Creators (14 page)
Authors: Paul M. Johnson
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.
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“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 Yorkshire patron, Walter Fawkes, remained in Fawkes’s family, and is still, happily, in perfect condition.
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Throughout the 1820s and 1830s Turner continued to astonish and sometimes shock the art public with large landscapes of ascending chromatic design.
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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
.
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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.”
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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.
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Turner, then, was intermittently a highly popular artist—by the 1840s he was probably the world’s best-known figure in art. That was, as David said, an amazing thing to happen to a “mere landscape painter.” But Turner was also violently attacked. One might say that the savage assaults on his late work, where light and color are supreme, and mere objects are often barely dis
cernible, were the first castigations of “modern art,” anticipating by a generation the rage which greeted Édouard Manet. The attacks continued after Turner’s death, the most celebrated being Mark Twain’s comparison of
The Slave Ship
to “a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes”—followed by much other similar abuse.
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In the 1840s Turner needed Ruskin’s defense, though he was ambivalent about it: “He sees more in my pictures than I ever painted.” But Ruskin refused to praise Turner’s last four paintings:
The Departure of the Fleet
and three depictions of scenes taken from Virgil’s
Aeneid
. Ruskin said they were of “wholly inferior value.” Turner’s best biographer, Finberg, described them as “too feeble to give offence.” All of them ended in the Tate, which destroyed
Aeneas Relating His Story to Dido
. But today they are much admired.
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Turner aroused mixed reactions among his contemporaries. J. W. Archer summed him up as “So much natural goodness mixed with so much bad breeding.” It was Turner’s manner that prevented him from becoming president of the Royal Academy, a position he coveted (he was made vice president, though). Mary Lloyd, another observer, noted: “His face was full of feeling, and tears readily came to his eyes when he heard a sad story.” There are many anecdotes of his sharpness, rudeness, covetousness, and concern for his trade secrets. If an artist looked too closely at his work, he snarled: “I paint my pictures to be looked at, not smelt.” He raged with fury if asked to comment on, or as he thought authenticate, an old painting of his: “You have no right to tax my memory with what I might have done one hundred and fifty years ago.” When owners brought an unsigned work of his to show him, they were rebuked—“I won’t look at it! I won’t look at it!”—and he would leave the room.
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Yet Turner not only taught painting at the Royal Academy; he also (from time to time) gave advice. “First of all, respect your paper!” “Keep your corners quiet.” “Centre your interest.” He advised all artists to buy materials, especially paints and brushes, of the very best quality. He used his own first earnings to buy good paints and top-quality paper. He kept in close touch with suppliers of art materials, and jumped at the opportunity to experiment with a new pigment. Between 1802 and 1840, the fol
lowing new pigments became available: cobalt blue, chrome yellow, pale lemon chrome, chrome orange, emerald green, synthetic ultramarine, Chinese white, veridian, barium chromate, and chrome scarlet. It can be shown that in most cases Turner was an earlier user of the novelties.
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Before using oils regularly he had been a watercolorist for ten years, and this practical training gave him great respect for the power, quality, and subtlety of pigments.
Turner was an astonishingly fast worker, like Hals and Fragonard before him, and Sargent after him. We have an eyewitness account of a big Turner watercolor from Walter Fawkes’s daughter-in-law:
One day at breakfast when Turner was staying with Fawkes in 1818, Fawkes said to him: “I want you to make me a drawing of the ordinary dimensions that will give some idea of the size of a man of war.” The idea hit Turner’s fancy, for with a chuckle he said to Walter’s eldest son, then a boy about fifteen, “Come along, Hawkey, and we will see what we can do for papa.” The boy sat by his side the whole morning and witnessed the evolution of “A First Rate Taking in Stores.” His description of the way Turner went to work was very extraordinary. He began by pouring wet paint onto the paper until it was saturated. He tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy, and the whole thing was chaos—but gradually, as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite
minutiae
, came into being, and by lunchtime the drawing was taken down in triumph.”
Turner was not only a fast but a ruthless painter. He applied, repeatedly, over a sketch scumbles, glazing, and impasto. He completely redid some of his paintings on the Academy’s walls, on varnishing day. His
Regulus
, painted in Rome in 1828, had its lighting scheme completely transformed by Turner as it hung on a wall of the British Institute in London, while a a wide-eyed Sir John Gilbert watched:
He was absorbed in his work, did not look about him, but kept on scumbling a lot of white into his picture—nearly all
over it. The picture was a mess of red and yellow in all varieties. Every object was in this fiery state. He had a large palette, nothing on it but a huge lump of flake white: he had two or three biggish hog-tools to work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows and every part of the surface…. The picture gradually became wonderfully effective, just the effect of brilliant sunshine absorbing everything, and throwing a misty haze over every object. Standing sideways at the canvas, I saw that the sun was a lump of white, standing out like the boss of a shield.
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Turner’s creative working methods are, alas, a reminder that painting is to some extent an ephemeral art. Few great masterpieces are as good today as when first painted. (Vermeer’s are a possible exception.) The skies of Claude, which dazzled his contemporaries and were still astonishing in the late eighteenth century, have lost much of their lustre 200 years later. Ruskin, in
Modern Painters
, warned his readers that Turner’s highest quality was transitory. He said that Turner painted works for “immediate delight,” and had “no thought for the future.” “No
picture
of Turner’s,” Ruskin added, “is seen to perfection a month after it is painted…. How are we enough to regret that so great a painter should not leave a single work by which in succeeding ages he might be entirely estimated.”
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Ruskin called this process of deterioration “sinking in,” and cited
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Italy
(1832) as an example of decay, “now a mere wreck.” Other examples of deterioration are
Waves Breaking against the Wind
(1835),
Chichester Canal
(1828),
Benedetto Looking towards Fusina
(1843), and
Landscape: Christ and the Woman of Samaria
(1842). Joyce Townsend, who has made a study of decay in Turner, thinks that the works which were not finished by Turner and so were unvarnished and were not fiddled about by him on the walls of the Royal Academy are the ones most likely to have retained their original appearance. She gives three examples of well-preserved works:
The Arch of Constantine
(1835),
Venice from the Canale della Giudecca di S. M. della Salute
(1840), and
Peace—Burial at Sea
(1842). Some of the earliest works have lasted best, such as
Morning among the Coniston Fells
(1798), which is still perfect.
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Another example of a well-preserved painting is
Lifeboat
and Manby Apparatus Going Off to a Stranded Vessel Making Signals (Blue Light) of Distress
(1831), a daring piece of work that Turner was wise enough to leave alone. Sometimes, however, the deterioration was not his fault. In his great
Richmond View and Bridge
, the reds have faded. A new red, recommended to him by the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, proved feeble over time. And in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century Turner’s work suffered grievously at the hands of “restorers.” Thus
Frosty Morning
, by all accounts one of his most astonishing works when first painted, had most of its top surface removed, and now looks dull. Still, Turner himself was careless. He said he kept most of his unsold works or those he did not wish to part with “down below.” That meant a cellar. It was damp, which led to spotting, and liable to floods in heavy rain. (The Tate too, inexcusably, allowed the floods in 1928 to reach its Turners.) In Turner’s studio, mold grew on egg-based primings, and there were other horrors.
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It is hard to say which has damaged Turner’s oeuvre most: his methods of work, his carelessness in storage, or the brutalities of twentieth-century British restorers.