J.M.W. Turner

by Anthony Bailey

  it was no use calling at Queen Anne Street as he was seldom there. I had long observed that he had become very infirm. I therefore thought that I might, from the friendly terms we were on, aske to call upon him. I therefore wrote a letter something to the following effect: Dear Turner / I rarely even see you now. I hope you are not ill; I should like to see you as formerly. If unwell will you let me call upon you? I promise no one shall know it but myself if such be your wish – & I think your experience of me is such that you may depend on my honour in this matter. I should like to tell you what is going on in the Academy as I am sure you would also wish to know. There are many things that they (The Council of which I am one) would like to consult you about & have the benefit of your experience. Take this as it is ment, honestly & sincerely. I am the very last man who has a wish or desire to pry into the affairs of other people. God knows I have quite enough of my own to care for but should [you] deem this an intrusion upon your privacy, put it in the fire, & think no more about it

  ever yours David Roberts

  Roberts noted that Turner rarely answered a letter, and there was no reply now. However, sometime after this, Turner called, and, thanking Roberts, said

  you must not press me on the matter it cannot be. But I will do what will be the same thing – I will never come to town without calling upon you. He keept his word. I think he called once or twice after that time. The last time he stood by my table where I usually write and putting his hand upon his breast, he said, there is something wrong here: it is no use hiding it but I feel something here is all wrong. I looked steadfastly at him and could not but remark that, although all the once burly figure had now Shrunk up, the little dark piercing eye seemed as brilliant as that of a child. I had been accustomed to look on the Vacant eye of those suffering with Opthalma in Egypt and the bleared pupil or orbit, but here all was clear & lucid as youth.

  This was about the beginning or end of August. His cabman was a little bandy legged dwarf about two heads shorter than himself, with whom he seemed to be on intimate terms & spoke of putting him in a livery. I thought him in better Spirits than usual.

  I never saw him again.15

  Roberts learnt that Turner had also called on George Jones that day. Jones was working on a very large canvas, The Battle of Hyderabad, seven feet long, in an upstairs room. Jones recalled: ‘Turner was too infirm to get up the stairs to see it, and [although] he never before appeared vexed with me, yet on this occasion he did so; but at that time it was almost impossible to move the canvas, and I hoped to see him again. My hope was fallacious’ – Turner’s terminology was catching – ‘and I lost his invaluable advice.’16

  Ruskin, whose own psychological problems may have coloured his view of Turner, was convinced that Turner’s last days were unhappy and ‘very sorrowful’.17 He wrote to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1858 to say that, while going through Turner’s later drawings, he had concluded that ‘the old man’s soul had been gradually crushed within him, leaving him at the close of his life weak, sinful, desolate – nothing but his generosity and kindness of heart left’.18 It could be said, somewhat to the contrary, that if some of these later drawings were erotic enough to disturb Ruskin they were evidence that Turner’s sexual energies were still pulsing. Moreover, Ruskin, still relatively young, may not have taken account of the effects of illness and pain – the loss of ‘marrow-bone’ strength, the failing connections and falterings of nerves, the trembling of limbs – and their effects on morale. Weak in body, it is a rare man who is not also weak in spirits. Hazlitt wrote, in an unpublished final paragraph for his essay On the Fear of Death: ‘Time has already anticipated the work of Death, and left him but half his spoils; for we die every moment of our lives …’19

  Turner and Mrs Booth managed a trip to Margate, no doubt hoping for ‘revival’. Frith said: ‘A slight change for the better took place, owing, as Turner thought, to the skill of a local doctor, and the sick man went back to his lodgings in Chelsea, where his illness returned upon him with great virulence.’20 With his bad teeth, he was having trouble eating solid food. Mr Bartlett, the Chelsea ‘Surgeon Dentist and Cupper’ who had made a set of false teeth for the patient he knew as Mr Booth, now called often at 6 Davis Place. From what he saw, he later told Ruskin, ‘There was nothing about the house at all to indicate the abode of an artist,’ though he noticed the Art Journal and the Illustrated London News lying on a table. As for his patient, ‘he was very fond of smoking and yet had a great objection to any one knowing of it. His diet was principally at that time rum and milk. He would take sometimes two quarts of milk per day and rum in proportion, very frequently to excess.’21 Turner had been missing his summer tours; he told Mr Bartlett that, should he recover, he would take him on the Continent and show him all the places he had visited. He obviously did not mind being saddled with a companion so long as he could go on a sketching tour again.

  In the autumn and early winter of 1851, while the crowds continued to visit the exposition in Hyde Park, he declined. He stayed in bed from the beginning of October. He tried to draw in bed. Mrs Booth told John Pye that some of his last work was inspired by his dreams. Pye recorded: ‘One night he was disturbed, and called out excitedly. She brought him drawing materials, with which he made some notes afterwards used for a picture.’22 What did he dream about? Castles – mountains – seashores – shipwrecks – his boat – riverbanks – fishing at Petworth – a woman’s body pressed against his?

  Into his residence at World’s End – ‘the world well lost’, as Roberts called it – none of his friends could intrude, not knowing where he was living. Even the faithful Hannah didn’t know how to find him. Roberts believed, with little evidence, that this ‘poor old deseased wretched creature … [had] served all the purposes of a wife in her time and had still some afection for this Don Juan’.23 Turner’s instructions to her that summer, during the Great Exhibition, had been to admit no visitors to his gallery. However, Turner had arranged for money to reach her; he wrote to Charles Stokes on 1 August, saying his limbs were ‘so weak’ and he feared the worst, and asking Stokes to call – presumably at Queen Anne Street – so that Hannah could ‘take what may be wanted of the Exchequer Bill’.24 But as the autumn passed Hannah became worried, not seeing him in Queen Anne Street or hearing from him. As Roberts told the story, she found a note in one of his coat pockets, giving Mrs Booth’s name and the address in Chelsea. With an elderly woman friend she made her way out to that suburb:

  They seem to have been afraid to go to the house itself, but in the house adjoining is a little shop where they sell Ginger beer; here they went in & had a bottle, asking at the same time whether they knew anything of a Mrs Booth next door. The answer was that two very quiet respectable people of that name had lived for years next door, but that the old gentelman had been very ill & in fact was supposed to be dying. The description left no doubt in this poor creature’s mind that Mr Booth and Mr Turner were the same. She gave the information to Mr Harper [Harpur, Turner’s solicitor and cousin] who at once went to see & ascertain the truth; with defuctulty got acces, & found the great painter in the last stage of illness.25

  In an earlier journal entry Roberts said that Harpur knew of Turner’s whereabouts as of the end of November, when Hardwick had made enquiries of the solicitor, and Harpur told the Academy Treasurer that Turner would not be able to dine with him on Christmas Day ‘as was his custom’ because he was ‘confined to bed and had been since the commencement of October’. In 1853, Mrs Booth said that ‘Mrs Harpur called with Mr Harpur to see Mr Turner many times during his illness.’26

  At some point in mid-December Turner managed to write a note to his stockbroker and moneyman, Charles Stokes:

  Dear Stokes

  Enclosed is a wish for Mr F. Marsh to advance on my account £100

  I do not like the debts of Mr Woods – not paid. Have the goodness to do it

  yours truly

  J. M. W. Turner27

  So what was apparentl
y his last letter was about money.

  He was well – even lovingly – cared for at the end. Mr Bartlett dropped in several times a day to see ‘Mr Booth’. Dr David Price came up from Margate to be with him. Accounts vary slightly about his final days. Roberts heard from Harpur that Turner was ‘speechless two days at the end’.28 Frith and several others, probably from hearsay, have him talking on his last day alive. Mrs Booth said later that two days before the end, ‘he suddenly looked steadily and said he saw Lady Eastlake’ – the very bright woman he had always admired.29 The December weather at the time was dull and cloudy, and Archer was told by Mrs Booth that Turner often said, restlessly, ‘I should like to see the sun again.’30 Ruskin seems to have been responsible for turning this into the magniloquent: ‘“The Sun is God,” said Turner, a few weeks before he died, with the setting rays of it on his face.’31 (Ruskin was not there.) Archer learnt from Mrs Booth that not long before Turner died ‘he was found prostrate on the floor, having tried to creep to the window, but in his feeble state had fallen in the attempt’. His bedroom window faced the river.32

  Finally, Dr Price was with him and told him that his life was ebbing; he should prepare for the worst. Turner said: ‘So I am to become a nonentity then?’

  Price, evidently not a man for long words, said he was not sure what Turner meant by this, but yes, his days were numbered. Turner said: ‘Go downstairs and have a glass of sherry.’

  Perhaps he wanted Price to have some Dutch courage to help him through this ordeal. Perhaps he thought some brown sherry might improve the doctor’s diagnosis. In any event, the suggestion about sherry seems to have formed his last recorded words.33

  The accounts concur that on the morning of 19 December, the clouds parted slightly and the sun broke through, filling his room with brilliant light.34 It was ten o’clock when he breathed his last, ‘without a groan’.35 The vortex had ceased to whirl. All was calm; the roar of the world had ended; and all his contradictions were resolved in silence.

  Next day Mr Bartlett informed the Parish Registrar of St Luke’s, Chelsea, of Turner’s death. The entry in the parish book of deaths gave his age as eighty-one – wrong if he was born in 1775 – and his rank or profession as ‘Artist. Royal Academician’. The cause of death was said to be ‘Natural Decay’.36 Henry Harpur told Turner’s executors. Philip Hardwick wrote to Charles Stokes, ‘I thought you should be informed that we have lost him.’37 The landlord of the King’s Arms, the pub next to Cremorne Wharf, now learnt the identity of Mr Booth. The undertaker’s men came in for a drink after their labours. The stairs of 6 Davis Place were too narrow for them to be able to get a coffin up to the body, and they had had to carry the body down to the coffin – a satin-lined model, fit for a lord, they said. Then the neighbours came into the pub after the hearse had left, and talked of how it had gone to Queen Anne Street. Mr Booth was Turner, the great painter.

  There, arrangements were made for a death mask to be cast. Thomas Woolner, a twenty-six-year-old sculptor who admired Turner greatly, made the mask: Turner’s eyes closed, his lips sunken in because of his missing teeth, his beak of a nose. Turner’s body in its open coffin was placed in his gallery. His colleagues and acquaintances came to pay their respects. George Jones paid his tribute by sketching the scene and painting an oil: friends around the coffin; the crowded pictures seeming to lean from the walls in a sort of blessing.

  The funeral took place on Monday, 30 December. More people wanted to attend than the executors had provided carriages for. Richard Redgrave – who had had Turner’s help on varnishing days, had been elected a full Academician in February 1851 and was now one of the mourners – thought it ‘curious that he, who had seemed all his life to despise appearances, whose dress and personal arrangements were of the most homely kind, should desire to leave the world and to be carried to his last rest with so much pomp! The whole affair, however, was strongly characteristic of the man.’38

  The undertaker had invited the mourners to arrive at Queen Anne Street at 9 a.m. Redgrave rose and shaved by candlelight, had a quick cup of coffee and, unable to find a cab, set off on foot across the park from his house in Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, hoping he was going to get breakfast at Turner’s house. He and the other mourners were shown into the gallery – as dusty and dirty as ever, he noted, with the plaster broken and the pictures dropping from their canvases, the gold on the frames gone and bare wood showing. The Bay of Baiae was bulging at the bottom; Redgrave and Maclise saw that this was caused by fallen plaster, piled up between the stretcher and the canvas. The funeral arrangements had been made by Henry Harpur, the chief mourner, who wore a crepe hatband. George Jones, Philip Hardwick, Hugh Munro, Thomas Griffith, Charles Eastlake, Clarkson Stanfield, David Roberts and Charles Leslie were there, along with many other Academicians: among them Chalon, Baily, Mulready, Pickersgill, Westmacott and Creswick. Godfrey Windus and William Kingsley, two of his patrons, were on hand. Mr Bartlett and Dr Price had come, as had his business advisers Stokes and Marsh. Young Daniel John Pound was there, though not, it seems, his mother; she still honoured his secretiveness.39 Absentees included Charles Turner, who wrote in his diary ‘I did not go’ but gave no reason,40 and John Ruskin, who was abroad. Roberts recognized the undertaker as the same man who had buried the impoverished Scots painter Patrick Nasmyth nineteen years before in Lambeth, an undertaker he hadn’t seen since.

  The mourners chatted quietly about the departed. Roberts conversed with Dr Price about Turner’s health. Redgrave and the others talked about his eccentricities, his glorious pictures, his proposed charity for distressed artists, and eventually, their stomachs grumbling, about the early start they had made that morning. Would there be any breakfast here? ‘But it seemed as if Turner, who was never known to feast or feed any one in his own house when alive, was determined that no one should brag of having feasted there when he was gone.’41

  The mourners were called to the small ground-floor parlour where the coffin now reposed. Redgrave noted the silver plaque on it which gave Turner’s age, inaccurately, as seventy-nine. At ten they set off. Eleven coaches had been hired, and eight private carriages had come. Hannah Danby was assisted by the undertaker into one of the coaches. Redgrave found himself in one with Edwin Landseer, C. A. Cockerell and Patrick MacDowell (who was to sculpt a statue of Turner for St Paul’s). Landseer told some funny stories – they had to sit well back in their seats so that they didn’t show faces that would have been deemed improper for mourners – and Redgrave reflected that if Turner had been with them, ‘instead of somewhat ahead’, he would have enjoyed himself in this company; his eye would have sparkled. The solemn convoy moved slowly through the streets, gaped at by the weekday throngs, threading its way among the carts and cabs and omnibuses. It went via Cavendish Square, Regent Street and Trafalgar Square – past the Royal Academy – and then the Strand, a hundred yards from Maiden Lane, past Somerset House and along Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill. Thus Turner arrived at the great domed cathedral, where he had wanted to be buried alongside his peers. His worries at the time of Lawrence’s funeral – ‘Who will do the like for me?’ – proved groundless. There Hannah, sobbing and weeping, was helped in.

  The native Londoner got the full grand treatment from his city’s cathedral. The coffin, carried by pallbearers, was ceremonially received by the clergy. It proceeded up the aisle followed by choristers, vicars choral, vergers, minor canons. The choristers chanted the Dead March from Handel’s Saul, ‘with the full blast of the organ, and the voices of the boys which rose to join it, and the basses coming in with a solemnity of effect which was almost startling’ – so Thomas Griffith thought.42 The noble service for the dead was conducted by the Dean, the Very Reverend Henry Milman, a fellow member of the Athenaeum, who as a boy had witnessed the burial here of Lord Nelson. Milman had apparently heard Chantrey’s story about Turner making him promise he would ensure that he was rolled up for burial in his Carthage. On hearing of Turner’s death and wish to be burie
d in St Paul’s, the Dean said, ‘I will not read the service over him if he is wrapped up in that picture.’43 But Chantrey had predeceased him and had no promise to keep. Dean Milman’s clear, melodious voice touched the congregation. Five hundred were on hand, many in tears. One wonders if Evelina was present, or Sarah Danby. The organ boomed again as the coffin was carried down into the crypt, far from the sunlight. The committal service was read as the coffin was deposited in a vault near the tombs of Reynolds, Lawrence, West, Opie, Barry and Fuseli, and the choristers, now unaccompanied by the organ, ‘put out their full force’.

  Back at Queen Anne Street – it was now 2 p.m. – the famished mourners reassembled in the gallery and removed their black sashes. Were they about to be ushered in to the funeral feast? Redgrave hoped so.

  But no, nothing came of it; until at last one of the undertaker’s men entered with a black bottle of port, and another of sherry, which, with a dozen or two of glasses, he had procured from a neighbouring public-house, together with a sixpenny bag of mixed biscuits from a baker’s, and this fi nished the ceremony. At about three o’clock we were turned out, all but fasting, to reach home as best we could … I came home to a sick headache and a sad evening, and this was the last of him whose works will long enchant mankind.44