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Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise …
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.
- Milton, Lycidas (1637)
In December 1851 Turner lay dying in an obscure part of London. Publicly he was still widely revered as the greatest painter of his generation. But, then aged seventy-six and weakened by a series of illnesses, he accepted that death was imminent, and apparently declared with grudging fatalism, ‘So I am to become a nonentity, am I?’(1) These words provide a telling insight into the underlying desire for recognition, and its related fear of insignificance, that had propelled and sustained the artist through a long career marked at one extreme by critical and material success, and at the other by controversy and outrage. Few other British artists before, or since, have generated such wildly diverse responses to their work during their lifetimes or have continued to provoke such fervent debate. Though Turner never lacked passionate advocates prepared to claim that he was ‘indisputably the first landscape painter in Europe’,(2) his paintings frequently inspired disquiet or outright animosity among their initial viewers. The effect was noted as early as 1833 by William Henry Pyne, who wrote: ‘A person cannot be a half admirer of Turner; his genius admits of no gradation of favour; universal, or not at all, must be the person’s admiration.’(3)
Turner’s contemporaries were just as polarised by his gruff personality, and his evident desire to succeed at all costs and on his own terms. In the genteel circles of Regency London, his forthright and professional approach to the business of art was, not surprisingly, perceived as decidedly vulgar. The effect that he created appears occasionally to have resembled the behaviour of one of Jane Austen’s boorish characters, trampling across the neatly cultivated sward of arcane social proprieties. But the financially astute artist, though often accused of squalid money-grubbing, was actually a generous friend, prepared to sacrifice his own interests to support projects he believed in. And though it was not always evident to his peers, what was so extraordinary about Turner was the way that his appreciation of his own worth was coupled not only with the profound ambitions that he had for his art, but also with his patriotic hopes for the advancement of a truly national school. The point was succinctly made by Lawrence Gowing, when he proposed that ‘no artist ever had the three traditional motives of painting – fame, money and the love of art – in better balance than Turner’.(4)
In spite of his obvious artistic talents, Turner’s desire to rise to the top of the British art world could not have seemed more elusive to someone who was so widely considered to be physically ill equipped for the leading role that he claimed as his own. In an era marked by pseudo-scientific fashions like craniology (which often buttressed the snobberies of class prejudice), even close associates noted that ‘at first sight Turner gave one the appearance of a mean-looking little man’, while others advised that ‘the man must be loved for his works; for his person is not striking’.(5) Similarly, in the late 1820s Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), playing to French prejudices, pronounced that he looked more like a farmer than a painter, and throughout Turner’s life his admirers and detractors struggled to reconcile his unprepossessing appearance with the visionary qualities of his pictures.(6) Those who ventured beyond their preconceptions, however, found someone more interesting. John Constable (1776–1837), for instance, admitted that, though Turner was as ‘uncouth’ as he had expected, he had ‘a wonderful range of mind’.(7)
Discrepancies and seeming contradictions like this are very typical of Turner, who appears to have gone out of his way to be cryptic and to confound straightforward interpretations of his art. His was a personality that somehow embraced diametrically opposed absolutes: he encompassed the need to pursue radical, independent ends, while maintaining his allegiance to the presiding academic institution; he presented imagined realities as vividly as if they were documentary reportage; and he opened up dynamic new avenues of subject and style, while also imitating and celebrating the best of the past. Despite these apparent oscillations, Turner’s ambitions for his art were always closely identified with the vigour and progressive qualities of the emerging British school, which fittingly eventually absorbed and came to be epitomised by his unique contribution.8 Inspired by the achievements of those who had preceded him, from William Hogarth to Joshua Reynolds, Turner would have recognised that art provided him with the opportunity to overcome the checks of rank and advantage, and thereby secure his own name for posterity.
Spurred on by these ambitions, Turner was in many ways typical of the age in which he lived, which was a time of revolutionary upheaval and social fluidity that only later became more rigidly stratified. Born in central London in 1775, he grew up in the respectable, yet modest circumstances provided by his father, a barber and wig-maker. He was christened Joseph Mallord William Turner, but was generally known in his youth as William. The family home in Covent Garden placed him close to the Royal Academy of Arts, the institution that would remain the focus of his artistic aspirations for over sixty years. From 1780 the Academy began to stage its annual spring exhibitions in the purpose-built rooms of Somerset House.9 Early anecdotes suggest that the senior Turner’s clients included Academicians, who discerned the precocious talent in the watercolours displayed in the barber’s shop window. But the practical-minded father initially seems to have encouraged his son to develop his skills as an architectural draughtsman, presumably considering this a more reliable means of employment. Despite this, a few months before his fifteenth birthday, Turner enrolled as a student at the Academy, and thereafter his ambitions were inextricably bound up with its professed aim of developing a uniquely British school of painting.
Turner would subsequently devote much thought to the issue of whether genius was essentially inherent or could be nurtured. In his case, he would have found little of practical use in the Academy’s curriculum to advance his proficiency as a painter (the specifics of the ‘craft’ of applying paint to paper or canvas were not actually taught), and he appears to have gained more by following the advice of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), its first president, who encouraged students to learn from the example of earlier artists by analysing their techniques and absorbing their imagery. Always an energetic and assiduous worker, Turner made rapid and assured progress, greatly impressing his contemporaries. By 1805 Edward Dayes (1763–1804) was able to recommend him as a model of ‘how much may be gained by industry, if accompanied by temperance, even without the assistance of a master’.10 Just a few years later, Turner himself recognised that there was something exceptional about his own development, confessing in a private note: ‘What we call genius is not alone sufficient. Great industry and application must be so join’d with it, without which it will be better for young men to apply in time to some other Profession’.11 Evidently, for Turner notions of visionary inspiration were an illusion, and he preferred to insist on discipline and perseverance. Indeed, much later in life, when asked to explain his success, he exclaimed: ‘The only secret I have got is damned hard work.’12
While still in the Academy’s schools, Turner began to send works to the annual exhibitions, which represented the most significant arena of the London art world, where reputations were made and patronage bestowed. From 1790 he submitted beautifully crafted watercolours, but he quickly understood that he would need to master oil paints to gain the recognition he craved, resulting in 1796 in his first exhibited canvas (no.4). One of his other exhibits that year reveals the true extent of his ambition (fig.2). This was a watercolour view of the interior of Westminster Abbey, which at that date still served as the principal national mausoleum. With characteristic presumption, Turner inscribed his own name and date of birth on the tombstone in the foreground, asserting his right to a place in this pantheon. What is remarkable is that his audacious self-belief was not misplaced; all he misjudged was the location. For, when his compatriots eventually came to bury him, it was in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, where he joined other artists and national heroes such as Admiral Nelson (fig.3).
Having fixed his sights on pre-eminence at the Royal Academy, he demonstrated over successive years his ability to assimilate established styles of landscape and marine painting. Before 1800 these types of subject matter fell many rungs below history painting in the academic hierarchy, but Turner delighted in producing pictures that muddled the strict classifications, introducing richly allusive narratives to topographical scenes and imbuing his landscapes with closely observed atmospheric effects that created their own sense of drama, evolving his own type of history painting. In tandem with this, he built on the achievements in watercolours of contemporaries such as John Robert Cozens (1752–97) and Richard Westall (1765–1836), using powerful contrasts of tone, a bold and innovative range of techniques, and an ambitious scale to challenge the belief that works in this medium could not compete with the force of oil paint. This comprehensive assault on all fronts, coupled with a charm offensive on influential opinion-makers like Joseph Farington (1747–1821), helped to establish Turner as the rising star of his generation. The rewards were tangible: by the end of 1799 he had been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy; and he then became the youngest artist to be honoured as a full Academician at the beginning of 1802 (see no.1). The prominence that he gained at the Academy translated readily into commissions from some of the most notable aristocratic patrons, providing him with an entrée to polite society and privileged access to the finest art collections in Britain, which did not have a National Gallery until 1824.
Although the painterly bravura that produced such thrilling visual effects in Turner’s exhibited works was in tune with the vanguard of contemporary British art (which eschewed the polished surfaces deployed across the Channel in France), by the early years of the nineteenth century conservative voices were beginning to object that his style was insufficiently subservient to the images it produced. Writing in the Porcupine in 1801, one critic lamented the lack of definition, describing it as ‘an affectation of carelessness’; and disparaging remarks of this kind thereafter became a staple feature of the reviews of Turner’s exhibits.13 Just as significant are the reservations expressed privately by his artistic peers, many of whom judged his manner incomplete. John Hoppner (1758–1810), for example, was alarmed by the raw nature of the paintings resulting from Turner’s first continental tour of 1802, in which he felt ‘so much was left to be imagined that it was like looking into a coal fire, or upon an Old Wall, where from many varying and undefined forms the fancy was to be employed in conceiving things’. Others, like Constable and James Northcote (1746–1831), considered Turner’s work ‘more and more extravagant, and less attentive to nature’.14
Turner was presumably alert to such perceptions, for it is striking that in the mid-1800s he undertook a plein air painting campaign along the banks of the River Thames, which enabled him to engage very directly with the appearance of the natural world and to reconsider the means of representing it pictorially (nos.17-20). Painting in the open air was practised at this time by many younger British artists, who were aware that earlier landscape painters, like the Frenchmen Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5–82) and Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665), had used their studies of ‘bits’ of the countryside around Rome as the foundation for imaginative studio productions. Much more than those of his compatriot, the pictures of Claude represented for Turner the ideal, perhaps even the very essence, of what could be achieved in landscape painting. The structured elegance of Claude’s compositions, though possibly formulaic to the modern eye, represented a harmonious vision of the classical world, in which the setting and the presented narrative seemed indivisible (fig.67??). When he had first seen examples of Claude’s work in the 1790s, Turner had been moved and daunted by their subtle realisation of light, and had professed them ‘beyond the power of imitation’.15 This did not, however, prevent him from thereafter setting out explicitly to surpass his role model, a mission that remained central to his art and its exploration of the themes of empire (see no.34).16 His ambition was undoubtedly shaped by the prevailing view among connoisseurs that Claude was the most prestigious landscape painter, a perception that had resulted in the greatest number of his pictures entering collections in Britain. Though Turner clearly played to the commercial potential of this audience, he was not content simply to offer a slavish imitation of Claude’s work, preferring instead to clothe the prototypes he borrowed in recognisably British subjects: a fusion of imagination and reality. In his use of the discoveries of his Thames sketches in the years after 1805, there is a sense of him viewing his native scene through a lens of Claude’s devising. In paintings like The Thames at Weybridge (‘Isis’) (c.1806; Petworth House, B&J 204), The Thames at Windsor (c.1806; Petworth House, B&J 64) or the View of Richmond Hill and Bridge (1808; Tate, B&J 73), Turner located actual viewpoints and motifs that were effortlessly imbued with the wistful mood of the arcadian idyll.17
In fact, the river landscape he was contemplating already resonated with rich historical associations, having been eulogized by poets throughout the eighteenth century. Two of these writers are invoked in Thomson’s Aeolian Harp (fig.5), a panoramic view of the Twickenham stretch of the Thames from Richmond Hill and one of Turner’s most overtly Claudian paintings.18 The poets to whom he paid tribute were Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and James Thomson (1700–48), who had both lived in this area. For some of his earlier exhibits Turner had supplemented the titles of his paintings in the Royal Academy catalogues with extracts from literature, frequently selecting Thomson as his poet of choice. Occasionally, however, as in the case of this large canvas of 1809, he appended verses of his own, thereby providing additional layers of meaning. This pattern continued over the next forty years, during which his favoured poet became Lord Byron (1788–1824), even as he sporadically offered extracts from his own ongoing and otherwise unpublished epic, ‘The Fallacies of Hope’.19 This consuming need to find a means of auxiliary expression, to enlarge on the purely visual, is noteworthy, particularly in someone who was often reported to be faltering and incoherent as a speaker. An intimation of what he hoped to achieve can be found in Turner’s private notes, which are peppered with drafts of poetry and also reveal his attempts to differentiate between the roles of painter and poet. Fundamental to the views he collated and reviewed was a belief that the painter was limited to the truth of what could be seen, whereas the poet’s imagination was limitless.20 Yet, such a neatly prescriptive division could never satisfy Turner’s ambitions for his art. Indeed, as Evelyn Joll remarked in 1979, Turner ‘intended every work of art to be a refinement upon nature’, which required a judicious refashioning of the rudimentary ingredients of picture-making based on experience and invention.21
Turner’s earliest poetic ramblings coincided with the years in which he formulated his theoretical ideas about the potential scope of landscape painting. The latter were tangible in two ways: firstly, his work on the Liber Studiorum, the series of Claude-inspired mezzotints that together constitute a manifesto of his artistic aims (see nos.28-33); and secondly, his role as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy (he occupied the post between 1807 and 1837 but lectured only erratically after 1828). Although he impressed his students with his stylish illustrative diagrams (figs.???; nos.26-7), it seems most listeners considered his lectures to be garbled conflations of earlier perspective treatises – that is, when his words were audible. His most successful talk addressed the significance of ‘Backgrounds’ in paintings and made a passionate case for landscape art.22 Both of these pedagogic endeavours represented a major commitment of time and energy, aiming ultimately to position Turner more securely at the head of his profession. A further measure that contributed to his status was the opening of his own gallery on Harley Street in April 1804. The decision to do this may have been prompted by a period of bitter division at the Royal Academy, but, more importantly, this act of independence enabled him to control the way in which his pictures were presented and to show work that would have been considered too radical in a more public sphere. As it was, the Academy’s American-born President, Benjamin West (1738–1820), found the Thames landscapes Turner exhibited there merely ‘crude blotches’, and declared that ‘nothing could be more vicious’ (nos.21-2).23
What had been a localised murmur of disapproval grew steadily in force during these years, led primarily by the rather blinkered objections of Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827). This wealthy nobleman and powerful arbiter of taste dabbled as an artist himself but held obstinately to very conservative beliefs about the desirable appearance of paintings.从From 1806 onwards he castigated Turner and artists like Augustus Wall Callcott (1779–1844) and John Crome (1768–1821) as ‘white painters’, regarding the fresh, silvery sparkle of their work with great disdain. In Turner’s case the new lightness of tone was directly attributable to the fact that he had abandoned the traditional method of building up an image on a dark ground, and instead prepared his canvases with a white priming, so that the process of developing an image approximated more closely to painting in watercolours on a luminous surface. This is especially successful for works in which Turner sought to recreate subtle, graduated atmospheric effects, as in Frosty Morning (fig.6), where the stark chill of an English winter day is acutely palpable. Turner’s break with accepted methods of representing light and landscape in this work earned him the respect, posthumously, of Claude Monet, who acclaimed it as having been ‘painted with open eyes’.24 But, in their own day, pictures like this continued to shock those not in sympathy with the radical interplay between the facture and overall appearance of an image. Just three years after Frosty Morning was first exhibited, the essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was perhaps thinking of that work and the Snow Storm of 1812 (no.15) when he described Turner’s landscapes as ‘the triumph of the knowledge of the artist, and of the power of the pencil [i.e. brush] over the barrenness of the subject. They are pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water’. Getting into his stride, he concluded:
‘The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world, or to that state of things when the waters were separated from the dry land, and light from darkness, but as yet no living things nor tree bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the earth. All is without form and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing, and very like.25
Away down the road on the left-hand side of Frosty Morning is an approaching carriage, a sight that played a vital part in Turner’s existence. From his teenage years onwards he had been an inveterate traveller, notching up hundreds of miles every summer as he undertook sketching tours to new areas of Britain (see Chronology). During these wanderings he systematically covered page after page of his sketchbooks, compiling an invaluable visual database that served as the starting point for his exhibited oil paintings and the sets of engraved views, based on his watercolours, that became his most important means of widening his appeal to an audience beyond the metropolis (nos.39, 42-5, 47-52, 62-5, 76-8). With practice, as he honed his eye, he found he rarely needed to work in colour on the spot, recording in outline all that was necessary to translate these simple recollections into complicated watercolours, dense with incidental details specific to the location depicted (figs.7, 8): he once boasted of being able to make fifteen or sixteen pencil sketches in the time it would take to work on one watercolour.26 Even more than his work in oils, Turner’s watercolours transcribe and exalt the British landscape, encompassing the sublime extremes of its settings and its variable weather, as well as its more urbane face. This immense achievement would not have been possible without his sketchbooks, which reveal a journalistic curiosity, endlessly questioning and trying to define what he saw; indeed, as Andrew Wilton has noted, ‘it is as though drawing was an embodiment of the act of thinking’.27
By the beginning of 1819 many of Turner’s most innovative watercolours (and a handful of oils) had been acquired by the anti-slavery Whig landowner, Walter Fawkes (1769–1825), who lived at Farnley Hall, near Leeds, in Yorkshire. From 1808 Fawkes had regularly welcomed Turner as a guest at his home, drawing him into the family circle there by involving him in projects, such as the creation of an ornithological collection (fig.??? [reposition either in Introduction or Chronology]), and also commissioning a set of drawings of the hall and its estate (fig.??? [in Chronology]). Having closely witnessed Turner’s stylistic development, Fawkes was more sympathetic than most to new departures in the artist’s work, and sought every opportunity to add the latest examples to his collection, as in the case of the Rhine views of 1817 (see no.67) or the languid, honey-toned view of Dordrecht (fig.???). But, when the highlights of his collection were exhibited at his London mansion between April and June 1819 (fig.9), few would have questioned that the finest works were the group of around twenty watercolours resulting from Turner’s first tour of the Alps in 1802, which were considered the equal of oil paintings in their expressive and technical artistry (see no.14 [NB; why not reposition figs.18 and 19 from USA catalogue by that catalogue entry as comparative illustrations?]). Fawkes’s display, staged during the years of post-Waterloo patriotic euphoria, could not have been more effectively timed to secure Turner’s reputation as the foremost representative of the supposedly uniquely British art of watercolour painting. For once, the press was unanimous in celebrating Turner’s achievement, praising him as the supreme magician of the brush.28
It was in the wake of this critical success that Turner set off for his first tour of Italy. The experience constituted the fulfilment of much that he had aspired to over the preceding decades, as well as seeming to be, in retrospect, a transition towards new directions. The main purpose of the journey was to visit Rome, where it was falsely rumoured Turner was to paint a series of views for the Prince Regent (in fact, the only instance of royal patronage arose shortly after his return to London, when Turner painted an immense, but unloved depiction of the Battle of Trafalgar, now at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich).29 For Turner, as for many of his contemporaries, the idea of Rome was inseparable from the pictures of Claude. However, even before he set out there in 1819, his friend Sir Thomas Lawrence professed that Turner was the only living artist who could respond as profoundly to the specific qualities of the Italian setting: ‘He has an elegance, and often a greatness of invention that wants a scene like this for its free expression; whilst the subtle harmony of this atmosphere, that wraps everything in its own milky sweetness . . . can only be rendered, according to my belief, by the beauty of his tones.’30 Something of what Lawrence anticipated can be found in the vast painting Rome from the Vatican (fig.10), which was exhibited in London shortly after Turner arrived back in 1820. Beyond the somewhat cluttered foreground, the picture coalesces as a piece of exquisitely rendered topography, infused with the ‘pure … calm, beautiful and serene’ qualities Turner had identified as the finest characteristics of Claude’s landscapes.31
Though the Italian trip has often been described as a stylistic watershed, many of the changes that can be detected in the 1820s were already under way before Turner left Britain, suggesting that this first encounter with Italy represented a subtler catalyst. Paintings like the Dort, or Dordrecht of 1818 (fig.????), for instance, had already indicated a predisposition towards a lighter, more radiant palette. Similarly, Turner’s experimental watercolour sketches of the 1810s are harbingers of the bold interplay of undiluted colour that became such a notable feature of his later work.32 Even where Turner specifically engaged with Italian themes, there is little sense of an acute rupture with what had gone before (see The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl, 1823, Tate; B&J 230). Nevertheless, the decade after his return from his stay in Rome was indisputably a period of underlying restlessness, something barely concealed by his tireless involvement with various publishing projects.
These years were the apogee of Turner’s fame among his contemporaries, but no one, least of all the artist himself, could have failed to notice that his success was qualified, and that his paintings were invariably greeted less favourably than his works on paper. Though some reviewers began to recognise the ambition for a more poetic form of landscape that permeated his exhibited paintings, his choice of fanciful subjects and opalescent tones puzzled many viewers. If this was the case in London, where his audience had at least the benefit of a knowledge of his development, there was much greater controversy when (against his better judgment) he eventually agreed to exhibit a group of three canvases during his second stay in Rome in 1828 (see no.73). These works were generally perceived as incomprehensible daubs, and ridiculed for their preference for yellow: one anecdote mentioned a Roman tradesman also called Turner and noted wryly that ‘one sold mustard, and the other painted it’.33 It was only among his compatriots that the pictures were respected as ‘the doings of a poet who had taken to the brush’.34
By now in his early fifties, Turner developed new tactics from the mid-1820s for ensuring that he retained his pre-eminent status in the public exhibitions in London. At the Royal Academy especially, the annual show was a formidably competitive environment, with pictures packed floor to ceiling in the Great Room and the adjacent spaces, all vying for the viewer’s attention (fig.11). George Scharf’s depiction of the 1828 exhibition vividly illustrates the impact Turner’s paintings obviously had in this forum. Commanding the centre of the north wall directly opposite the viewer, is the imposing Dido Directing the Equipment of her Fleet (Tate; B&J 241), but just as noticeable is the smaller picture on the right wall, shimmering more brilliantly than the surrounding works, which has attracted the densest throng of visitors. The work in question is one of the two views of the Cowes Regatta (see under nos.53-4; the pendant picture hung just beyond the limits of the right-hand edge of Scharf’s image). As this example reveals, the impact a picture could have on its neighbours was of crucial significance. Turner was evidently generous on occasions, reputedly toning down his large view of Cologne (1826, Frick Collection, New York: B&J 232) when it threatened to overwhelm the portraits by Lawrence on either side. But there are many more apocryphal tales of him seeking to outshine others, either playfully, as with friends like George Jones (1786–1869), or more mischievously, as was apparently the case in the cunning way that he undermined, with just a little touch of judiciously placed colour, the torpid bluster of John Constable’s heavily worked rendition of The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (1832; Tate). Resigned to his defeat, Constable apparently noted ruefully that Turner had been and ‘fired a gun’.35
From this period onwards Turner regularly outgunned his peers by waiting until his pictures were actually installed before he fully resolved them. His strategy was facilitated by the tradition of ‘Varnishing Days’, the three or more days prior to the public opening of the exhibition when artists could make slight adjustments to their pictures. Turner embraced the adrenaline rush of this enforced deadline, pushing it to its limits by submitting canvases that seemed to be little more than the rudimentary beginnings of an image. With the clock ticking, he then effected miraculous transformations, gradually adding more paint to create descriptive details until he was satisfied with his work, the whole process assuming the quality of a performance for his peers (fig.??? [Portrait of Turner in Chronology]; see the account of his 1837 transformation of Regulus given in no.73).
Such calculated showmanship, of course, augmented the perception of Turner as an assured alchemist, absolutely at one with his materials. But it is also important to recognise in the nature of the preparatory works, with their open, sometimes blank and ambiguous character, a correlation between his processes in the different media of oil and watercolour. In fact, his oil paintings had increasingly benefited from the insights gained by his untrammelled experiments in watercolour.36 Thus, for example, the practice of working simultaneously on batches of images, which he had developed on paper in the 1810s, seems to have been applied to oil studies in the following decade (nos.53-4). Moreover, the revelatory groups of unfinished later oil paintings that were discovered in the twentieth century (see nos.84, 88-89, 95-6, 108, 112) should be viewed as comparable to the hundreds of colour beginnings that Turner made when he was at work on sets of topographical images (i.e., nos. 62-5). One of these, the study of a steamer on the Thames (fig.12), perhaps intended for Picturesque Views in England and Wales, is typical of the schematic, loosely realised forms that Turner evolved when trying out a multiplicity of options, any one of which, it seems, he viewed as having the potential for more elaborate resolution. Inevitably, the expansive nature of these personal studies can still be traced in the fully finished works of the final two decades of his working life, and it was the indistinctness of this kind of broad handling that became such a preoccupation for his later critics.
Perversely, though subsequent generations have lauded the expressive brushwork and pared-down character of Turner’s mature work as among the essential components of his unique achievement, his contemporaries largely preferred to consume his images at second hand, as black and white engravings (fig.13). In these prints the original dynamics might superficially appear to be subdued by the precision and delicacy required by the process of line engraving. However, Turner appears to have considered his watercolour designs to be part of a continuum that only achieved consummate form in the refined chiaroscuro of their printed form. The contemporary focus on this facet of his work is hardly surprising, considering his prolific contributions to sets of published views, amounting to well over 800 subjects, which contrived to keep Turner’s name always before his audience as well as on the pages of the press devoted to art and literature. Given this vast range of material, and the extent of Turner’s close supervision of the translation of his designs into monochrome prints, this vital foundation of his fame now remains too little known and appreciated.37 The process of working for publishers was a constant in his life, serving very effectively to bridge the gulf between the idea and the reality of his art. It also lent his images an extensive reach, so that they could be seen by audiences in Paris, Berlin or Philadelphia very soon after they appeared in London, as was the case with his views of the French rivers (nos.76-8). In our own age, when images are dispersed globally instantaneously, it is difficult to regain the sense of excitement that must have accompanied the publication of a new volume illustrated by Turner. The heightened interest in his engraved designs after 1830, resulting essentially from the immense success of the vignettes that he produced for Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy (fig.???), in fact threatened to relegate the status of the authors with whom he was paired. A case in point was Sir Walter Scott, who had already worked with Turner in the early 1820s and was disinclined to repeat the experience. However, when planning a new edition of Scott’s writings in 1831, his publisher brusquely insisted: ‘With Mr Turner’s pencil I will ensure the sale of 8,000 of the poetry – without, not 3,000.’38 Chastened, the Scottish novelist and poet welcomed Turner once more to his home later that year, during the same sketching tour on which the artist made his excursion to the romantic isle of Staffa on the west coast.
It was in paintings like Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1832, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; B&J 347), with its steamboat pitted against a towering storm cloud, that Turner presented a unique vision of modern life that was radical, not only in deciding to depict the innovations of the new steam age but also in signalling their sublime and heroic qualities. Though he had frequently incorporated scenes of industry in his watercolours, most notably in those of Leeds (fig.8) and Dudley (fig.13), he was exceptional in consistently introducing the very mechanisms of change that still seemed so ugly and unpalatable to his compatriots. This vein of subject matter culminated spectacularly in Rain, Steam and Speed (fig.???? [Chronology]), his defiant representation of a train hurtling out of the picture space towards the viewer.39 Remarkably, it is only in the last thirty years or so that this type of image has received proper consideration, for these subjects were largely omitted by John Ruskin from the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843–60), the most influential nineteenth-century study of Turner’s work. Ruskin had felt compelled to embark on this extended eulogy after witnessing the escalating levels of critical ridicule that Turner attracted throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s (see nos.94, 102). The most constant objection during this period was to the lack of a clear correspondence between the thing depicted and Turner’s means of representing it, which encouraged Ruskin to focus in his defence on what he believed to be the essential truth to nature of the artist’s pictures. As a result of this emphasis, Ruskin’s writings were, perhaps, partial in their range. Nevertheless, there was an inspiring fervour to them that induced countless readers on both sides of the Atlantic to respond more sympathetically to the images. Yet, even with such a passionate advocate, many found the works of Turner’s last years elusive, regarding them as ‘dreams, challenges, theories, experiments, and absurdities’.40
The publication of the first of Ruskin’s books in 1843 can be shown to have benefited Turner financially, because it revived interest in his unsold paintings. However, various anecdotes suggest that he was rather uncomfortable about his young admirer’s attempts to interpret his life’s work. Indeed, he was pointedly tardy in thanking Ruskin for his efforts, possibly believing he did not need to be promoted so vigorously. Having relentlessly courted controversy over such a long period, it seems that he was pretty much inured to the jibes of his critics, shrewdly accepting that all publicity, however dire, had its uses.41 Yet he undoubtedly retained the urge to be appreciated, which had driven him so purposefully in his youth, and must have derived some satisfaction from this late flowering of popular esteem.
It is not uncommon for artists to fall out of favour in their lifetimes only for their work to receive wider respect posthumously, and to some extent Turner had begun to prepare for this eventuality as early as the 1820s, the decade in which, for the first time, he regularly found it difficult to sell his pictures. He had then drawn up his first will, in which he specified his desire for two of his paintings to be hung in close proximity to a pair of the most renowned works by Claude Lorrain in the new National Gallery (see figs.66-7 and no.34).42 Whatever else happened, this instruction was intended to be his means of ensuring his place in the history of art as the successor of the revered seventeenth-century landscape painter; and the juxtaposition inevitably also proposed and highlighted his improvement on what had gone before. In addition to this implied victory, the ageing Turner reviewed his own achievements, and was evidently occasionally compelled to measure himself against his younger self.43 This may have been one of the underlying motives that led him to produce his final sets of Swiss views at the beginning of the 1840s (fig.15), which are as technically accomplished as anything he had produced twenty or thirty years earlier for Fawkes and which continue to enhance his reputation as one of the greatest ever practitioners of the art of watercolour.
That watercolour was ever considered a bold and exciting medium was in large part the achievement of Turner and his generation, but it is curious how quickly developments later in the nineteenth century managed to tame and diminish the vitality of this form. On the other hand, the daring of Turner’s triumph in oils seems never to have been eclipsed. The idea of his obstinate refusal to appease his audience helped to enshrine him as a hero for the modern movement, and from 1906 onwards his status as a romantic rebel was inevitably enhanced by the rediscovery and subsequent display at the Tate of about 150 previously uncatalogued canvases (nos.84, 88, 96, 112).44 Despite the fact that these oil sketches were always presented as unfinished works, there has been a tendency to see them as ends in themselves, and as somehow anticipating later advances in the history of Western painting. It was primarily this type of work that formed the nucleus of Lawrence Gowing’s landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1966, which included only sixteen oil paintings that Turner himself considered ‘finished’ and exhibitable from a total of thirty-nine. In justifying the unrepresentative nature of his selection, Gowing suggested: ‘It is not certain that we are prepared to see him whole.’45 He aimed instead to demonstrate an intelligibility in the unresolved works that he felt spoke directly to the abstract art of the period. Though this resulted in a stunning and hugely popular display, the act of foregrounding Turner’s technical prowess tended to suppress a proper understanding of the original function and meanings of the images. Nevertheless, Gowing was probably right to conclude that it was then impossible to digest the full extent of Turner’s achievement (some of the works that he showed had been unearthed in the basement of the National Gallery only about twenty years earlier).
Since the late 1960s, however, a tidal wave of new scholarship has re-evaluated Turner and his art more fully, combining to present a much more complex individual, who emerges as a less isolated figure, more in step with the intellectual and artistic preoccupations of his own period. Tremendous efforts have also been made to consider the implications of Turner’s imagery on its own terms, rather than as it can be read from a twentieth-century perspective. None of this diminishes the revolutionary qualities of Turner’s art; in fact, the result has been to relocate such characteristics within their time, and to reconnect the youthful firebrand with the proto-modern Turner of his maturity. Yet, curiously, in the final contradiction of a life so rich in them, Turner’s work now appeals to traditionalists as well as to more progressive tastes. At one extreme the British heritage industry enlists his pictures as a means of preserving the landscape, while at the other the Tate has, since 1984, claimed his mantle for its annual contemporary art prize. Whether Turner himself would approve of all the causes to which his name lends support is a matter for speculation. It is, nevertheless, an indication that his mission to defy the limitations of his own mortality has been accomplished. Whether people like them or not, his paintings and watercolours remain with us as things that amaze, delight and stimulate anew, ensuring, above all, that his name lives on.
Notes
J.M.W. Turner and the Pursuit of Fame - Ian Warrell
1. Noted by David Roberts (see Guiterman 1989, p.6). A slight variant of the phrase appears in Sir Charles Eastlake’s account of the final visit of Dr Price (Falk 1938, p.221). Curiously, this was omitted from A.J. Finberg’s subsequent biography, although a similar version appears in Thornbury’s earlier book (1862, II, p.275), which glosses over the remark quoted here, presumably because of its implicit atheism.
2. Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1808 (see Levey 2005, p.328 n.6). Intriguingly, Lawrence’s comment anticipates Fuseli’s undated praise: ‘Turner is the only landscape painter of genius in Europe’ (Knowles 1831, I, p.364).
3. Quoted in Ziff 1986, p.24.
4. Lawrence Gowing, in New York 1966, p.21.
5. Thornbury 1862, I, p.178; Dayes 1805, pp.352–3.
6. See Warrell 1999, pp.39–42.
7. Letter to Maria Bicknell, 30 June 1813 (Beckett 1964, VI, p.110).
8. See Kriz 1997, p.5, which identifies ‘boldness, imagination, independent-mindedness, sensibility, and manliness’ as the defining characteristics of English landscape painting.
9. See Solkin 2001; and Hoock 2003.
10. Dayes 1805, p.352.
11. Venning 1982, p.38; note that in 1799 Turner and Girtin were considered to represent industry and genius respectively by the circle of Edward Lascelles (Finberg 1939/61, p.92).
12. Reported by Miss Fawkes (Hamilton 1997, p.vi).
13. Quoted in Finberg 1939/61, p.71
14. Ibid., p.99. The son of Turner’s friend, the Revd Henry Trimmer, is supposed to have pinpointed the decline of Turner’s style to his first continental tour (Thornbury 1862, II, p.66).
15. Finberg 1939/61, p.59.
16. See Kriz 1997a.
17. The germ for the second of these paintings seems to be derived from plate 68 of Claude’s Liber Veritatis. The picture has been identified as Richmond, rather than Windsor, by David Hill (see Hill 1993, pp.124–5). See also Nicholson 1990.
18. See Wilton and Turner 1990, pp.47–61, 134; and Hill 1993, pp.53–6.
19. Transcribed and discussed in Wilton and Turner 1990, pp.180–1. See also Lindsay 1966a.
20. Venning 1982, pp.39–40.
21. B&J 1979/84, p.xvii; see also Venning 1982, pp.38–9.
22. Transcribed in Ziff 1963. The most recent survey of Turner’s lecture diagrams is that by Andrea Fredericksen (2004), whose catalogue entries for these works will shortly appear on the Tate website.
23. Farington, VIII, p.3038 (May 1807).
24. See B&J 127, p.91.
25. The Examiner, 18 Feb. 1816, p.109.
26. Finberg 1939/61, p.262.
27. RA 1974–5, p.21.
28. See Kriz 1997, pp.109–110; and Ian Warrell, ‘“The wonder-working artist”: Contemporary Responses to Turner’s Exhibited and Engraved Watercolours’, in RA 2000–1, pp.32–45.
29. Literary Gazette, 20 Nov. 1819, p.747.
30. Quoted in Finberg 1939/61, p.260.
31. Quoted in Ziff 1963, p.144.
32. As noted by Finberg, Hazlitt had detected the placing of yellow and blue side by side, as a means of producing ‘green at a distance’, as early as 1816 (Finberg 1939/61, p.247).
33. Thornbury 1862, I, p.227. See also descriptions of Jessica, Turner’s curious figurative exhibit of 1830 (B&J 333).
34. Joseph Severn to Thomas Uwins (Uwins 1858, II, pp.239–41).
35. See Martin Butlin on ‘Varnishing Days’, in Oxford Companion 2001, pp.354–8, and Michael Rosenthal, ‘Turner fires a Gun’, in Solkin 2001, pp.145–155.
36. Turner’s opponents tended to malign his paintings by describing them as ‘only large water-colours’ (Constable, quoted in Thornbury 1862, II, p.43). See also comments in Haydon, Diary, vol.3 (1825–32), pp.370–2.
37. Useful exhibitions on this subject were staged by Anne Lyles and Diane Perkins (1989), and Eric Lee (1993), as well as by Gillian Forrester in her survey of the Liber Studiorum (1996). See also Herrmann 1990.
38. Quoted in Piggott 1993, p.31.
39. See Gage 1972 and Rodner 1997.
40. Thornbury 1862, II, p.327
41. See Gage 1980, letter to Ruskin, 1836, pp.160–1; this conflicts with Ruskin’s later insistence that Turner was niggled and worn down by bad reviews (see no.136).
42. For the subsequent revisions to the will, see the discussion by Nick Powell in Oxford Companion 2001, p.382–4.
43. See Warrell 2006.
44. Vaughan 1990; Tate Britain 2006.
45. New York 1966, p.7.
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