color of the Hill Wilson Claude the olives the light of these when the Sun shone grey [turn?]ing the Ground redish green Gray now … to Purple the Sea quite Blue, under the Sun a Warm Vapour from the Sun Blue relieving the Shadows of the Olive Tree dark while the foliage Light or the whole when in shadow a quiet Grey. Beautiful dark Green yet warm. the middle Trees get Bluish in parts for distance. the aquaduct redish the foreground Light grey in shadow5
Now that the long wars were over, Rome was once again luring many foreign artists as visitors and residents, particularly the English and Germans. But Turner was his usual somewhat secretive self, staying in the Palazzo Poli and quietly getting on with the job. From the moment he arrived he was out sketching the ruins and prospects of the city from the various vantage points; he drew the works of art, statues as well as paintings. From the Palazzo Poli, he sketched the extravagantly Baroque Fontana di Trevi with its gods and sea monsters.6 He determinedly filled sketchbook after sketchbook; he made several hundred larger drawings. His friend Chantrey was also in town, as fond of society as ever, and rather worried because Turner was being stand-offish – Chantrey didn’t know where Turner was lodging. However, he was seen at the Venetian Academy of Painting in Rome on 15 November, at an occasion to which Chantrey, Lawrence, Jackson and Thomas Moore, the poet, also went, with the fashionable sculptor Canova, and later in the day at the Academy of St Luke, where Canova had put him up for honorary membership, albeit in his letter of recommendation spelling his name Touner. Lawrence had written to Canova to introduce Turner – England’s ‘finest landscape painter’ – and asked Canova to be patient, as Turner was ‘unacquainted with the Italian language’. Lawrence, Turner and Canova shared an interest in the Venetian masters: Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese – though ultimately Turner preferred Tintoretto.7
Turner was spotted on the tower of the Capitol one stormy day when the Princess of Denmark and a friend of Moore’s named Colonel Camac were also sightseeing there. The Colonel noticed that the wind was bothering the Princess and plucked Turner’s umbrella from under his arm to shelter the Princess. The umbrella was blown inside out, breaking some of its ribs. The Princess smiled her thanks to the Colonel; Turner scowled. He had presumably been disturbed when sketching and had his umbrella wrecked. There were further sightings of him in Naples, to which he had dashed in hopes of observing Vesuvius erupting – the real as opposed to the imagined thing. One of Sir John Soane’s sons, then in Italy, wrote home to his father:
Turner is in the neighbourhood of Naples making rough pencil sketches to the astonishment of the Fashionables, who wonder what use these rough draughts can be – simple souls! At Rome a sucking blade of the brush made the request of going out with pig Turner to colour – he grunted for answer that it would take up too much time to colour in the open air – he could make 15 or 16 pencil sketches to one coloured, and then grunted his way home.8
Any who thought that the taciturn Turner would enliven the social scene in Rome soon changed their minds. Hazlitt called Rome ‘of all places the worst to study in’,9 and Turner did not want the city’s distractions. While Lawrence wrote to Farington on 16 October to talk of Turner’s arrival and say how worthy he was of ‘this fine City, of all the Elegancy and Grandeur that it exhibits’,10 those who were less in the swim saw Rome’s seediness. At least, back in Queen Anne Street, waiting for a letter, Turner senior heard no worrying rumours about his son of the sort that circulated about Chantrey: that the rubicund sculptor had been captured and was being held for ransom by bandits. Brigands were as much a part of the Italian scene as classical ruins, and featured, for example, in the popular paintings of his colleague Eastlake, in Rome since 1816.
Turner, possibly thinking of brigands, had taken the shortest and most frequented road when he went to Naples. On the way, through Fra Diavolo country, he sketched from the moving carriage or when it stopped in the safety of towns. He visited Lake Avernus. There Virgil had placed the meeting of Aeneas with the Sibyl, an old theme of Turner’s and the subject of a picture he had done in 1815 for the classically inclined Sir Richard Colt Hoare. His sketchbook was sprinkled with hot ash when he climbed Vesuvius, but there were no fireworks from the mountain. However, there were compensations: the view out over the Bay of Naples and the old Roman resort of Baiae; the excavations at Pompeii; and Paestum’s temples. He knew Paestum from the drawings of J. R. Cozens and Piranesi, but the real thing was tremendous; he drew the temples from without and within, from close and afar. On the way back to Naples by boat, he sketched the rugged coastline.
Lord Byron was in Rome – a friend of the poet Thomas Moore and acquainted with Samuel Rogers, the London banker and versifier, whom Turner knew – but there is no record of a meeting between the fashionable, unconventional poet and the moody, unconventional painter. The fourth Italy-centred canto of Byron’s world-weary epic Childe Harold had been published in 1818, and Turner read it. He owed to Byron the lines adapted from Childe Harold III he had attached to his Field of Waterloo, shown at the RA in 1818. Byron’s work became part of the filter through which his mind sieved his Italian experiences. Shelley’s work seems to have performed a similar function. ‘Ode to the West Wind’ was written at this time and that poet’s almost tactile reaction to the time-wrecked beauty of the Italian coast was much like his own.
Well stocked with dreams, Turner went slowly home in mid-winter. Christmas in Florence, then Turin. The ordinary coach service to Savoy was not running because of heavy snow, but Turner joined another voyager in hiring a coach to take them. Later he wrote to Holworthy about this venture, which went well until they reached the top of the pass over Mont Cenis, where the coach capsized:
Very lucky it was so; and the carriage door so completely frozen that we were obliged to get out at the window – the guide and the Cantonier began to fight, and the driver was by a process verbal put into prison, so doing while we had to march or rather flounder up to our knees nothing less in snow, all the way down to Lancesbyburgh [Lanslebourg] by the King of Roadmakers’ Road, not the Colossus of Roads, Mr MacAdam, but Bonaparte, filled up by snow and only known by the precipitous zig-zag.11
He got back to London in time for the Academy Club dinner on 2 February 1820 where he gave Farington, sitting next to him, the highlights of his six months’ trip, with particular praise for Tivoli, Nemi, Albano and Terni. During his absence John Constable had finally – sixteen years after first exhibiting at the RA – been elected an Associate Academician.
On his return, Turner saw a good deal of the Fawkeses in town, attended numerous RA Council meetings, and was kept ‘in constant ossillation’12 between Twickenham and London while his former mews property in Queen Anne Street was being reconstructed and his new gallery built. His mind was obviously on many things. In fact, the Academy exhibition this year suggested that the first impact of Italy had not been altogether salutary. He had been disoriented by the experience. In the 1820 RA catalogue he gave his titles as Professor of Perspective and – a new source of pride – member of the Roman Academy of St Luke, but for an expert in perspective his one picture on show was a bizarre performance.
Rome was the nominal subject. The full title of the roughly six foot by eleven painting was Rome, from the Vatican: Raffaelle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his pictures for the decoration of the Loggia. The background view of Rome was as Turner had recently seen it. The view of the Vatican loggia was a compositional mish-mash, with arches and balustrades disappearing weirdly, the floor slanting upwards as if under pressure, and the viewer’s eye led uncomfortably in several directions at once. The figures, to put it kindly, were not his best: Raphael’s mistress doll-sized, playing with her jewels, and the divine painter himself comparatively immense and rather posily looking up at his ceiling fresco work. As for the colours: the sky was a vivid blue, the stonework gloriously golden, the foreground a warm red. The overall effect was brilliant and gaudy and the general reaction to the picture that it was an unhappy experiment. E
ven Ruskin, some years later, thought that Rome had done Turner no good: ‘Michael Angelo’s sprawling prophets, and Bernini’s labyrinthine arcades wholly bewildered him, and dragged him into their false and fantastic world.’13
It took him a while to assimilate the Italian experience and the southern light. Having long since lived with the prospect of Italy, he now had to learn to handle the actuality. And it took his viewers time to come to terms with the results. His pictures no longer seemed to fall into simple categories of history painting, landscape or seascape. The categories merged, the complexities multiplied and the subjects became obscure. Turner had always crammed a lot into his paintings: references to work by other artists; innumerable associations picked up from reading; his own experiences, like the Wharfedale storm in Hannibal crossing the Alps. But now that great heap of compost seemed to be spread more freely, generally enriching his pictures. He was no longer painting views but visions. ‘Golden visions, glorious and beautiful,’ said Constable in 1826.14
Perhaps the first successful big picture to accommodate his Italian gatherings and what he had accomplished in the previous decade in such pictures as Hawksworth’s birthday gift, the Dort, was the Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl of 1823. (Turner’s original spelling was ‘Sybil’. The Cumaean sibyl was 700 years old, but Turner represented her as young and buxom.) Baiae was the coastal town near Naples where well-to-do Romans had their winter villas. Wilson and Claude had been here too, but Turner, painting its ruined beauty, got more in. His colour of the moment was an autumn gold. However, according to a well-travelled friend of George Jones, Turner invented ‘half the scene’. Jones told Turner that he ‘had planted some hills with vineyards [where] there was nothing in reality but a few dry sticks’. Turner replied, ‘All poets are liars.’ Jones then wrote on the frame, ‘SPLENDIDE MENDAX’, and Turner laughed and left it there.15 Unfortunately the inventor in this case was not only imaginative but faulty in his workmanship: the painting’s success was soon imperilled by his use of asphaltum, which caused parts of it to darken and crack.
His big Italian picture of 1826 was also golden: Forum Romanum, for Mr. Soane’s Museum. In this, he showed the Arch of Titus and the ancient Via Sacra, a fresco of a Madonna and child and an angel on a ruined wall incorporated in a church, and a procession of monks and a woman kneeling before a monk. The picture subsumed various past and present items to do with religion and reverence beneath a great overhanging arch which was a further bit of mendacity: he had made it up – or maybe borrowed it from Piranesi – but it worked, acting as the arch of history under which we live, and paint, and pray. He had been commissioned to paint the picture by his friend John Soane, but embarrassment soon set in. The painting – five feet by eight – was ‘over-size’ for the planned spot in Soane’s house (every cubbyhole full of antiquities) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane decently sent Turner a cheque for the agreed 500 guineas on 9 July 1826, but Turner, appreciating Soane’s predicament, kept the picture and returned the cheque. If Soane had been sensible, he would have cleared out some of the clutter in his house in order to hang a glowing masterpiece. But some contemporary critics also hesitated. After viewing Forum Romanum at the RA exhibition, the writer for the Literary Gazette declared (13 May 1826): ‘The artist … has combated a very difficult quality of art, in giving solidity without strong and violent opposition of light and shade. [However,] Mr Turner … seems to have sworn fidelity to the Yellow Dwarf, if he has not identified himself with that important necromancer.’16
The Yellow Dwarf! Was there a dig here at Turner’s height as well as at his extreme fondness for a particular colour? (Le Nain Jaune – The Yellow Dwarf – was a fairy story by Mme d’Aulnoye, later a pantomime. The Black Dwarf was a tale by Walter Scott, published in 1816, and also the name of a radical weekly paper, founded in 1817.) Yellow was by now well known to be his favourite.17 It had been asserting itself since The Rise of Carthage, but in the 1820s there was no avoiding it. Critics rushed to condemn Turner’s use of yellow and the ensuing gaudiness and ‘meretricious style of colouring’.18 The winter of 1825–6 was productive for him, and one of his other pictures at the Academy in 1826, Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, albeit unItalian, was also complained about on this score. The Morning Post on 9 May said, ‘Mr Turner had made very free use of the chrome yellow – will it stand the test of time?’19 The picture was so bright that a story was told to the effect that Turner generously washed it over with lamp-black, so as to avoid overwhelming two Lawrence portraits hung near by at the exhibition, and had advised an anxious Lawrence not to worry – it would all wash off after the exhibition. But this seems to have been a fable, generous to Turner. Indeed, Turner’s concern for the golden brilliance of the picture, partly achieved perhaps by watercolours as well as oils, was evident in one of the letters he wrote to his father from John Nash’s castle at Cowes in 1827, when the picture was about to be sold; he wrote, ‘You must not by any means wet it, for all the Colour will come off.’20
In 1827 his second Mortlake Thames-side picture, Mortlake Terrace, the Seat of William Moffat, Esq. Summer’s Evening, was condemned for its yellowness. This time the Morning Post on 15 June wrote that Turner was getting worse from ‘what we may call a yellow fever’. Moreover, switching diseases, it thought that when, as in this case, every part of a picture ‘should be afflicted with the jaundice, it is too much to be endured’. The painting represented a sad and needless ‘falling-off’.21 He had hitherto been called mad but now – aged fifty-two – he had to put up with the suggestion that his powers were failing.
Writing to Holworthy in May 1826 he joked about his notoriety. His colleague Thomas Phillips had just come back from Italy. Turner wrote: ‘Professor Phillips returned quite a carnation to what he went [–] jumbling about did him good, at least in complection. Tho the executive, alias hanging committee at the Royal Academy this year has brought him back to his original tone of colour – but I must not say yellow, for I have taken it all to my keeping this year, so they say, and so I meant it should be …’22 In another letter to Holworthy in December that year he referred to his friend Callcott’s forthcoming marriage in Italy to the widowed Maria Graham, ‘a very agreeable Blue Stocking; so I must wear the yellow stockings’.23 This was an allusion to a speech of Malvolio’s, in Twelfth Night – Turner knew his Shakespeare – but of course it also came aptly from one in the thrall of the Yellow Dwarf.
He continued in following years to harp good-humouredly on the subject. In a letter to George Jones of 22 February 1830, after some melancholy reflection on some recent deaths, he brightened up:
I wish I had you by the button-hole, notwithstanding all your grumbling about Italy and yellow. I could then tell freely what has occurred since your departure of combinations and concatenations [at the RA] somewhat of the old kind, only more highly coloured, and to my jaundiced eye not a whit more pure … Chantrey is as gay and as good as ever, ready to serve; he requests, for my benefit, that you bottle up all the yellows which may be straying out of the right way …24
On an occasion at the sculptor Richard Westmacott’s, a fellow member of the Academy Club, Turner was asked by someone who was leaving for Italy if he could do anything for him there. ‘No,’ said Turner, ‘unless you bring me back some Naples yellow.’25 The joke by now was part of his fame. A caricature by Dicky Doyle in the Almanack of the Month, in 1846, showed a small top-hatted Turner wielding a mop between a canvas and a bucket labelled YELLOW.
Italy and the ensuing liberation had an impact on his technique. It seemed to Samuel Redgrave that Turner now ‘adopted a principle of light with a small proportion of dark, used a light ground, and by scumbling obtained infinitely delicate gradations’.26 Yet there was a downside to this free and easy brightness as he placed watercolour on top of oil and oil on watercolour, added resin to paint, and used pigments that were bound to fade or grow dark; and he didn’t care. He wanted to capture the moment and put practical considerations aside. He was impa
tient to get effects, to try all sorts of things, sound and unsound. His paints sometimes dried unevenly and soon cracked. The ground was not always well prepared: that of one of his Cowes Regatta pictures was a sort of tempera, which caused the oils on top to flake constantly. Now and then he had to call in a cleaner or restorer to bring back to life a picture he had painted not many years before. One of his main paint suppliers, Mr Winsor, was unhappy at the fugitive colours Turner was buying and ‘plucked up courage one day to remonstrate with him for so doing. Turner’s answer, in spite of the friendship between the two men, was somewhat uncompromising … “Your business, Winsor, is to make colours for Artists. Mine is to use them.”’27 John Constable, having been to see the Turners John Sheepshanks had at his Blackheath house in 1836, wrote to C. R. Leslie, ‘Turner is very grand … but some of [his] best work is swept up off the carpet every morning by the maid and put into the dust hole.’28 The Bay of Baiae was soon a wreck – ‘a beautiful wreck it is true, of a picture that is past’, wrote Richard Redgrave in 1866.29
The pictures of his that generally stood up best were watercolours, if preserved from exposure to constant sunlight. The light inherent in them was less obstreperous than in many of the oil paintings. For Robert Hunt, reviewing in the Examiner of 3 February 1822 an exhibition of watercolours at W. B.Cooke’s in Soho Square, it was ‘a diffusive, lustrous, and mild light that … shines into the mind, blending … power with gentleness … The wonder-working Artist has produced this sweet effect by colour, almost independently of chiaroscuro, and by keeping the edges of the forms all tender. They hold a bland but luminous communion of light with each other, and with our minds …’30 While in Italy in late 1819 he made some lovely watercolours and preliminary colour-studies at Como, Venice, Rome and Naples – his brushwork increasingly bold and direct, the results fresh and immediate. Among the eight watercolours of Italy he painted for Fawkes when back in England in 1820 and 1821, one showed a coach crossing Mont Cenis in a snowstorm, two were of Venice, one was a morning view of Vesuvius across the Bay of Naples, and four were of Rome. Among the latter, The Colosseum and The Interior of St Peter’s were done from without and within, and were studies in scale. They were brilliant exaggerations, in which Turner juggled with the architectural facts and made the viewer feel puny. In his first Venice watercolours, water was the important element, reflection and shimmer the keynotes, the buildings seen as in a mirage. But many of the watercolours done at this time remained in their large sketchbooks.
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