J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  Turner’s large picture of ‘Hannibal crossing the Alps’ was placed over the door of the new room (but in the great room) & it was thought was seen to great advantage. Mr West came & concurred in this opinion with Smirke, Dance & myself. Calcott came and remarked that Turner had sd. that if this picture were not placed under the line He wd. rather have it back; Calcott also thought it wd. be better seen if under the line. He went away & we took the picture down & placed it opposite to the door of the entrance, the situation which Calcott mentioned.

  There, so Farington thought, it appeared to the greatest disadvantage. It injured the whole effect of that part of the arrangement, and the committee therefore decided to replace it. On the following day,

  While we were at dinner Turner came and took a little only having dined early. He asked me ‘What had we done with His pictures?’ I told Him we had had much difficulty abt. His large picture ‘Hannibal crossing the Alps’. He went upstairs & staid a while and afterwards returned to us with an apparently assumed cheerfulness but soon went away and took Howard out of the room, who soon came back & informed us that Turner objected to His picture being placed above the line. Howard assured Him it was seen there to better advantage, but He persisted in saying that if it were not to be placed below the line He would take it away; that as He saw us cheerfully seated He would not now mention his intention to us, but would come on Monday morning to have the matter finally determined.

  On the Monday Turner duly repeated his threat to take the Hannibal away. Farington then got it hung ‘at the head of the new room’ below the line. Here, after some more indecision from Turner, which presumably served to irritate the hanging committee, the artist approved its situation, ‘provided other members shd. have pictures near it’. His friend Leslie in fact thought that at this location it was hard to see the Hannibal ‘at the proper distance, owing to the crowd of people’ in front of it. The crowd, at any rate, seemed to indicate that Turner got for his picture what he wanted, the maximum of attention.37

  Turner was also unhappy about the way his other exhibits of that same year, his two Oxford pictures, were hung, because of their neighbours, but despite complaints about this to James Wyatt, for whom he had painted them, he left them at the exhibition. His interest in the surroundings of his pictures extended beyond the neighbouring paintings. Alaric Watts thought this concern ‘that everything should aid the effect of his pictures’ lay behind his offer one year to pay for cloth to recover the seats of the room in which one of his paintings was hung.38

  As always with Turner, his inner barometer soon swung from stormy to fair. Jones noted his generous behaviour as arranger one year when he ‘took down one of his own pictures to give a better place to a picture by the late Mr [Edward] Bird, before that artist was a member of the Academy’.39 And Jones recalled that on the occasion of their competition with fiery-furnace pictures, when the hanging committee gave Turner’s picture a superior position, Turner ‘used his utmost endeavours to get my work changed to the place his occupied and his placed where mine hung, as they were exactly the same size’.40 David Roberts contrasted Turner’s modesty about his own abilities with Constable’s disposition to talk about himself and his works. Roberts met the two one night in 1831 at ‘dear old General’ Phipps’s house in Mount Street, where the walls were covered with fine paintings:

  Constable a conceated egotistic person, whatever Leslie may have written to the contrary, was loud in describing to all the severe duties he had undergone in the hanging the Exibition. [He was on the hanging committee that year.] According to his own account nothing could exceed his disinteredness or his anxiety to discharge that Sacred Duty. Most unfortunately for him a Picture of Turner’s [Caligula’s Palace] had been displaced after the arraingment of the room in which it was … Turner opened upon him like a ferret; it was evident to all present Turner detested him; all present were puzzled what to do or say to stop this. Constable wriggled, twisted & made it appear or wished to make it appear that in his removal of the Picture he was only studying the best light or the best arraingment for Turner. The latter coming back invariably to the charge, yes, but why put your own there? [This was Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.] I must say that Constable looked to me and I believe to every one else, like a detected criminal, and I must add that Turner slew him without remorse.41

  Despite Roberts’s allegation that Turner ‘detested’ Constable, there is evidence that in this, as so often, a contrary case can be made: Turner went to call on Constable in February 1829, after he was finally elected a full member of the Academy, and talked with him till one in the morning, although it is uncertain whether Turner actually voted for Constable or for his good friend Eastlake. According to Cosmo Monkhouse, Turner gave Constable some varnishing-day help ‘on one occasion by striking in a ripple in the foreground of his picture – the “something” just needed to make the composition satisfactory’.42

  It was a matter of dispute among his fellow artists just how much of his pictures Turner painted when they were hanging on the walls of the Academy, though most agreed that his virtuoso performances on varnishing days greatly reduced the longevity of his paintings. Frith said it was ‘an erroneous notion that Turner occasionally had painted the whole of some of his pictures during varnishing days’, though he acknowledged ‘seeing great effects in the way of change and completion produced by Turner in a very short time’.43 But as the Redgraves noted, his habit of pinching knobs of colour from other painters like Stanfield and applying it, ‘irrespective of the medium with which it was made up’, caused a number of his later paintings to fail.44 His Rembrandt’s Daughter, with much last-minute brilliance, soon cracked up. Concern for the longevity of the surface of his pictures was less in his mind than concern for immediate impact and sometimes any medium would do. Stanfield told the restorer F. P. Seguier: ‘I saw Turner apply watercolours with his fingers as a finishing glaze to certain of his oils.’45

  George Leslie, with his own and his father’s knowledge of the subject, wrote of Turner’s later work:

  Turner used to send these pictures into the Academy with only a delicate effect, almost in monochrome, laid on the canvas, and very beautiful they looked, often like milky ghosts. They had probably been painted for some time, as they were quite dry and hard; all the bright colour was loaded on afterwards, the pictures gradually growing stronger in effect and colour during the … varnishing days.

  Leslie believed that Turner for a long time had been preparing works for future exhibition, by laying in, with simple colours, the effect and composition, painting them solidly and very quickly with considerable impasto, and allowing the whole to dry and harden together.

  He would use no fugitive pigments in these preparations, contenting himself with the ochres, siennas, and earth browns, with real ultramarine, black, and a very liberal allowance of white. He must, I think, have had many works thus commenced laid by in his studio, from which he would take one, from time to time, to send to the Academy for exhibition. I have formed this opinion from having seen the remarkable series of Turner’s works that were recently discovered and since hung in the National Collection. The preservation of these pictures is remarkable, and I have a very strong conviction that they were probably painted very quickly. Perhaps any one of them represents little more than a day’s work. That the safest and simplest pigments alone were used, accounts for their good preservation, their mellow tone being merely the effect of time. If I am right … we ought to be thankful that they were never exhibited, for, if this had been the case, they would, most likely, have by this time been ruined through the deleterious pigments with which he would have overlaid them on the varnishing days.46

  As for those that were exhibited in Turner’s later years, Ruskin limited their excellence to the time at which they made their exhibition appearance:

  No picture of Turner’s is seen in perfection a month after it is painted. The Valhalla cracked before it had been eight days in the Academy rooms; the vermi
lions frequently lose lustre long before the Exhibition is over; and when all the colours begin to get hard a year or two after the picture is painted, a painful deadness and opacity come over them, the whites especially becoming lifeless, and many of the warmer passages settling into a hard valueless brown, even if the paint remains perfectly firm, which is far from being always the case … The fact of his using means so imperfect, together with that of his utter neglect of the pictures in his own gallery, are a phenomenon in human mind which appears to me utterly inexplicable …47

  But perhaps there was an explanation. As Turner aged, he was less and less interested in the accomplishment, the results, of painting. He knew that what the Morning Chronicle in 1831 called his ‘freaks and follies’ were often regarded – as Richard Westmacott regarded them – as ‘unintelligible to the multitude’.48 Anyway, he was going to die. Nothing lasts forever. But he was interested in the act of painting; he enjoyed it; and he didn’t mind people watching him wound up and bound up in the performance. He was the exhibition.

  Just as he had with one of the burning of the Houses of Parliament paintings, he brought his Regulus to the British Institution to finish on its walls. He had painted and first shown this picture in Rome in 1828; it showed one of his Claudean harbours again, with a blinding dazzle of sunlight on the water. The Roman general Regulus, a captive in Carthage, had been sent home to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, and when his leaders refused this, he nobly returned to Carthage where the Carthaginians cut his eyelids off and left him in the sun, blinding him. Quite where Regulus was in the picture none of the viewers could make out, nor what point in the general’s comings and goings the scene represented. In 1837 at the British Institution Turner was watched by the twenty-year-old John Gilbert, who had a picture opposite, as he reworked Regulus:

  He was absorbed in his work, did not look about him, but kept on scumbling a lot of white into his picture – nearly all over it … The picture was a mass of red and yellow of all varieties. Every object was in this fiery state. He had a large palette, nothing on it but a huge lump of flake-white; he had two or three hog tools to work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows, and every part of the surface. This was the only work he did, and it was the finishing stroke. The sun, as I have said, was in the centre; from it were drawn – ruled – lines to mark the rays; these lines were rather strongly marked, I suppose to guide his eye. The picture gradually became wonderfully effective, just the effect of brilliant sunlight absorbing everything and throwing a misty haze over every object. Standing sideways of the canvas, I saw that the sun was a lump of white standing out like a boss on a shield.49

  It has sometimes been suggested that the viewer is meant to imagine himself in Regulus’ position, being blinded.50

  At the Academy, there had been intimations of a crack-down on varnishing-day privileges. Martin Shee may have harboured a grudge against Turner for ‘checkmating’ him in the battle of reds in 1827, because, on succeeding Lawrence as President in 1830, Shee – once an enthusiast for the varnishing days – tried to reduce the number of them. Constable wrote to C. R. Leslie on 27 April 1832:

  I am in the greatest alarm for the Academy. No notice of varnishing has yet come – therefore we shall not be allowed the five days. This is a sad affair to me – but I am rightly served – I should not have sent my scumbling affair. As to Turner (to whom no doubt the blow is levelled) nothing can reach him, he is in the clouds

  The lovely Jessica by his side

  sat like a blooming Eastern bride

  I cannot complain. We set the example by cutting off a day last year – & Shee would cut off all but one if he could. His pictures are always ‘hard’ before they are sent off his easil & will bear anything being put upon them.51

  In 1852 the varnishing days were suspended, and Charles Eastlake said it was the thought of Turner that had prevented the Academy taking that action until after his death. Leslie wrote that ‘had the varnishing days been abolished while Turner lived, it would almost have broken his heart. When such a measure was hinted to him, he said, “Then you will do away with the only social meetings we have, the only occasions on which we all come together in an easy unrestrained manner. When we have no varnishing days we shall not know one another.”’52 David Roberts observed Turner’s increasing antipathy to innovations at the Academy, such as the admission of the press to the Academy’s private view, and Roberts’s daughter Christine Bicknell in 1845, riding home with her father and Turner in a fly, noted Turner’s bad temper on the subject of the Academy: he ‘grumbled at everybody the whole way particularly at the “Italian” as he called Eastlake & my father who he called “Young England” for attempting Reforms in the Academy’.53 Turner, according to the Redgraves, was proved right. The varnishing days were reinstated in 1862, their value recognized again as a time when knowledge and experience and advice could be exchanged.

  Notes

  1 Whitley, 1800–20, pp.148–9.

  2 Turner’s first actual completion of a painting at the RA, ‘adding glazes and toning’ to transform it from a sketch into a finished picture, may have been in 1818. Townsend, p.58.

  3 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, pp.1–2.

  4 Frith, Autobiography, i, p.139.

  5 Whitley, 1821–37, p.319.

  6 Farington, Diary, 13 May 1803.

  7 B&J, no.131.

  8 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, pp.535–9.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Finberg, pp.351–2.

  11 Century, p.255.

  12 Ibid., pp.263–4.

  13 Ibid., p.265.

  14 Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape, pp.22–3.

  15 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.8.

  16 Ibid., p.9; Cooper, My Life, ii, pp.9–10.

  17 Cooper, My Life, ii, pp.2–3.

  18 Stillman, TS, 9, 2, p.49.

  19 Ruskin, Dilecta, in Praeterita, p.537.

  20 Leslie, Inner Life, p.144.

  21 Ibid., p.145.

  22 AR, i, p.201.

  23 Frith, Autobiography, i, pp.129–30.

  24 Archer, TS, 1, 1, p.36.

  25 Leslie, Inner Life, p.145.

  26 Jones, Chantrey, p.126.

  27 Leslie, Inner Life, p.148.

  28 Frith, Autobiography, i, pp.132–3. Masaniello is now in the Tate.

  29 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, pp.5–6.

  30 AR, i, pp.202–3.

  31 Th. i, p.305.

  32 Whitley, 1821–37, p.282. Shanes, TS 3, 1, pp.49–50.

  33 Hilda Finberg, Burlington Magazine, xcix (1957), p.48.

  34 B&J, no.238.

  35 Leslie, Inner Life, p.75.

  36 Whitley, 1800–20, p.187.

  37 AR, ii, p.12.

  38 Th. 1877, p.295.

  39 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.5.

  40 Ibid., p.6.

  41 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.4.

  42 Monkhouse, p.101.

  43 Frith, Autobiography, i, p.131.

  44 Century, pp.255, 343.

  45 Falk, Turner, p.161.

  46 Leslie, Inner Life, pp.146–7.

  47 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, pp.144–5.

  48 Whitley, 1821–37, pp.211–12.

  49 B&J, no.294.

  50 See e.g. Gage, Colour, p.143.

  51 Ibid., p.167.

  52 AR, i, p.201.

  53 TS, 9, 1, p.3.

  17: Liberty Hall

  Anyone looking for a place and a person that embodied what was – albeit quirkily – best about the highest level of English society in the first half of the nineteenth century needed to look no further than Petworth House, Sussex, and its master, George O’Brien Wyndham (1751–1837), the third Earl of Egremont, the nobleman who became one of Turner’s greatest patrons. William Cobbett, that scourge of unrepresentative governments, sinecure holders and bad landlords, recorded his arrival in Petworth in 1823, while on one of his Rural Rides to examine the condition of British agricul
ture; it sounded as if he had reached the Earthly Paradise:

  As you approach Petworth, the ground rises and the soil grows lighter … Petworth is a nice market town; but solid and clean … Lord Egremont’s house is close to the town, and, with its outbuildings, garden-walls, and other erections, is, perhaps, nearly as big as the town; though the town is not a very small one. The Park is very fine, and consists of a parcel of those hills and dells, which Nature formed here, when she was in one of her most sportive moods … A most magnificent seat …1

  And two years later, on a fine sharp November morning, Cobbett rode through Lord Egremont’s park, which Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown had laid out in 1752:

  In a very fine pond not far from the house and close by the road, there are some little artificial islands, upon one of which I observed an arbutus loaded with its beautiful fruit (quite ripe) even more thickly than any one I ever saw even in America. There were, on the side of the pond, a most numerous and beautiful collection of water-fowl, foreign as well as domestic … Everything here is in the neatest and most beautiful state. Endless herds of deer, of all the varieties of colours; and, what adds greatly to your pleasure in such a case, you see comfortable retreats prepared for them in different parts of the woods.