46 Ibid., p.126.
47 Odyssey, book IX (trans. Fitzgerald, p.172).
48 B&J, no.330.
49 Odyssey, book IX (trans. Fitzgerald, p.162).
50 Th. 1877, p.446.
51 Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, ll.70–4.
52 Letters, p.132 n.9.
53 Finberg, p.249.
54 Will, 1, p.2.
55 Dossier.
56 Letters, p.135.
57 Ibid., p.137.
58 Th. i, p.177.
59 B&J, no.342.
60 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, XXVI.
61 Hamerton, Turner, p.260.
62 B&J, no.355.
63 Powell, 1995, p.44.
64 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, p.140.
65 TSN, no.3, p.53.
66 B&J, no.365.
67 Ruskin, Works, iii, pp.635–40.
68 Letters, pp.160–1.
69 Brown, Turner and Byron, p.96.
15: Figures on the Shore
Like most of us, Turner felt urges that were by turns outward and inward; he was impelled by the need to seek new places and to return to those he had been close to. But, despite the attractions of Devon and Yorkshire, Italy and Switzerland, Margate remained an essential element in his life. Throughout the late 1820s and the 1830s – through his own middle age, when he was no longer beholden to Sandycombe – he went to Margate for weekends and longer stays.
Mr Coleman’s school had been sold in 1805. The bluff-bowed sailing hoys were replaced by paddle-wheel steamers, speedier and less impeded by contrary winds. Gas-lighting was introduced in 1824. The old windmill – Hooper’s mill – which had dominated the town skyline was damaged in a gale about this time and pulled down, ceasing to figure in Turner’s sketches. By 1829 the little seaside town had 9000 inhabitants. Its fresh air and sea-cures still beckoned invalids and genteel holiday-makers – Keats went there in May 1817 and stayed at the Bell. Margate’s Benjamin Beale had invented the bathing machine – a sort of shed on wheels – in which the bather’s modesty was preserved while he or she was hauled in and out of the sea by horses. Margate’s bathing rooms, where bathers booked their machines, were regarded as good places for meeting the other sex. Margate also had its Assembly Rooms, with a band which played from noon to one, three circulating libraries, from which the works of Miss Burney, Miss Austen and Lord Byron could be borrowed, and a Theatre Royal, with performances from very light to semi-serious. But it was Brighton on the south coast and other small resorts like Sidmouth and Aldeburgh that gradually acquired the fashionable visitor, while Margate got more and more of hoi polloi. Mrs Sarah Trimmer had taken her children to Margate; her son the Reverend Henry Trimmer took his to Southwold. But Turner stayed loyal.
In 1829 he could still catch the so-called Safety Coach that left Charing Cross at 8 a.m. and, via Canterbury, reached Margate at 6 p.m., horses, coach and road permitting. Thornbury’s ubiquitous informant the Reverend Judkin ‘met him once on a Margate coach. They had, he found, been travelling together for some time. Mr Judkin reproached him with his shyness, and Turner said, in fun, ‘’Why, how could I venture to speak to a great divine?”’1 But by the late 1820s Turner was more likely to be found on one of the new paddle-steamers that left from the Tower at 9 a.m. and got to Margate pier by 4 or 5 p.m.: flush-decked, with two raking masts and a slender, equally raked funnel (which had to be stayed like a mast to keep it up) belching coal smoke. Alaric Watts recalled: ‘Mr Turner was very fond of Margate, and in the summer often went there on Saturday morning by the Magnet or King William steamer. Most of the time he hung over the stern, watching the effects of the sun and the boiling of the foam. After two o’clock he would open his wallet of cold meat in the cabin, and, nearing himself to one with whom he was in the habit of chatting, would beg a clean plate and a hot potato and did not refuse one glass of wine, but would never accept two. It need hardly be added that he was no favourite with the waiters.’2 On a later occasion, he was seen on one of the steamers, eating shrimps like any holidaymaker out of an immense red silk handkerchief laid across his knees. Once, on the City of Canterbury, he had his portrait done in silhouette, complete with top hat. One suspects the insistence of a companion in this case, possibly female, for – as noted before – Turner was not keen on having others portray him. Meanwhile the other passengers paced the decks, ate their sandwiches, read novels, looked down the hatchway at the valves and connecting rods of the steam engine, or talked about where they were going to stay.
At Margate, new arrivals still had to push their way through the porters, sightseers and urchins on the pier. If Turner was heavily burdened with baggage, he may have splashed out the porter’s fee of 3d per item. His choice of inns included the York, the Ship and the Queen’s Arms, but he seems to have preferred the greater seclusion and domestic comforts of boarding houses. Just when he first came to the lodgings run by Mrs Sophia Caroline Booth is not known.3 Mrs Booth is listed in the local rate books for a house over-looking the promenade from 1827 to 1836. She was also there for the 1841 census. This property was just east of the little harbour, part of a terrace of buildings known as Cold Harbour that included the Customs House and the Foy Boat Inn, and had an oblique view of the sea. Nearby steps led up to the fort on the cliff top. At first he would seem to have been an intermittent lodger chez Booth, but the old bachelor gradually became a regular and cosseted guest.
In the 1841 census Sophia Caroline Booth was recorded as being ‘of independent means’.4 Also in the Cold Harbour house was a female servant, Judith Hollam, age twenty-two. Mrs Booth gave her age as forty. Like some women at that watershed, she seems to have deducted a year or two, for other indications are that she was born just before rather than just after the turn of the century; at her death in 1878 her age was given as eighty. Her birthday was 9 January. (Ruskin later wrote to her on that day to wish her many happy returns. The year was probably 1799, since ‘Sophia Caroline Nolt’ was baptized at Dover on 3 February of that year.)5 Mrs Booth was therefore about thirty when she first met the short, preoccupied and rather odd London artist; he was roughly twenty-five years older than she. But ‘older men’ presented no problem for Sophia Caroline, already twice a widow in 1830. And Turner, as we know from his liaison with Sarah Danby, had no problem about widows.
First time round, Sophia married in 1818 Henry Pound, a Margate mariner; by him she had a son, Daniel John. About four years after Pound’s death by drowning in 1821, she was snapped up by John Booth, a fairly well-to-do Kent man then in his early sixties. They too had a son, who was christened John Pound Booth in the church of St John-in-Thanet, Margate, on 13 November 1825. However, this boy died in Margate when only six and a half, and less than a year later, on 13 April 1833, John Booth senior was buried, aged seventy-one. Her second husband left Sophia Caroline the household effects, £1200 in cash, and the income on the rest of his property, with £200 to be paid to his stepson Daniel Pound when he reached the age of twenty-five. So Mrs Booth was, unlike Sarah Danby, not hard up when Turner became more than a paying guest. From various later descriptions, she seems to have been a comfortably buxom woman, not well educated, and with an earthy country accent. Evidently she soon made Turner think of doubles instead of singles; Mrs B might keep his bed warm.
In one respect he was even more successful with Mrs Booth than with Mrs Danby: no one in the London art world knew about his Kent widow while he and she were cohabiting in Margate in the 1830s and 1840s. Few suspected even when he had moved her up to Chelsea after that. It was one of his cleverest pieces of subterfuge. Indeed, his arrangement with Mrs Booth seems to have driven him to ever deeper concealments. In the summers of 1837 and 1838 he now appears to have been in Margate a lot but also perhaps went touring in Europe; he covered his tracks neatly. Charles Turner, the engraver, seemingly a bit miffed that he had not found out about Mrs Booth during JMWT’s lifetime, later complained, ‘What a Pity so great a Man in talent should not have made a more Lady like choice – he could not
have introduced Her to his Friends.’6 But Turner, being who he was, didn’t want to. Margate was at a useful distance from most of his Academy colleagues.
At what point Turner made the passage from lodger to lover is not known. While staying in Margate with her, Turner when occasionally taken ill was attended by Dr David Price, who had been John Booth’s physician and executor, and Price’s prescriptions for the artist were made out in the name of Booth – Turner seems to have been passing in Margate as a new ‘Mr Booth’. David Roberts, the artist, had the impression shortly after Turner’s death that Turner and Mrs Booth had been together for about eighteen years, during which ‘they lived & passed together as husband & wife, under the name of Mr & Mrs Booth’.7 Roberts talked to Mrs Booth in the summer of 1852 and thought her ‘a tall, lusty woman’. She told him that she knew ‘from the first’ who Turner was. But it is doubtful whether she knew what she was letting herself in for. She told Roberts – something he regarded as ‘extraordinary’ – that ‘with the exception of the first year [Turner] never contributed one shilling towards their mutual support!!!’ However, he did give her numerous scraps of his poetry – ‘Verses in honour of herself and her personal charms’.
Roberts, though sensible of Turner’s talent and even of his ‘profound greatness’, couldn’t help but conclude that, as a man, Turner ‘was selfish to an extream … [and] cunning, penurious & sensual’. Roberts believed that he saw more of Turner ‘in latter years’ than did Turner’s other professional brethren and was more of a friend to him than many, but still Turner went on making a ‘Mistery’ of his life, resisting all attempts to find out how and where he was living, and delighting ‘in mistifying others’.8 This need to keep secrets went back to his childhood; he was the sort of boy who wouldn’t tell his mother everything she wanted to know about his doings. He seemed to want to divide his life into watertight compartments, so that, if one was pierced, the others would keep him afloat. The pleasure he took in going incognito wasn’t simple: sometimes it seemed the reverse of a desire for fame; sometimes it seemed as if it heightened for him the fact that he was famous. He and Mrs Carrick Moore, a London surgeon’s wife, had fun with the name ‘Jenkinson’, which he now and then used with her, as in a letter in 1844: ‘Mr Avalanche Jenkinson presents his thanks to Mrs Moore …’9 Mrs Moore called him this in return, to humour what George Jones referred to as Turner’s ‘jocose love of mystery.’10
For Turner, the pleasure of knowing things that he kept to himself was greater than any pleasure he might have got from revealing them. He stayed several times with Mr and Mrs Thomas Rose at Cowley Hall, near Uxbridge, generally walking the fifteen miles from London. Rose recalled that Turner came in,
heated and tired, carrying a small carpet-bag, which was kept like a sealed book, never allowing the key out of his possession. The ladies tried various means to induce him to give up its possession, ostensibly to arrange his articles of clothing which they presumed it contained, though it must be confessed that female curiosity was the predominating cause; but he clung as tenaciously to his key as a miser to his gold.
On one occasion at the Roses, Turner came in wet and tired from fishing in the rain.
The servant was sent to the bedroom for his slippers; only one was to be found. Here was an opportunity not to be missed. The ladies ordered the servant to bring down the carpet-bag, hoping doubtless to obtain a glimpse of its contents; but a sly glance from our friend, with a peculiar shrug of his shoulders, and the two monosyllables ‘No, no,’ effectually put to flight their hopes. As a dernier ressort, one then offered to take his key and bring down the slipper. To that he replied, ‘I never give it up’; and they never learnt its contents.11
Some of Turner’s secretiveness about Sophia Booth and Sarah Danby may have sprung from a fear that, by carrying on with them, he would prejudice his standing as a Royal Academician. The Academy’s founding instruments required its members to be ‘men of fair moral character’ as well as artists of distinction.12 But Turner’s need for mystery was in his bones. He also knew its value in terms of his art. The Redgraves observed that Turner ‘ever studied to preserve a sense of mystery [in his pictures] … The suggestiveness of a work of art is one of its richest qualities; and the veriest blot of Turner is suited to suggest more than the most finished picture of imitative details.’13 As for his taciturnity, Ruskin found it ‘very strange and sorrowful’ that Turner would only ‘hint … at these undermeanings of his; leaving us to find them out, helplessly …’14 But perhaps Turner was helpless, too; he could not help being the way he was, not wanting to spell things out. In any case, the ‘meaning’, if it were forced out of him, might not always be as profound as some thought. The simplest answer might be the most correct. George Lance attended a dinner at which Turner was one of the distinguished guests.
When we adjourned to the drawing room, our interest was fixed upon that lovely picture of Venice, which Turner painted expressly for Chantrey [Ducal Palace, Dogano, with part of San Giorgio, Venice, RA 1841], in the centre of which is a gondola, or rather gilded barge, in which are grouped a crowd of ladies and gentlemen, children and boatmen. Floating near this vessel is an object which I conceived must be, from its size and colour, a gorgeous turban. Just as I had suggested that belief, Turner came up, and Professor Owen said diplomatically: ‘We are enchanted with that glorious work of yours, sir, but are divided in opinion as to what that object is floating so buoyantly on the water.’
Was it a buoy, a barrel, a seaman’s cap, or some other highly coloured piece of flotsam?
Turner took his time in answering. Then, ‘after two or three twitches of his lips, and as many little half hmms, he replied, “Orange – orange.”’15
Although it would have had more shock potential in the prudish age into which he was now moving than it might have done earlier or later, Turner’s choice of an ‘unladylike’ friend had a lot to recommend it. Sophia Booth was a Margate woman when he met her, and Margate was his favourite resort. With its bow-fronted terraces, plentiful taverns and eel-and-pie shops, 1830s Margate was not stuffy – it was like the cheaper seats in a theatre, where the customers took their coats off and laughed out loud. All day the streets were noisy with the cries of vendors of cockles, bloaters, muffins, souvenirs and sermons. Organ-grinders and itinerant bands played at street corners. The air smelled of brine, fish and beer. The arrival of the Saturday evening ‘Husbands’ Boat’, bringing down from London the spouses who had been working there all week to their holidaying wives and children, was the source of much badinage.
Seaside landladies – often widows, known for their frugality – were also the butt of coarse jokes. But we have no evidence that Sophia Booth, after taking in Turner, went on harbouring paying guests in Cold Harbour. This sailor ashore was no spendthrift, but she may have decided that the late Mr Booth’s estate provided enough for her to live on. Like Turner, she was presumably glad of an occasional partner to keep her bed warm. That he wanted his identity to remain secret – that he sometimes had the furtive ways of a bankrupt – was in the end no great matter. It seems fitting that in the place where, by the account Mrs Cato gave to Robert Leslie, the first love of Turner’s life had been blighted, he now found a good companion.
From Mrs Booth’s point of view, it may have been an advantage that he was not around all the time. The sailor went to sea. He returned to Queen Anne Street, still his homeport, albeit little cared for, with Hannah (and the cats) in residence. Except once, Margate doesn’t figure in his correspondence; he tried to leave his business affairs in town. But Margate was a practical jumping-off point for Europe. Sketchbooks might begin with Margate and go on with French or German subjects. And from Margate he roamed the Kentish coastline from the Medway round to Folkestone; he sketched at Whitstable and Ramsgate, Deal and Dover. He walked the beaches and headlands in fair weather and foul. He hired boats to take him a little way offshore, so that he could sketch the harbours, cliffs and towns. He observed and drew waves break
ing, or running up and then noisily retreating over the shingle. A sailing ship stranded ashore was still a promising subject; so was a steamer bucking into the chop and scud off the North Foreland, black smoke blown skyward. For watercolours, there was nothing like Thanet skies – ‘the loveliest’, as he once told Ruskin.16 From the fields west of Margate he made a watercolour of the town rising behind the bay and harbour, with a verdant foreground where sun-hatted children and attendant girls with parasols picked nosegays. He had done a painting of the old pier nearly thirty years before (The Old Pier, Margate, c. 1804). Now he sat with a sketchbook at the upstairs front windows of Sophia Booth’s house and looked out over the esplanade and rebuilt pier to the waters where North Sea and Thames Estuary converged. The sea’s energy, its relaxed moments, its beauty and the sense it gave of being dangerous, ready to pounce, offered him a profusion of subjects for sea paintings.
He dipped into Dutch history at this time. He read about the Anglo–Dutch conflicts of the seventeenth century and the way in which British constitutional monarchy had been secured by the accession of a Dutch prince to the British throne. And in his usual manner – part homage, part competition – he set about a sequence of seapieces that would have been ‘history paintings’ if they had not been so fresh and vivid – it was as if the sun-drenched spray was still wet on them. He seemed to be on the Dutch side (it was a period in which, as we shall see, while visiting Petworth and fulfilling commissions for the Earl of Egremont, he was also taking a great interest in Rembrandt). The Academy exhibition of 1831 saw his Admiral van Tromp’s Barge at the Entrance of the Texel, 1645. (Turner’s interest in things Dutch did not extend to getting Tromp’s name right – there was no ‘van’.) The following year he exhibited three Dutch paintings: The Prince of Orange, William III, embarked from Holland, and landed at Torbay, November 4th, 1688; Van Tromp’s Shallop, at the Entrance of the Scheldt; and Helvoetsluys; – the City of Utrecht, 64, going to Sea. In 1833 there were Van Goyen, looking out for a Subject and Van Tromp returning after the Battle of the Dogger Bank (followed eleven years later by Van Tromp, going about to please his masters).
J.M.W. Turner Page 37