. J. Munro that the Admiralty made him spoil the picture and the only sensible observations were from the Duke of Clarence, a navy man, later King William IV. The Duke, however, is said by another informant to have made ‘as a sailor’ some disagreeable observations, to which Turner replied rather roughly. ‘The Duke finished the conversation by saying, “I have been at sea the greater part of my life, Sir, you don’t know who you are talking to, and I’ll be damned if you know what you are talking about.”’50 According to Munro, ‘Turner once invited Holworthy and myself to dine with him at Greenwich [where in 1829 both Turner’s and de Loutherbourg’s pictures were relegated from St James to the retired seamen’s hospital]. We, after dinner, visited the Hall and were looking at this painting, a Pensioner came up and told us it was like a carpet. “That is the one to look at,” pointing to the Loutherbourg. I turned to look at Turner who was gone.’51
Although Turner on and off considered Sandycombe an act of folly, and worried about keeping it, such anxieties did not stop him from expanding his Twickenham empire. In the summer of 1818 as a Twickenham property owner he was awarded a small piece – about an eighth of an acre – of an area of common ground that was being enclosed. In August he acquired more of the land: three adjoining plots of ‘Freehold Land situate and being on and late part of the waste called Twickenham Little Common’.52 These plots totalled nearly an acre and were bounded by the Hanworth–Twickenham road on the north and the Hampton road on the south. At this time he was Chairman and Treasurer of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution – he got his friend Walter Fawkes to become a member in 1816, paying annual dues of five guineas – and he was thinking more and more of how to help artists in distress. He had talked to Farington on this subject at an Academy Club dinner in March 1818. Soon he began to think of building a college or almshouse for ‘decayed English artists’ on this land. ‘To his intimate friends he constantly talked of the best mode of leaving property for the use of the unsuccessful,’ said his friend George Jones, adding, after noting Turner’s occasional closeness in small matters, that he loved to save and accumulate for that one great object.53 He also owned a small meadow just north-west of Sandycombe, which he had bought at the same time as the Sandycombe site and from the same person: ‘a piece or parcel of Copyhold or Customary Land … at the North West End of … Holloway Shot’.54
This may have been the land he sold to the South Western Railway Company some years later when they were extending their network from Richmond to Windsor. The railway company wanted only a tiny portion of Turner’s land, but the artist got the Duke of Northumberland’s land steward John Williams to handle the matter for him, and the company was talked into buying half an acre. Williams, wrote Alaric Watts, ‘exerted himself so effectively that he obtained, to the astonishment of Mr Turner, who had not the remotest idea of the Railway value of land, £550 for it. “But,” said Mr Turner, after recovering from his surprise, “the expenses will, I suppose, swallow up a considerable part of it.” “Not a shilling,” said Mr Williams, “beyond a small fee to the surveyor; the company will pay the rest.”’ Turner ‘expressed himself highly satisfied, muttered a few thanks, and parted without any further recognition of the service’.55
He was fifty in 1825, the year his friend Fawkes and his professorial colleague Henry Fuseli died, and he had begun to think in even greater detail about what should be done with his wealth and possessions on his own death. The year before, feeling the need for order, he had got out all his sketchbooks and labelled, numbered and sometimes named them. (The most up to date was that used in the summer of 182456 for sketches of the piling works for the new London Bridge.) His ties with the past needed confirming even as individuals who had been of early help slipped away. His old adviser Joseph Farington had died on the next-to-last day of 1821, falling downstairs from the gallery of a church in Didsbury, near Manchester. He had also been affected by the death of his uncle Joseph Marshall – his Brentford guardian – at Sunningwell near Abingdon in June 1820. From him Turner inherited part of the property once owned by his mother’s grandfather, Joseph Mallord. This was a share in four small houses in Wapping that would have been his mother’s, had she been alive and competent. These were in New Gravel Lane, near Eastern Dock, one of the new docks into which ships could lock from the tidal Thames and which were changing the nature of cargo-handling.
Turner seems to have got the job of looking after this little estate, making sure the rents were collected for the benefit of himself and his co-heirs. In an 1821 sketchbook he kept a copy of a receipt for the annual rent he had received for 7 and 8 New Gravel Lane from one Isaac Hodgson. Turner sent on shares of the proceeds to his co-beneficiaries – once in 1822 using W. B. Cooke to deliver £20 to Joseph Marshall’s widow. At some point the ownership of the houses seems to have been divided, 9 and 10 New Gravel Lane becoming the property of his cousins Henry and Eleanor Harpur. (Henry Harpur served as one of Turner’s solicitors; George Cobb was another.) Turner took on 7 and 8 New Gravel Lane and a few years later consented to them being converted into an inn, the Ship and Bladebone; in 1843, its tenant, Thomas Farrell, sent Turner a receipt for £10 which Turner had paid for repairs to its roof.
Owning the freehold of a Wapping pub gave Turner an excuse for jaunts downriver to the docks, to look at shipping, talk to the mariners and stevedores and have a drink. In later years, it also – according to Thornbury, who heard about it from John Ruskin – allowed him sometimes to ‘wallow’ at weekends. Being Turner, he took his sketchbook with him. Ruskin eventually came across drawings Turner had supposedly done at Wapping, of ‘sailors’ women … in every posture of abandonment’.57
Certainly the Ship and Bladebone would have given Turner a good base for Wapping research; but just how depraved a hostelry it was is open to question. The twenty-one-year lease (at a rent of £50 a year) which Thomas Farrell had signed, under bond, bound him ‘to conduct the place in orderly fashion so as not to imperil the licence’.58 More innocent drawings possibly of Wapping origin are sketches of mudlarks he did in 1823–4.59 Even if he did spend a good deal of time there, he wasn’t shy of letting the connection be known. He took an open interest in the wording of leases. George Cobb, who acted for him in connection with leases in 1827 and 1831, also visited Wapping on Turner’s behalf. In 1827, Turner tried to ensure that work was done on the Wapping properties to make them good to the end of the leases and had his friend Thomas Allason, a surveyor and architect, look them over to see what needed doing. The Ship and Bladebone was still in his possession at his death, though by then it was, like his gallery, in a r
un-down condition. Indeed, at that stage it was ‘unsafe and unoccupied’.60
Turner continued to amass property. He eventually had his leasehold houses in Harley Street and Queen Anne Street, the Wapping houses, the Twickenham Common land, the Lee Common cottage and orchard he had bought in 1810, and four acres of marshland in Barking, Essex, which was let to a Mr Choat for £10 a year. But despite an evident desire to keep a portion of his wealth safe in bricks, mortar and land, not all his property investments were a success. J. W. Archer wrote:
He would occasionally look in at the auction mart by the Bank; and on one of those occasions it occurred to him that two houses were about to be knocked down at a very low figure; he bid, and got them; but on going to view his purchase, he found them situated in Little Clarendon Street, Somers Town – a low back street, whose tenants frequently flit before quarter day [when rents were due]; and he learned, moreover, that the cheapness of the houses was much more than balanced by the heavy ground rent of £12 each. Turner now called upon an associate engraver of the Royal Academy, and took him into counsel as to how he should manage to transfer his purchase to somebody else. His friend undertook to try what could be done, and went to one W—, who held a large amount of similar property in the neighbourhood; but on stating his object, the man of tenements, instead of making an offer, said:
‘I have no objection to take the houses off the gentleman’s hands; but what is he willing to offer me for doing so?’
What he paid to be let off his bargain, the writer knows not; but he has little doubt that it was a good round sum.61
At any rate, Turner didn’t add the worry of being a Somers Town landlord to that of owning a low dive in Wapping. He had trouble enough with some of his tenants. In 1821, there were problems with Benjamin Young, a dentist, who was renting part of his Harley Street domain. Turner asked Holworthy to go with him to ‘Hick’s Hall’, the Clerkenwell sessions house, to give evidence that a second notice had been properly served on Young. In 1827 he was having continued difficulty with one Smith, whom he had ‘long ago desired’ his father and William Marsh, his stockbroker, to remove from one of his properties.62 In 1840 there were problems concerning an agreement about a ‘frontage’ and boundaries with a Mr Wally Strong, and Cobb, the solicitor, was told by Turner to ‘watch him … I will not be charged for his ifs and ands’. Strong, it appeared to the angry artist, wanted ‘to swell the cost of the lease for him some how or other’.63 Like many property owners, Turner vacillated between the joys of possession and the pains of administration and maintenance. But his Micawberish habits could be suddenly thrown aside in favour of an extensive magnanimity; at his death, it was found that he hadn’t bothered to pursue a tenant for several years of unpaid rent.
Eventually in 1826 he sold Sandycombe Lodge. Rather than the ‘Discarded London’ he had apostrophized in verses at the beginning of his Sandycombe experience, he decided to discard Twickenham.64 In a letter to Holworthy in May 1826 he refers to ‘us poor Londoners’,65 and first and last he was a Londoner. As he rationalized it, the Sandycombe garden had become too much for his father, who was eighty-one that year. The sale didn’t please the old man, but Turner went ahead anyway; he may not have wanted to leave him there so much by himself or have him walking the long distance up to town, if his cheap rides failed. This filial concern did not prevent him from continuing to keep his father busy – ‘latterly’, the young Trimmer noted, ‘his son’s willing slave’,66 as the various commands from East Cowes showed. Writing to Holworthy in January 1826 to thank him for a turkey, which father and son had evidently eaten together, Turner said, ‘Daddy being now released from farming thinks of feeding, and said its richness proved good land and good attention to domestic concerns.’67
Sandycombe was sold for £500 ‘of lawful money’ to a retired haberdasher, Joseph Todd of Clapham; this sum was less than he had put into it. Turner looked at the fishpond for the last time. But before leaving Twickenham, he made some trips on the river, revisiting the sites of old sketches and pictures, and making a few more – valedictions, as it were.68 Yet there was still going to be life on the river to come for him, closer to town.
Notes
1 Letters, p.60.
2 TB CXIV.
3 Gage, Colour, p.22.
4 TB CXX.
5 TB CXL.
6 Livermore, Country Life, 6 July 1951.
7 Youngblood, TS, 2, 1, pp.21, 34.
8 Th. 1877, p.120.
9 Ibid., p.118.
10 Letters, p.294.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p.61.
13 Smith, Nollekens, pp.199–200.
14 Farington, Diary, 7 July 1819.
15 Letters, p.86.
16 Th. 1877, p.226.
17 Ibid., p.224.
18 Monkhouse, p.89.
19 Ibid.
20 Th. 1877, p.124.
21 Ibid., p.121.
22 Ibid., p.122.
23 Watts, p.xxvii.
24 Ibid.
25 TB CXXVII.
26 Th. i, pp.6–7.
27 Ibid.
28 Th. 1877, p.117.
29 Monkhouse, p.85.
30 Finberg, p.196.
31 Dossier.
32 Letters, p.89.
33 TB XLII.
34 TB CXXXV.
35 TB CXXIX.
36 Th. 1877, p.127; Letters, p.84.
37 Letters, p.61.
38 Th. 1877, p.392.
39 Powell, TSN, no.62, p.14.
40 Letters, p.103.
41 Ibid., p.107.
42 Farington, Diary, 6 April 1821.
43 B&J, no.140.
44 Hill, Turner on the Thames, p.152.
45 Th. 1877, p.117.
46 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, 27 May 1824.
47 Finberg, p.283.
48 Th. 1877, p.429.
49 Wyllie, Turner, p.44.
50 B&J, no.252.
51 Munro MS note in G. Jones’s copy of Th. i, pp.292–3.
52 Finberg, p.253.
53 Letters, pp.7, 10.
54 Youngblood, TS, 2, 1, pp.22, 34 n.43.
55 Watts, p.xxv.
56 TB CCV.
57 Ruskin, quoted in Harris, Life and Adventures, pp.288–9.
58 Falk, Turner, p.173.
59 TB CCV.
60 Chancery affidavit, Dossier.
61 Archer, TS, 1, 1, pp.35–6.
62 Letters, p.109.
63 Ibid., p.181.
64 TB CXXIX.
65 Letters, p.101.
66 Th. 1877, p.116.
67 Letters, p.96.
68 TB CXII. The house at Twickenham still stands.
A self-portrait by Turner, aged about 24, c. 1799
14: Southern Light
Like Aeneas, Turner finally found Italy. As we have seen, he had been painting Italy before he got there: classical ruins; homages to Claude; and tributes to Richard Wilson, such as Diana and Callisto of 1796 and Tivoli and the Roman Campagna, after Wilson of 1798. He had wanted to go to Italy in 1816 and expressed his disappointment when he told Holworthy that, as well as Yorkshire being soaked with rain, Italy was ‘deluged, Switzerland a wash-pot … [and] all chance of getting over the Simplon or any of the other passes now vanished like the morning mist’.1 Italy stayed in his mind as he read Byron’s poetry and copied bits of the Reverend J. J. Eustace’s Tour through Italy of 1813 and made commissioned watercolours to be engraved for James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of Italy. One might have thought, from a watercolour he did in 1817, that he already had been there. The watercolour, which Fawkes bought, showed Vesuvius erupting, full of fire and colour, though it was based on someone else’s drawing. His colleagues kept urging him to go. Lawrence, who was in Rome in the summer of 1819, doing portraits of princes of the Church and hanging around the Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to Farington on 2 July, with the advice that he press Turner to get cracking: ‘His genius would here be supplied with new Materials, and entirely congenial with it He has
an Elegance, and often a Greatness of Invention, that wants a scene like this for its free expression …’2
In fact, Turner – now forty-four – had already decided to go. He set off on the last day of July 1819, and marked the occasion by starting a diary:
Left Dover at 10 arr. Calais at 3 in a Boat from the Packet Boat. beset as usual. began to rain next morn on the setting out of the Dil[igence] Conversation in the diligence the Russe 2 Frenchman and 2 English Cab. 3 Engl. Russe great par Example the Emperor Alexander too … the French tres bon zens but the English everything at last was bad, Pitt the cause of all, the Kings death and fall and Robespierre their tool. Raind the whole way to Paris. Beaumont sur Oise good3
And that was far as the ‘diary’ got. The grind of travelling took over. He was two days in getting to Paris. From there he went via the valley of the Yonne to Sens, Auxerre and Lyon, and thence to Chambéry and Lanslebourg and over the Mont Cenis pass. Early starts, long days in the coaches; bad inns, poor food, awful beds. But the Alps, wonderful as ever, as always allowed one to encounter what Byron called ‘throned Eternity in icy halls / Of cold Sublimity’.4 Then down to Lake Como, Milan, Verona and Venice – drawing, drawing, drawing during his short stay there. On to Bologna, Rimini, Ancona and over the Apennines – the further south, the more brilliant the light – sketching the streets, squares and gateways of the towns, his fellow-travellers waiting for a diligence or vettura, the hillsides with villages and towers. South of Ancona he noted among his sketches colours that reminded him of his heroes:
J.M.W. Turner Page 33