the pendant the artist showed the reconstructed building in dawn light, thus using the rebirth of day not only to suggest constant renewal within the ancient world but equally to hint at the future restoration of Greek liberty. This latter subject was immensely important to him, for he wholly shared the views of one of his favourite Augustan poets, James Thomson, that Greece was the ancient home of liberty and democracy. In 1812 Turner had been forcibly reminded of the subjugation of contemporary Greece by the publication of the second Canto of Byron’s poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, in which the loss of Greek liberty is lamented. The two 1816 paintings might therefore well have been their creator’s most open statements of his identification with liberty and democracy to date.
Turner lived through the greatest period of political upheaval in European history. His affinity with demands for political and religious freedom in his own time first seems to have found expression around 1800 in works alluding to contemporary struggles for liberty in Britain and abroad. During this period he was hoping to gain election as an Academician, and many of the leading Royal Academicians, such as Barry, Fuseli and Smirke, were known to hold libertarian opinions. By painting such pictures he may have been simultaneously courting their votes. Around that time Turner’s most sympathetic future patron, Walter Fawkes, even held republican convictions, although he later moderated his stance (at least publicly). There can be absolutely no doubt that the similarity of their political views strengthened the bond between Turner and Fawkes after 1808. Moreover, the painter is known to have read banned radical political literature in the early 1820s. He would continue subtly to express his libertarian views during the rest of that decade as the Greeks struggled for their freedom and demands for parliamentary reform in Britain quickened. In a number of works made between 1829 and 1833 Turner would even allude to the latter struggle, the major British political issue of his entire lifetime. In one such design – a watercolour representing a parliamentary election in Northampton – he would even make his sympathies with the reform of Parliament quite clear, for the drawing shows the election of Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reformist administration of Earl Grey. In several works made after the attainment of Greek independence in 1830, Turner would celebrate that rebirth of freedom (for example, see a watercolour of a fountain on the island of Chios below). The artist’s identification with libertarianism is entirely understandable, given his lowly origins and immense sympathies with common humanity. Although he always had to exercise extreme caution when expressing his political views – for the majority of his monied supporters held Tory political views, and were therefore opposed to parliamentary reform – Turner would never turn his back on either the social class from which he had emerged, or its political aspirations.
The painter resumed touring in the 1810s. In 1811, 1813 and 1814 he visited the West Country in order to obtain material for the “Southern Coast” series and other engraving schemes. On the 1813 trip he had a particularly enjoyable time in Plymouth where he was much fêted locally. He treated his friends to picnics, took boat rides in stormy weather – which he enjoyed enormously, having good sea-legs – and again painted in oils in the open air. In 1816 he undertook an extensive tour of the north of England to gather subjects for watercolours intended for engraved reproduction in the “History of Richmondshire” scheme, a survey of a county that in medieval times had ranged from Richmond in Yorkshire to Lonsdale in Lancashire. He could not have selected a worse time for the trip, as a major volcanic eruption in the Pacific during the previous year was causing the acute disruption of world weather patterns, with endless rain in Britain (where it was called “the year without a summer"). Originally Turner was to have made 120 watercolours for the project, and to have been paid the huge sum of 3000 guineas for those drawings. Unfortunately the venture petered out shortly after it had begun due to a lack of public enthusiasm for the antiquarian texts that accompanied Turner’s images. By that time the artist had only made some twenty-one of the watercolours, four examples of which can be seen below (Wycliffe, near Rokeby, Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle, Simmer Lake, near Askrig, and Weathercote Cave when half filled with water).
In 1817 the painter revisited the Continent, stopping off at the scene of the recent battle of Waterloo before touring the Rhineland and visiting Holland where he scrutinised the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Impressive paintings of Waterloo in the immediate aftermath of battle and of the river Maas at Dordrecht with shipping becalmed were exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year (both works are reproduced below); not for the first time Turner used a pair of pictures to contrast war and peace. The Dordrecht view was purchased by Walter Fawkes who installed it over the fireplace at Farnley Hall as the centrepiece of his collection. Fawkes also bought a complete set of fifty watercolours on grey-washed paper that Turner had made in the Rhineland. And in 1819 Fawkes put a considerable part of his large collection of Turner watercolours on public display in his London residence. For the catalogue he wrote an impressive dedication to Turner, stating that he was never able to look at the artist’s works “without intensely feeling the delight I have experienced, during the greater part of my life, from the exercise of your talent and the pleasure of your society”. The dedication must have gratified the painter enormously.
Turner finally visited Italy in 1819, although he had already developed a number of superb watercolours of Italian scenes from sketches made by others. He visited Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Sorrento and Paestum, before turning northwards and probably spending Christmas in Florence. His return journey took place in late January 1820, when he crossed the Mont Cenis pass, where his coach overturned during a snowstorm (wasting nothing, he later pictorialised the experience in a vivid watercolour now in Birmingham Art Gallery). He arrived back in London loaded down with some 2000 sketches and studies, and immediately started one of his largest paintings ever (reproduced here). This is a view from the loggia of the Vatican, showing the Renaissance painter Raphael in the foreground. It was displayed in the 1820 Royal Academy exhibition, obviously to commemorate the Italian master who had died exactly three hundred years earlier.
J. M. W. Turner, The Artist and his Admirers, c. 1827, watercolour on blue paper, 14 × 19 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U. K., TB CCXLIV 102.
J. M. W. Turner, Scene on the Loire (near the Coteaux de Mauves), c. 1828–1830, watercolour and gouache with pen on blue paper, 14 × 19 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, U. K. This work was made for engraved reproduction in “Turner’s Annual Tour – The Loire”, 1833.
Although Turner was increasingly busy making small watercolours for the engravers during the 1820s (such as the jewel-like drawing of Portsmouth discussed below), perhaps the most impressive watercolour achievements of the first half of the decade were the large and superbly wrought drawings made for the “Marine Views” scheme (of which two examples are reproduced below). No less impressive are the oil paintings The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sybil, shown at the Academy in 1823, and The Battle of Trafalgar created between 1822 and 1824 to hang in St James’s Palace. In The Bay of Baiae (reproduced here) Turner expressed his awareness of the relationship between beauty and mortality, for the picture shows the god Apollo bestowing as many years of life upon the Cumaean Sibyl as she can hold grains of sand in her hands. Yet because the poor lady will refuse to grant her favours to the god in exchange for perpetual youth, eventually she will waste away to nothing. The derelict buildings in the background hint at her forthcoming physical ruin, while the beauty of the surrounding landscape puts that decay into ironic perspective. It is not surprising that The Battle of Trafalgar (reproduced below) is impressive, for it was the largest picture Turner would ever paint and fully captures the enormous forces unleashed by war. The trouble the artist had with the work, and its sorry fate, are related in the detailed discussion of the painting that appears below.
In 1824 Turner embarked upon yet another ambitious set of watercolours destined for engraved reproduction. This was the “Picturesque Views in England and Wales” series, a group of drawings that has quite aptly been termed “the central document of his art”. Like the “Richmondshire” series, the “England and Wales” scheme was to have comprised 120 designs, but this time
