Turner occasioned some postmortem scurrying around by memento gatherers, bargain hunters and recorders of recent history. The teapot and sherry bottle at 6 Davis Place were kept busy as John Archer, John Pye, John Ruskin and David Roberts called on Mrs Booth. She was in deep mourning when Roberts paid a visit; the cottage was ‘clean to a nicety, and the walls covered with pictures, principally Engravings from his works’. This was when she told Roberts that Turner had never given her money – not a farthing – towards their common living expenses or the cost of the cottage. She assured Roberts that the only money she had had from him in eighteen years was ‘three half crowns she found in his pocket after death, black, She says with being so long in his pocket & which She keeps as a souvenir’.26 In October 1851 she had given Turner £59 19s 9d to invest for her in Government Funds; she never heard any more about it. But she kept the three half-crowns ‘together with numerous scraps of his poetry – not the fallacys of hope (for I put the question) but Verses in honour of herself & her personal charms … What simpletons the greatest become when a woman’s in the case.’27
Sophia Booth also told Roberts that she was going to claim expenses from the executors for six years’ board and washing – a claim that Roberts thought well founded. (The executors apparently allowed her only five years.) As well as the poems in her honour, she had a number of coastal pictures and drawings done, it seems, at her Margate house, that Turner had given her. (Her son Daniel Pound organized a sale at Christie’s in March 1865 where some of these were sold, bringing nearly £4000.) She kept Turner’s fishing rod until 1864, when she gave it to the art dealer William Vokins, who greatly admired Turner. She presented a late watercolour study of a sunset to Bartlett, the doctor. On the back of its mount he had inscribed ‘Given to me by Mrs Booth August 1855 W. Bartlett M.P.S. 1 Bretton Terrace, Chelsea who attended Mr B [that is, Mr T] during the last six months of his existence.’28 Her tending of the flame was not impeccable. Bartlett wrote to Ruskin in 1857: ‘I was grieved after [Turner’s] death to find Mrs Booth burning a clothes’ basket full of letters from him received, many of them poetical effusions.’29
Charles Turner called at Chelsea twice, on 23 March and 6 September 1852. Mrs Booth struck him as ill-educated, ‘exactly like a Fat Cook’, but she may have disappointed him in his hunt for Turner bargains.30 However, two years later he noted with self-satisfaction that she called on him and offered him ‘a small case with 4 sketches by Mr. J. W. M. Turner which I refused’.31 John Pye also visited Mrs Booth that 23 March 1852, got on well with her and liked the little house, with its flowers, creepers and bird singing in its cage. J. W. Archer went to Chelsea hoping to draw the room in which Turner died. Mrs Booth would not let him do this, but she did allow him to draw the exterior of the house, and then – telling him that Turner used to call her a handmaid of Art – gave him a sandwich and some sherry. Ruskin by now had at last made her acquaintance, and became a long-term friend. She gave him one of Turner’s last sketchbooks, a travelling colour box and a small watercolour palette. Ruskin wrote to her on her birthday, 9 January 1862 (Thornbury’s biography, the first large-scale attempt to deal with Turner’s life, had just been published):
I caught cold the first thing on coming home, or I should have come to see you today. I will come some day next week early if I hear you can receive me; and indeed I wish you many happy returns still of the day; at least as happy as they can be. I have been sad and very sad myself about many things. Not least about the wretched ‘Life’, which I hope you have cast aside with contempt and carelessness. A better one will be done some day; be assured of that; but never I fear by me …32
Ruskin had been of some help to Thornbury but now wished he hadn’t. It was clearly embarrassing and aggravating for him to think of Mrs Booth reading Thornbury’s comment that Turner ‘died unmarried, with no hands but those of mercenary love to close his eyes and smooth his dying pillow’.33 When George Jones came on this he underlined ‘mercenary love’ and wrote in the margin: ‘Mercenary love burnt all his letters that they should not be criticised by the public – was that mercenary?’34 Ruskin may have felt that he had been responsible for steering Thornbury into nooks and crannies that he now wished had been avoided. According to Thornbury, Ruskin had admonished him thus:
Fix at the beginning the following main characteristics of Turner in your mind, as the keys to the secret of all he said and did: –
Uprightness.
Generosity.
Tenderness of heart (extreme)
Sensuality.
Obstinacy. (extreme)
Irritability.
Infidelity.
And be sure he knew his own power, and felt himself utterly alone in the world from its not being understood. Don’t try to mask the dark side …35
In 1863, also in January, Ruskin wrote to Mrs Booth from Mornex, in the Haute Savoie: ‘Every year that passes brings with it to me a deeper sense of the loss of my dear and honoured friend, and therefore a deeper sense of gratitude to the only person who cared for him and helped him during his life.’36
Mrs Booth continued to live at 6 Davis Place until her twenty-one-year lease ran out in 1867. Then, perhaps helped by the profits from the Christie’s sale, she moved to Haddenham Hall, Haddenham, on the Oxfordshire–Buckinghamshire border, where she lived another eleven years. She died on 25 June 1878, aged eighty, and was buried close to her second husband’s grave in St John’s churchyard, Margate. Since St Paul’s was not on offer, at the last she had to be with the real Mr Booth.
The enterprising Charles Turner also tracked down Sarah Danby. Perhaps he had got the information about where she was living from Hannah. He called on Sarah on Saturday, 9 September 1854, at 29 William Street, off the Hampstead Road in St Pancras, where she had been living for over twenty years with her unmarried daughter Marcella, a music teacher, and still collecting her thirteen shillings a week pension from the Royal Society of Musicians. In December 1852 she had to write to the Society to say that there was no truth in a report that Mr Turner had left her an annuity or legacy. According to what he recorded in his diary, Charles Turner softened up the now very elderly lady (she was about eighty-eight) by asking her about JMWT. Could she tell him where he was born? Hand Court, Maiden Lane, she said – the Maiden Lane part of her answer correct; Turner had been living at Hand Court when she first met him. He then got her to sell him seventeen drawings and two small oil sketches ‘of trees’ for three guineas.37 He went back to William Street on 13 November and bought two further drawings by Turner that she told him she had had for nearly fifty years. This time he gave her a sovereign for both. ‘She was delighted,’ he noted. And a little over two weeks later he took her a brace of partridge ‘for her civility’.38 Three years after this he sold the seventeen ‘small drawings’ at Christie’s for ten guineas each – a total of £177 17s. Charles Turner may have felt that he was finally getting his own back on JMWT for the poor rates of pay he had received for engraving Liber plates. Sarah Danby lived nearly ten years after the death of her former lover. She died, aged about ninety-five, on 16 February 1861 at 34 George Street, off Euston Square, where she had moved with Marcella. Sarah was buried in the Catholic cemetery at Kensal Green in a common grave; her estate was less than £200.
Hannah died at Queen Anne Street on 11 December 1853, aged sixty-seven. She was described in the death certificate as ‘Housekeeper to a gentleman’. (‘My Damsel’ was the way Turner had once referred to her, in a letter to William Wethered, a Norfolk collector who had sent a turkey, no doubt appreciated by Hannah.) The cause of death was given as ‘Eczema exedens for many years’. The eldest Trimmer son told Thornbury, ‘She had some fearful cancerous malady which obliged her to conceal her face, which did not add to the charms of his [T’s] domicile.’39 Hannah may not have kept a spotless house but her loyalty to her employer was exemplary. She left £600, with £50 to Evelina and a painting of Turner as a youth, that he had given her, to John Ruskin.
And thus t
o Evelina. In 1853 she was living with her husband Joseph Dupuis in Covent Garden, at 2 Tavistock Street, a few yards from the eastern end of Maiden Lane. Four days after Hannah’s death, Dupuis, the ex-consular official, wrote to the solicitor Jabez Tepper. The office of custodian of Turner’s Gallery at Queen Anne Street was now vacant. Dupuis (severely in debt, it seems) put himself forward for that job. He wrote:
I am the husband of the Evelina Danby mentioned in Mr. Turner’s Will. My wife is a natural daughter of Mr. Turner. She was for several years recognised as his daughter, and was, till the age of womanhood, brought up in the expectation of always enjoying a respectable function in Society, and was married to me when I was about leaving England to fill a consular situation abroad with Mr. Turner’s consent and approbation. We have been married now upwards of thirty-six years and have brought up a family of four children, of whom two are daughters.
Dupuis goes on to mention their ‘state of absolute want’ and asks Tepper’s help to save them ‘from absolute destitution’.40
Dupuis did not get the job; no one did. The £50 Hannah had left Evelina was given specifically not to be used to pay her husband’s debts. A further request for Tepper’s help came from Mr Hutton, at the Rectory, Covent Garden, on 20 November 1856, and referred to the very needy circumstances of the Dupuis family ‘at present located in this Parish’. Hutton asked for a small annuity out of Turner’s property to be made over to them.41 As we have seen, the Chancery settlement indeed gave Evelina such an annuity, recognizing that she was Turner’s child, despite his revocation of a bequest to her in the first codicil of 1832. But this annuity of £100, not quite £2 a week, paid from December 1856 onwards, did not enable Mr and Mrs Dupuis to live well. At least for a time it went to pay off a loan of £100 plus interest that they owed a solicitor. Evelina wrote to Tepper on 14 November 1865, from 18 Great Ormond Street. She mentioned their ‘narrowed circumstances’, the annuity being ‘encumbered’, and ‘the past, so fraught with adverse destiny’. She asked Tepper for his help to ‘alleviate the sorrows which oppress the last lineal descendant of the race of Turner, the surviving daughter of an artist of such repute. Thus afflicted, E. Dupuis.’42
Joseph Dupuis – by then living with his wife south of the river, in Kennington Lane, Lambeth, not far from the Henry Harpurs – died on St Valentine’s Day, 1874. He was evidently a difficult man, but for Evelina that was nothing new; as she had pointed out, she had been burdened with adverse destiny. The high point of Joseph’s career seems to have been the publication in 1824 of his Journal of a Residence in Ashantee, which was reviewed in many of the weighty periodicals. Evelina died six months after her husband, still in Lambeth. She was seventy-three and had had a heart attack. Her two surviving sons must have given her pleasure. Joseph and Hanmer served long careers in the Consular Service, more successfully than their father. One daughter, Rosalie, never married, taught music. Of the other daughter, another Evelina, little is known. These were Turner’s four grandchildren.
Turner’s death made a vacancy in the ranks of the Academicians. William Frith was elected to fill it. The commission to sculpt Turner’s monument, for which he had left £1000, was given to Patrick MacDowell RA; the full-length statue was set on a pedestal on the south side of St Paul’s, below the dome, and showed Turner in middle age, his head turned in profile, with the bold nose and sideburns, and in his right hand what looks like a compass for scribing circles. He had not asked for a statue, simply a monument, but the sum he had left ensured that his fame would be solidly commemorated. Along with his ambition to be a great artist, he had had an almost archaic hunger to be recognized as such; he wanted his name remembered, as in ‘Turner’s Gift’. Of course, if he had thought about all the possible ramifications, and considered that a marble portrait of himself might ensue, he might have stipulated that the monument should not take the form of a statue or bust.
His ‘afterlife’ has had (at least) one bizarre episode. A few years on, William Stillman, back in the USA, became interested in spiritualism. Although he believed most professional mediums were fakes, he thought a few were not. Stillman met a fourteen-year-old New York girl, ‘Miss A’, the daughter of an ironworks foreman, who heard ‘rappings’, went into trances, made involuntary gestures and wrote messages in handwriting that resembled that of dead people – or so relatives of the deceased were convinced. On these occasions her eyes were closed or bandaged. Questions to her were not spoken aloud but were simply framed in the questioner’s head. In one session with Miss A, Stillman silently put the question to her, or through her, whether his dead cousin Harvey had encountered someone called Turner, who had died not long before. ‘The reply was “Yes,” and I then asked what he was doing, the reply being a pantomime of painting.’ Shortly after this Miss A said ‘I don’t like it,’ and then
sat up in her chair with a most extraordinary personation of the old painter in manner, in the look out from under the brow and the pose of the head. It was as if the ghost of Turner, as I had seen him at Griffith’s, sat in the chair, and it made my flesh creep to the very tips of my fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A. exclaimed, ‘This influence has taken complete possession of me, as none of the others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to.’
I asked if Turner would write his name for me, to which she replied by a sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he would give me some advice about my painting … This proposition was met by the same decided negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl had put on at the coming of the new influence.
Presently Miss A said she had to get up. She crossed the room ‘with the feeble step of an old man’. She took down from a wall a coloured French lithograph and placed it before Stillman. She went through the motions of stretching a piece of paper on a drawing board, sharpening a pencil and tracing the outlines of the lithograph. Then, still in pantomime, she chose a brush and made some broad strokes, washing in the drawing. The next step was with brush and handkerchief to rub out the lights. Stillman mentally questioned whether Turner worked in this manner and Miss A gave an affirmative sign. He wondered about Turner’s Llanthony Abbey, and its central passage of sunlight and shadow: was it done that way? Again, this time emphatically, she gave an affirmative sign. Stillman left convinced he had been humbugged, although he was sure the girl knew nothing of drawing or Turner.
Nearly two months later, again in England, he went to see Ruskin and told him the story. ‘He declared the contrariness manifested by the medium to be entirely characteristic of Turner and had the drawing in question down for examination. We scrutinised it closely, and both recognised beyond dispute that the drawing had been executed in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised me to send an account of the affair to the Cornhill, which I did; but it was rejected … and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the basket in a rage.’43 Either Turner was functioning as ever on the astral plane, or his fame had spread to circles in New York well beyond James Lenox, and the empathetic daughter of the iron-works foreman had somehow cottoned on to who Stillman’s hero was.
The verger of St Mary’s, Battersea, shows visitors the chair under the west window where the artist from Chelsea is said to have sat and drawn. In the Yorkshire Dales, a tourist brochure notes picturesque spots where he sketched the hillsides and valleys. Bits of the Temeraire were saved: her timbers provided material for an altar table, altar rails and two sanctuary chairs for a Rotherhithe church. An old people’s home in Margate has been named after Turner, as has an annual prize given to a modern British artist. Turner’s work generally fetches large prices but is occasionally ‘bought in’ (too bewildering, too weird …) and once in a while – an accolade – is stolen. His houses have had varying fates: 47 Queen Anne Street was demolished in the late nineteenth century, as were the two houses – 21 and 26 – in which he had lived in Maiden Lane. The site of 21 Maiden Lane has recently been occupied by an American-style ‘diner’, sheathed in cream-and-blue alumin
ium, called ‘Fat Boys’, but is now being redeveloped. (No plaque for Turner is apparent.) Sandycombe Lodge survives, well cared for, with some additions to its wings, and so does 6 Davis Place, incorporated with two of its neighbours in a large house, 118–119 Cheyne Walk, that Mrs Eve Fleming, a First World War widow, created in the 1920s. There she brought up her four sons, two of whom – Peter and Ian – became writers. She called it ‘Turner’s House’. Turner might have enjoyed knowing that his Carthaginian harbourscapes had an impact in the 1890s at the Chicago World’s Fair, where the critic Montgomery Schuyler saw Turner’s ‘dreams of classic architecture’ made real. The designers of the temporary exposition buildings had provided, Schuyler thought, ‘a stage setting … They have realized in plaster that gives us the illusion of monumental masonry a painter’s dream of Roman architecture. In Turner’s fantasias we have its prototype much more nearly than in any actual erection that has ever been seen in the world before. It is the province and privilege of the painter to see visions …’44
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