but humankind is small, vain and of exceedingly limited strength within that surround. For Turner we are not the “lords of creation”. Far from it. Instead, we are merely insignificant specks of matter in an often hostile and always indifferent universe. We may try to overcome the forces of external nature, but such attempts are both a cosmic and a comic self-delusion. To underline this “fallacy of hope” Turner constantly made us look as imperfect, gauche, crude, child-like or even doll-like as possible, just as Teniers and other painters influenced by that Flemish artist (including de Loutherbourg) had represented us. In this respect he was consciously turning his back on a dominant aspect of the academic idealism propounded by Reynolds, namely the formation of beautified human archetypes. But if Turner had filled his works with heroic, Michelangelesque figures, those people would have severely diminished what he had to say about our lowly place in the universal scheme of things. Instead, by creating an anti-heroic and “low” model for humanity, Turner not only maximised the contrast between humanity and the natural world beyond us but simultaneously he stated something that is even more intensely truthful and universal about humankind than Reynolds had demanded. Turner lived in an age in which the majority of people were often made ugly by the harshness of survival, and endured tragically short, brutalised, uneducated and anonymous lives. He represented such people countless times, and his consciously imperfect figures are totally congruent with the extremely imperfect lives they led. This is the ultimate form of Turnerian Decorum: a complete matching of human appearances to our underlying realities.
In addition to ideal “imitation” – the creation of perfected notions of form, which by definition included the expression of the “qualities and causes” of things – Reynolds had also advocated artistic “imitation”, the absorption of the qualities of the finest masters of past art through imitation of their works stylistically. Here too Turner followed Reynolds assiduously. Throughout his life he emulated the pictorial formulations of a vast range of past (and present) masters, from Titian (1490?-1576), Raphael (1483–1520) and Salvator Rosa in the Italian school, to Claude, Nicolas Poussin and Watteau (1684–1721) in the French school, to Rembrandt (1606–1669), Cuyp (1620–1691), van de Velde, the younger (1633–1707) and Backhuizen (1631–1708) in the Dutch school, to any number of his contemporaries in the English school. Such emulation was not the sign of any imaginative deficiency in Turner, and even less was it due to him being possessed of a supposed inferiority complex that led to rivalry with his betters, as has often been suggested. Turner was merely following Reynolds’ teachings and example. It is a mark of his creative vision that whomsoever he emulated, the results always ended up looking thoroughly Turnerian (even if they might well fall short of their models qualitatively).
In 1791 Turner made the first of his sketching tours; by the end of his career he would have undertaken more than fifty such tours. During the 1790s alone he ranged over the south of England, the Midlands and the north of England (including the Lake District). He also made five tours of Wales in search of the kind of scenery that Richard Wilson had painted. On each tour he filled a number of sketchbooks with dry topographical studies and the occasional watercolour, from which he would work up elaborate paintings and watercolours back in London.
A young woman’s memoir of Turner on his sketching tour of Wales and the West Country in 1798 makes his creative priorities very clear:
I recollect Turner as a plain uninteresting youth both in manners and appearance, he was very careless and slovenly in his dress, not particular what was the colour of his coat or clothes, and was anything but a nice looking young man… He would talk of nothing but his drawings, and of the places to which he should go for sketching. He seemed an uneducated youth, desirous of nothing but improvement in his art…
This view of Turner seems to have been a general one, for it was echoed by the topographical artist Edward Dayes in 1805: “The man must be loved for his works; for his person is not striking nor his conversation brilliant.” Although Turner’s intellect was enormous, his patchy education and wholehearted commitment to his art meant that he cut a poor figure socially, although in time he would polish his edges and gain in public confidence. Emotionally he was remarkably sensitive, for just below the surface lay a deep vulnerability which probably derived from unhappy childhood experiences brought about by the instability of his mother. Such insecurity led Turner always to maintain his emotional defences until he felt he could fully trust people not to hurt him. When he did trust them, however – and he always trusted children – then a completely different side of his personality would emerge. This can be seen in another memoir of the painter as a young man, by his friend Clara Wells:
Of all the light-hearted, merry creatures I ever knew, Turner was the most so; and the laughter and fun that abounded when he was an inmate in our cottage was inconceivable, particularly with the juvenile members of the family. I remember coming in one day after a walk, and when the servant opened the door the uproar was so great that I asked the servant what was the matter. “Oh, only the young ladies (my young sisters) playing with the young gentleman (Turner), Ma’am.” When I went into the sitting room, he was seated on the ground, and the children were winding his ridiculously long cravat round his neck; he said, “See here, Clara, what these children are about!”
Turner’s “home from home” in the cottage of Clara Wells’ father, William Wells, at Knockholt in Kent, was the first of several such boltholes he would enjoy throughout his life. By the end of the 1790s, as the insanity of his mother intensified, it must have seemed a vital means of escape for him. As soon as he could afford it, the painter moved from Covent Garden, in late 1799 obtaining rooms at 64 Harley Street in a house that eventually he would take over completely.
The 1796 Fishermen at Sea was Turner’s first exhibited oil painting, and it demonstrates his natural proficiency in the medium. By that date, of course, he had already mastered watercolour, and henceforth he was fully capable of investing it with the same powers of expression and representation more usually to be encountered in oil paint. Similarly, in his oil paintings the artist increasingly obtained the kind of brilliance and luminosity that are more usually to be found in watercolour. But why choose one medium rather than the other? Well, watercolour was fast to work with, and hence permitted great spontaneity. Its speed of drying also allowed for the creation of large numbers of works within a given timescale, and hence lower prices to the public. Oil paint was slower-drying but more highly regarded culturally and more publicly assertive through its capacity for deployment over much larger surfaces than watercolour. One could also charge far higher prices for oils (which was partially a necessity, as they took much longer to produce).
J. M. W. Turner, The Wreck of a Transport Ship, c. 1810, oil on canvas, 172.7 × 241.2 cm, Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal. With this picture Turner exhausted his need to express himself by means of ferocious shipwreck scenes, for with one exception he did not paint such a subject for another twelve years.
J. M. W. Turner, Frontispiece of “Liber Studiorum”, 1812, mezzotint engraving, Tate Britain, London, U. K.
Turner never rested on his laurels as far as techniques were concerned. In order to extend himself, he would often set himself technical challenges. For example, in the 1820s and “30s he would choose to make sets of watercolours on an unfamiliar kind of support such as a blue or a grey paper. In some of his even later works his trust in new materials (such as a paint supposedly soluble in either oil or water) would be misplaced, with disastrous results for individual works. Yet in the main his paintings and watercolours are technically sound. When he was especially inspired, as with The Fighting “Temeraire” of 1839, he would go to great lengths to paint the work as carefully as possible.
In 1798 an alteration to the rules governing the Royal Academy annual exhibitions allowed artists to include quotations from poetry alongside the titles of their works in the exhibition catalogues. Turner immediately availed himself of this change in order to embark upon a public examination of the roles of painting and poetry, how each
