1839: AGED SIXTY-FOUR
'THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE,' AND A SEA-PIECE ON A VISITING-CARD
A party of the Academy Club were journeying to Greenwich, on their
annual visit, when the steamer passed a tug with an old battleship in
tow.
'There's a fine subject for you, Turner,' said Clarkson Stanfield,
And Turner, who could take a hint from anybody, looked, chuckled,
ruminated, no doubt made a pencil sketch, and the result was 'The
Fighting Téméraire.'
She was launched at Chatham Dockyard in 1798: she had been the second
ship in Nelson's division at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Sold
out of the service at Sheerness in 1838, she was now being towed to
Rotherhithe to be broken up. Her career was ended, but Turner has
made the memory of the old wooden warrior immortal. 'The Fighting
Téméraire' is too well known to be described. Pages and pages have been
written about the picture with scornful comments that the sun and the
mast are in the wrong places, and I know not what else. The mast, of
course, should not be abaft the funnel; this curious error, or perhaps
intention on Turner's part so that nothing should interfere with that
black note, was corrected by J. T. Willmore, in his engraving. The
'Téméraire' as popular. No abusive voice, says Ruskin, was ever raised
against it. 'And the feeling was just, for of all pictures and subjects
not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic
that was ever painted.'
An admirer who tried to purchase the 'Téméraire,' had a long interview
with Turner in Queen Anne Street, but the painter could not be
induced to put a price upon the picture, although he offered to take
a commission of the same size at two hundred guineas. There is the
usual Varnishing Day story told about the 'Téméraire.' Geddes, who had
a portrait hung above, realising that his picture was killed by the
dazzle of Turner's sunset, prepared to introduce a showy carpet into
the floor of his portrait. He had laid it in with a flat, bright tint
of vermilion when Turner appeared. 'Oh, ho! Mr. Geddes,' he cried,
and seizing his palette knife loaded on orange, scarlet and yellow.
Returning the next day Turner found that the bright vermilion ground in
Geddes's picture had been converted into a 'rich, quiet, sober-coloured
Turkey carpet.'
Less popular, because it makes no appeal to pathos or sentiment, was
another exhibit of this year, with another of the unwieldy titles,
'Ancient Rome, Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus, The
Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Cæsars restored,' with this
quotation, obviously Turner's own composition:--
'The clear stream,
Aye--the yellow Tiber glimmers to her beam,
Even while the sun is setting.'
If only Agrippina, with the ashes of her husband and the bodies of her
suite were absent, what a lovely vision this would be with the rosy
bridge, the yellow fairy-like building, and the full moon riding in
the evening sky. Yet why ask to have the figures taken away? They are
Turner; it is all Turner, a glorious Turner, still in the hour of his
splendour, and quite careless of the fact that it was at Brindisium,
not Rome, that Agrippina landed. Northcote, who had a dark subject
picture hanging above 'Ancient Rome,' said, 'You might as well have
opened a window under my picture.' Turner was always opening a window
to a poet's land, which, if it has no earthly habitation, exists,
eternally, in that place where all beautiful things dwell--the
imagination. The Sketch-Books of this period are as crowded with
drawings as the court of Agrippina with figures. In the 'Venice' Book
of 1839 against a water-colour entitled by Ruskin 'Venice: Sunset
sketch with turned edge,' he has appended this note: 'Preserve this
drawing exactly as it is, as evidence of the way he worked; the turned
edge of the paper painted upon.'
The 'Venetian Fishing Boat' also shows the 'way he worked,' when
working for his own pleasure, not for exhibition--green water, violet
hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny
sail--lovely.
On a packet which contained a number of drawings in a Sketch-Book, now
labelled 'Miscellaneous,' Ruskin inscribed the following: 'Thirty-four
pieces of paper, some double. Pencil Outline. Rubbish; only worth
looking at for references. It contains many late scrawls of German
scenery. Studies of Germany, etc.'
What may have seemed rubbish to Ruskin, pencil scrawls, etc., may
have been of vital importance to Turner. How these Sketch-Books evoke
the man and the moment. In one of them is 'A Study for a Sea-Piece,'
scrawled on a visiting-card, above the name of Mr. J. M. W. Turner, 47
Queen Anne Street, Harley Street. The number of studies of the sea he
made during his life certainly exceeded the number of visiting-cards he
used.