VICISSITUDES OF THE TURNER BEQUEST
'In the name of God, Amen. I, Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A.,
of Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, in the County of Middlesex,
Esquire, do make and publish and declare this to be, and contain my
last Will and Testament....
Turner's long will, with the complicated codicils which he added to
it, fills eleven closely printed pages of an Appendix to Thornbury's
_Life._ It is a confused and involved document, and the lawyers spent
years and much money endeavouring to effect a compromise between the
contesting parties. Ruskin succinctly summed up the litigation thus:
'The nation buried with three-fold honour, Turner's body in St. Paul's,
his pictures at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery.'
If love governed the world, if we lived for one another, it would have
been quite possible to carry out, at once, Turner's wishes, which are
sufficiently plain, in spite of the muddle of the will. He desired that
the nation should have his pictures, that they should be kept together
in a room or rooms added to the National Gallery to be called 'Turner's
Gallery,' to be built within a period of ten years; that his fortune
should be devoted to founding a Charitable Institution for unfortunate
artists; that provision should be made for Hannah Danby and Mrs. Booth;
that the Royal Academy should be given funds to found a Turner Medal,
and that the testator should have a fitting monument in St. Paul's
and a fine funeral. Turner had revoked his legacies to his next of
kin: they were to have nothing. As Monkhouse justly remarks, the will
was not exactly an unselfish document. Apart from his generosity to
unfortunate brothers of the brush, and his care, no more than his duty,
for his mistress housekeepers, it was devised to perpetuate his own
fame, and to disregard his relatives.
In 1856 the Vice-Chancellor made an order which took the place of the
will. The nation obtained all the works of art by his own hand, and
the Royal Academy a sum of twenty thousand pounds for the Turner Medal
and Scholarship. The real estate went to the heir-at-law, and Hannah
Danby and Mrs. Booth received their portions. The plates, engravings
and copyrights, and the rest of the property, were divided among the
next-of-kin.
In 1854 the removal of the pictures and drawings from Queen Anne Street
to the National Gallery began; in 1856 a final delivery was made, and
in 1858 the catalogue delivered by the assessors, Sir Charles Eastlake,
the President of the Royal Academy, and Mr. Knight, the secretary,
consisted of the following works:--
Finished pictures 100
Unfinished pictures including
mere beginnings 182
Drawings and sketches in
colour and in pencil including
about 300 coloured
drawings 19,049
19,331
Of the oil-paintings thirty-four were almost immediately placed on
exhibition. Additions were constantly made, until by May 1857, the
exhibited works had reached the number of one hundred and five.
That, in brief, is the early history of the exhibited portion of the
Turner Bequest, as given in the preface to the _Inventory._ The whole
history, including the exhibition of a number of the water-colours at
Marlborough House and the Victoria and Albert Museum, would require a
long chapter to tell in detail.
I must now turn to the 19,049 drawings and sketches with which the
name of Ruskin is for ever associated. He has told the story in his
inimitable way in the preface to the fifth volume of _Modern Painters._
In 1857 he received notice that permission had been obtained for him
from the Trustees of the National Gallery to arrange, as he thought
best, the Turner drawings belonging to the nation. 'On which,' says
Ruskin, 'I returned to London immediately.'
'In seven tin boxes in the lower room of the National Gallery, I found
upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in
one way or another. Many on both sides; some with four, five or six
subjects on each side (the pencil point digging spiritedly through
from the foregrounds of the front into the tender pieces of sky on
the back); some in chalk, which the touch of the finger would sweep
away. (The best book of studies for his great shipwrecks contained
about a quarter of a pound of chalk debris, black and white, broken
off the crayons with which Turner had drawn furiously on both sides of
the leaves; every leaf, with peculiar foresight, and consideration of
the difficulties to be met by future mounters containing half of one
subject on the front of it, and half of another on the back.) Others
in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid coloured drawings
among them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust
at the edges, in capes and bays of fragile decay; others worm-eaten,
some mouse-eaten, many torn half-way through; numbers doubled
(quadrupled, I should say) up into four, being Turner's favourite
mode of packing for travelling; nearly all rudely flattened out from
the bundles in which Turner had finally rolled them up, and squeezed
them into his drawers in Queen Anne Street. Dust of thirty years'
accumulation, black, dense and sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed
and crumpled edges of these flattened bundles, looking like a jagged
black frame, and producing altogether unexpected effects in brilliant
portions of skies, whence an accidental or experimental finger-mark of
the first bundle-unfolder had swept it away.... With two assistants,
I was at work all the autumn and winter of 1857, every day, all day
long, and often far into the night.
'The manual labour would not have hurt me; but the excitement involved
in seeing unfolded the whole career of Turner's mind during his life,
joined with much sorrow at the state in which nearly all his most
precious work had been left, and with great anxiety, and heavy sense
of responsibility besides, were very trying; and I have never in my
life felt so much exhausted as when I locked the last box, and gave
the keys to Mr. Wornum in May 1858.'
It would take too long to continue the narrative of Ruskin's labours:
the four hundred cabinets designed by him to contain the drawings; his
privately printed catalogue; the official catalogue; his division,
interesting but bewildering, of the Exhibited water-colours into
groups; his notes upon them, delightful to the dilettante, but of
little service to the student.
The Unexhibited drawings were arranged by Ruskin in three hundred and
eight parcels, and classified by him according to his theory of their
artistic value.
71 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'R,' meaning, right
in intention.
124 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'M,' meaning, middling
value.
108 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'O,' meaning, entire
rubbish.
5 were marked as unexamined.
Never was man less suited to the task of cataloguing, which should be
absolutely methodical and entirely unfanciful, than John Ruskin. In a
letter to the Keeper (Mr. R. N. Wornum), enclosing his catalogue, Mr.
Ruskin referred to the lettering on the parcels as horrible, and added,
'I never meant it to be permanent.'
For long it seemed as if the neglect of the tin boxes, containing the
parcels of unexhibited drawings, would be permanent. Mildew formed on
them, 'the contents of the tin boxes were in a dirty state, with broken
pieces of old sealing-wax, tattered fragments of string, dusty brown
paper, etc., etc.' In 1862 Ruskin, with the assistance of Mr. George
Allen, effected a kind of spring cleaning. 'I've got the mildew off,'
he wrote, 'as well as I could, and henceforth I've done with the whole
business; and have told them they must take it off themselves next time
or leave it on--if they like.' When Mr. E. T. Cook, who, in his book
on the _Turner Drawings_, did so much to arouse public interest in the
'buried Turners,' saw the tin boxes in 1904, the 'mildew was on.' But
the period of neglect of the unexhibited portion of the Turner Bequest
was nearly at an end.
In 1905 Mr. A. J. Finberg was invited by the Trustees of the National
Gallery to classify the '19,049 pieces of paper' chronologically, to
re-arrange the Sketch-Books in order, and to compile a chronological
and descriptive _Inventory_ of all the unexhibited Turner sketches.
Later it was decided to include the whole collection of exhibited
drawings and sketches. The work occupied Mr. Finberg's entire time for
four years, and the result was made public in 1909, when a _Complete
Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest_ was published as
described in Chapter IV. The exhibited water-colours, as well as all
the sketches, are included in the _Inventory._ Perhaps for the sake of
accuracy, it would have been better if Ruskin had never touched the
seven tin boxes. In following the communings of Turner with nature, he
disintegrated many of the Sketch-Books (over 150 were dismembered),
removed a leaf here and there, omitted to number them, gave the
sketches Ruskinian titles, and made the task of re-arranging them in
chronological or topographical order almost impossible. Mr. Finberg
allows himself the following gentle and amusing reproof of his great
predecessor: 'The question of dates had little or no interest for Mr.
Ruskin; on such questions he is, as M. Cherfils grimly remarks, "_plus
que sobre._"'
In 1878, when a selection of nearly three hundred drawings and sketches
were exhibited on the ground floor of the eastern wing of the National
Gallery, the Turner water-colour rooms became a place of pilgrimage;
still more so when additional rooms were added, and the sepia drawings
for the _Liber_ were displayed. The collection was changed quarterly,
and for years many made a point of visiting those little rooms each
time that the change was made. Who did not love the 'delight drawings'?
who did not wonder anew each visit at their beauty? Students copied
and re-copied them, desiring nothing better in life than to sit there,
through long days, trying to follow the Master's vision.
So the years passed. Turner was a classic; his environment was fixed.
It seemed as if no alteration would ever be made in the crowded gallery
where his oil pictures hung, overflowing into the adjoining room, or
in the series of little rooms on the ground floor which we visited at
each re-hanging, greeting the water-colours at each encounter like
the faces, loved and lost awhile, of old friends. It was enough to
know when we missed them, that they would return again, and that the
'buried Turners,' the Sketch-Books with their thousands of pages, each
containing something of the Master's work, were being cared for. Turner
was firmly settled in his niche in the Temple of Fame. It seemed that
nothing more could ever happen to him.
Then suddenly, in the month of May 1906, something did happen:
something that made the art sensation of the year.
That event was the exhibition of the 'unfinished' oils by Turner at the
Tate Gallery.