19 December: Boreham on Joseph Turner

Splendour and Squalor
Today marks the anniversary of the death of Joseph W. Turner, the most eminent and remarkable of our British landscape painters. Did ever grossness subsist with delicacy to anything like the extent to which they dwelt together in him? Holding a place as peerless and unrivalled in the realm of art as Shakespeare holds in the republic of letters, he was by no means a happy man nor a particularly attractive one. Short, plain, and ill-dressed, he walked with a slouch and a shuffle. Poorly educated and possessing no gift of speech, his utterance was invariably inelegant. His ways were uncouth; his habits were untidy; and, to be perfectly truthful, he was dirty. His mental make-up was no more engaging than his physical. He was selfish and sordid and spiteful; he was jealous and grasping and mean; he seemed in a hurry to pick a quarrel with everybody who crossed his path; he lost no opportunity of venting his spleen on those who had the misfortune to incur his displeasure. A gnarled, twisted, repelling personality the personality of Turner must have been.

Yet he was a natural craftsman. As a boy of five, he caught sight of a beautiful silver salver in a home that he visited with his father. Late that evening he showed his parents a fine drawing of the salver, including a coat of arms and other embellishments. As soon as the father saw it, he realised that his son's destiny was determined. From that moment the youngster never looked back. He devoted all his time and energy to the observation of natural colouring, and to its reproduction on canvas. Shortly after his twelfth birthday he applied himself to landscapes, and, at the age of fourteen, visited Bristol to paint a series of pictures for Mr. Narraway, including that gentleman's portrait. He was fifteen when his first work appeared in the Royal Academy, a painting entitled "A View of the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth." It created no sensation; yet nobody criticised its acceptance by the authorities at Burlington House. It was just a good workmanlike production.

A Master Of Light And Shade
It was at the age of seventeen that Turner began to paint pictures in which his distinctive passion began to find definite expression. Of all the tricks that light can play under all kinds of atmospheric conditions, he made an exhaustive, complete, and singularly fruitful study. Into each of his innumerable paintings he imparted this vivid portrayal of Nature's moods. The admirer of the canvas may not realise the secret cause of the unity on which he gazes, but he subconsciously feels that, on the day on which the cottage on the right of the painting appeared as it is depicted, the sheep, away on the left, would look exactly as the pigments portray them. It was this meticulous fidelity to reality that rendered every touch of his brush magnetically entrancing and irresistibly convincing. In his old age he set himself to paint the sunshine. In his view, nothing was impossible to art. He courted Nature with a lover's ardour and a lover's skill.

In extenuation of the less engaging elements in Turner's incongruous personality two things must be said. The first is that, whilst most of us acquire the finer delicacies of life through the softening medium of our contact with womanhood, Turner was particularly unfortunate in this respect. To begin with, his mother failed him. She was a wizened, shrewish, melancholy little creature who never made the slightest attempt to brighten her boy's existence, and who, in the end, lost her reason altogether.

A Medley Of Crudity And Chivalry
Later on, when he was nearly twenty, the young academician fell in love. But, almost simultaneously, the time arrived for him to travel in order to educate his eye by an inspection of the work of the old masters. Before leaving England, he presented the young lady with his own portrait, painted by himself. It is still the best picture that we possess of him. He was abroad for nearly three years. During the whole of that time his fiancee received no letter from him. On his return he found her busily preparing for her marriage with another. Turner pleaded with her passionately, but vainly, assuring her of his unwavering constancy. He discovered that all his letters had been intercepted and destroyed by the girl's stepmother. He bitterly renounced his faith in womanhood. He never married, and the only female with whom he was on friendly terms was the housekeeper who tended him for nearly fifty years.

The companion plea that must be urged in his defence is that, if his behaviour was often contemptible, it was sometimes almost sublime. He would stick at nothing to humiliate a rival, yet, when he found one of his own pictures hanging in an exhibition beside the work of a young struggler, he was capable of visiting the gallery privately and moderating the glories of his own painting in order that it might not throw its modest neighbour into the shade. He was a veritable Shylock in wringing from those with whom he had monetary transactions the last penny to which he thought himself entitled; yet he occasionally made the most princely gifts, and, in his will, made benefactions so splendid that the nation in general, and his own profession in particular, must always be his grateful debtors. He loved in his later years to creep away to a waterside hovel, unknown even to his housekeeper, and, under an assumed name, to live in rags and poverty; yet he has bequeathed to the world a record of achievement that, both for quantity and quality, gains in lustre and surprise as the generations come and go. He is a bundle of contradictions, a tangle of incongruities, a man whom it is very difficult to understand. But those who approach the study with a little penetration and a little patience will find the exercise a singularly intriguing venture.

F W Boreham

Image: Joseph Turner