Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

Turner and Hokusai: Apocalypse Now and Then

  JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER (1775–1851) was a creative genius on the scale of Bach, in the sense that his manner of painting was entirely original, unmistakably his own—it is impossible to confuse him with anyone else—and conducted on a prodigious scale. But whereas Dürer, like Bach, worked in and expanded all the forms of his art then practiced, and added to them, Turner was from first to last a painter of landscapes and buildings (exteriors and interiors), of seas and skies, mountains and lakes, rivers and forests, and nothing more. He never did portraits, still lifes, animals, or human figures (except as staffage). Within his chosen field, however, he was a master who has never been approached, let alone equaled.

  Turner’s family came from Devon, but he was born in London, in Covent Garden, and spent all his life in London, except for traveling strictly for professional reasons (he never took a vacation as such). He seems to have drawn or painted from the age of three, and he started to sell his work when he was very young: “When I was a boy I used to lie on my back for hours watching the skies, and then go home and paint them; and there was a stall in the Soho Bazaar where they sold drawing materials and they used to buy my skies. They gave me 1s. 6d. for the small ones and 3s. 6d. for the larger ones.”1

  Turner’s father, a wig maker and barber, recognized Turner as an artistic genius when the boy was ten or thereabouts, and not only raised no objections to an artistic career but actively promoted it with all the means in his power. As soon as Turner began to make money, the father gave up his business and turned himself into his son’s salesman, promoter, and studio assistant, functioning as such from about 1790 to his own death in 1829. (The mother went mad, was committed to the Royal Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, in 1800, and died there in 1804.) At age ten Turner worked in the offices of an architectural draftsman, Thomas Malton; at age fourteen he entered the Royal Academy Schools; he was briefly an assistant scene painter at the Pantheon Opera House in Oxford Street; and then he participated in the Academy of Dr. Thomas Monro, copying watercolors by J. R. Cozens and Edward Dayes in the company of his contemporary Thomas Girtin. That was the extent of Turner’s professional training.

  He never lacked recognition or sales. His first watercolor was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1792, when he was sixteen, and his first oil in 1796, when he was not yet twenty-one. He was elected an ARA in 1799, at age twenty-five, and a full Royal Academician (RA) in 1802 at age twenty-eight. He never did anything in his life except draw and paint (though he performed some teaching duties for the Royal Academy). He worked all day, every day. His family life was nothing, though we know he had two regular mistresses and fathered two daughters. Work occupied his entire life until a short time before his death, at age seventy-six, in December 1851.2 Unlike the works of Dürer and Bach, virtually all he did has come down to us, for he marketed it with great skill and energy or preserved it for the nation. Its extent is staggering: nearly 1,000 oil paintings, some very large and elaborate; and about 20,000 drawings and watercolors.3 In addition, he left many sketchbooks, some still intact. He etched and engraved and supplied materials for endless publications in the commercial book market, imposing hard bargains on the men of business with whom he dealt. But these activities were ancillary to his major trade, which was to sell large oil paintings to rich collectors at the highest possible prices. For this purpose, he exhibited every year at the Royal Academy and also designed, built, and ran his own studio-gallery, with Etruscan red walls and proper overhead lighting. He guarded it like a gold vault, with peepholes to ensure that no one took advantage of his absence to copy or take notes.

  Turner had no master. As a teenager he once imitated Philip de Loutherbourg, a French immigrant whose turbulent nature scenes made a sensation in the 1790s. More seriously, he studied Richard Wilson, the first English landscape painter of any eminence, and through Wilson the great Claude Lorrain, whose sunsets were hugely admired by English collectors and artists in the second half of the eighteenth century—and were fiendishly difficult to imitate. Turner admired and learned from Claude to the point where he sought to create his own version of Claude’s Liber Veritatis of mezzotints by publishing, in fourteen parts (1807–1814), a book of prints called the Liber Studiorum, each with five pictures (characterized as marine, mountainous, pastoral, historical, or architectural), which Turner etched in outline, leaving the mezzotint to subordinates. The idea was to advertise himself and “show how to do it,” rather like Bach’s Art of Fugue or the Well-Tempered Clavier. Essentially, however, Turner worked on his own, seeking and taking no advice, attracting no pupils (other than by his classes at the Royal Academy), acquiring few followers, and founding no school. He was from the start, and remained till his death, sui generis. While making use of Claude, he could not refrain from a sneer: “People talk a great deal about Sunsets, but when you are all fast asleep, I am watching effects of sunrise—far more beautiful—and then, you see, the light does not faint and you can paint them.”4

  Turner began his professional career with major topographical subjects, watercolors of London and the Thames Valley, and oils of the inshore waters of the Estuary. Later he went on painting tours in Yorkshire and the north, and in Wales, forming connections with people (such as the Fawkes family in Yorkshire and Lord de Tabley in Cheshire) who acquired collections of his works. He first went abroad in 1802, to Paris (during the brief Peace of Amiens). Then after the final fall of Napoleon in 1815, he went annually to the Netherlands, Germany, the Alps, and Italy. Unlike Dürer, he never set up a studio abroad, and he painted few pictures in oils (other than sketches) on these trips. But he filled hundreds of sketchbooks and did numerous finished watercolors.5 In general, whether Turner worked outside or in his studio depended entirely on practical considerations. To get his basic visual material he had to work in the open, drawing with great speed and accuracy. He sketched as if he were writing, his hand never still, taking in details every second and often not glancing at the paper as his hand covered it with lines.6 On his first trip to Venice (1819), he allowed himself only five days. On the first day he took a gondola from the entrance to the Canale di Cannaregio, upstream to where the railroad station now is, then slowly down the Grand Canal to the Salute church, and then into the Baccino, with pauses to sketch the more complex bits. In this way he produced eighty sketches in one day, or possibly two days. Turner formed his own notions of the economics of art and the best means of combining quality with productivity. He knew that a watercolor produced on the spot was more likely to be better than one painted in the studio from a line sketch. (I too have found this to be invariably so.) So if the weather was good he always painted watercolors (and sometimes oils) outdoors, as in the superb series of Yorkshire vales and moors, Lakeland hills and lakes, Welsh hills and cityscapes, especially Oxford, which he did in the late 1790s and early 1800s. These included cathedral interiors, also done on the spot, of great size and magnificent complexity—his watercolor of the Ely crossing is perhaps the finest thing he ever did.

  As he grew older, however, and more keen on productivity (more avaricious perhaps), he resented the time taken up by coloring on his trips—you can draw in the rain, but you cannot paint, especially in watercolor. Turner (as he told Sir John Soane’s son) calculated that he could do fifteen or sixteen pencil sketches in the same time he took for one color sketch.7 So he trained himself to memorize colors, a difficult business. After about 1805 he painted outdoors in oils only on special occasions, as the apparatus took so long to set up and dismantle, and the medium tended to determine where he could sit and the viewpoint—an irksome parameter for an artist like Turner, one of whose greatest skills was in finding spectacular viewpoints. But he always carried a small box of watercolor paints, brushes, and a water bottle in his pockets so that he could snatch a color view as soon as he saw it. On his first trip to Venice he painted in watercolor four sketches (almost miraculously brilliant) of the effect of light on the city and its waters, entirely for his ow
n information and records. These sketches came to light only after his death.8 He never missed an opportunity to record a rare effect, but he was also prepared to wait for it. When his coach was overturned in the Alps, and its passengers were marooned in the dark and snow, Turner whipped out his paint box and, ignoring his freezing hands, produced a magnificent watercolor. But R. J. Graves, who watched him in Naples, said: “Turner would content himself with making one careful outline of the scene and…would remain apparently doing nothing, till at some particular moment, perhaps on the third day, he would exclaim: ‘There it is!’ and, seizing his colors, work rapidly until he had noted down the peculiar effect he wished to fix in his memory.”9 “Apparently doing nothing” conceals the fact that Turner, on a working trip, was never idle, often doing several works at once, turning from one, which was drying, to concentrate on another, sometimes with four or five sketches spread out on a table at once.

  He was secretive always when working. One young painter (later Sir Charles Eastlake, president of the Royal Academy), who was with Turner in the West Country in 1813, said that Turner often made sketches “by stealth.” On this trip, eyewitnesses recorded Turner’s going out in a small boat in heavy weather. The rest were seasick, but Turner “sat in the stern-sheets intently watching the sea and not at all affected.” He sketched or sat recording wave motions in his mind, “like Atlas unmoved.” Sea trips were followed by walks on which Turner paused occasionally to sketch. He was “a good pedestrian, capable of roughing it in any mode the occasion might demand.” One evening he had a technical argument with De Maria, a scene painter for Covent Garden, who resolved it by watching the ships in the Tamar. “You were right, Mr. Turner, the ports cannot be seen. The ship is one dark mass.” “I told you so, now you can see it—all is one mass of shade.” “Yes, I can see that is the truth, and yet the ports are there.” “We can take only what we see, no matter what is there. There are people in the ship—we don’t see them through the planks.” “True.”10 Turner was a hardy man. Sun, ice, heat, cold, and stormy seas meant nothing to him when art was to be created. When he was sixty-seven, he wanted to make accurate sketches for a big oil he was planning, to be called Snow Storm: Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. He had himself lashed to the mainmast of the Ariel, in what turned out to be a gale, and continued sketching.

  Turner was an exceptionally active man, traveling rapidly all over Europe and Britain to feed his creative passion. He was also a very physical man: small but muscular; tough; wiry; with powerful lungs, strong jaws, hands with a fiendish grip, and large feet. He glowed with power in a room. But he was also, in his own semiliterate way, an intellectual, much more interested in ideas than in people. He had more effect on painters, in the long run, than any master since Rembrandt and should be seen as the ultimate progenitor of the modern movement in art. His craftsmanship was important, but it should be noted that the dynamics of his art were strongly intellectual (and emotional). Like Bach (and unlike Dürer), he was little educated outside his craft but (like Beethoven, for instance) he read widely, and wildly, all his life, seized on ideas, thought about them, transformed them, and applied them to his art. Modern research has revealed that the literary and intellectual content of his work is much greater than had been supposed.11

  Turner, unlike most other English artists, characteristically picked up public themes, such as the slave trade, Greek independence, and industrialization. He gave his works literary references, often quoting classical or even modern poetry, and sometimes writing his own (clumsy but vivid). He believed that painting is a form of language and that its object is to tell the truth about nature, seen objectively. He believed also that paintings have a moral purpose, to instruct and improve, but they do so physically by showing the effect of light on objects. In no sense was he an abstract or “uncommitted” painter. By the time he was twenty he had learned from observation that light was the key to all painting—objects merely reflected it. Salisbury Cathedral was an edifice of stone, but what it looked like (since its Chilmark limestone reflected light with astonishing variety and fidelity) depended entirely on the time of day, the weather, and the season. To understand light, Turner studied optics and the current theory of color. He knew classical theory, as explained by Aristotle and Pliny; he was familiar with Newton’s seven-color system, and had read what Kant and Goethe had to say about color. He followed the works of Thomas Young and read Chromatics by George Field, who spent much of his life improving the colors available to artists. He read the manuscript essay “Letter on Landscape Colouring” by Sawrey Gilpin, who did the cows and sheep in some of Turner’s early landscapes. But in the end Turner had to work out for himself a right and systematic way of distinguishing colors and of actually getting them onto the canvas—a very different matter—when they were suffused by light of different kinds and intensities. It was here, above all, that his creative genius manifested itself.

  From his early twenties, Turner was highly original in using color and depicting light—light seen on buildings, radiating from skies, reflected on still or angry water, seeping through mist and spray. Some of his big early watercolor oil paintings, though supposedly derived from Dutch models, in fact concern concepts the Dutch masters were unaware of, such as polycentric sources of light and light received and reflected at different instants of time on the same canvas. Once Turner began taking light seriously and scientifically, his color automatically went up the scale and it continued to do so for the rest of his life. By 1810 he was credited with founding the “white school,” which waged war against the browns and sepias of the old masters. Oddly enough, most contemporaries (painters and “experts”), with eyes and minds conditioned to the lower color key of Claude, Poussin, and their infinite followers—Ruisdael and Cuyp, too—had lost the capacity to look directly at nature and its colors, and saw Turner’s high chromatic vision as “invention.” The Examiner (supposedly radical politically and avant-garde aesthetically) referred to his “intemperance of bright color.” The Literary Gazette accused him of replacing the “magic of nature” with “the magic of skill,” when in fact he was doing the opposite—using truth to destroy artificial conventions.12

  “White painters” (like virtually all catchphrases or neologisms for schools of art—gothic, mannerist, baroque, rococo, impressionist, fauve, etc.) was a hostile expression, coined by Sir George Beaumont, a wealthy amateur and collector who helped to found the National Gallery. Though imperceptive, Beaumont exercised some power, and scared Turner’s little band of followers. They melted away into mediocre anonymity, and he carried on alone, quite impervious to the insults. He was already saving money by 1805, investing it in sound government securities; by 1805 he was financially independent, and thereafter he gradually became a very rich man, eventually leaving over £150,000 in cash, an immense sum in 1850. He was probably the richest painter since Luca Giordano, who left his son a princely inheritance of 300,000 gold ducats; and perhaps the richest of all before Picasso. One of Turner’s greatest works, Frosty Morning (1813), which was very “white” then—before destructive “cleaning” ruined it—was unsold. So was Apulia (1814), which Turner thought his best to date and hoped could win the top annual prize at the British Institution. But moods and fashions change, as he discovered—often with disconcerting speed and for no apparent reason. In the year of Waterloo, both his Crossing the Brook and Dido Building Carthage won instant and enthusiastic approval. He followed this big success by painting the superb virtuoso golden-light picture Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817), and he was soon building a new gallery of his own to show off his large oils. In 1818 he produced the magnificent View of Dort, which raised the chromatic pitch still higher. Henry Thomson RA, who got an early viewing, described it to the diarist Joseph Farington RA as “very splendid with colors so brilliant it almost puts your eyes out.” Constable, not a man to praise his contemporaries, least of all Turner, called it “the most complete work of genius I have ever seen.” It was bought by Turner’s Y
orkshire patron, Walter Fawkes, remained in Fawkes’s family, and is still, happily, in perfect condition.13

  Throughout the 1820s and 1830s Turner continued to astonish and sometimes shock the art public with large landscapes of ascending chromatic design.14 He did hundreds of vignettes and sometimes large illustrations for the publishers of high-quality travel books. The illustrated topographical coverage of Britain, which had begun in the 1760s, was by now pretty well exhausted: Turner did the ancient cities and, especially, the rivers—Seine, Rhine, Rhône—of Europe, the lakes and mountains of Switzerland, and the delights of cities like Venice. He seized on the coming of the age of steam as an excellent chance to bring modern technology into his art, and to create new opportunities of light and color. In 1832 he produced a superb watercolor of steamboats on the Seine, Between Quillebeuf and Villequier.15 He followed this with one of his tragic masterpieces, The Fighting Téméraire (1839), tugged to its last berth to be broken up in 1838–1839, a marvelous atmospheric evocation of the symbolic triumph of steam over sail as the tiny steam tug pulls the vast hulk of the powerless battleship into oblivion. The Téméraire was a popular ship, built of 5,000 oaks and launched in 1798; with ninety-eight guns and a crew of 750, it stood next in line to Nelson’s Victory at Trafalgar. Turner was twenty-three when the Téméraire was launched, thirty at Trafalgar, and sixty-three when he painted its last voyage; he felt he had lived with the vessel all his life. The painting he called “my darling.” He refused to sell it, often. During most of the nineteenth century it was under glass, and it is exceptionally well preserved (it was the subject of a special exhibition at London’s National Gallery in 1995). The public loved it. John Ruskin, the young art critic, who in the 1830s became an outspoken advocate and defender of Turner’s work, wrote of it: “Of all pictures not visibly involving human pain, this is the most pathetic that ever was painted.” Thackeray wrote in Fraser’s Magazine (July 1839): “The old Temeraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer…. This little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume…of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke.”16 But of course the smoke of the powerful new steam engines was Turner’s delight. He welcomed the visual opportunities afforded by progress. An enthusiastic rail traveler, he rejoiced in high speed, often begging fellow travelers to come to the window with him to watch visual effects as the train hurtled past the scenery. His Rain, Steam, and Speed, at the time and ever since one of his most popular pictures, records the positive virtues of the new steam age. 17