The Earl’s death had its effect on Turner. He caught cold, either at the funeral or while attending a life class at the Academy, and, feeling low, turned down an invitation from J. H. Maw, a surgical-instrument manufacturer, amateur artist and purchaser of four of his watercolours, to come and stay in Guildford. He wrote to Maw: ‘Sir Anthony Carlisle, who I consult in misfortune says I must not stir out of door until it is dry weather (frost) … or I may become a prisoner all the Winter.’33 Another of his patrons, the Norfolk banker Dawson Turner, seems to have thought Turner might benefit from Lord Egremont’s will. Turner wrote on 20 December to thank his Yarmouth namesake for the gift of a barrel of herrings, which he had as yet been unable to taste because of his illness, and said: ‘Phillips and myself have to thank you for your good wishes but he says Lord Egremont has left but few or scarcely any legacies, his Lordship having been his own Almoner during life doing good to all around him.’34
Despite a sharp touch of fever following the cold, he kept working while confined to 47 Queen Anne Street. (The herrings he sent on to Eastlake, two days before Christmas.) Indeed, his most profound response to the final slipping away of his noble patron may have been by painting. A rapidly done picture – Interior at Petworth as it has been called – shows no specific room in the house but seems rather to be an assemblage of Petworth elements. The oil painting has a bright blood-red ground. Light fills a large arched doorway. What may be the Earl’s black-topped catafalque, with the coat of arms on its side, stands amid pieces of sculpture, mirrors, an overturned stool, and a number of dogs, seemingly out of control, who jump, yap and pull at an orange table-cloth. Colour runs riot; order is dissolving into chaos.35 Turner never exhibited this picture: possibly a final work for Lord Egremont con amore and also with grief. As with Farnley after Walter Fawkes’s death, he never went to Petworth again.
Notes
1 Cobbett, Rural Rides, i, pp.215–22.
2 Ibid., ii, pp.13–20.
3 Creevey, Papers, pp.505–6.
4 Ibid., p.506.
5 Whitley, 1821–37, p.344.
6 Farington, Diary, 9 October 1803.
7 Falk, Turner, p.90.
8 Ibid., p.89.
9 Wyndham, Wyndham and Children First, p.29.
10 AR, i, p.102.
11 Ibid., p.103.
12 Butlin, Turner, p.192.
13 Haydon, Autobiography and Journals, 15 November 1826.
14 Youngblood, TS, 2, 2, p.18.
15 AR, ii, p.220.
16 Ibid., p.237.
17 Ibid., i, p.103.
18 Gore and Joll, Picture Collection at Petworth, p.18.
19 B&J, no.333.
20 R. C. Leslie, p.57. Ruskin, Praeterita, p.536.
21 Jones, Chantrey, p.122.
22 Th. 1877, p.306.
23 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.2.
24 Ibid., p.3.
25 Letters, p.278.
26 TB CCXLIV. See Butlin et al, Turner at Petworth.
27 Wyndham, Wyndham and Children First, p.37.
28 TB CCXLV, f.54v.
29 TB CCXLIV f.102.
30 Wyndham, Wyndham and Children First, pp.38–9. See also AR, i, pp.128–9.
31 TS, 2, 2, pp.30–2.
32 Ibid., p.33.
33 Letters, p.168.
34 Ibid., p.169.
35 B&J no.449; Andrew Wilton in TS 9, 2, pp.26–7 believes the picture is c.1830 and does not show a Petworth interior, though it may contain Petworth references. The Tate now calls it Sack of a Great House. Partly because of the dogs, I prefer the earlier, Egremont-connected theory.
18: Home and Away
On the second day of August 1839, Turner wrote from Queen Anne Street to the portrait painter Henry Pickersgill RA, a fellow Visitor to the Life Academy, ‘My dear Pickersgill[,] Pray forgive me but excuse my [not] being with you on Wednesday next for I am on the Wing for the Continent (Belge) this morning.’1 Although Petworth and Margate had figured greatly in his life away from Queen Anne Street for the previous ten years, he had also spent a good deal of time abroad, ‘on the wing’, during many of the summers. His sketchbooks of the period are filled mostly with European subjects. A restlessness seized him after the Academy exhibition closed in July, and could be appeased only by organizing his money (dunning, say, a print-publisher like one of the Findens who owed him), telling Hannah not to expect him back for so many weeks, and packing his ‘wallet’, a long duffle bag generally carried over the shoulder, with sketchbooks, pencils, box of colours, guidebooks, razor, nightshirt, stockings, cravats, waistcoats, shirts and even a spare ferrule for his umbrella, before setting off for the Channel packet. His planning for what he thought of as ‘my summer tour’2 was not rigorous; his destinations seem often to have been picked at the last minute; and even then, when he knew where he was going, his friends and colleagues generally didn’t – Pickersgill was fortunate to be given a hint. One consequence of this is that his ‘on the wing’ movements in the 1820s and 1830s remain a little blurred. Even when places in his sketchbooks have been recognized, the years in which he visited them are occasionally uncertain. How different he was from the altogether domestic John Constable, who never went abroad.3
Turner’s cross-Channel venturing had begun in 1802; until the Napoleonic wars were over, his restlessness – perhaps partly the result of being shipped hither and yon as a child – had to be appeased by tours within Britain. In 1817, he went to the Rhine by way of Ostend and the battlefield of Waterloo. In 1819–20 he made his six-month trip to Italy and back, but didn’t dally on the way through France. He took a mid-September jaunt to northern France in 1821, travelling along the Normandy coast and the Seine between Rouen and Paris. He sketched some Claudes in the Louvre, boats in Dieppe, the cathedral at Rouen and various Channel prospects. In 1824 there was a more extensive journey to the Meuse, Mosel and middle Rhine, with a side trip to Dieppe, which had caught his fancy. In the summer of 1825 he toured Holland and then went on to the Rhine and back via the Meuse. In August and September 1826 he visited Paris and the Loire.
In his sketchbooks he continued to write notes to himself about the distances between places, inns worth staying in and fragments of French or German that might come in handy – in one case, he listed the days of the week in French; in another, in his copy of Handbuch den Englischen Umgangssprache used in the 1830s, he noted the German for ‘I am very hungry’ and ‘Will you take a glass of wine?’ In the post-war years the means of long-distance travel greatly improved: coaches lost their close kinship to top-heavy farm wagons and became the steady, stately vehicles John Ruskin later remembered, with underseat store-cellars, secret drawers, padded linings, perfectly fitting windows, and four stout, good-humoured horses to pull them. But Turner’s travels could still be arduous and even dangerous: he walked for more than twenty miles between one Rhine village and another; a diligence overturned and was, he noted, ‘dug out of a ditch between Ghent and Brussels’. ‘Dogs and Cats’ he wrote beneath a sketched shop-front – a butcher’s shop – at Trarbach on the Mosel; the dogs and cats were presumably window-shopping. Most of what he recorded in quick pencil sketches was the usual selection of castles, spires, river scenes, rock formations, aqueducts, boats and harbourfronts, and some of it seems merely compulsive, hardly worth the repetition, until suddenly out of the forest of hurried drawings emerged for the Academy exhibition a luminous oil painting that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise: Harbour of Dieppe (Changement de Domicile) (RA 1825) was one such, Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening (RA 1826) another, both commissioned by John Broadhurst. Even in a place new to him there were continuities and connections. Dieppe has overtones of Carthage – harbour, boats, quaysides, reflected sun. Cologne omits the great landmark, the cathedral, and concentrates on the riverfront. Its close relation is the Dort, or Dordrecht, by then hanging at Farnley.
In 1828–9 he was back in Italy again, but in the late summer of 1829, when he could not get to Rome, he seems to ha
ve been happily, busily, drawing on the Normandy coast, along the Seine, in Paris and on the Channel Island of Guernsey. Unrest on the Continent may have kept him at home in 1830; the July Revolution in France finally replaced the Bourbon dynasty with the more liberal House of Orléans – Louis-Philippe, whom he knew from Twickenham, came to the throne. But Turner was back on the Seine and in Paris in 1832. He was partly occupied with a commission to illustrate Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon, and was diligent with his research; he wrote to the publisher Robert Cadell that he had been to Brienne, not far from Troyes, south-east of Paris, where Napoleon had studied at the Military Academy, had then gone looking for Bonaparte’s early lodgings in the capital, and had acquired material from which he could make drawings to do with various Napoleonic battles.
He carried a copy of Edward Planta’s A New Picture of Paris, or, the Stranger’s Guide to the French Metropolis; underlinings and notes in the margins marked his interests. Thus he drew attention to the guidebook’s declaration that most French inns were ‘not very careful in airing their linen’, thereby endangering the health of English travellers. Similarly he ticked Planta’s statement that ‘half a bottle of most of the best wines may be had at any of the restauranteurs’, which suggests that despite his earlier biliousness, he was no longer averse to the produce of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Another mark emphasized the guidebook’s warning that ‘the tradesman of the Palais Royal will unblushingly demand considerably more than the value of his commodities’. At least by now the French had ceased to call Englishmen by such abusive terms as ‘Monsieur Pomme de Terre’ and ‘Monsieur Goddam’.4 Turner noted in his copy of Planta’s Guide that a bronze statue of Napoleon was now to be seen that the guidebook said had disappeared. In the back of the book he listed places that for various reasons specially interested him: the Prefecture of Police in the Rue Jérusalem; the Museum of Natural History; the Jesuit church; the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; the Pantheon; and the Tivoli pleasure gardens. In 1829 or 1832 he called on Delacroix at his studio on the Quai Voltaire. As noted, Delacroix recalled that Turner ‘made a mediocre impression on me. He had the look of an English farmer, black clothes, gross enough, big shoes, and hard cold demeanour’.5
Meuse, Mosel, Rhine, Elbe, Danube, Seine, Loire and Rhône – his journeys in Europe between 1817 and 1840 depended on rivers. They provided attractively wet and winding ways into a landscape. In England too, for the watercolours he did in the 1820s for engraving in Cooke’s Rivers of England, he had a chance to revisit old haunts on (and old sketches of) the Tweed, Tyne, Aire, Dart, Arun and Medway. At home or abroad, the juxtaposition of riverside buildings caught his eye. When he felt in the mood for detail, his architectural drawing could still be very precise, as at Coutances, in Normandy, in 1829 or thereabouts, where he drew the two towers of St Pierre Church, with houses between.6 Norham Castle, on the Tweed, a favourite subject, provided the opportunity to capture atmosphere in watercolour and experiment prismatically by placing primary colours next to one another.7 He continued to climb heights to look down wooded slopes to sinuous stretches of water and boats in their element. Sails, as on the Avon in his time with the Narraways, still drew his attention, and so did such features as the large rudders and sweeping tillers on the vessels on the Loire.8 Canal locks attracted him, as they did many artists who drew in the English countryside in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and a windmill might demonstrate an older technology to be contrasted with the new.
Now on coastal and inland waters smoke from tall funnels was an aspect of the scene. Steam packets were introduced on the Dover–Calais run in 1821, when the Rob Roy made the crossing in two hours and forty-five minutes. A year later one could avoid the time-consuming land journey to Dover by taking a paddle-wheeler from the Tower to Calais; his c. 1825 watercolour The Tower of London shows the paddle-steamers Lord Melville and Talbot, with their candy-striped funnels, that ran a regular service ‘within twelve hours’ several times a week.9 On the Seine by 1829 one could take a bateau à vapeur from Le Havre to Rouen. Turner, doing so, took along M. J. Morlent’s little guidebook, Voyage sur la Seine, en bateau à vapeur, though he used it more as a sketchbook for marginal memoranda of churches and rivercraft; most of the pages remained uncut. Perhaps he found himself on board without a sketchbook.
Steamboats became part of his life – going to and from Margate, for example – and part of his sketching agenda, along with castles and bridges. He liked the thrusting blackness of them, their symmetrical bow waves, the bossy priority they took on waterways. It would be easy to assume that he thought of these steamboats as symbols of the new age. But they may simply have appealed to his eye. He admired their shapes and was grateful for the way their dark smoke made evident the currents in the air. He had noted in a sketchbook around 1808: ‘One word is sufficient to establish what is the greatest difficulty of the painter’s art: to produce wavy air, as some call the wind … To give that wind he must give the cause as well as the effect …’10 And ‘wavy air’ became visible by way of coal smoke from the steamers in Staffa, Fingal’s Cave and in the lovely Seine watercolour of 1832, Between Quilleboeuf and Villequier.11 Of course, he generally fitted in on these river trips one of his other preoccupations. On the Seine in the 1820s he reminded himself about bait for fishing: ‘Provide yourself with plenty of gentles [that is, fly-maggots]. If the aforesaid be old so much the better because they will work through the same cleaning themselves the while.’12
His travels along French rivers came to fruition in three ‘annuals’, volumes published for the Christmas and New Year trade that came out in the late autumn but were dated in the following year. Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire (1833) was the first; Wanderings by the Seine appeared in two parts in the two following years. All three were gathered together in a bumper volume, Liber Fluviorum or River Scenery of France, in 1853. Leitch Ritchie, the journalist who wrote the travelogue that accompanied Turner’s illustrations, didn’t much mention his artist in the text. They may not have travelled together a great deal, ‘their tastes in everything but art being exceedingly dissimilar’, according to Alaric Watts, whose biographical sketch accompanied the Liber Fluviorum.13 But Ritchie told Watts that when he was in Turner’s company he ‘was frequently surprised to find what a forcible idea he conveyed of a place with scarcely a single correct detail. His exaggerations, when it suited his purpose to exaggerate, were wonderful, lifting up, for instance, by two or three storeys, the steeple, or rather stunted cone, of a village church.’ When Ritchie good-humouredly chided him for this habit, Turner took the offensive, ‘his little sharp eyes glistening the while’, and gleefully drew attention to Ritchie’s insistence that the beard of the notorious wife-killer Gilles de Retz, known as Bluebeard, ‘was so intensely black that it seemed to have a shade of blue’.14 Ritchie must have been affected by Turner’s sardonic chant, ‘Blue Beard! Blue Beard! Black Beard!’, because this observation of Ritchie’s, assuming a painter’s prerogative to analyse colour, disappeared from the letterpress of the 1853 edition. One such exaggeration of Turner’s was to be seen in Light Towers of the Heve, a watercolour and gouache he did after his 1829 trip for engraving as a vignette frontispiece for the Seine Wanderings. In this the height of the cliff with its two lighthouses at La Hève, near the mouth of the Seine, was shown as far higher than it actually was.
Ritchie was lucky to see anything of Turner; much of the time he travelled on his own, more or less incognito. When he was off on tour, few of his friends or family had an exact idea of where he was. Sometimes, one suspects, Turner himself may not have known where he had got to – on the Loire in 1826 when he jotted down a place name as ‘Boulancy’, he was in Beaugency, it seems.15 His solitariness would have been increased by his lack of fluency in other languages. But, apart from that, there was a good deal of the Scarlet Pimpernel about him, spotted here and rumoured there; he didn’t want to be pinned down. Despite its characteristic embroidery, a story of Thornbury’s rings true; it tell
s of ‘Turner meeting a well-known water-colour painter on the Moselle, and fraternising with him. He [Turner] even went so far as to invite him to rather a handsome dinner, whereat the wine passed freely as the comrades discussed the scenery with enthusiasm. At last it was time to separate, and Turner and his guest exchanged friendly farewells. The next morning the weaker vessel arose late. His first enquiry was if Monsieur Turner had gone out sketching yet. “Left for good at five o’clock this morning, and said you would settle both bills,” was the petrifying answer.’16 In other places the man who enjoyed playing this sort of ‘rough practical joke’ would simply be missing from the inn come morning because – as this watercolour painter suspected – Turner had got up at dawn and was on the beach or mountainside, filling his sketchbook. The Reverend Judkin once encountered Turner at Boulogne and found that the artist did not relish his cheery ‘Why, who would have expected to see you here?’ Thornbury reported that ‘Mr Judkin saw no more of him till just as he was leaving, when he caught a glimpse of him in a boat bobbing off the shore, drawing in an anxious, absorbed way, and heedless of all else.’17
J.M.W. Turner Page 44