The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner. Eric Shanes
is entirely understandable, given his lowly origins and immense sympathies with common humanity. Although he always had to exercise extreme caution when expressing his political views – for the majority of his monied supporters held Tory political views, and were therefore opposed to parliamentary reform – Turner would never turn his back on either the social class from which he had emerged, or its political aspirations.
The painter resumed touring in the 1810s. In 1811, 1813 and 1814 he visited the West Country in order to obtain material for the “Southern Coast” series and other engraving schemes. On the 1813 trip he had a particularly enjoyable time in Plymouth where he was much fêted locally. He treated his friends to picnics, took boat rides in stormy weather – which he enjoyed enormously, having good sea-legs – and again painted in oils in the open air. In 1816 he undertook an extensive tour of the north of England to gather subjects for watercolours intended for engraved reproduction in the “History of Richmondshire” scheme, a survey of a county that in medieval times had ranged from Richmond in Yorkshire to Lonsdale in Lancashire. He could not have selected a worse time for the trip, as a major volcanic eruption in the Pacific during the previous year was causing the acute disruption of world weather patterns, with endless rain in Britain (where it was called “the year without a summer"). Originally Turner was to have made 120 watercolours for the project, and to have been paid the huge sum of 3000 guineas for those drawings. Unfortunately the venture petered out shortly after it had begun due to a lack of public enthusiasm for the antiquarian texts that accompanied Turner’s images. By that time the artist had only made some twenty-one of the watercolours, four examples of which can be seen below (Wycliffe, near Rokeby, Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle, Simmer Lake, near Askrig, and Weathercote Cave when half filled with water).
In 1817 the painter revisited the Continent, stopping off at the scene of the recent battle of Waterloo before touring the Rhineland and visiting Holland where he scrutinised the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Impressive paintings of Waterloo in the immediate aftermath of battle and of the river Maas at Dordrecht with shipping becalmed were exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year (both works are reproduced below); not for the first time Turner used a pair of pictures to contrast war and peace. The Dordrecht view was purchased by Walter Fawkes who installed it over the fireplace at Farnley Hall as the centrepiece of his collection. Fawkes also bought a complete set of fifty watercolours on grey-washed paper that Turner had made in the Rhineland. And in 1819 Fawkes put a considerable part of his large collection of Turner watercolours on public display in his London residence. For the catalogue he wrote an impressive dedication to Turner, stating that he was never able to look at the artist’s works “without intensely feeling the delight I have experienced, during the greater part of my life, from the exercise of your talent and the pleasure of your society”. The dedication must have gratified the painter enormously.
Turner finally visited Italy in 1819, although he had already developed a number of superb watercolours of Italian scenes from sketches made by others. He visited Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Sorrento and Paestum, before turning northwards and probably spending Christmas in Florence. His return journey took place in late January 1820, when he crossed the Mont Cenis pass, where his coach overturned during a snowstorm (wasting nothing, he later pictorialised the experience in a vivid watercolour now in Birmingham Art Gallery). He arrived back in London loaded down with some 2000 sketches and studies, and immediately started one of his largest paintings ever (reproduced here). This is a view from the loggia of the Vatican, showing the Renaissance painter Raphael in the foreground. It was displayed in the 1820 Royal Academy exhibition, obviously to commemorate the Italian master who had died exactly three hundred years earlier.
J. M. W. Turner, The Artist and his Admirers, c. 1827, watercolour on blue paper, 14 × 19 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U. K., TB CCXLIV 102.
J. M. W. Turner, Scene on the Loire (near the Coteaux de Mauves), c. 1828–1830, watercolour and gouache with pen on blue paper, 14 × 19 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, U. K. This work was made for engraved reproduction in “Turner’s Annual Tour – The Loire”, 1833.
Although Turner was increasingly busy making small watercolours for the engravers during the 1820s (such as the jewel-like drawing of Portsmouth discussed below), perhaps the most impressive watercolour achievements of the first half of the decade were the large and superbly wrought drawings made for the “Marine Views” scheme (of which two examples are reproduced below). No less impressive are the oil paintings The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sybil, shown at the Academy in 1823, and The Battle of Trafalgar created between 1822 and 1824 to hang in St James’s Palace. In The Bay of Baiae (reproduced here) Turner expressed his awareness of the relationship between beauty and mortality, for the picture shows the god Apollo bestowing as many years of life upon the Cumaean Sibyl as she can hold grains of sand in her hands. Yet because the poor lady will refuse to grant her favours to the god in exchange for perpetual youth, eventually she will waste away to nothing. The derelict buildings in the background hint at her forthcoming physical ruin, while the beauty of the surrounding landscape puts that decay into ironic perspective. It is not surprising that The Battle of Trafalgar (reproduced below) is impressive, for it was the largest picture Turner would ever paint and fully captures the enormous forces unleashed by war. The trouble the artist had with the work, and its sorry fate, are related in the detailed discussion of the painting that appears below.
In 1824 Turner embarked upon yet another ambitious set of watercolours destined for engraved reproduction. This was the “Picturesque Views in England and Wales” series, a group of drawings that has quite aptly been termed “the central document of his art”. Like the “Richmondshire” series, the “England and Wales” scheme was to have comprised 120 designs, but this time the project floated long enough for the painter to create some 100 of the constituent images. Sadly the enterprise was terminated in 1838, due to the failure of the prints to sell and other factors that rendered their publication uneconomical. In 1829 Turner exhibited a fairly large group of “England and Wales” watercolours in London, and he did so again in what must have been a dazzling show in 1833, when sixty-seven drawings went on display. In the “England and Wales” designs almost all aspects of British scenery and life are depicted, while Turner’s unrivalled mastery of the medium of watercolour is everywhere apparent. And throughout the 1820s and ‘30s the painter was frantically busy producing marvellous watercolours for a host of other engraving projects as well. These included topographical surveys of the ports, rivers and east coast of England; explorations of the rivers of France (part of a scheme to survey the rivers of Europe that never got further than forays along the Seine and the Loire); and illustrations for books of the collected poetry of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Samuel Rogers and Thomas Campbell. Moreover, Turner also found the time to produce illustrations for Scott’s collected prose works, and to depict the landscapes of the Bible. Although he had never visited the Holy Land, he elaborated these works from sketches made by travellers who had. Well might he have complained, as he had done in the mid-1820s, that there was “no holiday ever for me”.
As we have seen, early on in his career Turner had of necessity evolved a production-line method for making his watercolours. Naturally, such a procedure proved of enormous benefit when creating large numbers of watercolours for engraving. Two accounts of the artist’s watercolour technique have come down to us from the same witness:
There were four drawing boards, each of which had a handle screwed to the back. Turner, after sketching the subject in a fluent manner, grasped the handle and plunged the whole drawing into a pail of water by his side. Then quickly he washed in the principal hues that he required, flowing tint into tint, until this stage of the work was complete. Leaving this drawing to dry, he took a second board and repeated the operation. By the time the fourth drawing was laid in, the first would be ready for the finishing touches.
…[Turner] stretched the paper on boards and after plunging them into water, he dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout the work. His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out highlights and dragged, hatched and stippled