J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  Richard Redgrave also had first-hand experience of the help Turner gave on these occasions to younger colleagues, even though ‘it was conveyed in dark hints and ambiguous phrases’. He recalled that during the first varnishing days in 1841 to which he was admitted on being elected an associate, he was ‘trying to spoil’ his picture, The Castle Builder, when Henry Howard came up to him and said, ‘in his most frigid manner’, that the bosom of his figure was indelicately naked, and that some of the members thought he should paint the dress higher.

  Here was a dilemma for a new associate. Of course, with due meekness, I was about to comply with his advice, although greatly against the grain, and with a sort of wonder at myself that I could possibly have been ignorantly guilty of sending an immodest contribution to the Exhibition. Meanwhile, Turner looked over my shoulder, and, in his usual sententious manner, mumbled out, ‘What-r-doing?’ I told him the rebuke I had just received from the secretary. ‘Pooh, pooh,’ said he, ‘paint it lower.’

  Redgrave thought Turner was trying to lead him into trouble. Turner added, turning on his heel, ‘You want white.’

  What could he mean? I pondered over his words, and after a while the truth struck me. The coloured dress came harshly on the flesh, and no linen intervened. I painted at once, over a portion of the bosom of the dress, a peep of the chemise. Howard came round soon after, and said, with a little more warmth, ‘Ah! you have covered it up – it is far better now – it will do.’ It was no higher however; there was just as much of the flesh seen, but the sense of nakedness and display was gone. Turner also came round again, and gave his gratified grunt at my docility and appreciativeness, which he often rewarded afterwards by like hints.

  Now this was not a mere incidental change, but it was a truth, always available in the future, the value of linen near the flesh – a hint I never forgot, and continually found useful. Many such have I heard and seen him give to his brother landscape painters – either by word of mouth or with a dash of his brush.13

  In fact, Turner did not confine his help to landscapists. Wandering around the exhibition rooms on a varnishing day in 1847, he stopped at a picture by the history painter Solomon Hart, showing Galileo in a Florence prison being visited by John Milton. Galileo’s head in the picture was against a light, bare background. Turner with a piece of chalk sketched in Galileo’s solar system behind his head. ‘Turner was upon the point of effacing his addition,’ Hart wrote later, ‘but Stanfield, who was much interested, hastened to me, to persuade me to preserve the lines. He mixed up some paint and stood over me whilst I secured them with colour. All thought that Turner’s suggestion had much improved my picture.’14 As a ‘fixer’, Turner was busy that year. He was working on his own picture of the making of a statue of the Duke of Wellington, The Hero of a Hundred Fights, and one of its neighbours in the hanging arrangement was Daniel Maclise’s Sacrifice of Noah after the Deluge. The following conversation was recorded by George Jones:

  Turner: ‘I wish Maclise that you would alter that lamb in the foreground, but you won’t.’

  Maclise: ‘Well, what shall I do?’

  Turner: ‘Make it darker behind to bring the lamb out, but you won’t.’

  Maclise: ‘Yes I will.’

  Turner: ‘No you won’t.’

  Maclise: ‘But I will.’

  Turner: ‘No you won’t.’

  Maclise did as Turner proposed and asked his neighbour if that would do.

  Turner (stepping back to look at it): ‘It is better, but not right.’

  He then went up to the picture, took Maclise’s brush, accomplished his wish and improved the effect. He also introduced a portion of a rainbow, or reflected rainbow, much to the satisfaction of Maclise, and his work remains untouched.15

  On a varnishing day during an earlier year the landscape painter W. F. Witherington was having trouble with a picture of a road passing through a wood, with some prominent white wild flowers in the foreground. It wasn’t quite right, and Witherington asked some Academicians how to improve it. William Hilton said, ‘I will fetch a man to tell you.’ Turner came over. According to T. Sidney Cooper, who was on hand, Turner ‘dipped his brush into some blue that he had on his palette [and] glazed over the white flowers. They all immediately exclaimed, “That’s it!” And certainly the effect was magical. It at once put the whole picture in tone.’16

  The same ability to see how a small change could significantly make or break a picture came to the aid of Cooper himself. Stanfield on this occasion, possibly in 1846, had suggested to Cooper that he lower the tone of the background on which some sheep were painted, as it was all too much the same colour. Cooper was just about to do this when Turner came by, looked at the picture, added some colour from his palette and walked on. Stanfield said, ‘Don’t touch it – he has done all that it wanted.’ When Cooper left the RA rooms, he ran into Joseph Gillott, the wealthy pen manufacturer, and told him what had happened. Gillott, after being reassured that Turner had really ‘touched’ the picture, immediately agreed to buy it unseen for £300.17 Assisted in a similar way was the landscapist Thomas Creswick, who in 1848 exhibited at the RA a picture called Squally Day. The American artist and journalist William J. Stillman wrote:

  Near the centre of the landsfape was a white horse, forming rather a conspicuous object. On the varnishing day, one of the academicians advised him to paint out the horse, and a difference arose with regard to it, when it was agreed to refer the point to Mr Turner, who was in another room, and had only once walked hastily through the room in which the picture was, making it impossible for him to have given it more than a passing glance. He replied, without going [again] into the room, ‘Keep it in.’ ‘But,’ said they, ‘something is wrong.’ ‘Well,’ said Turner, ‘you have got him turned the wrong way’ – and on seeing the picture they discovered that the horse had turned his head towards the storm instead of his tail, as he should have done.18

  Other young painters received encouragement from Turner – one of them, Frith, thought modestly that Turner had overpraised him on one occasion. When young Robert Leslie became an exhibitor at the Academy in 1850, with a rather sentimental picture called A Sailor’s Yarn, Turner came over and after a minute of looking at it said, ‘I like your colour.’ One imagines that Turner felt the need to be kind and this was the most honest compliment he could pay; at any rate, it remained in Robert Leslie’s memory, a source of pleasure.19 If there were small boys around, like Robert and George Leslie when younger, Turner didn’t mind them watching him, and even now and then explained things to them. George Leslie, aged nine, observed him in 1844 when he was working on Rain, Steam, and Speed:

  He used rather short brushes, a very messy palette, and, standing very close up to the canvas, appeared to paint with his eyes and nose as well as his hand. Of course he repeatedly walked back to study the effect … He talked to me every now and then, and pointed out the little hare running for its life in front of the locomotive on the viaduct.20

  Young Leslie then had lunch in the Council Room, sitting between his father and Turner. Turner helped him to slices of tongue and made him feel at home. The boy didn’t ‘understand all the jokes and fun that went on’, but got the impression ‘that Turner held his own in it all remarkably well’.21 (According to George’s father, Turner – despite his singularly secretive habits – had a social nature, and on these occasions ‘was the life of the table’.)22 Frith was at one of these varnishing-day lunches when R. R. Reinagle came in late and somewhat drunk and sat down next to Turner. Turner asked where he had been – ‘You were not in the rooms this morning.’

  ‘Been, sir?’ said Reinagle. ‘I have been in the City. I have invented a railway to go up and down Cheapside. Omnibuses will be done away with. I shall make millions, and’ – looking round the table – ‘I will give you all commissions.’ Then looking aside at Turner, ‘And I will give you a commission if you will tell me which way to hang the picture up when I get it.’

  ‘You may hang
it just as you please,’ said Turner, ‘if you only pay for it.’23

  At another lunch, when an engraver stood up to carve some beef, another member appropriated the engraver’s chair, with the result that when the engraver sat down he did so, with a shock, on the floor. At this – J. W. Archer wrote – ‘Turner growled out: “Come, come – this is too bad, I cannot have one of my best engravers spoilt in this way”; and going round to his prostrate ally, assisted him to rise, with an earnest expression of condolence, and recommended a mixture of oil and turpentine, which he said he had in his colour-box, as an efficient lineament.’24

  There was also of course an element of rivalry at the Academy on these days; Turner zestfully entered into the spirit of competition. George Leslie noted that other artists used to dread having their pictures hung next to his, on which he piled, ‘mostly with the knife, all the brightest pigments he could lay his hands on, chromes, emerald green, vermilion, etc.’ His neighbours said that ‘it was as bad as having their pictures hung next to an open window’.25 Chantrey as a sculptor could afford to be better humoured about this Turner effect; one cold day, he stopped before one of Turner’s paintings ‘in which orange chrome was unusually conspicuous, and affecting to warm his hands before it, said, “Turner, this is the only comfortable place in the room. Is it true, as I have heard, that you have a commission to paint a picture for the Sun Fire [Insurance] Office?”’26

  Not only did Turner make his own pictures ‘blaze with light and colour’; there were reports, said George Leslie, that he occasionally worked on pictures hung next to his to make them less so. ‘It is said that he was once discovered, by a fellow-member, rubbing tone over a small picture that was above one of his own, and on being asked if that were his picture he was working on, he replied, ‘’No, but it is spoiling mine.” Most probably the toning was put on with watercolour only, for he would hardly have been so unjust as to use oil. Yet Turner was, as Voltaire said of the prophet Habakkuk, capable de tout.’27

  His younger colleagues Stanfield and Roberts followed him in treating varnishing days as occasions for working on their pictures and having a good time. In 1826 Callcott exhibited a picture entitled Dutch Fishing-Boats running foul, in the endeavour to board, and missing the painter-rope – the last phrase of which was taken to be a jocular reference to Stanfield’s failure to finish a picture called Throwing the Painter in time for the exhibition. The following year, Turner – with whom jokes could ferment for a long time – took up the challenge with his ‘Now for the Painter’, (Rope). Passengers going on Board. (The rather flat-footed ‘(Rope)’ seems to have been for the benefit of landlubberly viewers, though it may have been Turner simply milking the pun to the last drop.)

  Frith was on hand when David Roberts needed all his sense of humour to handle Turner as a varnishing-day neighbour. Roberts’s A View of Edinburgh – ‘a long, narrow, delicately-coloured picture’ – was hung next to Turner’s Masaniello and the Fisherman’s Ring. Frith wrote that when first placed on the wall, Masaniello’s ‘queer figure’ was relieved by a pale grey sky, the whole effect being almost as grey and quiet as Roberts’s picture. Turner’s face was muffled ‘to protect it from the draughts’ for which the rooms were celebrated.

  Both he and Roberts stood upon boxes, and worked silently at their respective pictures. I found myself close to them, painting some figures into a landscape by Creswick. I watched my neighbours from time to time, and if I could discover no great change in the aspect of ‘Edinburgh’, there was no doubt whatever that ‘Masaniello’ was rapidly undergoing a treatment which was very damaging to its neighbour without a compensating improvement to itself. The gray sky had become an intense blue that even Italy could scarcely be credited with it. Roberts moved uneasily on his box-stool. Then, with a sidelong look at Turner’s picture, he said in the broadest Scotch:

  ‘You are making that varra blue.’

  Turner said nothing; but added more and more ultramarine. This was too much.

  ‘I’ll just tell ye what it is, Turner, you’re just playing the deevil with my picture, with that sky – ye never saw such a sky as that!’

  Turner moved his muffler to one side, looked down at Roberts, and said:

  ‘You attend to your business, and leave me to attend to mine.’

  And to this hour ‘Masaniello’ remains – now in the cellars of the National Gallery – with the bluest sky ever seen in a picture, and never seen out of one.28

  Yet he let Jones win a similar contest in 1833, when Turner added more blue to a picture one day to outblue the sky in Jones’s picture, and Jones the next day made his own sky whiter, which made Turner’s sky look much too blue. Turner slapped Jones on the back and told him to enjoy his victory. When Jones before the 1832 exhibition told Turner that he was going to paint Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being delivered from the fiery furnace, Turner said, ‘A good subject. I will paint it also.’ He asked what size Jones intended to paint it, and said he would paint it the same, got Jones to order two panels for them both, and said he would make sure not to look at Jones’s while he was painting it. ‘Both pictures were painted and exhibited,’ wrote Jones. ‘Our brother Academicians thought that Turner had secretly taken an advantage of me and were surprised at our mutual contentment, little suspecting our previous friendly arrangement.’29

  Others, faced with Turner’s competitiveness, were less contented. C. R. Leslie was on hand when Turner’s Helvoetsluys, to start with ‘a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it’, was hung next to Constable’s Opening of Waterloo Bridge. Leslie wrote that Constable’s painting looked as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while Constable was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind Constable, looking from the ‘Waterloo’ to his own picture, and at last went and got his palette from the Great Room where he had been touching another picture. He then put a round daub of red lead,

  somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, [and] went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just as Turner left it. ‘He has been here,’ said Constable, ‘and fired a gun.’ … The great man did not come again into the room for a day and a half; and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.30

  There has been some discussion as to whether the jaunty black dog that was put on the parapet in Turner’s Mortlake Terrace … Summer’s Evening was added as an afterthought by Turner himself on a varnishing day or by a fellow artist doing him a good turn. One viewer, the writer and editor of Punch Tom Taylor, called the dog ‘a proof of Turner’s reckless readiness of resource when an effect in art was wanted. It suddenly struck the artist that a dark object here would throw back the distance and increase the aerial effect.’31 But Frederick Goodall RA, the son of one of Turner’s engravers, said it was the work of the twenty-five-year-old Edwin Landseer: ‘He cut out a little dog in paper, painted it black, and on Varnishing Day, stuck it upon the terrace. All wondered what Turner would say and do when he came up from the luncheon table at noon. He went up to the picture quite unconcernedly, never said a word, adjusted the little dog perfectly, and then varnished the paper and began painting it. And there it is to the present day.’ However, it seems more likely that it was Turner himself who originally placed the paper dog on the canvas, and perhaps it fell off and Landseer stuck it back again.32 Turner, we recall, also employed a paper figure in The Golden Bough.

  Landseer admired Turner’s helpfulness and teaching skills on varnishing days. He said later:

  I should think no man could be more accurate in his observation, or more thoroughly grounded in the education of the artist than Turner. I have seen him detect errors during the days when we met at the Academy, after th
e pictures were placed; and whatever he suggested was done without question, and it was always an improvement, whether in proportion or chiaroscuro, or anything else. He was thoroughly grounded in everything, and, without exception, I should say, the best teacher I ever met with.33

  Doubts also are cast on two stories about his 1826 exhibit, Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening. One had it that Chantrey heard that during varnishing days Turner had been toning the picture with watercolour. Chantrey was said to have rubbed a wet finger across one of the packet boat’s sails and realized he had removed some glazing. Another was that the vividness of this picture – one of his ‘yellow dwarf’ products – overwhelmed two portraits by Lawrence that hung on each side of it, and Turner therefore generously gave the Cologne a wash of lamp-black; this horrified Lawrence, though Turner was said to have assured him it would wash off after the exhibition. Despite George Jones and Ruskin standing by this story, it has been pointed out that Turner, for all his acts of helpfulness to his colleagues, would never have diminished to such a degree the impact of one of his main exhibits. He had, moreover, specifically told his father to take care of the surface of this painting – not to touch it with water or varnish and to wipe it only with a silk handkerchief. A more typical incident occurred the following year, when his Rembrandt’s Daughter was hung close to a Martin Archer Shee portrait of an academic in a bright-red university gown. Turner piled on the red lead and vermilion to ‘checkmate’ Shee.34

  The operation of hanging the pictures involved a good deal of politicking, diplomacy and – it could not be helped – ill-feeling. Pictures were hung close together all over the walls, which in the case of the Great Room were extremely high. They could be hung ‘on the line’, at roughly a viewer’s eye height; ‘below the line’, as many small pictures were, packed in like ‘little bricks’, as the hangers called them; or ‘skied’ up to the ceiling, tilted forward to make them more visible.35 Turner served from time to time on the hanging committee, whose membership changed every year. In 1811 when he and Callcott were on the committee, they were criticized for exceeding the limits of eight works allowed members (Turner showed nine, Callcott ten), ‘all placed in the very best positions’, it was noted.36 (In 1818, Callcott moved his Mouth of the Tyne to make room for Turner’s Dort.) In 1812 there had been ructions at Somerset House. Big historical pieces by West and Fuseli (who was on the hanging committee) were given the best positions. Farington was also on the hanging committee that year and wrote in his diary (10 April):