picture at the Royal Academy, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (reproduced below). The subject had intrigued the painter ever since the late 1790s when he had copied a representation of Hannibal looking down into Italy by J. R. Cozens, a work that is unfortunately now lost. Yet the immediate inspiration for a painting on that subject only came to Turner late in the summer of 1810 when he was staying at Farnley Hall. One day he was witnessed by Fawkes' son, Hawksworth Fawkes, standing at the doorway of the house and looking out over Wharfedale; as the latter recalled, Turner shouted:
“Hawkey! Hawkey! Come here! come here! Look at this thunder-storm. Isn’t it grand? – Isn’t it wonderful? – Isn’t it sublime?” All this time he was making notes of its form and colour on the back of a letter. I proposed some better drawing-block, but he said it did very well. He was absorbed – he was entranced. There was the storm rolling and sweeping and shafting out its lightning over the Yorkshire hills. Presently the storm passed, and he finished. “There! Hawkey,” said he. “In two years you will see this again, and call it ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’.”
This story vividly indicates not only the force of Turner’s inner eye but also his precise aesthetic leanings, for his immediate placing of a sublime natural effect at the service of an epic historical subject is profoundly poetical – clearly the vastness of nature was not an end in itself for Turner, but merely a starting point. And the artist’s adherence to the Theory of Poetic Painting is further proven by the method he employed to develop Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, for he synthesised the image exactly in the manner that Reynolds had recommended, in this case by marrying the Yorkshire storm to a Swiss alpine vista seen in 1802.
Turner equally made a helpful verbal debut with Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps. Although the painter had been appending lines of verse to the titles of his pictures in the exhibition catalogues since 1798, and some of them were probably of his own devising, in 1812 and for the very first time he added lines that were openly by himself. These verses were drawn from a “manuscript poem” entitled “Fallacies of Hope” that only ever seems to have existed as short extracts in many of the Exhibition catalogues published between 1812 and 1850, the last year Turner exhibited at the Academy. Yet the title of this supposedly epic poem, and often the verses themselves, indicate the artist’s general view that all hopes of successfully defying the forces of external nature, of overcoming the inherent weaknesses and contradictions of human nature, and of religious redemption, are fallacious. In the particular case of Hannibal the verse reminds us of the central irony of the Carthaginian general’s life, that for all his immensely successful effort to cross the Alps into Italy, eventually he would entirely nullify his achievement by allowing his own strength and that of his countrymen to become weakened by a life of idleness and luxury at Capua. As a result, the Carthaginians would fritter away their chances of ever defeating the Romans.
Clearly this irony was directed at Turner’s empire-building countrymen, warning of the perils that awaited them if they similarly put their own selfish interests above those of the state. At a time when Britain was still at war with Napoleon, this was a highly relevant message. The idea that the citizens of a given nation should eschew self-interest, vanity and luxury in pursuit of the common good was frequently encountered in eighteenth-century Augustan poetry, from whence Turner undoubtedly derived it. He was to repeat that old-fashioned message repeatedly after 1812 in many increasingly innovative images. These not only represent Carthage but also further great empires such as Greece, Rome and Venice, whose downfall because of individual self-interest might similarly serve as warnings to England. Such political moralism externalised Turner’s belief, stated in a letter of 1811, that it is the duty of a poet – and therefore by implication a poetic painter as well – to act as a moral seer.
The 1812 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps received some very favourable comments. For example, the American painter Washington Allston called it a “wonderfully fine thing”, declaring that Turner was “the greatest painter since the days of Claude”. Yet Turner’s art was not always received so rapturously. Throughout the 1800s it had been severely criticised by the influential connoisseur, collector and artist Sir George Beaumont, who professed to be alarmed both by the liberties Turner took with appearances, and by the increasingly bright tonalities he employed. Probably Beaumont was secretly jealous of Turner’s great artistic success, having once himself been called the “head of the landscape [school]”, a mantle that Turner had easily assumed during the 1790s and 1800s. Because of his distaste for Turner’s pictures, Beaumont did his utmost to discourage other collectors from buying them. Turner was understandably infuriated by this, although by the early 1810s he already enjoyed a loyal following that was prepared to pay high prices for his works.
In the 1813 Royal Academy Exhibition Turner displayed an unusually fine rural scene, Frosty Morning (Tate Britain), which for once gives us not a grand statement but a small slice of everyday life (unfortunately the painting has now lost the glazes used to convey the hoariness of the frost). Also on show was a picture first exhibited in Turner’s own gallery in 1805, a dramatic riposte to Poussin’s Deluge. In 1814 the artist exhibited two works, one of which, Apullia in search of Appullus (Tate Britain), contained a veiled attack on Sir George Beaumont. And in 1815 Turner displayed two of his greatest paintings to date, Crossing the Brook and Dido building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, both of which are discussed below. Turner called Dido building Carthage his “chef d’oeuvre”, and when he came to draw up the first version of his will in 1829 he requested that the canvas should be used as his winding-sheet upon his death. He even asked one of his executors, Francis Chantrey, as to whether that condition of the will would be carried out. To his eternal credit Chantrey replied that the stipulation would be respected but immediately added that “as soon as you are buried I will see you taken up and [the canvas] unrolled”. Turner saw the funny side of the situation and thereupon amended his will to bequeath the painting to the National Gallery to hang alongside the very seaport view by Claude that had moved him to tears when it was in the Angerstein collection.
It is not surprising that Turner particularly esteemed Dido building Carthage. He had long wanted to paint a seaport scene worthy of comparison with Claude, and with the painting he succeeded (just as in Crossing the Brook he painted his most successful Claudian landscape to date). Yet Dido also probably summarised everything he was trying so hard and so opaquely to articulate in the perspective lectures. With its mastery of perspective, its superb exploration of light, shade and reflections, its moral contrast between life and death (as represented respectively by the teeming city and solemn tomb), and its total congruence of time of day, meaning and pictorial structure, it is certainly far more eloquent than any of Turner’s tortuous verbal discourses.
J. M. W. Turner, The Bay of Baiae: Apollo and the Sibyl, RA 1823, oil on canvas, 145.5 × 239 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U. K. The painting was exhibited with the inscription “Waft me to sunny Baiae’s shore”. Turner’s friend, the painter George Jones, knowing the actual landscape to be far more prosaic than depicted here, wrote the words “SPLENDIDE MENDAX” (“Splendid lies”) on the frame. Turner was delighted and said “all poets are liars”, a statement that makes clear his equation of painting and poetry. He left the inscription on the frame for many years.
William Radclyffe, after J. M. W. Turner, Deal, Kent, 1826, line engraving on copper made for the “Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast” series, The British Museum, London, U. K.
Two years later Turner exhibited the companion to Dido building Carthage, namely The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (reproduced below). In the intervening 1816 Royal Academy show he displayed two complementary pictures of a Greek temple. In one of them (Duke of Northumberland collection) he portrayed the building as it appeared in a ruined state under contemporary Turkish domination, while in the other (reproduced here) he depicted it as it had probably looked in ancient times. The ruined building is appropriately
