Turner. Eric Shanes
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Harewood House from the South-East
1798
pencil and watercolour, 47.4 × 64.5 cm
Trustees of The Harewood House Trust
We know little about Turner’s mother, Mary (born Marshall), other than that she was mentally unbalanced, and that her instability was exacerbated by the fatal illness of Turner’s younger sister, who died in 1786. Because of the stresses put upon the family by these afflictions, in 1785 Turner was sent to stay with an uncle in Brentford, a small market town to the west of London. It was here he first went to school. Brentford was the county town of Middlesex, and had a long history of political radicalism, which may have surfaced much later in Turner’s work. But more importantly, the surroundings of the town – the rural stretches of the Thames downriver to Chelsea, and the countryside upriver to Windsor and beyond – must have struck the boy as Arcadian (especially after the squalid surroundings of Covent Garden), and done much to form his later visions of an ideal world.
The Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth
RA 1790
watercolour, 26.3 × 37.8 cm
Indianapolis, Museum of Art, Indianapolis,
Indiana, U. S.A
By 1786 Turner was attending school in Margate, a small holiday resort on the Thames estuary far to the east of London. Some drawings from this stay have survived and they are remarkably precocious, especially in their grasp of the rudiments of perspective. His formal schooling apparently completed, by the late 1780s Turner was back in London and working under various architects or architectural topographers. They included Thomas Malton, Jr, whose influence on his work is discernible around this time.
After Turner had spent a term as a probationer at the Royal Academy Schools, on 11 December 1789 the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), personally interviewed and admitted him to the institution. The Royal Academy Schools were then the only regular art training establishment in Britain.
Interior of King John’s Palace, Eltham
c. 1791
watercolour, 33.2 × 27 cm
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut
Painting was not taught there – it would only appear on the curriculum in 1816 – and students merely learned to draw, initially from plaster casts of antique statuary and then, when deemed good enough, from the nude. It took the youth about two and a half years to make the move. Amongst the Visitors or teachers in the life class were History painters such as James Barry RA and Henry Fuseli RA whose lofty artistic aspirations would soon rub off on the young Turner.
Naturally, as Turner lived in the days before student grants, he had to earn his keep from the beginning. In 1790 he exhibited in a Royal Academy Exhibition for the first time, and with a few exceptions he went on participating in those annual displays of contemporary art until 1850.
The Pantheon, the Morning after the Fire
RA 1792
watercolour, 39.5 × 51.5 cm
Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London
In that era the Royal Academy only mounted one exhibition a year, and consequently the show enjoyed far more impact than it does today, swamped as it now is by innumerable rivals (some of the best of which are mounted by the Royal Academy itself). Turner quickly provoked highly favourable responses to his vivacious and inventive offerings. In 1791 he briefly supplemented his income by working as a scene painter at the Pantheon Opera House in Oxford Street. This contact with the theatre bore long-term dividends by demonstrating that the covering of large areas of canvas held no terrors, that light could be used dramatically and that the stage positionings of actors and props could usefully be carried over to the staffing of images. Thus in his mature works Turner would often place his figures and/or objects in downstage left, centre and right locations when he especially wanted us to notice them.
Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxford
1792
watercolour, 27.2 × 21.5 cm
Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London
At the 1792 Royal Academy Exhibition Turner also received a lesson that would eventually move his art into dimensions of light and colour previously unknown to painting. He was especially struck by a watercolour, Battle Abbey, by Michael Angelo Rooker ARA (1746–1801), and copied it twice in watercolour (the Rooker is today in the Royal Academy collection, London, while both of Turner’s copies reside in the Turner Bequest). Rooker was unusually adept in minutely differentiating the tones of masonry (tone being the range of a given colour from light to dark). The exceptionally rich spectrum of tones Rooker had deployed in his Battle Abbey demonstrated something vital to Turner. He emulated Rooker’s multiplicity of tones not only in his two copies but also in many elaborate drawings made later in 1792. Very soon the young artist attained the ability to differentiate tones with even more subtlety than the master he emulated.
St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s Crown Canterbury Cathedral
RA 1794
watercolour, 51.7 × 37.4 cm
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K
The technical procedure used for such tonal variation was known as the ‘scale practice’, and it was rooted in the inherent nature of watercolour. Because watercolour is essentially a transparent medium, it requires its practitioners to work from light to dark (for it is very difficult to place a light mark over a darker one but not the reverse). Instead of mixing up a palette containing all of the many tones he required for a given image, Turner instead copied Rooker and mixed up merely one tone at a time before placing it at different locations across a sheet of paper. Then, while that work dried, he would take some of the remaining tonal mixture off his palette and brush it onto various locations in further watercolours, which were laid out around his studio in a production line.
Fishermen at Sea
RA 1796
oil on canvas, 91.5 × 122.4 cm
Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London
By the time he returned to the first drawing it would have dried. Turner would then slightly darken the given colour on his palette and add the next ‘note’ down the tonal ‘scale’ from light to dark to this work and its successors.
Naturally, such a process saved enormous time, for it did not require the simultaneous creation of a vast range of tones, which would also have required a huge palette and a multitude of brushes, one for each tone. And as well as permitting the production of large numbers of watercolours, this procedure helped with the reinforcement of spatial depth, for because the finishing touches would always be the darkest tones mixed on a palette, their placement in the foreground of an image would help suggest the maximum degree of recession beyond them.
Llandaff Cathedral, South Wales
RA 1796
watercolour, 35.7 × 25.8 cm
British Museum, London
Before too long Turner would enjoy an unrivalled ability to differentiate the most phenomenally