Fair Shines the morn, and soft the zephyrs blow,
Venezia’s fisher spreads his painted sail so gay,
Nor heeds the demon that in grim repose
Expects his evening prey.14
He wanted to let the viewer know that even in the glory that was Venice there was decay. Expectant demons were just around the corner. But what the viewer saw was sparkling beauty.
He was in Switzerland in 1841, 1842, 1843 and 1844. (In 1843 he was also in the Tyrol and northern Italy.) He revisited sketching sites he had first gone to in 1802. He continued climbing. In December 1844 he wrote to Hawksworth Fawkes and alluded to his summer travels:
I went however to Lucerne and Switzerland, little thinking or supposing such a cauldron of squabbling, political or religious, I was walking over. The rains came on early so I could not cross the Alps, twice I tried, was set back with a wet jacket and worn-out boots and after getting them heel-tapped I marched up some of the small valleys of the Rhine and found them more interesting than I expected.15
He was sixty-nine.
On his way back from Venice in September 1840 he called at Coburg, in Bavaria. Out of this visit came a landscape painting, Schloss Rosenau, Seat of H.R.H. Prince Albert of Coburg (RA 1841). Queen Victoria had married Albert in 1840 but the monarch didn’t take the bait, if such it was, and present her consort with this picture. (The wealthy pen-manufacturer Joseph Gillott bought it several years later – and seven other Turners.) For that matter, the newspaper and periodical critics were not ecstatic. The Times said, ‘Here is a picture that represents nothing in nature beyond eggs and spinach. The lake is a composition in which salad oil abounds, and the art of cookery is more predominant than the art of painting.’ The Athenaeum thought it was one of ‘the fruits of a diseased eye and a reckless hand’.16
Were Turner’s eyes in fact diseased? The question had been posed before. Leigh Hunt may have been the writer in the Tatler in 1831 who somewhat facetiously attributed Turner’s predilection for wild colours – his ‘chromatic absurdities’ – to an ophthalmic condition.17 Blackwood’s, denouncing his RA exhibits in 1837 and in particular Snow Storm, Avalanche, and Inundation (a product of his Swiss trip with Hugh Munro), asked: ‘Has any accident befallen Mr. Turner’s eyes? Have they been put out by the glare of his own colours?’18 Turner had mentioned several times in some verses in a sketchbook of 1810–12 the word ‘oculist’, when he was in his mid-thirties,19 and at some point he acquired spectacles, perhaps for reading. However, he did not wear them in public.20 To one lady who complained to him about his use of blue, red and yellow, Turner said crossly, ‘Well, don’t you see that yourself in Nature? Because, if you don’t, Heaven help you!’21 Lady Eastlake, the former Elizabeth Rigby, wrote in 1856: ‘Every object he saw, as he himself told us, was outlined to his vision in prismatic colour.’22
As he grew older his eagle-like sight may have deteriorated and caused a change in his response to natural colours. It has been suggested that a ‘lens sclerosis’ and a secondary astigmatism may have caused distortion of vision, a blurring of detail and an overall reddening. A modern eye-surgeon, Patrick Trevor-Roper, discusses the effect of a cataract – ‘an opacity of the lens of the eye’ – that absorbs ‘the shorter spectral wave-lengths, starting with violet and blue’, so that ‘ultimately it may permit little beyond the red rays to reach the retina’. And he thought that Turner’s later pictures became ‘more blurred and at the same time increasingly suffused with red and orange light (in Mark Twain’s crude description, “like a ginger cat having a fit in a bowl of tomatoes”)’.23 Moreover, ‘when such a cataractous painter feels compelled to use blue, he generally exalts it in order to reach through his lowered blue-perception … In this way, perhaps, we can account for the single patch of blue that Turner usually interpolated among the miscellany of reds, right up to the end of his life, but as an almost isolated hue in strong contrast to the seemingly endless variety of reds and oranges which he was using in the same painting.’24 And yet, even if his eyesight ‘failed’, and his responses to certain colours changed, the net effect was not necessarily ‘bad’. His late watercolours particularly testify, as Monkhouse noted, to a ‘perfect perception of the relations and harmonies of different hues … Instead of declining, this faculty of colour seems to have increased in perfection almost to the last.’25
For many years his doctor had been Sir Anthony Carlisle, the former Professor of Anatomy at the RA (1808–24). According to Joseph Farington, Carlisle charged a guinea a mile for out-of-town visits and ten guineas a day if detained. He was Joseph Nolleken’s doctor and at one period ‘visited him at all hours and … was always with him at the shortest possible notice’.26 But the diligent doctor abandoned all his patients by dying in 1840 at the age of seventy-two. Turner had had a number of bouts of ill-health in the previous decade, including bad colds and influenza, which sapped his spirits. Now, past sixty-five, there were frequent reports of illness. In April 1842, so ‘a lady in Jersey’ reported (possibly Thomas Rose’s wife), Turner had been ‘very ill’, and, though ‘now better … it has shook him a good deal. He is living by rule.’27
Just what the regimen was, we do not know. Perhaps it was homoeopathic. He might have recalled a remedy he had written in a ‘Hastings’ sketchbook of 1809–11 using a herb called ‘stramonium’: ‘smoke 2 or 3 pipes every day & swallow the saliva’.28 His continued interest in such remedies was shown in several sketchbooks in the 1830s, for the bite of a mad dog, for what he called the Colera (‘25 Drops of Caje-put oil in a glass of Hot Water, if not relieved in 5 min. take 50 more’), and for some unmentioned ailment that required a prescription of vitriol, rhubarb, soda and some sort of powder.29 His well-founded nervousness about cholera – which visited London in 1832 – was visible in a letter to Robert Cadell, asking him to send a recent paper on treating the disease, written by Edinburgh medical men.30 The letter he wrote to Clara Wheeler at her Gracechurch Street home in the City in February 1844 suggests that he was taking some practical measures to keep well:
I intended to have called in G Church St yesterday but the Enemy beat me. Time always hangs hard upon me, but his auxiliary, Dark weather, has put me quite into the background, altho before Xmas I conceived myself in advance of Mr Time … Pray accept my concern for the delay of your seeing such kind friends through my engagements at the R.A., which I really do dread. However I have got a Macintosh and with some fur round the shoulders I hope to fare better betwixt the heat and the cold. If not I will give in for everyone feels the variety of the temperature of the Life Academy to be very bad.
In a postscript he added: ‘I have been to the R.A. study. It is equal cold and hot like Death.’31
By the following December, when he wrote to Hawksworth, the Macintosh with fur didn’t seem to be doing the trick: ‘for myself, the rigours of winter begin to tell upon me, rough and cold and more acted upon by changes of weather than when we used to trot about at Farnley, but it must be borne with all the thanks due for such a lengthened period’.32
Had he had a scare, which made him thus grateful?
He wrote to Ruskin senior in May 1845: ‘I have been so unwell that I was obliged to go away from Town to revival by a little change of fresh air.’33 One wonders about the cumulative effects of working so long with ‘pernicious pigments’ – particularly chromes and leads – which, as George Leslie observed, Turner ‘delighted in and recklessly employed’.34
And was he drinking too much? In his Twickenham days, moderation had been the rule, at least at home. The eldest Trimmer son, visiting Sandycombe Lodge, said, ‘At this time Turner was a very abstemious person.’35 Travelling on the Rhine in the late 1830s he noted a day’s fare in a sketchbook: ‘Bread & Cheese. Bottle of Ale. [That was presumably lunch.] Dinner. 2 small bottles of Stout. Glass of Gin and Water.’36 Hardly the regimen of a heavy drinker. But ‘Mr Time’ may have changed him in this respect. ‘Bad habits’ are mentioned by one of his later physicians, Dr David Price of
Margate.37 Thornbury claimed to have heard from two old boatmen on the Thames, who rowed Turner on sketching excursions, that the artist ‘always took a bottle of gin with him for inspiration and never gave them any’.38 Thomas Rose of Cowley Hall, near Uxbridge, and later of Jersey, told Thornbury of an occasion when, ‘after the ladies had retired’, Turner and he sat up and talked. On the table stood a large jug of water and a bottle of cognac. Turner had never been very communicative with Rose before, but he now surprised his host by talking about the Pyrenees, various places in Scotland and picturesque scenes on the River Rance in Britanny. ‘During the course of the evening his tumbler had never been emptied; first a dash of brandy, then an addition of water, and thus he continued, never entirely exhausting its contents, until it struck two in the morning.’ Then they went to bed.39 (It may have been the Alps rather than Pyrenees, unless Turner was truly drunk.)
As time went on, ‘brown sherry’ is often mentioned. He did not seem shy about alluding to his fondness for it. In an undated letter to Henry Pickersgill, he wrote, ‘Sorry to say I am engaged out of town to-day, so I must be put down on the Black List, instead of the Brown Sherry …’40 Wilkie Collins, the novelist and son of the landscape painter William Collins, told Thornbury that he used to attend his father on varnishing days and remembered
seeing Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at the Academy lunch), seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush, and now receded from. Yet in spite of the sherry, precarious seat, and old age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every pin’s head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale.41
George Jones was convinced that Thornbury’s assertion that Turner in his later years ‘gave way to even greater excess’42 was ‘entirely false’.43 However, although there is no evidence for frequent wallowing in ‘some low sailors’ house in Wapping or Rotherhithe’,44 there were – Thornbury claimed – other sightings of the great man ‘rather the worse for grog’ at Offley’s in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. He was said to have resorted frequently in the evening to the Yorkshire Stingo, a well-known tavern in Lisson Grove, in northern Marylebone, with a bowling green, tea gardens and hall where vaudeville acts were performed. But, says Thornbury, he stopped going to the tavern ‘on being recognised there by a friend’.45 One later medical man’s diagnosis of Turner’s health was that he had ‘an alcoholic cirrhosis’. Sir Joshua Reynolds had apparently gone the same way.46
Some evenings, after working all day in his studio, he felt like being on his own with his sherry or grog and his thoughts. Some days his mood was low; he did not want company. Colleagues died – old friends like Holworthy, in 1841, and Chantrey, the same year. On the morning of Chantrey’s death he went to his house and met George Jones, who recalled, ‘He wrung my hand, tears streamed from his eyes, and he rushed from the house without uttering a word.’47 He declined an invitation from Mrs Carrick Moore and acknowledged that he was ‘very low indeed for our loss in dear Chantrey’.48 However, sometimes action followed loss. His old rivalry with Wilkie – who had died on 1 June 1841, during a voyage home from Egypt – was quite set aside in a desire to paint a memorial for his brother painter, although his old competitiveness with a living artist, Jones, remained brisk. Turner had a conversation with Jones.
Turner: ‘I suppose nobody will do anything to commemorate Wilkie?’
Jones: ‘I shall pay a humble tribute by making a drawing representing his funeral.’
T: ‘How will you do it?’
J: ‘On the deck of the vessel, as it has been described to me by persons present, and at the time that Wilkie’s body was lowered into the sea.’
T: ‘Well, I will do it as it must have appeared off the coast.’
And so Turner’s Peace: Burial at Sea and Jones’s ‘drawing’ appeared at the next Academy exhibition. And there, according to Jones, Stanfield chided Turner on the black sails of the ship, thinking the colour and effect untrue. Turner replied, ‘I only wish I had any colour to make them blacker.’
Jones thought Stanfield in the right, but also thought that it was ‘very like’ Turner ‘to have indicated mourning by this means, probably retaining some confused notions of the death of Aegeus and the black sails of the returning Theseus’.49
On 26 November 1844, the twenty-nine-year-old artist and teacher James Hammersley visited the Queen Anne Street gallery and was being shown round by an exceedingly taciturn Turner, who was clutching a letter, when the artist exclaimed, ‘“Mr. Hammersley, you must excuse me. I cannot stay another moment; the letter I hold in my hand announces the death of my friend Callcott.” He said no more. I saw his fine grey eyes fill as he vanished.’50
On the very same day, Turner wrote to Dawson Turner to thank him for a gift of a barrel of bloaters, to tell him Thomas Phillips was recovering from a ‘severe attack of something like Bilious Jaundice’, to express sorrow at reading in that morning’s paper ‘that Callcott is no more, alas’, and to note that ‘a great Robbery has been committed upon friend S. Rogers and Co.s Bank, 40,710 in Bank notes’.51 Callcott’s death in context! This is not to suggest that the weepy eyes that Hammersley saw were an act. He was sometimes flooded by sentiment.
Old rivals, old followers and old companions passed on. We do not always have his reactions. A younger friend, the Reverend Edward Daniell, of the North Audley Street chapel, died aged thirty-nine on a trip to Syria in 1843. (Daniell once told David Roberts that he had known many artists, but none except Turner ever came to hear him preach. ‘I never felt more proud than when the great painter passed up the aisle with his old umbrella to take his seat.’)52 And we don’t know what he thought in February 1843 when his daughter Georgiana died. She had got married on 18 June 1840 at St Mary Magdalene Church in Bermondsey to one Thomas James Thompson. She was twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time and said her father was ‘George Danby, deceased’. Her husband was only twenty-two and gave his occupation as chemist. (In the 1841 census he was described as a clerk.) They went to live in Park Street, off the City Road, in Southwark, one street from the river, and in the next few years had two sons who died, one at seventeen months, the other at five months, both named Thomas. The first was baptized Thomas William. Evelina’s second son was also named William. So the Turner girls’ neglectful father – and Grandfather Turner – were in a small way remembered. Georgiana predeceased her second Thomas. He was barely a week old when she died of puerperal fever at the Lying-In Hospital, Lambeth, aged thirty-one.53
Georgiana’s death caused Turner to change his testamentary arrangements. In the codicil he had made on 20 August 1832 she had been named as a residuary legatee. In the codicil of 29 August 1846 he declared, ‘Whereas the residuary legatee mentioned in my Will has died …’ and proceeded to replace her, for the time being, with Hannah Danby and Sophia Booth. (This codicil was later revoked, but Hannah and Sophia were given annuities, which remained.) He did not seem to think of Evelina, out of sight and out of mind; she and her husband Joseph Dupuis were in North Africa at this time with their three children. Dupuis – until recently British Vice-Consul in Sfax, Tunisia – had been forcibly detained for a short time, apparently because of a lawsuit, and left the Consular Service in 1842. One has the impression of a cranky man, not ambassadorial material.
Turner continued to go out to convivial dinner-parties. Georgiana’s death on 8 February 1843 – assuming he had heard about it – did not stop him from accepting on 12 February an invitation to the Bicknells’ for the 25th. He visited the Leslies one evening in the early 1840s and they supped informally on Welsh rarebit. Robert Leslie wrote later:
At the time my father was engaged upon a portrait of Lord Chancellor Cottenham; and during the evening Turner went into the painting-room, where the robes, wigs, etc., of the Chancellor were arranged upon a lay-figure; and, afte
r a little joking, he was persuaded to put on the Lord Chancellor’s wig, in which … Turner looked splendid, so joyous and happy, too, in the idea that the Chancellor’s wig became him better than any one else of the party.54
He was also to be seen regularly at the Carrick Moores’ house in Brook Street, off Grosvenor Square. James Carrick Moore, a surgeon, had been a good friend of Fuseli, and he and his wife were well acquainted with Samuel Rogers and his sister and such artists as Chantrey, Wilkie, Jones and Eastlake. When Turner could not accept one of Mrs Moore’s invitations, he thanked her with one of his jokey letters from Mr Avalanche Jenkinson. He dined with the Bicknells at Herne Hill, with Sam Rogers in St James’s Place and with Rogers’ sister Sarah in Hanover Terrace. At a dinner at the publisher John Murray’s in Albemarle Street in March 1844, he was a guest along with Scott’s biographer J. G. Lockhart and Elizabeth Rigby, who wrote for the Quarterly Review (and was to become the wife of Charles Eastlake). She wrote in her diary about Turner: ‘a queer little thing, very knowing about all the castles he had drawn – a cynical kind of body, who seems to love his art for no other reason than because it is his own. Lockhart grew black as thunder when Turner was pertinacious and stupid, and looked as if he could have willingly said, “You blockhead!’”55 Turner, despite his breadth of mind, was not quick-witted, particularly when among ‘intellectuals’.
J.M.W. Turner Page 48