My dear Ruskin
!!! Do let us be happy
Yours most truly and sincerely
J. M. W. Turner22
Turner’s almost paternal anxieties about Ruskin had been evident three years before, when he argued against Ruskin’s plan to go to Switzerland in the spring of 1845 without his parents, to look at places where Turner had sketched. Ruskin wrote later:
he feared my getting into some scrape in the then disturbed state of the cantons … Everytime Turner saw me during the winter, he said something to dissuade me from going abroad; when at last I went to say good-bye, he came down with me into the hall in Queen Anne Street, and opening the door just enough for me to pass, laid hold of my arm, gripping it strongly. ‘Why will you go to Switzerland – there’ll be such a fidge about you, when you’re gone.’ … I made no answer, but grasped his hand closely, and went. I believe he made up his mind that I was heartless and selfish; anyhow he took no more pains with me.23
He was still often at the Academy and wrapped up in its affairs. In 1845, for example, he attended Council meetings and served on the hanging committee. He continued to be a Visitor in the Academy Schools, helping students. One aspiring artist, Charles Hutton Lear, encountered Turner for the first time in early May 1847 and wrote in his diary:
He is not at all ‘Turner’ as I should have expected to find him, but he is a little man dressed in a long tail coat, thread gloves, big shoes, and a hat of a most miserable description made doubly melancholy by the addition of a piece of broad shabby dingy crape encircling two thirds at least. Thus clad and with his hands behind him appeared in outward form the greatest landscape painter that ever existed and one of the greatest geniuses, perhaps the world’s greatest genius, in Art. There is no evidence of unhealthy biliousness in his face; it is red and full of living blood, and although age has left its mark upon him it does not seem to have taken his energy of mind, for this lives in that observant eye and that compressed mouth, the evidence of an acute, calculating, penetrating intellect.
Lear remembered that T. S. Cooper had told him that when any of the members of the Academy were ‘in a mess’ with their pictures, a single application to Turner would put everything right.
An instance of that occurred this morning. I was standing near [J. R.] Herbert’s picture watching him introduce an object to the left of his figure of Christ, when a little old man who stood close by me made a gruffly low sort of remark to him. Herbert turned round and with a very reverential air told him that he was going to introduce something to fill up the space to the left, at the same time showing him in his sketchbook the thing he intended. The little old man stood silent for a few seconds and then in a low but very decided tone said, ‘You’ll spoil your picture, you’ll spoil your picture’ and in a lazy sauntering movement with his hands behind him walked idly out of the room. Herbert seemed to hesitate and put down his palette, and I turned away. In a few moments I observed the little man return, with a lazy indifferent air walk up to the picture, glance slyly at it, turn round and saunter out again.
When Lear looked at the canvas again, he saw that Herbert had followed Turner’s advice. He also noted that there was talk of Turner’s pictures being the wreck of a great mind. Rather, he thought, ‘They are the glorious setting of a glorious sun.’24
At one end-of-exhibition dinner around this time Turner made the speech about sticking together for the good of the Academy that Frith found memorable for ‘the stammerings, the long pausing, the bewildering mystery of it’.25 Because of his age, he was probably not among the Royal Academicians who were sworn in as special constables on 10 April 1848, when the authorities feared that revolution was going to spread from Europe and civil strife was expected in London. Richard Redgrave wrote: ‘All day long did we watch anxiously for the coming of the rabble.’26 In July 1848 he sat on the Academy committee that examined the case of Reinagle, who was accused of exhibiting as his own a painting by another artist; the committee found against Reinagle, who lost his membership of the Academy. But there were indications that the Academy had had just about all Turner had to give it. David Roberts sensed that ‘latterly, he became much more estranged from the Royal Academy’, and cited various reasons for this: the death of friends and his belief that the Academy should save money so that it could build its own independent quarters.27 He had been an Auditor of the Academy since 1824, but he declined to be re-elected in December 1846. He did not like such innovations as allowing the press into the Private View. And his pride must have been hurt when he wasn’t asked to become the Academy’s President. Martin Archer Shee’s health had collapsed in 1845; the younger Academicians wanted Eastlake for President; and Turner – the oldest member at the time – soldiered on for several years as deputy to the President, presiding over Council meetings and presenting diplomas. The job took it out of him. He wrote to Hawksworth on 26 December 1846 thanking him for the customary excellent Christmas pie, and going on: ‘in regard to my health sorry to say the tiresome and unpleasant duties of [presiding] during the continued illness of our President for two years – viz my rotation of Council – and being senior of the lot made me Pro Pre – it distroyd my happiness and appetite [so] that what with the business and weak[ness] I was oblidged to give [up] my Summer’s usual trip abroad – but thank Heaven I shall be out of office on Thursday the 31 of this month’.28
When Shee died in August 1850 a new President had to be elected. Turner was no longer in the running. Charles Leslie wrote later: ‘greatly as his genius would have adorned it, on almost every other account he was incapable of occupying it with credit to himself or the institution, for he was a confused speaker, and wayward and peculiar in many of his opinions, and expected a degree of deference on account of his age and high standing as a painter, which the members could not invariably pay him …’29
Leslie called some colleagues to his house to talk over the situation. Turner was there, and Philip Hardwick, architect and Treasurer of the Academy, the son of his old employer Thomas Hardwick. Young George Leslie recalled Turner being
full of spirits on the evening, and apparently in his usual good health. He quite won the hearts of my two sisters, pretty girls of twenty-two and twenty at the time, flirting with them in his queer way, and drinking with great enjoyment the glass of hot grog which one of them mixed for him. He always had the indescribable charm of the sailor both in appearance and manners; his large grey eyes were those of a man long accustomed to looking straight at the face of nature through fair and foul weather alike.30
The competent, articulate and polished Charles Eastlake was elected President (and knighted). Turner was not in good health and did not attend the meeting that voted Eastlake into the Presidency or the dinners for Academicians Sir Charles and Lady Eastlake gave in early 1851. But the moment had passed when he might have wanted the job. However, his old friend Jones, Keeper of the Academy, who had been acting President after Turner, was miffed at not being asked to stand, and resigned his post.
Organizing one’s life as one gets older takes an effort, part of which is the need to think about life after one has gone. In July 1844 he had an indenture drawn up between himself and Samuel Rogers, Hugh Munro, Charles Turner and Martin Archer Shee, to sell them the land in Twickenham for his artists’ charity hospital or almshouses, of which they were to be trustees. The institution was to be called ‘Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Charity for the relief of decayed and indigent Artists’, with provisos about the artists being painters in oil, aged fifty-five or older, Academicians, Associates or exhibitors at the Academy for more than five years. Evidently Turner had decided to try to comply with the requirements of the Mortmain Act, which made it illegal to give land in a will only for charitable purposes. Unfortunately the indenture or deed of agreement was not legally implemented. Did some of the trustees refuse the task? Did Turner have second thoughts? Whatever the reasons, it meant that eventually his cherished scheme unravelled. A great muddle ensued.
Oth
er worries overtook him at different hours of day and night. He was not happy about some of his bequests, and in 1846, 1848 and 1849 he added various codicils to his will, leaving £1000 for a monument ‘for me and my memory’ in St Paul’s Cathedral, appointing Hannah and Sophia his residuary legatees, with annuities of £150 each, and revoking his previous bequests to his Turner uncles and cousins and to Sarah Danby, Evelina and Georgiana. He left his ‘finished pictures’ to the National Gallery as long as it provided a room or rooms called ‘Turner’s Gallery’, giving it ten years to do so. Until then the pictures were to stay at Queen Anne Street with Hannah as custodian. He appointed as trustees and executors Thomas Griffith, John Ruskin, Philip Hardwick, his solicitor Henry Harpur, W. T. Wells, Henry Trimmer, Samuel Rogers, George Jones and Charles Turner. (Wells, he seems to have forgotten, had died in 1836.) For this service they were to get £19 19s each ‘for a Ring’ – a sum that cannily just escaped legacy duty.
In a fifth and final codicil of 1849 he left £100 each to Clara Wheeler and her sisters Emma and Laura. If the National Gallery ultimately did not want his pictures they were to be sold, after the lease of his gallery ran out. Out of the money received, he wanted £1000 to go to the RA pension fund, £500 to the AGBI, £500 to the Foundling Hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Street, £500 to the London Orphan Fund, and the residue to his intended Artists’ Charity. He had various other testamentary thoughts in these years, and made rough drafts for codicils, but none of them seems to have been legally drawn up; and so scattered notions about female servants to help the gallery custodian, copyright proceeds from copying fees, a change of mind about giving his Carthage rise and fall paintings to the nation and donating his ‘funded property’ to the RA or Dulwich College were not given legal effect.
Late in the day, he began to have new ideas about the sale of his work. Despite his deep-seated dislike of dealers, he took on Thomas Griffith in that capacity in this decade. Griffith not only introduced John Ruskin to Turner but took the American James Lenox to Queen Anne Street in 1848, when Lenox vainly tried to buy the Temeraire. Griffith ran a gallery close to the Athenaeum in Pall Mall. In 1842 Turner seems to have decided that he was short of commissions and needed cash to pay for five costly plates he was having engraved – Edward Goodall being paid £700 for one. So he took to Griffith some ‘sample studies’ of mostly Alpine subjects. Griffith was meant to find customers for a number of finished watercolours – Turner first proposed twenty, but revised this to ten. Turner made four of these in advance, as Ruskin wrote later, to ‘“show his hand” … whether it shook or not, or had otherwise lost its cunning’. In Griffith’s gallery Turner took out the four drawings and the roll of what Ruskin remembered as fifteen sketches and (in Ruskin’s account) asked Griffith:
‘What do you think you can get for such things as these?’
Says Mr Griffith to Mr Turner: ‘Well, perhaps commission included, eighty guineas each.’
Says Mr Turner to Mr Griffith: ‘Ain’t they worth more?’
Says Mr Griffith to Mr Turner: (after looking curiously into the execution which, you will please note, is what some people might call hazy) ‘They’re a little different from your usual style’ – (Turner silent, Griffith does not push the point) – ‘but – but – yes, they are worth more, but I could not get more.’31
Griffith managed to sell nine: Ruskin, Hugh Munro and Bicknell came through. But the once staunch Windus was not enthusiastic enough to buy, and in the following year another set for Griffith found only two patrons – Munro and Ruskin – for six watercolours. Whether Turner was beginning to falter, as Ruskin in spite of his support believed, or the Taste and he were drifting further apart, is a moot point. Many of these watercolours could be called ‘hazy’. Many – with their quick dashes of paint and hatched strokes of colour – could (with our hindsight) be described as vital precursors of Impressionism and Pointillism.
Turner’s tightness about money did not relax with age. In June 1842, in a letter to the engraver William Miller, he asked what discount there would be per hundred for greater quantities of prints and payment in ‘ready money’.32 And he remained at cross-purposes with many printdealers. The dealer Dominic Colnaghi later told John Pye that Turner had over several years reduced his firm’s trade discount on Liber prints from 20 per cent to 10. Then, around 1848, said Colnaghi,
I received an order for a set of the work. As usual, I sent to his house for it with the money. He was not in London; but his housekeeper furnished my messenger with a copy, but had received orders from her master not to allow more than 5 per cent. The money (£14) was of course paid, and I thought no more about the transaction. But, some five or six weeks after, I received a visit from Mr. Turner, and in his rather uncourteous manner he said, ‘You owe me fourteen shillings.’ ‘I was not aware of being indebted to you,’ said I. He explained that before he left town, he had made up his mind not to make any allowance to the trade on sales. He acknowledged that he was not quite certain of having mentioned this determination of his to his housekeeper, but still he thought I owed him the money. I then took some silver out of my pocket, and, offering it to him, I said, ‘if you really think I owe you the money, take it’; which he felt very much inclined to do, but I suppose an unusual fit of liberality came across him, and he said, ‘No, not this time – but recollect, in future, no discount to the trade.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘in that case how are we to live?’ ‘That’s no affair of mine,’ said he. Upon which we shook hands and parted.33
His ‘generosity’ also continued to be of a circumscribed kind. In December 1844 the committee of a group of student artists purchased a set of the Liber from Turner, in person. The agreed price was fourteen guineas, but Turner, ‘on hearing that the work was being bought by a society of students, returned one guinea as a donation to their funds’.34
Things might be tidy in Chelsea but at headquarters in Queen Anne Street they were running down – not fast, but with the inexorable accretion of soot and dust, damp and decay. Visitors rang the bell with foreboding. In 1844 the young artist and art teacher James Hammersley, to whom Turner had declined to give painting lessons as Hammersley’s father had requested in 1838, called to see the gallery. As he waited for a short time in ‘a cold and cheerless’ room he supposed was the dining room, he heard a ‘shambling, slippered footstep’ on the stairs.
When the door opened, I nobody, stood face to face with, to my thinking, the greatest man living … I saw, felt (and still feel) his penetrating grey eye! … At his request I followed him into his gallery … The room was even less tidy than the one we had left … most of the pictures, indeed all those resting against the wall, being covered with uncleanly sheets or cloths of a like size and character. Turner removed these protections to his pictures, and disclosed to my wondering and reverend observation many of those works which are now known so generally … Turner and I walked many times from end to end of the apartment, he occasionally giving brief descriptions of the pictures, and asking after my proceedings at the institution with which I was connected. Generally … he was taciturn, though still sufficiently chatty to remove all idea of inattention or discourtesy.35
At one point Turner suggested that, because the gallery was so cold, Hammersley should put his hat on. Hammersley replied that he could not think of doing so in Turner’s presence. After a few seconds Turner said he would feel much more comfortable if Hammersley complied with his wishes. Hammersley put his hat on and thought thereafter of Turner’s ‘kindly and most considerate mind’.36
Elizabeth Rigby, soon to be Lady Eastlake, called with Hugh Munro at the gallery in May 1846. Hannah let them in.
She showed us into a dining-room, which had penury and meanness written on every wall and article of furniture. Then up into the gallery; a fine room- indeed, one of the best in London, but in a dilapidated state; his pictures the same. The great Rise of Carthage all mildewed and flaking off; another with all the elements in an uproar, of which I incautiously said: ‘The End o
f the World, Mr. Turner?’ ‘No, ma’am; Hannibal crossing the Alps’ … Then he uncovered a few matchless creatures, fresh and dewy, like pearls just set – the mere colours grateful to the eye without reference to the subjects. The Temeraire a grand sunset effect. The old gentleman was great fun: his splendid picture of Walhalla had been sent to Munich, there ridiculed as might be expected, and returned to him with £7 to pay, and sundry spots upon it: on these Turner laid his odd misshapen thumb in a pathetic way. Mr. Munro suggested they would rub out, and I offered my cambric handkerchief; but the old man edged us away, and stood before his picture like a hen in fury.37
He was funny about his works, caring for them deeply even if he didn’t always look after them or even look at them. Ruskin’s Cambridge friend, the Reverend William Kingsley (‘a pale, thin man, who stammers’, according to the future Lady Eastlake),38 visited the gallery and saw that a piece of paint ‘as large as a fourpenny piece’ had fallen from the sky of Crossing the Brook and lay on the floor.
‘How can you look at the picture and see it so injured?’ asked Kingsley.
Turner said, ‘What does it matter? The only use of the thing is to recall the impression.’39
On another occasion, Ruskin said, ‘I have watched him sitting at dinner nearly opposite one of his chief pictures – his eyes never turned to it.’ And further: ‘Turner appears never to have desired, from any one, care in favour of his separate works. The only thing he would say sometimes was, “Keep them together.”’40 He was annoyed when a doctor called at the gallery, ostensibly to see his pictures, and proceeded to ask about an early painting of Rochester Castle, commissioned from Turner by the Reverend Douglas, which the doctor now owned. Did Turner remember painting it? A tortuous dialogue ensued, Turner refusing to authenticate the picture, the doctor saying he was not asking for this, Turner saying the doctor had no right to tax his memory of what he might have done one hundred and fifty years ago, the doctor apologizing, Turner growling, the doctor bowing his way out. Perhaps Turner was particularly grumpy because he had been interrupted while painting.
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