The executors stayed on for a while to hear Mr Harpur read the will.
In 1807, aged thirty-two, Turner had copied in his ‘Spithead’ sketchbook these lines from some verses addressed to Time:
For thou hast made me gaily tough
Inured me to each day thats rough
In hopes of calm tomorrow
When Old Mower of us all
Beneath thy sweeping Sythe I fall
Some few dear friends will sorrow
Then though my idle prose or rhime
Should half an hour outlive me time
Pray bid the Stone ingravers
Where’er my bones fi nd church-yard rooms
Simply to chisel on my tomb
Thank Time for all his favours.45
Notes
1 Turner’s tag for The Departure of the Fleet gives the impression that Dido killed herself by drinking poison, but in the Aeneid she used a Trojan sword.
2 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.2.
3 Lindsay, p.248 n.33.
4 Letters, p.224.
5 Ibid., pp.225–6.
6 Ibid., p.227.
7 Ibid., p.228.
8 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in ibid., p.9.
9 Wilton, p.238.
10 Ruskin, Modern Painters, i, June 1851 postscript (1897 edn, p.454).
11 Cooper, My Life, ii, pp.10–11. Cooper’s anecdote is nice; but his statements on Turner’s death and funeral on p.11 are untrue.
12 Finberg, p.432.
13 Letters, p.228.
14 Whitman, Charles Turner, p.20.
15 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
16 Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.9.
17 Ruskin, Works, xxii, p.512.
18 Ibid., xxxvi, p.292.
19 Hazlitt, Selected Writings, p.509.
20 Frith, Autobiography, p.139.
21 Finberg, p.437.
22 Armstrong, Turner, p.181.
23 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
24 Letters, p.229.
25 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.7.
26 Ibid., p.6. Geese III, p.66.
27 Letters, p.230.
28 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
29 Eastlake, Journals, i, p.273. She was forty-two in 1851.
30 Archer, TS, 1, 1, p.36.
31 Ruskin, Works, xxii, p.49; xxviii, p.147.
32 Archer, TS, 1, 1, p.36.
33 Roberts, TS, 9, 1, p.6.
34 Archer, TS, 1, 1, p.36; Jones, ‘Recollections’, in Letters, p.4; Finberg, p.438.
35 Whitman, Charles Turner, p.20.
36 Dossier: certified copy of death entry.
37 Letters, p.230 n.1.
38 Redgrave, Memoir, pp.80–1.
39 If Mrs Booth had attended, David Roberts would have known her when he met her, apparently for the first time, in Chelsea the following summer: TS 9, 1, p.7.
40 Whitman, Charles Turner, p.20.
41 Redgrave, Memoir, p.82.
42 Finberg, p.439.
43 AR, i, pp.207–8.
44 Redgrave, Memoir, pp.83–4.
45 TB C. Jan Piggott in TSN no.74, pp.12–13, identifies Turner’s source as a poem by the dramatist George Colman Jr., first published c.1808–9.
6 Davis Place, Cremorne New Road, Chelsea, by J. W. Archer, 1852
22: Turner’s Gift
‘It is a very stupid will.’ That was Elizabeth Eastlake’s opinion and apparently that of the people she talked to at the Academy dinner on the first night of the New Year.1 A good deal of legal wisdom later concluded that Turner’s intentions had been evident enough in his will, stupid or not, and could have been given effect to with strong enough backing from those in whose hands he left his estate; but the volition of the executors he had chosen turned out to be shaky. Although they turned up for frequent meetings at 47 Queen Anne Street, their attention to the task was not rigorous. Opposition soon appeared, and, though one might think it would have caused them to gird their loins, it failed to elicit much determination. The result was serious change and compromise. True, Turner had not – in his thriftiness – allowed them much in the way of expenses for their labours: just under twenty pounds each. The frail or uncertain dropped out. Griffith resigned apparently because of a conflict of interest with his art dealing. Ruskin did not get on very well with Charles Turner, whom he called ‘the old lying rascal’ in a letter to his father of 17 February 1852,2 and he was fearful of becoming enmeshed in legal and financial hassle. Samuel Rogers was eighty-nine, ‘utterly white in hair, skin and eyes’, said Lady Eastlake,3 and he also dropped out. This left Henry Harpur, who had retired as a solicitor in 1849, and the Academy treasurer Philip Hardwick, to handle money matters; and Hugh Munro, Charles Turner, George Jones and the Reverend Henry Scott Trimmer to organize the fate of the pictures and drawings. It would have helped if Turner had earlier sat down with his executors and had several long conversations with them to clarify his purposes; but he does not seem to have done this. The executors gave the impression that they had been landed in a muddle and were trying to make the best of a bad job. One major problem arose from the failure of Turner and his legal advisers, Cobb and Harpur, to ensure that the three-quarters of an acre of land at Twickenham, on which the almshouses for distressed artists – ‘Turner’s Gift’ – were to be built, was transferred to the trustees of the charity at some time between July 1844 and December 1850, at least a year before his death. This transfer did not take place.
Turner died wealthy, though inevitable mystery shrouds some of the particulars. For a start there were over 100 ‘finished’ paintings, over 200 unfinished paintings, and more than 19,000 sketches, drawings and watercolours. There was his property: little bits of land in Twickenham, Barking and Great Missenden; the run-down Ship and Bladebone in Wapping, although it was soon to be demolished; and his leasehold houses in Harley Street and Queen Anne Street, valued for legacy duty for a total of £900. There was ‘cash in the house’ amounting to £605 – a great deal to have lying around, but burglars wouldn’t have thought 47 Queen Anne Street a promising target. There were his savings in Government Funds. Charles Eastlake told Samuel Rogers that Turner ‘had not more than £80,000 in the Funds’,4 though the actual amount, in Consols and Three Per Cent stocks seems to have been just under £70,000. Charles Turner wrote in his diary for 11 September 1852 that Turner’s will was proved for £140,000, not including the pictures, drawings and so on, but in fact the executors declared to the probate court ‘that the whole of the goods chattels and credits of the Deceased do not amount or value to [more than] the sum of One hundred and forty thousand pounds’.5 This ‘whole’ would seem to incorporate his art work – and that included about £5000 worth of engravings and plates. One hundred and forty thousand pounds then was worth, at a rough estimate, about five-and-a-half million today.
It was enough to excite many of his relatives. His first cousins may have been chatting, hopefully, for several years. Now, as news circulated of his death, the first cousins were pestered by second cousins, asking why they shouldn’t receive some of the benefits. Jabez Tepper, son of Turner’s South Molton, Devon, cousin Mary Turner Tepper (1770–1855) and providentially (for her and the other next-of-kin) a London solicitor, fired an opening shot five days after Turner’s death. He wrote a letter to the Times, which had announced that Turner was not known to have had any relatives, that ‘Mr Turner had five first cousins at his decease; one of them is my mother.’6 When it became evident that Turner’s will and codicils gave these cousins absolutely nothing, Mr Tepper went into action. Hannah Danby and Sophia Booth were made parties to the cousins’ case.
The group of claimants represented by Tepper first of all tried to stop probate being granted to the executors on the ground that Turner had been of unsound mind and incapable of making a valid will. They failed in this. Then, when the executors asked the Court of Chancery to let them administer the estate, the next of kin asserted that the will could not be ‘construed’; and – their second line of attack – that, even if it could be, the Mor
tmain Statutes made void its chief provision for the decayed artists’ charity, ‘Turner’s Gift’. It was nearly four years later, on 19 March 1856, that the Court gave its approval to a settlement that the executors and the claimant group had finally reached. Harpur and Tepper had been talking and arguing with each other. As members of the legal profession they knew that a case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce length could benefit only lawyers, and presumably the next of kin and other executors had been putting pressure on them to find a solution that did not exhaust Turner’s wealth. At this point the claimants no longer included Hannah Danby, for she had died in December 1853, but did include her heirs, the three surviving daughters of John and Sarah Danby. The settlement resulted in the abandonment of ‘Turner’s Gift’, his primary dream. George Jones was upset, though he evidently gave his agreement as executor. It was the most inequitable act he had ever heard of, ‘considering that no human being doubts Turner’s intentions declared in his will’.7 The relatives got the money, the property, the engravings and any works of art not by Turner. Some uncontroversial bequests had already been ordered by the Court, including the legacies to Clara Wheeler and her sisters, and by the March 1856 agreement the annuities to Hannah Danby and Mrs Booth were ordered to be paid; that owed to Hannah before her death was divided between Marcella, Caroline and Theresa Danby. Their half-sister and Turner’s daughter Evelina Dupuis was to receive an annuity of £100. This was a decision made despite the fact that in 1848 Turner had revoked any bequest to her in his third codicil; the decision was an act of generosity for which the disputing parties and Court of Chancery could take more credit than he.
The legal arrangement honoured his bequests to the Artists General Benevolent Institution, the Foundling Hospital and the London Orphan Fund. The Royal Academy did particularly well, since instead of the £1000 he had bequeathed it for its pension fund it received £20,000; some of this was set aside for the relief of distressed artists, some eventually for the Academy schools. His legacy of £1000 for erecting a monument to himself in St Paul’s Cathedral was declared ‘good and valid’.
The nation also came out ahead. Once again, there was a fudge about fulfilling his intentions in regard to his art – but, here too, it would be possible to say that those intentions had varied from time to time, now clear, now hazy, now requesting this, now that. His executors in this respect seem to have done their best, although the institutions they had to deal with were often dilatory. The National Gallery in the first instance acted promptly about the two paintings he had wanted to hang alongside Claude: Dido building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour were whisked off to Trafalgar Square eleven months into the year after his death that he had specified as a time limit, and this precluded them going elsewhere. According to Thomas Uwins, the Keeper (from 1848 to 1855), the Carthage was particularly dirty and neglected, with its paint flaking off in large pieces. Uwins was in charge of its removal from Queen Anne Street, along with Sun rising through Vapour, and had it dusted down before it was put in the movers’ van. He said, ‘The pavement in front of the door looked afterwards almost as if a chimney had been swept upon it.’8
Turner had changed his mind several times about the nature and location of a Turner gallery to preserve a collection of his pictures after his death, but in the codicils of 1848 he gave his ‘finished pictures’ to the Trustees of the National Gallery – provided that a room or rooms called Turner’s Gallery was provided. Until then the pictures were to stay at Queen Anne Street. Moreover, if the National Gallery failed to accept the pictures or house them properly, they were to remain at Queen Anne Street as long as the lease of his house could be renewed; if it could not be, the pictures were to be sold. As it happened, the oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and sketchbooks were sent – apparently for reasons of ‘safety’ – to some empty rooms at the National Gallery before the Chancery settlement was reached.
In 1856 and 1857 Ruskin and two assistants sorted the sketchbooks and drawings that were in seven tin boxes in one of the basement rooms. Ruskin used such words as rot, damp, dust, soot, mildew and mouse-eaten to describe their condition.9 It was during this period of sorting sketches that, by the account of one of his helpers, W. M. Rossetti, Ruskin found some ‘which from the nature of their subjects it seemed undesirable to preserve’.10 According to Frank Harris, Ruskin some years later determined that these ‘shameful’ works were the product of Turner’s weekends in Wapping living with ‘sailors’ women’. For some weeks Ruskin hesitated over what to do, ‘till suddenly it flashed on me that perhaps I had been selected as the one man capable of coming in this matter to a great decision’.11 Ruskin decided to destroy these offending items. Several years later, in 1862, Ruskin was worried about having an accident during a Continental tour, and before going wrote to Ralph Wornum, Keeper of the National Gallery from 1855 to his death in 1877, to take the credit or blame for the act of destruction: ‘As the authorities have not thought proper to register the reserved parcel of Turner’s sketchbooks, and have given no directions about them, and as the grossly obscene drawings contained in them could not be lawfully in any one’s possession, I am satisfied that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner’s reputation, (they having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity) and for your own peace. And I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction; and I hereby declare that the parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December, 1858.’12 Despite this cull, Ruskin remained disturbed by items he continued to turn up. In his diary for 5 June 1867, he wrote: ‘At National Gallery; worked over Turners – felt element of vice in them.’13 In 1860, in the last volume of Modern Painters, he had confessed about his old hero: ‘I find myself more and more helpless to explain his errors and his sins.’14
Much of Turner’s work remained unsorted. Some 185 of the 285 oils in the Bequest, still uncatalogued and unnumbered, had perhaps bewildered their new guardians; they were found in the cellars of the National Gallery at the start of the Second World War, thick with dust, and were thought by Kenneth Clark at first sight to be ‘old tarpaulins’15 Turner might have felt that the Queen Anne Street tradition was being maintained. His works were being kept together and neglected.
Nevertheless, it was a benefaction. The British nation got the work from the old Aladdin’s Cave, finished and unfinished oils, watercolours and drawings – a Bequest that made up for the failure to implement what Jones called his ‘great object’,16 the Gift. But the gift horse had stabling problems. Because of lack of room at the National Gallery, some of the paintings and watercolours were shown first at Marlborough House, next to St James’s Palace at the west end of Pall Mall.17 There some people became acquainted with Turner for the first time. The American consul in Liverpool, Nathaniel Hawthorne, felt the Turners were ‘tantalizing’ and ‘full of imaginative beauty’, but found himself in a world that made him grope around: ‘There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dream-land, seen dimly through sleep …’18 The selected Turners then moved to the South Kensington Museum for a time before coming back to the National Gallery. In October 1861, the West Room, the Gallery’s largest, was crammed with eighty-two paintings and renamed Turner’s Gallery in a last-minute attempt to meet Turner’s ten-year deadline for their acceptance.19 In the following years the pressure was relieved a little by lending some to provincial museums. From 1905 many were housed in the new Tate Gallery of British Art at Millbank, and since 1987 in the Tate’s Clore wing, specially built for the Turner collection – a tardy, welcome, but not entirely satisfactory fulfilment of his wishes. The pictures of his Bequest are not, as he had wanted, all together, and not all can be seen at any one time. But they are better looked after than they have ever been.20
In the last two years of Hannah’s life, 47 Queen Anne Street slowly shed its air of gloom. The house was busy with executors’ meetings. John James Ruskin, John’s father, brought gifts
of food – newly laid eggs, for example – to the housekeeper-custodian. After a visit in February 1852 he wrote to his son: ‘Nothing since Pompeii so impressed me as the interior of Turner’s house – some of the dust of 40 years had been cleared away and windows opened to let in the light.’21 Henry Syer Trimmer called, presumably accompanying his father the Reverend Trimmer, an executor, and made a melancholy tour of inspection. His reflections were mundane but some of the things he remarked were of interest. Let in by Hannah, he found all silent: ‘The master mind was gone; the mainspring had snapped.’ The younger Trimmer looked around the house, at the sombre-coloured walls, the deserted studio, the jars of colours, brushes and travelling paint-box, the books (Young’s Night Thoughts, Isaak Walton and Horace), and the pictures, many of which did not appeal to him. In the studio, on a side table, he saw a small wooden box in which, covered by a glass pane, lay the death mask:
Dear old Turner! … He reminded me strongly of his old father, whom long years before I had seen trudging to Brentford market from Sandicomb Lodge, to lay in his weekly supplies. Alas for humanity! This was the man whom in my childhood I had attended with my father, and been driven by on the banks of the Thames; whom I had seen sketching with such glee on the river’s banks, as I gathered wild flowers in my earliest years; who had stuffed my pockets with sweetmeats, had loaded me with fish, and made me feel as happy as a prince.22
After Hannah’s death, the executors had an inventory drawn up of Turner’s possessions in the house; this was done in November 1854 by an appraiser, Mr Elgood from nearby Wimpole Street; and it made sad reading. The ship models, three small telescopes and sea chest; the rugs, iron stoves and dressing tables; the palettes, drawing boards and sketchbooks, and – not your usual studio necessity – a gun in its case, maybe a shotgun for the Farnley moors or a souvenir of his days in brigand-infested Italy. In the ‘West Room’ on the second floor were six pairs of trousers, two waistcoats and three ‘Shirts Cravat’. (Presumably he had other clothes and sets of underclothes at Chelsea.) His library contained much Scott, Byron and Milton, maps of Scotland and Antiquities of Italy, and many volumes of his own Annual Tours. There was a stuffed bird and, in the back kitchen, six beer barrels. Among the ‘Plate’, little silver cutlery to speak of, but the appraiser for some reason noted a ‘pair of Sugar Tongs (broken)’.23 In a separate schedule of his estate, mention is made of engraving plates, sundry proofs and ‘A Quantity of Old Pictures all in very bad condition’.24 Roughly twenty-five paintings were actually hanging in the Queen Anne Street gallery at his death, among them such wonders as London from Greenwich, Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand, Frosty Morning, the two Carthages, Bay of Baiae and Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. The Temeraire and Polyphemus must have been in the dining room or amid the paintings stacked against the gallery walls. Going through Turner’s accounts, the executors discovered (so George Jones reported) ‘that the rents for houses in Harley Street had not been paid during some years; in application to the lawyer, the answer was that “Mr Turner would not allow him to distrain.”’25
J.M.W. Turner Page 55