Excerpted from Eccentric Personages
It is in no spirit of detraction that I string together a number of descriptive anecdotes of this great painter’s eccentricity of character and manner. They afford another illustration of the world-old truth, that the life of the highest and the best of us is woven of a mingled yarn of good and evil. Social shortcomings or extravagances, deviations from the beaten path of decorum, are little noticed in ordinary men. There is no violent contrast to strike the eye—no fine gold seen in incongruous mixture with common clay. The dazzling mantle of genius reveals and magnifies such spots. This is one of the penalties of intellectual greatness.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1773, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, nearly opposite the Cider Cellars. His father, William Turner, was a barber. Some of the admirers of the greatest of English landscape-painters have endeavored to attenuate the disagreeable fact that he was born in such a vulgar locality, by pointing out that Andrew Marvel occupied a second floor there in the days of Charles the Second, and that even M. de Voltaire, the prince of persiflage, and a bright particular star in the galaxy of French celebrities, lodged there for several years at the sign of the White Peruke. J.M.W. Turner, R.A., may be excused having been born in a street or lane so patronised.
William Turner, the barber, and his father were natives of South Molton, Devonshire. The barber was an illiterate, close-fisted, but not ill-natured man. When, in after-life, Turner was reproached with his penurious way of life—how nobly redeemed, All England knows—he would reply, “You would not be surprised if you knew the lessons instilled into me during boyhood. My father never praised me except for having saved a half-penny.”
William Turner did not neglect his son’s education. Comparatively with his scanty means he was liberal in that respect. J.M.W. Turner was sent for the benefit of his health to an uncle and aunt who kept a butcher’s shop in Brentford. Whilst there he was sent to an academy, opposite the Three Pigeons—the master of which “academy” was a pedagogue of the sternest kind. His name was White. The future Royal Academician was next sent, at the age of thirteen, to a school at Margate, then a little fishing-village. It was there he formed an acquaintance which colored, and in a moral sense ruined, his future life. He fell in love with the sister of one of his schoolfellows; tremblingly declared his passion when on the point of leaving, and was accepted. Young Turner, then a sprightly youth, trod the empyrean. It had long since been determined he should be a painter. Feeling with the instinctive consciousness of genius that he was certain to obtain eminence in his art, he looked with confidence to the future. At nineteen he left for a lengthened tour in the North, to sketch scenery from the great book of Nature, after first exchanging vows of mutual fidelity with Miss —-. He wrote constantly, but the young lady was not permitted to see one of his letters. Her stepmother, who did not approve of the contemplated match, intercepted them. Miss —- believed herself to be forgotten, forsaken, and finally consented to receive the address of a new lover. The day was fixed for the marriage, when Turner, who, in spite of not having received an answer to one of his letters—the cause of which he must have divined—had never for one moment doubted his beloved’s constancy, came back to London, and forthwith betook himself to the young lady’s abode. When informed how matters stood, he was wild, mad—passionately implored Miss —- to break off an engagement into which she had been inveigled. The lady, believing she had gone too far to recede, refused. The marriage was soon afterwards celebrated. A most unhappy one it proved to the bride. To young Turner the marriage-bells sounded the death-knell of his hopes. The blow was mortal: he never recovered from it; and to it must be attributed, in an almost entire degree, his misanthropic manner, his neglect of appearances, and his contempt of the world, except as a place in which money might be scraped together. One unbroken idol at whose shrine he might worship remained to him—Art, and to that worship he for the future devoted himself with all his heart and strength.
The goddess rewarded her votary with her especial favors—inspired, inflamed his genius, but for many years was niggardly of temporal gifts.
Turner took up his abode in his old dingy bedroom over the barber’s shop in Maiden Lane, drew sketches, which when he had gained recognition would have brought hundreds of pounds, for three or four shillings each. He acquired the art of engraving, greatly excelled in it, and was much patronised by the print-publishers, with whom, till he became celebrated, he was perpetually at war—at such low prices did they require him to work. Throughout his life he cherished a bitter hatred of publishers.
The sole relaxation which this remarkable man permitted himself, besides certain potations—but it was not till late in life that he at times over-indulged—was fishing. He might be seen wending his way to the river-side, dressed in the oddest fashion—a flabby hat, ill fitting green Monmouth-street coat, nankeen trousers much too short, and highlow boots, with a dilapidated cotton umbrella, and a fishing rod. From early morning till nightfall would he sit upon the river’s bank, under pelting rain, patiently, shielded by his capacious umbrella, even though he did not obtain a single nibble. He was not, however, an unskillful angler, and was very proud of a good day’s sport. He often fished in the Thames at Brentford.
Turner engraved for a livelihood; he painted for fame, and fame came at last. The world of London awoke to the knowledge that a great painter had arisen amongst them. Yet was the recognition for some time doubtful, hesitating. The critics of the press abused unmercifully his painting of “Carthage,” exhibited at the Royal Academy. The gentleman who had ordered and was to pay one hundred pounds for it refused on account of those strictures to complete the bargain. Not very long afterwards Turner was offered thousands for the same work. “This is indeed a triumph,” he exclaimed, with natural exultation. He was at last at the top of Fortune’s wheel. His paintings commanded any price he chose to ask for them, and he accumulated money at an astounding rate. He had removed to 48 Queen Anne Street West, a street north of Cavendish Square—a house subsequently known as “Turner’s Den.” Truly a den. The windows were never cleaned, had breaches in them patched with paper; the door was black and blistered, the iron palisades rusty for lack of paint. If a would-be visitor knocked or rang, it was long before the summons was replied to—up to 1812 by a wizened, meager old man, who unfastened the chain sufficiently to see who rang or knocked, and the almost invariable answer was, “You can’t come in.” After the old man’s death, Mrs. Danby, an elderly woman with a diseased face, supplied his place.
A profound melancholy shadowed not only the social, but artistic life of Turner, relieved by occasional, far-between flashes of merriment. Mr. Ruskin has remarked upon this in his usual forcible language—”Sunset and twilight on ruins were his favorite effects.” Speaking of the Liber, the great art-critic goes on to remark—”A feeling of decay, of humiliation, gives solemnity to all his simplest subjects, even to his views of daily labor. In the pastoral by the brookside, the child is in rags and lame. In the hedging and ditching, the laborer is mean and sickly, the woman slatternly. The mill is a ruin; the peat-bog dreary.”
Nothing could be more true. Even his glorious picture of the last of the Old Temeraire, is the Temeraire going to be broken up. “Ah! the fallacies of hope!” was his frequent exclamation when he was in the full blaze of his fame and rolling in riches. “Ah! the fallacies of hope,”—a thought which, if seldom uttered in words, is ever burning in the brain of finely-organized poetic natures, and Turner’s was a finely-organized poetic nature, if ever there was one. The burden of the mystery is too heavy for them. The highest poetry of the nineteenth century is but the melodious echo of this deep-seated feeling, this religion of despair.
Turner loved to mystify people. His great picture of Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops whose eye Ulysses put out, with a tree pointed like a stake, when the monster was asleep, the subject of which was taken from the Odyssey, had an immense success. One day Turner dined with a large party, amongst the guests at which were the Reverend Mr. Judkins, and a lady, who greatly admired Turner’s pictures. They were sitting opposite Turner and talking in whispers. “I know what you are talking about,” exclaimed Turner, his keen eyes glittering with fun; “you are talking of my picture.” This was true, the lady having expressed great admiration of the Polyphemus; “a sweet picture,” she called it. The Rev. Mr. Judkins intimated assent; they were talking about his picture. “And where do you think I got the subject from, sir?” asked Turner. “Why, from the Odyssey, of course.” “Not a bit of it, my dear sir; I took it from Tom Dibdin. Don’t you remember the word?—
‘He ate his mutton, drank his wine,
And then he poked his eye out.'”
One Mr. Gillat, a wealthy manufacturer of Birmingham—it was the wealthy merchants and manufacturers, not the aristocracy, by whom Turner was chiefly patronized—Mr. Gillat was determined, if possible, to possess himself of some of Turner’s pictures. With that fixed purpose he came to London, called at the Den, 48 Queen Anne Street, rang the bell again and again, till at last it was answered by the old woman with a diseased face. He told his business, and the usual reply was given—”You can’t come in.” The Birmingham gentleman was not so easily beaten. He had got his foot in the doorway—the housekeeper had incautiously unhooked the chain—and Mr. Gillat made a forcible entry. He had hardly gained the first landing when Turner, hearing strange footsteps, rushed out of his particular compartment in the Den and angrily confronted the intruder. “What do you want here?” “I am come to purchase some of your pictures.” “I have none to sell.” “But you won’t mind exchanging them for some of mine. You have seen our Birmingham pictures?” “Never ‘eard of ’em.” “I will show you some,” rejoined the gentleman from Birmingham, pulling out a roll of Bank-of-England notes to the amount of five thousand pounds. “You are a rum one,” said Turner. “Those are pictures, too, that must not be copied.” The Birmingham gentleman was successful, and carried off five thousand pounds’ worth—now perhaps worth five times that sum—of the great artist’s creations.
Turner could not bear to sell a favorite painting. It was a portion of his being; to part with it was a rendering up, the blotting out of that space of his life spent in its creation. He was always dejected, melancholy, after such a transaction. “I lost one of my children this week,” he would sadly exclaim, with tears in his eyes.
At a meeting at Somerset House, presided over by the late Sir Robert Peel, it was decided to purchase Turner’s two great pictures, the Rise and Fall of Carthage, for the National Gallery. A Mr. Griffiths was commissioned to offer five thousand pounds for them. “A noble offer,” said Turner, “a noble offer; but no, I cannot part with them. Impossible.” Mr. Griffiths, greatly disappointed, took leave. Turner ran after him. “Tell those gentlemen,” he said, “that the nation will, most likely, have the pictures after all.”
Long before this Turner had matured a purpose which continued to be his dominant idea till the curtain fell upon the incongruous drama of his life. This was to bequeath to his country a Turner’s Gallery of noble pictures, and amass one hundred thousand pounds at least, to build and endow an asylum for decayed artists. It was for this great end that he scorned delights, except such cheap luxuries as fishing, and the indulgence, at times, of some ignoble tastes; consented to be esteemed a miserly curmudgeon, lived in a state of almost absolute squalor, dressed in such a Paul-Pry fashion—Paul-Pry run to seed—that country friends, as well as his aristocratic acquaintances, gave him the sobriquet of Old Podgy.
His resolve once made could not be shaken. A wealthy merchant of Liverpool offered him one hundred thousand pounds down for the art-treasures rolled up in the dark closets—hanging from dripping walls in the Den, Queen Anne Street, “Give me the key of the house, Mr. Turner,” said the would-be purchaser, “and here is the money.” “No thank you,” replied Turner, “I have refused a better offer,” which was true.
Upon another occasion an eager speculator called upon him to effect purchases. Turner happened to be in one of his jocose moods, and he displayed his wonderful sketches bound up in volumes. The purchaser expectant was in ecstasies as the gem-like pages flashed one after the other upon him. His bid for them rapidly increased till it reached the sum of one thousand pounds per volume. “You would very much like to have them, I daresay?” “Yes, very much.” “Well, then, you won’t.”
Yet this large-souled man—a mighty spirit prisoned in the shabbiest of shells—could be guilty of the most niggardly meanness. He caused a tablet to be placed in St. Paul’s. Some masonry work was required to fix it; the charge for which was seven-and-sixpence, which one of the churchwardens paid, believing, of course, that Mr. Turner would immediately reimburse him such a trifle. Mr. Turner was much pleased with the tablet, but his mood changed when the little bill was presented. “Send me a receipt from the mason,” said Turner; “I won’t pay it till you do.” It was not worth the trouble to do so, and the churchwarden lost his money. “He a great man!” growled a Southend boatman, one of two whom Turner used to hire to pull him about the Thames shore whilst he was sketching. “He a great man! Over the left! Why, he take out a big bottle of gin regular, and never axes us to have a nip.”
Yet even with respect to that least-significant sign or evidence of true benevolence, indiscriminate almsgiving, the great artist was often, very often, impulsively, lavishly generous. An old Irish beggar-woman importuned him in the streets, to his great annoyance. He rebuked her angrily, but presently repenting of his harshness, ran back and slipped a five-pound note into her hand.
He was sometimes munificent, even during life, in affording help to those who he knew really needed it. A gentleman who used to buy his sketches when he was working in the dingy bedroom over his father’s shop in Maiden Lane, and always prophesied high things of him, fell into difficulties, and was about to sell the timber on his estate. Turner heard of this, and sent many thousands—twenty it is said—anonymously to the gentleman’s steward. The embarrassment was temporary only, the gentleman recovered himself, and Turner received back his twenty thousand pounds.
Especially for struggling artists he felt an ardent sympathy, and was ever ready to assist them with advice and money. One young man who had painted “Galileo in the prison of the Inquisition,” showed the work to him. “It is a good picture,” said Turner; “full of promise.” Then seizing a brush, he dashed in some geometrical figures upon the prison walls. This was worth fifty guineas to the young painter.
One incident gives high proof of the native generosity of his nature. He was one of the hanging committee, as the phrase goes, of the Royal Academy. The walls were full when Turner’s attention was attracted by a picture sent in by an unknown provincial artist of the name of Bird. Turner examined it carefully. “A good picture,” he exclaimed; “it must be hung up and exhibited.” “Impossible,” responded the committee of Academicians. “The arrangement can’t be disturbed. Quite impossible!” “A good picture,” iterated Turner; “it must be hung up”; and finding his colleagues to be as obstinate as himself, he hitched down one of his own pictures and hung up Bird’s in its place.
Another time Sir Thomas Lawrence exhibited a painting which was hung close by one of Turner’s. The exceeding brightness of the latter rendered the dullness of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s repulsively apparent. The courtly portrait-painter was much annoyed, but there was no help for it. The next day, a friend called upon Turner, and asked what, in the name of heaven, he had been doing with his picture. “Yes, yes—Lawrence looked so miserable. But it’s only lamp-black; it will easily wash off.”
Turner never entertained any one, never gave a dinner during his life. Upon one occasion he had no option but to do so. He had paid a visit to Edinburgh, and whilst there had been hospitably entertained by a Mr. Thompson. He had, in fact, made that gentleman’s house his own. Mr. Thompson came to London, and Turner could not do less than invite him to dinner. The invitation was accepted, greatly to the consternation both of Turner and his father. There seemed, however, to be no help for it, when fortune came to their relief. Mr. Thompson called upon a nobleman, who pressingly invited him to dine at his mansion the next day, the last he should remain in town. Mr. Thompson pleaded his previous engagement with Turner. “Bring Turner with you,” said the nobleman. Mr. Thompson delivered the message. Turner, secretly delighted, affected to hesitate. “Well, I suppose I must, but—” “Go, Billy,” exclaimed the father, furtively opening the door, on the outside of which he had been listening. “Go, Billy; the mutton need not be boiled.”
The suffering of his friends grievously affected Turner. Their death encompassed him for a time with the gloom of an inconsolable despair. He had, unhappily, no religious convictions, and the thought of annihilation was to him a source of constant terror and dread. The death of his jovial-hearted friend Chantrey, the sculptor, deeply affected him. He could never be induced to enter a sick-room, and would not visit at the house where a friend or acquaintance had died.
At last the sere of life had fallen upon this great genius. He felt, though he refused to acknowledge it to himself, that he was fast approaching the setting sun, that the universe was fading from his sight, crumbling at his feet. He strove to escape from himself, as it were: “He would give all his wealth to be twenty years old again.” He was recognized at the Yorkshire Stingo by a very slight acquaintance. He may have indulged in potations at times. “I shall often come,” said the man, “now I know you frequent the house.” Turner never went there again; but the world was a blank for him: he had no cheerful fireside—no home in its true saving sense.
Becoming more and more conscious of the swift approach of death, and fancying, perhaps, that a change of scene—seclusion from society—might retrim the expiring lamp, he suddenly left Queen Anne Street with merely a change of linen, as if he were going out for a walk, and took lodgings in a cottage at Chelsea, next door to which ginger-beer was sold, and not far from the present Cremorne Pier. It was a long time before his whereabout was discovered by his old faithful housekeeper, Mrs. Danby, by accident.
He had not then many days to live. A medical gentleman whom he had known at Margate—Margate which he was never weary of visiting, and the memories of which were present to him in his last hours—had been sent for, and he had no sooner looked upon the moribund than he gently but firmly announced that the last hour was at hand. Turner was greatly shocked, and refused to believe that his end, that “annihilation” was so near. “Go down-stairs,” trembled from his ashen lips, “go down-stairs, and take a glass of wine. Then come and look at me again.” The medical gentleman did so, returned, and again interpreted in the same words the doom of inevitable death written unmistakably upon the great painter’s brow. A few hours afterwards, on the 19th of December, 1851, J.M.W. Turner, R.A., expired, aged 79 years. He was buried in St. Paul’s.
By his will he bequeathed one hundred and forty thousand pounds to found an asylum for poor artists born in England, and a magnificent art-treasure to his country.
This latter bequest was, however, coupled with the condition that his Rise and Fall of Carthage should be hung up in the National Gallery between Claude’s Sea-port and Mill.
