Light and Mystery

The genius of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), greatest of English painters, is one of those Himalayas of art whose height seems to increase with distance. Students of Romantic painting have found Turner's shadow longer than that of his French contemporaries (Gericault, Delacroix), longer than that of the Impressionists, whom he anticipated, and somewhere above such abstractionists as Redon, Kandinsky and Klee. John Ruskin spent most of his days interpreting Turner's art. But Turner's life has remained muddied by the fictions of his first biographer, a prolific hack named George Walter Thornbury.

Published this week was a new, scrupulous biography* with Thornbury sieved out by 35 years of patient research (ended last March by Biographer Finberg's death) in contemporary records and in the previously unstudied "Turner wastepaper basket," eleven boxes of notes and sketchbooks preserved in the National Gallery. The figure that emerges is a businesslike professional with a shrewd grey eye and the weather-beaten taciturnity of a shipmaster, a lover of open sea, open sky and the money that enabled him to be independent and solitary. In reproving Thornbury's tales of early love affairs and a later mistress, Biographer Finberg was possibly over prim. But his facts are faultlessly chronicled.

"Light and mystery in combination was one critic's description of Turner's painting at the height of his career. To arrive at that combination this barbers son put himself with peasant caution and intelligence through years of discipline in the Royal Academy School, under teachers of perspective and architectural drawing, on constant sketching trips through half the terrains and atmospheres of Europe, as an illustrator for, among other things, the poems of Scott and Byron. When a building in Oxford Street burned down, he was up early to sketch the smoking ruins; when Nelson's flagship, the Victory, returned from the Battle of Trafalgar, he went down to Sheerness to go aboard and make sketches.

Turner's sea pieces were the wonder of such stay-at-home fellow Academicians as Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence, who began by comparing them with Claude Lorrain and ended by finding them incomparable. His Snowstorm, for which he prepared by having himself lashed to a mast for four hours during a Channel blizzard, was too much for almost everybody. One of the finest, in his own estimation, was The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838. This sunset picture of a black, belching little tug beside the spectral jewel of the old ship-of-the-line made Thackeray lyrical was never sold in Turner's lifetime.

The fortune which Turner thriftily amassed amounted to nearly $700,000 by the end of his life. With it, he wanted to provide for two things: a gallery in which all his work might be kept and exhibited together; a fund for "the Maintenance and Support of Poor and Decayed Male Artists." Both were messed up by distant but covetous relatives after his death. In his last years Turner lived in increasing loneliness and dilapidation in his big Queen Anne Street house among his beloved pictures or in a little house on the Thames at Chelsea, where he and his housekeeper were known as Captain and Mrs. Booth. Young Ruskin's adoration made him grumpy, but he was jollier with fellow artists. When a doctor informed him he was going to die he told the doctor to have a glass of sherry and look at him again. Scribbled feebly at the end of the old man's last sketchbook is the draft of a letter to someone who wanted to borrow The Fighting Temeraire for engraving: "No considerations of money or favour can induce me to lend my Darling again. . . ."

* THE LIFE OF J. M. W. TURNER, R. A.--A. J. Finberg--Oxford ($10).

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