His father died on 21 September. Two years before, Turner had told Holworthy that he had begun to think of being truly alone in the world, and now the moment had come. The funeral took place on the 29th at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, which made for a sort of homecoming: William Turner had married Mary Marshall there on 29 August 1773. He had seen his son started as an artist and on his way. So much of what Turner first did was with the knowledge that it gave his father pleasure and pride. And that knowledge, though overtaken by much else, remained part of the deep momentum, a sustenance. Now he would have to do without the old man’s pride in him.
Fearfully low, he went to stay with the Trimmers at Heston. With the years, the father–son relationship is reversed; the son acquires an almost parental concern for the father; and now, as he told the Trimmers, he felt as if he had lost an only child. It was a moment when The Aeneid might have provided a refuge. Turner, like Aeneas, had carried his father, not out of burning Troy but from Maiden Lane. In mid-voyage, like Anchises, his father forsook him by dying.
Another dream, or nightmare, of this time shows a spectral horse, seemingly high in the air, its lower parts enveloped by cloud, with wild orange sky above. The horse bears a human skeleton, arched across its back, arms outstretched, head upside down – the head wears a rudimentary crown. Death, terrible and fearsome, filled his mind. He may have been reading the Bible too, and this Death on a Pale Horse may have been provoked by the Book of Revelation. He laid on the oil paint and then frenetically scratched away at it, as he had done at the watercolour A First Rate taking in Stores.
The day after the funeral he signed a will; it was his first. Obviously his father’s departure had made him decide to set his estate in order, in case the pale horse came for him as well. In this will, he left small amounts to several uncles and nephews and small annuities to his ex-mistress and children and housekeeper. (These annuities were to be interest from capital, at 5 per cent amounting roughly to £25 per year to Sarah Danby; £25 to Evelina and £50 to Georgiana, ‘natural daughters of Sarah Danby’; and £50 to Hannah Danby – whose father’s name he couldn’t remember when he tried to identify her.)54 Evelina was about twenty-eight and married at this point; Georgiana was unmarried and about eighteen. Turner himself seems to have drawn up this will, although William Marsh, his stockbroker, was one of the witnesses. In the will Turner also left £500 to the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution and funds to the Royal Academy to provide for a Professor of Landscape Painting and a Turner Gold Medal. The rest of his estate was to go towards setting up a charity for distressed landscape painters and single men. (He presumably meant landscape painters who were single men, a category close to his heart, but legal exactitude was unfortunately not his forte.) This charity was to take the form of a ‘college’ and gallery built on his land at Twickenham. His two Carthage paintings were to go to the new National Gallery, which had opened five years before in Pall Mall, as long as they were hung next to Claude’s Mill and Seaport. His own fame remained a prime concern. However, his wealth was not much increased by his father’s death. In the probate letters of administration of December 1829 for his father’s tiny estate, Turner was referred to as ‘the only child of the said deceased’ and the effects were described as ‘under £50’.55
Other deaths cast a gloom on this time. Turner was a pallbearer at the funeral of the painter and engraver George Dawe in October 1829 – Dawe had been six years younger than him. Harriet Wells, one of the three daughters of his good friend W. F. Wells, went next. Turner wrote to her sister Clara on 3 January 1830:
Your foreboding letter has been too soon realized. Poor Harriet, dear Harriet, gentle patient amiability. Earthly assurances of heaven’s bliss possesst, must pour their comforts and mingle in your distress a balm peculiarly its own – not known, not felt, not merited by all.
I should like to hear how they are at Mitcham, if it is not putting you to a painful task too much for your own misery to think of, before I go on Friday morning. Alas I have some woes of my own which this sad occasion will not improve, but believe me most anxious in wishing ye may be all more successful in the severe struggle than I have been with mine.56
Then Thomas Lawrence died, aged sixty, and after lying in state overnight in Somerset House was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral on 21 January. Turner wrote to George Jones, who was in Rome, to tell him
of the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourne from whence no traveller returns. Alas! only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like for me, or when, God only knows how soon. My poor father’s death proved a heavy blow upon me, and has been followed by others of the same dark kind. However, it is something to feel that gifted talent can be acknowledged by the many who yesterday waded up to their knees in snow and muck to see the funeral pomp swelled up by carriages of the great, without the persons themselves.57
Turner’s respect was immense for ‘gifted talent’ among his colleagues. During the service in St Paul’s, his pew neighbour Wilkie at one point whispered about some element of the spectacle, ‘Turner, that’s a fine effect,’ and Turner looked away in disgust. Constable noticed this, and talked approvingly of Turner’s reaction.58 Turner not long after paid his own tribute to the Academy’s late President in a watercolour showing the crowds and carriages standing in the cold outside St Paul’s: Funeral of Sir Thomas Lawrence, a sketch from memory. Along with Palestrina and the View of Orvieto, it was among the half-dozen pictures he showed that year at the RA. (But he didn’t hold Wilkie’s remark against him to the bitter end. Wilkie would eventually have his tribute too.)
Although, as it turned out, he had said farewell to Rome for ever, Italy kept surfacing in his work. He went on reading Byron (who had died at Missolonghi in 1824), studying Piranesi and consulting the classic authors. The golden light shone in paintings on Italian themes, both ancient and modern. He made watercolours for engraved illustrations to Byron’s collected works. He was the right man for the job, since he and Byron had similar artistic temperaments – they were fast workers; they responded to immediate stimuli; they both saw beauty and decay bound up in Italy.
One such painting, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy, made the connection brilliantly clear. The Childe – or noble youth – was the romantic, melancholy narrator of Byron’s poem of that name, a poem taking the form of a reflective tour of Europe past and present. The painting, exhibited in 1832, contained one of Turner’s favourite river-bend scenes, a single tall pine tree and sundry crumbling ruins. It was a homage to Italy and a bravura performance, as the Morning Chronicle told its readers on 7 May: Turner ‘performs wonders on a single string – is as astonishing with his chrome, as Paganini [who had been giving concerts in London] is with his chromatics’.59 Turner, slightly editing, attached Byron’s lines from Childe Harold:
and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world, the home
Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree;
Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?
Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste
More rich than other climes’ fertility;
Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced
With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.60
Unfortunately the charms of Turner’s picture were in one sense not immaculate: his pigments were unsafe, the ground soon absorbed the colours put upon it, tints dried and turned to powder and fell off; the picture went to pieces and restorers were needed. Critics asked why he wouldn’t take ‘simple, easy, and well-known precautions’61 to secure the permanence of such magic.
The Golden Bough of 1834 had similar ingredients and a similar golden glow, though no Byron – there was a reference to the ‘M.S. “Fallacies of Hope’”, but no actual lines from the work; gossip had it that the RA Council suppressed the dreaded verse. Lake Avernus, Claudean stone-pines, a temple, a brilliant landscape and D
eiphobe, the Cumaean sibyl, holding the bough which enabled Aeneas to visit the underworld without harm. In this painting, signs of decay also soon appeared. A few years on, Vernon Heath, the nephew of the purchaser, the wealthy horse-dealer Robert Vernon, noticed that one of the figures was coming away from the canvas. The artist was called in and the figure was discovered to be made of paper, like the dog in Mortlake Terrace – Evening. According to Vernon Heath, Turner exclaimed,
I now remember all about it. I determined, the picture being all but finished, to paint a nude figure in the foreground, and with this intention went one night to the Life School of the Royal Academy, and made a sketch in my notebook. Finding, next day, that it was the exact size I required my figure to be, I carefully, by its outline, cut it out of the book and fixed it on to the picture, intending, when I had time, to paint the figure in properly. But I forgot this entirely, and do not think I should have remembered but for you.62
The picture went back to Queen Anne Street and the artist properly painted the figure in. Turner in his usual contrary way could take infinite pains; he could also – as Clara Wheeler noted – be extremely careless.
And now Venice. Turner went there for the second time in 1833. The Gazzetta Privilegiata di Venezia of 9 September 1833 announced the arrival in the city from Vienna of ‘Turner, gent. inglese.’ He stayed just a week.63 The watercolour sketches he had done in 1819 during his five days or so in the city were evocative and simple – a few dashes of colour, some sweeping wash-filled brushstrokes, and there for example was Looking east from the Giudecca, sunrise. His almost calligraphic way with paint was powerfully evident in Venice: A Storm on the Lagoon – though this was painted during his last visit to Venice in 1840. Certainly Venice went on bringing out the absolute best in him. There the temptation to be florid and fanciful, over-allusive and genuflecting to influences this way and that was avoided, at least in the watercolours which the watery city demanded when he was on the spot. (Finished oils of the place, back in London, got more finicky; some of his large, late oil studies were as free as the watercolours.) Perhaps Venice was already unreal and fantastic enough not to need further mystification or complication. ‘There,’ wrote a fervent admirer, ‘he found freedom of space, brilliancy of light, variety of colour, massy simplicity of general form.’64
In 1840 he apparently stayed at the Hotel Europa, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, as he had in 1833. It was a great step-up from north of England village inns or Alpine hostelries. But there was no wallowing in luxury; he took his usual exercise, after supper climbing out on to the hotel roof to draw and paint the prospects: the Campanile of St Mark’s, for instance, during a thunderstorm, lit up by lightning, or the night sky spangled by fireworks and rockets. He haunted the canals by gondola, going back to places he had sketched in 1819 – churches, palaces, bridges, the lagoon. He went to the theatre and – judging by watercolours he did – saw Romeo and Juliet and Othello. He thought about Tintoretto, for whom his admiration had been noted by Thomas Moore and Lawrence. He brooded about Venetian history – the death of the Republic at the hands of Napoleon’s army in 1797 and the city’s existence now under repressive Austrian rule. There was the sense of vain striving that he got with the thought of Carthage and yet also the thrill, the delight, from what all his senses were reacting to: sketch after sketch, turning the pages, pencil or brush in a fast flurry of strokes, the days and nights not long enough to get it all down. In 1840 the watercolour artist William Callow was a fellow guest at the Hotel Europa. They sat together at meals and talked. Callow later recalled Turner as ‘a short, dark man, inclined to stoutness, with a merry twinkle in his eye … One evening whilst I was enjoying a cigar in a gondola I saw in another one Turner sketching San Giorgio, brilliantly lit by the setting sun. I felt quite ashamed of myself idling away the time whilst he was hard at work so late.’65
In Venice Turner did without his old props, or prompters, Claude and Wilson. He knew his Canaletto but wasn’t oppressed by the slightly claustrophobic painstakingness of the Venetian painter. His own Venetian pictures were wide open. Here for the first time he matched in his watercolours the vigorous economy of Rembrandt drawings. And back in London he went on pursuing the Venetian theme along with his usual sea scenes and classical subjects. Venice made for sales, as – in Byron’s wake – Bonington, Etty, Prout and Stanfield had discovered. From 1833 to 1837, and from 1840 to 1846, the Royal Academy exhibition had at least one Turner painting of Venice every year. Many of these pictures sold to merchants and manufacturers like Robert Vernon, John Sheepshanks, Elhanan Bicknell, Benjamin Windus and Henry McConnel, and to his Scottish landowning friend Hugh Munro, with whom he went to the Italian Alps in 1836.
One such oil painting, bought by Munro, was among his three Academy exhibits in 1836: Juliet and her Nurse. Why Juliet and her nurse should be standing on a balcony overlooking St Mark’s Place in Venice, and not a piazza in Verona, was one of many questions that came to the mind of a writer for Blackwood’s Magazine, the Reverend John Eagles, an amateur artist. For him the picture was ‘a strange jumble … thrown higgledy-piggledy together, streaked blue and pink and thrown into a flour-tub. Poor Juliet has been steeped in treacle to make her look sweet, and we feel apprehensive lest the mealy architecture should stick to her petticoat and flour it.’66 But other viewers saw it as ‘a perfect scene of enchantment’. The aesthetic seventeen-year-old son of a London wine importer was so angry that he wrote an impassioned reply to Eagles’s piece. John Ruskin had gone to Venice the year before. He thought Turner’s imagination was “Shakesperian in its mightiness … The spires of the glorious city rise indistinctly bright into those living mists like the pyramids of pale fire from some vast altar … This picture … ought only to be viewed as embodied enchantment, delineated magic …’67 Ruskin’s father recommended that young John first send this case for the defence to Turner himself. Turner replied on 6 October 1836: ‘I beg to thank you for your zeal, kindness, and the trouble you have taken in my behalf in regard to the criticism of Blackwoods Mag for Oc respecting my works, but I never move in these matters. They are of no import save mischief and the meal tub which Maga fears for by my having invaded the flour tub.’68
Ruskin’s letter did not go to ‘Maga’, a nickname for Blackwood’s, but his enthusiasm was not thwarted, and many hundreds of thousands of words, on and around Turner, were to follow. Turner sent the letter to Munro. When an engraving of the painting was made in 1842, Turner changed the title to St Mark’s Place, Venice (Moonlight); perhaps he realized that seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Venice was not quite a sufficient justification in the eyes of people who had altogether different associations for the play. Four lines of verse were attached to the second state of the print, adapted from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, as if to reiterate his deep affection for the city:
but Beauty doth not die -
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear -
The pleasant place of all festivity
The revels of the earth, the Masque of Italy69
Notes
1 Letters, p.70
2 Powell, p.19.
3 TB CLXXIII.
4 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 3, LXII.
5 Powell, p.31.
6 TB CLXXXVIII, f.26; Apollo, Oct 1996, pp.25–32.
7 Letters, p.81n. 1; Finberg, p.261; Apollo, op. cit.
8 Finberg, p.262.
9 Hazlitt, Collected Works, ix, p.367.
10 Letters, p.263.
11 Ibid., p.97.
12 Ibid., p.82.
13 Ruskin, Ruskin Today, p.220.
14 Wilton, p.131.
15 Th. 1877, p.103.
16 B&J, no.233.
17 See TB CXXXV with its five pages of formulations for yellow pig ments. He used chrome yellow in 1814, the year it was first manufactured; Townsend, 1993, p.41.
18 Finberg, pp.295–6.
19 B&J, no.232.
20 Letters, p.108.
21 B&J, n
o.239.
22 Letters, p.100.
23 Ibid., p.103 n.2.
24 Ibid., p.138.
25 Th. 1877, p.294.
26 Dictionary of Artists, p.437.
27 TSN, no.53, p.5.
28 B&J, no.230.
29 Finberg, pp.279–80.
30 Ibid., p.273.
31 Letters, pp.119–20.
32 Ibid., p.135 n.2.
33 Gotch, Lady Callcott, p.118.
34 Finberg, p.311.
35 Gotch, Lady Callcott, p.279; Letters, p.118.
36 Letters, p.120.
37 Whitley, 1821–37, p.159.
38 Broughton, Recollections, iii, pp.294–5.
39 Uwins, Memoir, ii, pp.239–41.
40 Powell, p.142.
41 Letters, p.127.
42 Powell, pp.158–9.
43 TB CCXXXVII, ff.8a, 9.
44 Uwins, Memoir, ii, pp.239–41.
45 Letters, pp.125–6.
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