Sadly the enterprise was terminated in 1838, due to the failure of the prints to sell and other factors that rendered their publication uneconomical. In 1829 Turner exhibited a fairly large group of “England and Wales” watercolours in London, and he did so again in what must have been a dazzling show in 1833, when sixty-seven drawings went on display. In the “England and Wales” designs almost all aspects of British scenery and life are depicted, while Turner’s unrivalled mastery of the medium of watercolour is everywhere apparent. And throughout the 1820s and ‘30s the painter was frantically busy producing marvellous watercolours for a host of other engraving projects as well. These included topographical surveys of the ports, rivers and east coast of England; explorations of the rivers of France (part of a scheme to survey the rivers of Europe that never got further than forays along the Seine and the Loire); and illustrations for books of the collected poetry of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Samuel Rogers and Thomas Campbell. Moreover, Turner also found the time to produce illustrations for Scott’s collected prose works, and to depict the landscapes of the Bible. Although he had never visited the Holy Land, he elaborated these works from sketches made by travellers who had. Well might he have complained, as he had done in the mid-1820s, that there was “no holiday ever for me”.
As we have seen, early on in his career Turner had of necessity evolved a production-line method for making his watercolours. Naturally, such a procedure proved of enormous benefit when creating large numbers of watercolours for engraving. Two accounts of the artist’s watercolour technique have come down to us from the same witness:
There were four drawing boards, each of which had a handle screwed to the back. Turner, after sketching the subject in a fluent manner, grasped the handle and plunged the whole drawing into a pail of water by his side. Then quickly he washed in the principal hues that he required, flowing tint into tint, until this stage of the work was complete. Leaving this drawing to dry, he took a second board and repeated the operation. By the time the fourth drawing was laid in, the first would be ready for the finishing touches.
…[Turner] stretched the paper on boards and after plunging them into water, he dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout the work. His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out highlights and dragged, hatched and stippled until the design was finished. This swiftness, grounded on the scale practice in early life, enabled Turner to preserve the purity and luminosity of his work, and to paint at a prodigiously rapid rate.
Judging by the results of such speedy and creatively economical working processes, the intense pressures put upon Turner by the engravers seems to have stimulated his inventive powers rather than hindered them.
In August 1828 Turner again travelled to Italy. He stayed principally in Rome where he both painted and exhibited those productions. The show attracted over 1000 visitors, most of whom were utterly mystified by what they saw. On his journey home in January 1829 his coach was again overturned by snow (as it had been some nine years earlier), this time on Mont de Tarare near Lyons in France. Again permitting no wastage, the artist recorded the experience in a watercolour exhibited in the 1829 Academy Exhibition (reproduced here). This time he put himself in the picture, wearing a top hat sitting in the foreground.
Another work that Turner displayed at the Academy in 1829 was Ulysses deriding Polyphemus (reproduced below). In connection with this oil, The Times commented that: “No other artist living… can exercise anything like the magic power which Turner wields with such ease.” John Ruskin later called Ulysses “the central picture in Turner’s career”. In colouristic terms at least, one can see why he did so, for by now the artist was achieving a beauty of colouring that was entirely commensurate with the “Ideal Beauties” of form he had earlier mastered. This ideal colour derived from the fundamentals of painterly colour itself, for it was based upon the primaries of yellow, red and blue, with all kinds of wonderfully subtle modulations between them.
Naturally, Turner was always profoundly interested in colour theory, and that involvement was greatly stimulated by his investigation of the science of optics undertaken in connection with the perspective lectures. In 1818 he had introduced the subject of colour into those talks that were ostensibly about spatial and pictorial organisation. A subtle change took place in Turner’s colour around that time. Thereafter a greater reliance upon the primaries and a more intense luminosity became apparent in his work. And Turner’s sense of the vivacity of colour was enormously stimulated by his visit to Italy in 1819, which seems natural, given that the colour sensibilities of most northern European artists are transformed by their contact with Italian light and colour. Certainly a change in Turner’s colour was recognised by 1823, when an encyclopaedia published in Edinburgh stated that Turner’s “genius seems to tremble on the verge of some new discovery in colour”. By the end of the 1820s, when Ulysses deriding Polyphemus appeared, such a “discovery” had been thoroughly consolidated, and Turner began habitually creating ranges of colour that have never been matched by any other painter, let alone surpassed.
J. M. W. Turner, Messieurs les voyageurs on their return from Italy (par le diligence) in a snow drift on Mount Tarrar – 22nd of January, 1829, RA 1829, watercolour, 54.5 × 74.7 cm, The British Museum, London, U. K. Turner is the seated man wearing a top hat to the right of centre.
John Constable, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (Whitehall Stairs, 18th June, 1817), 1832. Oil on canvas, 130.8 × 218 cm. Tate Gallery, London, U. K.
In October 1825 Walter Fawkes died. Turner subsequently refused ever to visit Farnley Hall again; it held too many memories for him. Clearly he was shattered by Fawkes’ death, and he had good reason to be, for he was only six years younger than the Yorkshireman. Early in 1827 Turner wrote to a friend:
Alas! my good Auld lang sine is gone… and I must follow; indeed, I feel as you say, near a million times the brink of eternity, with me daddy only steps in between as it were…
In September 1829 that brink moved appreciably closer when William Turner died, leaving the painter utterly bereft; as a friend remarked: “Turner never appeared the same man after his father’s death; his family was broken up.” The two men had always been especially close, doubtless because of the illness of Mary Turner. William Turner had served for many years as his son’s factotum, stretching his canvases and varnishing them when completed, which led Turner to joke that his father both started and finished his pictures for him. That the artist did feel nearer “the brink of eternity” after his father’s death is made clear by the fact that he drew up the first draft of his will less than ten days after the paternal demise.
The deaths of Fawkes and Turner’s father were joined by other sad losses around this time, most notably those of Henry Fuseli in 1825 and of Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA early in 1830. Turner portrayed Lawrence’s funeral in an impressive watercolour he exhibited at the Royal Academy later that year. This would be the last drawing he would ever display there, for works on paper were generally hung in inferior viewing conditions at the Academy and by this time Turner could show his watercolours more advantageously elsewhere (as he had done in 1829 and would again do in 1833). And because the artist refused ever to visit Farnley again, after 1826 he took to regularly staying at another “home from home” owned by one of his patrons, namely Petworth House in Sussex. This was the country seat of George Wyndham, the third Earl of Egremont, who was a collector of enormous taste and vigour. He had bought his first painting from Turner early in the century, and by the time of his death in 1837 he owned nineteen of his oils. At Petworth Turner was free to come and go at his leisure, although the age difference between the artist and his patron – the earl was seventy-five when the fifty-one-year-old painter began regularly revisiting the house in 1826 – meant that Turner could never be as close to the aristocrat as he had been to Walter Fawkes. After the earl died in 1837, Turner would shun Petworth, just as he had earlier shunned
