J.M.W. Turner

J. M. W. TURNER (1775 - 1851) W. L. Wyllie 1905 1 THE BRITISH ARTISTS SERIES London George Bell and Sons 2 • PORTSMOUTH PREFACE hen asked by Messrs. Bell to write “The Life of Turner” for their Series W of “British Artists,” I at first refused, for my ideas flow but slowly, and I have not the pen of a ready writer. Moreover, the only time I can spare for literary work is after the light has failed for painting. On being again pressed I agreed to undertake the task, mainly influenced by my admiration for the work of the inimitable poet-painter who has been my study and delight since boyhood. The first thing to be done was to read all the books on the subject. To my consternation I soon found that at least seven lives of Turner had already been published. Later, in my search among the sketch-books stowed away in the basement of the National Gallery, I met a gentleman engaged on yet another exhaustive Turner biography. What chance has my little book against so many by professional writers? How can I expect to put down anything that has not been better said before? My only hope is that, being a painter, I may look at Turner’s life and work from a point of view different from that of a literary man. Gilbert Hamerton, it is true, did draw a little, but his books were very much better than his pictures. An artist should be better able to distinguish and note the influences and beauties, the difficulties and limitations of another artist’s work, than a critic or a teller of tales. I have tried to describe the masterpieces of Turner as they appear to a fellow painter travelling, however remotely, along the same road. The biographical facts are mostly gleaned from that confused tangle of oft-told anecdote and exaggerated description compiled by Walter Thornbury in 1861. I have sorted and arranged these scattered scraps of history in chronological order to the best of my ability. The task was not an easy one, but night after night as I went slowly through the trials and triumphs of Turner, the uncouth old wizard, with his rough manners and tender heart, somehow became more and more real to me, until at last he seemed a friend that I had known all my life. If I can only paint the man and his works for my reader as clearly as they stand before me, my labour of love will not have been in vain. W. L. WYLLIE. 3 4 • J. M. W. TURNER Chapter 1 Life of J. M. W. Turner n the year 1775 a barber lived in a dark little shop, No. 26, Maiden Lane, I standing on the left of Hand Court, which lies close to the south-west corner of Covent Garden. There was a gloomy, low archway, with an iron gate, and coming out of the sunlight a stranger would have to stand a moment in the dim light before he could see the narrow door to the left which led into the hairdresser’s shop. There was a window gay with both bob and cauliflower wigs, the name over the door was Turner. Mr. Turner was a cheerful little man, spare and muscular, with small blue eyes, a hook nose, a projecting chin, and a fresh, healthy complexion. He talked fast with a rather transatlantic twang, but always had a smile upon his face. The barber had come to London in early life from South Molton, in Devonshire, and had married a lady named Mallord or Marshall, who lived in the village of Islington. The barber’s wife had pale blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a slight fall to her lower lip. Her hair was well frizzed, and she wore a cap, with large flappers. Report said the little woman had a terrible temper and led her husband a sad life. She held herself very erect, and her aspect was rather masculine. Dr. Shand, author of “Gallops in the Antipodes,” claims Mrs. Turner as first cousin to his grandmother, so we may suppose that she came from a rather superior class. On Saint George’s Day, the 23rd of April, a boy was born to this worthy couple, and on the 14th of May the child was baptised in the parish church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, and given the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner. The surroundings were not calculated, one would say, to breed and foster a great genius. The house was dark and small, the windows long and low, the narrow stairs were steep and winding, the rooms low-pitched and confined, and if we are to believe Mr. Duroveray, the barber lived most of his time in the cellar under his shop. The district round about was theatrical, and these were the days of the great David Garrick. There was also the studio of a society of artists opposite, in what had once been “the Cider Cellar.” Maiden Lane had seen better days, and men of note had lived in it. Archbishop Sancroft, in the days when he was Dean of York; Andrew Marvell, on a poor second floor, and Voltaire also spent 5 CHAPTER 1. LIFE OF J. M. W. TURNER 6 three years at the sign of the “White Perruke.” Leaving the lane, and looking out at the London of that day, one cannot say that the moment was propitious for the appearance of the most splendid painter of landscape that the world has seen. Portrait art was at its highest pitch. Reynolds was working in Leicester Square, and Gainsborough, who had left Bath the year before, had taken a house in Pall Mall. Both held levees where the rank and fashion met, the beauties in powdered toupees, hoops, high-heeled shoes, the men in short pigtails and striped silk knee breeches. West was painting classical subjects for King George III, and Wilson was neglected by all except Paul Sandby, the fashionable drawing master. Hogarth had been dead eleven years. Except for portraiture, English Art was either without life, insipid or classic, or a monstrous and indelicate caricature. The so-called humorous mezzotints which have come down to us show what wretched stuff our forefathers were content to gaze at in the shop windows, or bring home for the amusement of their families. Utterly without drawing or proportion, light and shade, or perspective, these hideous representations of the vices and follies of the time, often obscene, never suggesting a graceful thought or a beautiful line, bear witness to the coarseness of taste in 1775. Turning to literature, Richardson, Sterne, Gray, Smollett, and Goldsmith were dead; but Dr. Johnson, Burke, Sheridan, Thomson, and Cowper, were writing; Robert Burns was just growing up at Alloway, and Walter Scott about four years old. Captain Cook was homeward bound, having been away three years on his wonderful voyage. Napoleon was seven years old, and Wellington six, Talleyrand twenty-one, Catherine of Russia and Frederick the Great were engaged in the partition of Poland. The English government of that day had treated the colonies of America in a very high-handed and tyrannical fashion and four days before the birth of Turner a British force, marching to seize some arms and powder, was attacked, and thus began the unfortunate and needless war, which lost us the fairest parts of the new world, and the sturdy Anglo-Saxon settlers, who would have been loyal to the old country had they only been dealt with fairly. There is a story of a visit paid by Turner when about five years old to a house in Carburton Street, where lived a silversmith with a taste for art, who pried about and bought drawings cheap. The boy went with his father, who called to curl Mr. Tompkinson’s hair. Whilst the frizzing and powdering proceeded, a rampant lion emblazoned on a silver salver attracted the child’s fancy, and, when at home once more in Maiden Lane, he took pencil and paper, and drew from memory the very lion. A son of Stothard remembers that his father in early life went to the shop to get his hair cut, and the old man remarked to him in conversation, “My son, sir, is going to be a painter.” A year or two later we hear that small water-colour drawings, copied by the boy from Sandby’s, used to hang round the entrance door, ticketed at prices varying from one to three shillings. Years afterwards, Mr. Trimmer and Turner were looking over some prints. Turner took up one of them, a mezzotint of a Vanderveld, an upright, CHAPTER 1. LIFE OF J. M. W. TURNER 7 a ship running before the wind, and said with emotion, “Ah, that made me a painter!” In 1785 the boy was sent to a day school kept by a Mr. John White, near the “Three Pigeons,” at Brentford Butts. There were fifty boys and ten girls. He boarded with an uncle of his mother’s, a butcher, called Marshall. An old schoolfellow tells how young Turner drew birds and flowers from the windows. Many of these early sketches, says Bell, were taken by stealth. Afterwards he went to the Soho Academy, and studied under a Mr. Palice, a floral drawing master. At thirteen he was short and thickset, his face handsome, but with large features of a Jewish type, clear gray-blue eyes and arched eyebrows; a boy careless of dress, but sturdy and determined. His father now sent William to a third school, kept by a Mr.

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