Turner Joseph Mallord William - J.M.W. Turner

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Turners friend and colleague C. R. Leslie remembered him thus:

Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. There was, in fact, nothing elegant in his appearance. He might be taken for the captain of a river steamboat at a first glance; but a second would find far more in his face than belongs to any ordinary mind. There was that peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation.

Like many keen observers, Turner was not keen on being observed. Friends found it hard to penetrate his domestic existence. Women were sometimes on hand but not introduced. He assumed names that were not his own. Like an animal, he adopted a defensive posture part of the time. He was absorbed by painting, and by making drawing after drawing as raw material for painting; but he also made frequent appearances at the Royal Academy, often to serve dutifully, sometimes it seemed to perform flamboyantly. After periods secure in his studio, he emerged to spend days in the country homes of a few good patrons or to go on an afternoons excursion with his fellow painters. He was churlish one moment, helpful the next. Some people found him tight-fisted, others extremely (if taciturnly) generous. He was both lonely and gregarious, private and vainglorious. He was a confused speaker, a muddled writer, and an artist sometimes touchingly precise, sometimes blazingly free who could with a grunt and a gesture suggest to a colleague what was wrong with his work and how to put it right. His contradictions have puzzled many, but they endear him to me. He was and is a challenge.

Biographers have bounced off Turner. Books about him abound, but the most successful tend to be specialist studies like Cecilia Powells Turner in the South and David Hills Turner on the Thames. Nevertheless a comprehensive up-to-date biography of Turner has seemed to me worth tackling. I have felt grateful for the labours of Thornbury, Finberg and Lindsay, his main biographers to date, yet I remain greatly dissatisfied by their books. In the last few decades there has been a fine growth of Turner scholarship, visible in the periodicals Turner Studies and Turner Society News, by special exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and in works by, among others, Andrew Wilton, Eric Shanes, Selby Whittingham and John Gage. Gages collection of Turners correspondence is a tool earlier biographers had to do without.

One feeling prompted by Walter Thornburys biography is that he presents much of the material in the wrong place; another is that some of the material has been pirated, and some is untrue. Thornburys book was first published in two volumes in 1862 and reissued in a revised second edition in one volume in 1877. (I have relied mostly on the 1877 version, though where necessary I have given references to the first.) Thornbury, a London journalist, recognized Turner as a good story. He had access to many people who had known Turner well, he had Ruskins encouragement, and he produced a hodgepodge of a book full of excellent anecdotes and improbable suggestions. It was, as Robert Leslie (son of C. R. Leslie) pointed out, a sort of hashed-up life of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, with badly done bits of Turner floating about in it. A major problem in using Thornbury has been in deciding what is accurate and what is not. I have been considerably helped by access to a copy of the first edition, at the time the property of Professor Francis Haskell, which earlier belonged to Turners friend (and executor) George Jones. (This has now been given by Professor Haskell to the Tate Gallery.) Jones collected responses to Thornbury by other friends and colleagues, for example John Pye, Hugh Munro and David Roberts, and inserted some of their remarks at the appropriate places in the work; he also made his own marginal notes. So these denials and dissents and expressions of outrage have been valuable. Where they were missing, I have generally given Thornbury the benefit of the doubt, though remaining aware of his habit of taking a small fact and then elaborating it, the result being three-quarters invention.

The rewards (and the problems) of A. J. Finbergs heroic chronicle biography of 1939 (revised second edition 1961) are different. For Turners painting career, his life as an Academician and the reactions

Gratitude and exasperation remain the keynotes of ones response to the most recent critical biography, now thirty years old, by Jack Lindsay. Lindsay has much of interest to say about Turners poetry and Turners readings in such poets as James Thomson and Mark Akenside. His reflections on Turners inner life are sometimes full of insight and sometimes simplistic, expressed in modish psychoanalytic language. Of other biographies: Bernard Falks 1938 Turner the Painter: His Hidden Life combines a tabloid style, a prurient approach and much speculation with some nuggets of private history derived from Turner family documents. Cosmo Monkhouses deliberately modest brief life of 1979 distils various sources and both uses and corrects Thornbury; it remains valuable. The great Turner biographer manqu was, of course, John Ruskin. Instead the world got the five volumes of Modern Painters, in which Turner was the inspiration for a massive reverie on art, a splendid if somewhat indigestible soup with well-done bits of Turner floating in it.

I have attempted to look at almost all of Turners sketchbooks and many of his watercolours and paintings. I have tried to see at first hand the primary documents to do with his life and those close to him: records of birth, marriage, property ownership and death, in rate books and parish registers and family papers. I have found a few facts that seem hitherto to have gone unnoticed for example, regarding the date of the death of Turners little sister and have, I think, put together some known, previously disparate facts to shed new light here and there. At one point, when looking into the location of Cowley Hall, the home of a Turner host (and Thornbury informant) Thomas Rose, I became aware that well ahead of me in Turner detective work was Selby Whittingham, and I have been consequently grateful for his researches into the nooks and crannies of the Turner, Marshall and Danby families, and into Turners various wills and testaments. My aim has been to produce a work of synthesis, one which pulls together material old and new, which juxtaposes facts in a way that creates a better-rounded portrait of the man. It is a project of collaboration, as it were, with the work of my many predecessors and of contemporary scholars, not trying to repeat everything they have said but winnowing and rearranging the many details to make a truthful and evocative picture. I hope the Turner who emerges is a little more living, at one with the elements but with his feet on the ground.

This is the biography of an artist rather than a work of art history. In writing about Turners pictures, I have tried to bear in mind what Turner said in response to Ruskins writings: He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them I never intended.

I am indebted for much advice, help and encouragement. Among the many people I am grateful to are Fred Bachrach, Margot Bailey, David Bromwich, David Blaney Brown, Bernard Carter, Ann Chumbley, William Clarke, Lord Egremont, Gillian Forrester, Carolyn Hammond, Francis Haskell, Luke Herrmann, Nicholas Horton-Fawkes, Ralph Hyde, Samuel Hynes, Peter James, Evelyn Joll, Anne Lyles, Alison McCann, Pieter van der Merwe, Cecilia Powell, Judith Severne, Rosalind Turner, Ian Warrell, Selby Whittingham, Edward Yardley and Robert Yardley.