J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  The public saw the results of others he did between 1826 and 1828: small vignettes for engravings in an edition of poems about Italy by his patron–friend Samuel Rogers, which the illustrations helped to make a commercial success, and three watercolours for a Charles Heath print series which didn’t come to pass – the three were instead engraved for publication in a Heath annual, the Keepsake. One, Lake Albano, contained three Turneresque figures, a woman and two men, one of whom was a pedlar, the other obviously a bandit. If young Eastlake could do well with bandit pictures, why shouldn’t he? However, in this picture Turner’s non-conformist view of one of the world’s great religions has taken a hand. His bandit has laid aside his gun and appears to be discussing with his lady friend which religious print to buy from the pedlar. A temple of Catholic piety, the Pope’s summer place, Castel Gandolfo, can be seen in the background.

  Not long after this, he was heading back to the Mediterranean. He had moved out of Sandycombe, Walter Fawkes was dead, and it was eight years since he had been in Italy. He would be away for Christmas; his ageing father and Hannah would have to look after things, and each other, in Queen Anne Street. Setting off in August 1828, he took a different route from 1819, this time down through France to Marseilles and then along the coast. On 13 October, he wrote an amiable letter to George Jones from Rome:

  Two months nearly in getting to this Terra Pictura, and at work; but the length of time is my own fault. I must see the South of France, which almost knocked me up, the heat was so intense, particularly at Nismes and Avignon; and until I got a plunge into the sea at Marseilles, I felt so weak that nothing but the change of scene kept me onwards to my distant point.

  Genoa, and all the sea-coast from Nice to Spezzia is remarkably rugged and fine; so is Massa. Tell that fat fellow Chantrey that I did think of him, then (but not for the first or the last time) of the thousands he had made out of those marble crags which only afforded me a sour bottle of wine and a sketch; but he deserves everything which is good, though he did give me a fit of the spleen at Carrara …

  Hope that you have been better than usual, and that the pictures go on well. If you should be passing Queen Anne Street, just say I am well and in Rome, for I fear young Hakewell has written to his father [James Hakewill] of my being unwell; and may I trouble you to drop a line into the twopenny post to Mr C. Heath, 6 Seymour Place, New Pancras Church, or send my people to tell him that, if he has anything to send me, to put it up in a letter … directed for me, No. 12 Piazza Mignanelli, Rome, and to which place I hope you will send me a line? Excuse my troubling you with my requests of business. Remember me to all friends. So God bless you. Adieu.

  J. M. W. Turner31

  He seems to have been saving postage, and time, writing to Jones rather than Queen Anne Street. However, Clara Wells Wheeler was also keeping an eye on things. She wrote to Robert Finch in Rome on 4 November: ‘Will you have the kindness to give my kindest regards to Turner, and tell him I sent to his father’s house to enquire after his father’s health, that I might send him the latest intelligence, and that the old gentleman was very well, but was out of town.’32 As for Turner’s restorative plunge into the azure Mediterranean, it prompts the idea that this amateur Thames waterman – and child of Margate beach – could swim.

  He had written from Paris to Eastlake, who was still at 12 Piazza Mignanelli, where Captain Thomas and Maria Graham had also lived in 1819. (Widowed while on a voyage to Chile, Maria had married Turner’s friend Callcott in 1827, and, after a year-long honeymoon tour of Europe including Rome, had just got back to the Callcott house in Kensington.) Addressing him as ‘Signor Carlo’, Turner asked Eastlake to order basic painting materials for him, including two canvases with ‘the best of all possible grounds’. He wanted to get cracking on a painting for Lord Egremont, hoping that the ‘first brush in Rome on my part should be to begin for him con amore a companion picture to his beautiful Claude’.33

  His convivial mood continued. Once at Eastlake’s apartment near the Spanish Steps, where he was lodged in a spare study, he led a more social life than he had during his first stay in Rome, despite ‘working literally night and day’, as Eastlake told a friend.34 Eastlake, by now well established, got him welcomed by the artistic community. Turner visited a number of the brotherhood of British sculptors and painters and said friendly things to them; he seemed to be enjoying himself. But there were petty difficulties chez Eastlake. His host wrote to Maria Callcott in London that Turner was having trouble with other residents of the house: ‘He does not quite agree with Ugo, and Albina plays the piano wretchedly close to his bedroom, so that he is not very comfortable. We tried dining at home for a while, but they did not use us well, and we now go out – he is used to rough it.’35

  In December, after he had moved to more spacious and apparently quieter rooms near the Quattro Fontane, he held an exhibition to stop people ‘gabbling’, so he wrote to Chantrey.36 He showed three of the canvases on which he had been working so hard. These were The Vision of Medea, a View of Orvieto and Regulus. Eastlake, who may have talked him into this show, wrote to a friend in Liverpool:

  More than a thousand persons went to see his works when exhibited, so you may imagine how astonished, enraged or delighted the different schools of artists were, at seeing things with methods so new, so daring, and excellences so unequivocal. The angry critics have, I believe, talked most, and it is possible you may hear of general severity of judgment, but many did justice, and many more were fain to admire what they confessed they dared not imitate.37

  For one thing, artists and art-lovers had never seen pictures displayed, as Turner’s were, unframed but instead with ropes nailed around the stretchers, painted with yellow ochre tempera. One viewer was Byron’s friend J. C. Hobhouse, later Lord Broughton, who had met Turner at Farnley Hall, and who now said, ‘An ignorant man like myself would find it difficult to believe them to be the production of the very first of living painters. The chief of these strange compositions, called the Vision of Medea, was a glaring extravagant daub, which might be mistaken for a joke – and a bad joke too.’38 Thomas Uwins, painting in Naples, heard the rumours and wrote to Joseph Severn, who had helped look after the dying Keats in Rome in late 1820. Uwins asked if Turner was ‘trifling with his great powers’. Severn answered: ‘Turner’s works here were like the doings of a poet who had taken to the brush.’39

  The gossip persisted. Eastlake – unexciting as a painter but an extremely perceptive colleague – wrote to Maria Callcott in March 1829, after Turner had left:

  The Romans have not yet done talking about the Paesista Inglese – how they talk would be worth relating if they knew anything of the matter. When you see his ‘Vision of Medea’, you may imagine with what astonishment the modern Italian school would look at it … The one called ‘Regulus’ is a beautiful specimen of his peculiar power, yet the wretches here dwelt more on the defects of the figures, and its resemblance to Claude’s compositions than on its exquisite gradation and the taste of the architecture. The latter was perfect for beauty of design, more Italian that Italy itself.40

  The ‘picture for Lord Egremont’ was Palestrina – Composition, which the noble Earl in the end didn’t buy and Turner held on to possessively for another sixteen years. This was indeed a specimen of Turner’s peculiar power, though perhaps imperfect in design and ‘composition’. Turner’s eight-foot-wide canvas contained many echoes of Egremont’s Claude, Landscape with Jacob, Laban and His Daughters: a bridge, a town, a mountain, some pastoral figures. But Palestrina seems the product of a split vision, two pictures, as it were, each lovely in its way, joined down the middle. A hill, castle, town, bridge and river to one side; figures and cattle and a receding avenue lined with tall trees on the other. The conjunction is unsettling. The viewer’s attention is taken in two directions at once. Turner seemed to be working on several different levels in terms of perspective, paint-handling and mood. A more satisfactory Italian venture for Lord Egremont was the purchase
of a piece of antique sculpture – a Dionysus – which Turner examined for him and – with Eastlake’s help – had shipped to England, eventually to join the Petworth collection. (The Dionysus took its time to reach England, as did Turner’s own paintings that he shipped back; at one point he lamented that they must be ‘among the fishes’ and wondered about making an insurance claim.)41

  A simpler and nobler picture than Palestrina was a large red-brown-and-yellow landscape he did of the hill country south of Orvieto. One can just make out a ruined village, Civita di Bagnoregio, on its lonely crag. A road undulates across the treeless foreground – also bereft of peasants and banditti. It is a warm and hazy day. The picture feels, like some of his Thames oil sketches, as if it was done on the spot, though they were conjured up in Queen Anne Street, and this was probably begun in Rome.42 He seems to have put it aside before working out quite how to finish it. It lacks picturesque flourishes or ‘poetical’ content. It is the work of a painter with a brush.

  He set off for home at the New Year. Before he left he began a poem ‘Farewell a second time the land of all bliss’. He went on to refer, among many obscurities, to two of his touchstones: ‘the lost greatness of Imperial Rome’ and ‘that great being of long versed renown ariel Claude’.43 A young fellow Englishman in the coach between Rome and Bologna wrote en route to Thomas Uwins in Naples:

  I have fortunately met with a good-tempered, funny, little, elderly gentleman, who will probably be my travelling companion throughout the journey. He is continually popping his head out of the window to sketch whatever strikes his fancy, and became quite angry because the conductor would not wait for him whilst he took a sunrise view of Macerata. ‘Damn the fellow!’ says he. ‘He has no feeling.’ He speaks but a few words of Italian, about as much of French, which two languages he jumbles together most amusingly. His good temper, however, carries him through all his troubles. I am sure you would love him for his indefatigability in his favourite pursuit. From his conversation he is evidently near kin to, if not absolutely, an artist. Probably you may know something of him. The name on his trunk is, J. W. or J. M. W. Turner!44

  There were troubles enough in the course of the journey for the fifty-four-year-old ‘near kin to’ an artist. Winter had set in. Turner a few weeks later wrote to Eastlake, describing the trip:

  Snow began to fall at Foligno, tho’ more of ice than snow, that the coach from its weight slide about in all directions, that walking was much preferable, but my innumerable tails would not do that service so I soon got wet through and through, till at Sarre-valli the diligence zizd into a ditch and required 6 oxen, sent three miles back for, to drag it out; this cost 4 Hours, that we were 10 Hours beyond our time at Macerata, consequently half starved and frozen we at last got to Bologna …

  There, his troubles did not diminish:

  the Milan diligence was unable to pass Placentia. We therefore hired a voitura, the horses were knocked up the first post, sigr turned us over to another lighter carriage which put my coat in full requisition night and day, for we never could keep warm or make our day’s distance good, the places we put up at proved all bad till Firenzola being even the worst[,] for the down diligence people had devoured everything eatable (Beds none) … crossed Mont Cenis on a sledge – bivouaced in the snow with fires lighted for 3 hours on Mont Tarate while the diligence was righted and dug out, for a Bank of Snow saved it from upsetting – and in the same night we were again turned out to walk up to our knees in new fallen drift to get assistance to dig a channel thro’ it for the coach, so that from Foligno to within 20 miles of Paris I never saw the road but snow!45

  Crossing Mt Cenis by sledge was fairly common practice in winter; carriages, unable to negotiate the conditions, were often dismantled and their parts carried over by mules. The alternative Simplon route offered the dangers of avalanches. Turner’s good humour and indefatigability, sorely tested by the journey, were on record that year at the RA when he showed a watercolour of the diligence in a snow drift.

  At home again in Queen Anne Street in the dark mists of a London winter, he stayed for a few months in spirit in the south. (The country was in political turmoil, with the movement for Catholic emancipation finally about to achieve its objective.) Turner worked hard finishing paintings for the Academy exhibition. He was too busy even to dine with Clara Wheeler and her family on a Saturday in mid-March; he decorated his note of regret with a sketch of a knocked-over jar of varnish, pouring out its contents, and a palette which he turned into a dismayed-looking head. He added a rush of words: ‘Time Time Time so more haste the worse speed.’46 One of the pictures he was most preoccupied with was one that had been in the back of his mind for more than twenty years. Ulysses deriding Polyphemus was the resolution of a dream.

  Turner had long been enthralled by the Odyssey and in particular by the story of the hero’s encounter with the giant one-eyed son of Poseidon, the Cyclops, Polyphemus. Did Turner identify, one wonders, with Ulysses, whom Polyphemus at one point refers to as ‘small, pitiful, and twiggy’?47 The painting was a trumpet blare of triumph, celebrating the escape of Ulysses and his surviving men. Ulysses’ burnished, lateen-rigged ship is being rowed strenuously away from a rocky shore; its strange bows, like the mouth of a huge fish, gape open most usefully to house an anchor. Ulysses stands on a raised platform just aft of amidships, taunting the giant, while an ensign aloft flourishes his name in Greek. Polyphemus himself, in blinded agony, rises out of purple smoke and cloud above a volcanic peak. Meanwhile the horses of the sun-god Apollo prance above the sea. The early-morning sun irradiates the water towards which Ulysses’ ship bustles, and phosphorescent Nereids frolic like porpoises in its bow-wave. The colouring is wild but wonderful. ‘Colouring run mad,’ said the Morning Herald on 5 May 1829. But as the Times noted on 11 May, ‘No other artist living … can exercise anything like the magical power which Mr. Turner wields with so much ease.’48

  Part of the magic lay in the mixture of fact and fancy, his reading and his imagining. The sky could be that seen after a volcanic eruption – one he had never witnessed. The coast could be the Bay of Naples – with perhaps a few rocks from the English south coast, like the Needles or the Thurlestone, thrown in. Some of the detail is as described by Homer: the Cyclops, for example, who ‘seemed no man at all … he seemed rather a shaggy mountain reared in solitude’.49 Turner properly places the other ships in the Greek squadron at an offshore island waiting for their leader’s return. Moreover, he may have come across in some journal or other discussion of recent investigations into phosphorescence – hence the nearly transparent Nereids. But other things are not as in the text of the Odyssey. The Cyclops’s cave Turner puts at sea-level rather than up in the mountains. The crew members seen in profusion up on the lateen spars as they unfurl the sails look more like stage-hands than sailors. Indeed, the ship coming towards the middle of the picture from the left, while the sun beams out of the right-hand side, was a theatrical formula he was to use again, maybe with even greater success, ten years later. A gesture, echoing Ulysses’ dramatic brandishing of the olive branch with which he had blinded Polyphemus, is implicit in the high stem of one of the waiting craft at the right, looking like a raised fist, and mocking the Cyclops’s anger.

  Turner went on having a good time with this painting after he had finished it. When the amateur artist and collector Reverend T. J. Judkin met him at a dinner party soon after the 1829 exhibition and started going on about the Odyssey, Turner mischievously denied that Homer, or Homer via Pope, was his source. He took his theme rather from that later interpreter of the Ulysses and Polyphemus story, the comic theatre and song writer, Tom Dibdin:

  He ate his mutton, drank his wine,

  And then he poked his eye out!50

  Turner’s theatregoing was noted by his friends. He talked about Shakespeare and the acting of William Macready. But if he knew his Dibdin from visiting the music halls, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus seems to show that he knew his Shelley too:

>   Half the sky

  Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry

  Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew

  Down the steep west into a wondrous hue

  Brighter than burning gold.51

  The painting did not find a buyer. It remained his own dream. But, like Ulysses, Turner must have rejoiced to have got this far in his voyage. The painting like a banner flaunted that success.

  He had kept his rooms in Rome, hoping to return this year. But the thought of the summer heat there worried him, and his father was ailing, so in the end he didn’t go – in fact, he never went back to central or southern Italy. He wrote to Eastlake to ask him to sort out any problem in getting new tenants for his rooms and to make arrangements for the continued rent of a closet in which he had left some things. Mutual aid among the British artists in Rome, and those coming or going there, was a happy commonplace, but Turner’s helpfulness might have had a high price. Clara Wheeler, thinking Turner was still planning to go again to Rome, wrote in August 1829 to Robert Finch, who was out there: ‘The second chance you mention, viz. Turner, by whom to send the books, is a broken reed;he coming overland, will not increase his luggage, and if he would, I should be quite sorry to trust him, for he would be quite sure to lose your books, as he invariably does, more than half his own baggage in every tour he makes, being the most careless personnage of my acquaintance.’52 (During his 1817 tour to the Low Countries and Germany, he noted in a sketchbook: ‘Lost in the Walett. – A Book with leaves. ditto Campbell’s Belgium. 3 shirts. 1 night ditto. A Razor. A Ferrell for Umbrella. A pair of Stockings. A Waistcoat. ½ Doz. of Pencils. 6 Cravats. 1 Large ditto. 1 Box of Colours.’)53 Instead of Italy, Turner made a quick trip to France and then stayed at Petworth for a few days in early September.