The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner

Franny Moyle

Viking, £25

Review by Brian Morton

IT ISN’T as famous a put-down as John Ruskin’s furious dismissal of Whistler as a man capable of flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face and asking 200 guineas for the privilege, but it will do. And being from the pen of Mark Twain, it doesn’t miss and hit the wall. In A Tramp Abroad, he expresses his anger at first seeing Turner’s The Slave Ship. Twain reacts to the manifest impossibility of iron cable-chains afloat on the sea, and a sea turned to lurid mud, on which fish and monsters crawl. For once, he cedes the killer remark to an unknown (and possibly imaginary) Boston newspaper man, who is supposed to have likened Turner’s masterpiece, correctly known as Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, to a tortoiseshell cat having a fit on a platter of tomatoes. The point, though, and the reason for fobbing off the put-down is that this was Twain’s thought before he received an education in art through the writing of John Ruskin, who was Turner’s most devoted admirer. It’s a deft change-of-mind.

It happens often in art history that an artist becomes fixedly identified with just one period in his output: Goya’s black paintings, Pollock’s drips, Rembrandt’s mirrored selves, and in this case the late and nearly abstract sea- and industrial land-scapes of his final decade. These range from the much-reproduced The Fighting Temeraire, through his extraordinary threnody to his Scottish rival Sir David Wilkie, Peace: Burial at Sea, to Rain, Steam and Speed, to the washed-over oddity of Sunrise With Sea Monsters. Taken in isolation, this is an unrepresentative caricature of Turner’s career output, which consisted of more than 550 oil canvases and thousands of “drawings”, as watercolours were known. The problem is that the repro industry has been abetted by the screen in portraying Turner as a one-off eccentric whose imagination and personality bordered on the pathological.

Some of us are still struggling with Leo McKern’s scenery-chewing 1974 version of Turner in the Thames TV production The Sun is God, even if we were a little mollified by Tim Spall’s gentler version in Mr Turner. The outcome is the same. We don’t see Turner in the round, and we don’t see him as a man of his times. That is Franny Moyle’s challenge here. She begins in what looks like scandalising mode by telling the full story of how Turner, England’s greatest painter, came to die not at home with his faithful retainer, but in a small house in Chelsea with another lady and in the person of “Admiral Booth”. The story was covered up, but was well enough known in the art world.

Moyle then goes back to his modest beginnings, and his apprenticeship to art in a London where pictures were becoming a public, rather than aristocratic, property. The coming of the French Revolution when Turner was 24 brought lots of aristocratic collections over from France, when art became portable cash, but the scene was opening up at home as well, with British patrons like the redoubtable Dr Monro, and institutions like the Royal Academy, offering encouragement and the company of fellow-artists. There seems to have been no question that Turner, from a modest but well-connected background – his father may not have been high-born, but he dressed gentlemen’s hair and heard their gossip – was going to be anything other than a painter.

His native talent was immense, and his application intense. Turner did not chew scenery, in his younger days at least. Instead he drank it in, in every detail. He also studied the work of his contemporaries and his great predecessors with forensic precision. Moyle is excellent at establishing these stylistic contexts: the influence of Van De Welde’s seascapes, the introduction of a narrative strain, often borrowed from English poetry, into the titles of paintings, the discovery first of Richard Wilson, Britain’s answer to Claude, and then of Claude himself, when some of those great works made their illegal way to these shores. He took it all in, and gave it all out. Turner’s technical mastery was such that the painting was invariably greater than the scene it depicted and yet partook of natural phenomena that defied capture in paint. It was unclear for many years how he managed to convey light in such dimensional detail, until it was discovered that he often painted on the reverse of a watercolour, working the pigment through the pores to the recto side, a virtuosic technique that remains mysterious even when it has been explained.

Moyle has written previously on the pre-Raphaelites and on Mrs Oscar Wilde and so might seem to be drawn to the more tabloidy end of things, but her art-historical perceptions are what make this detailed and beautifully balanced biography so compelling a read. Turner emerges from it larger, but no longer larger-than-life in the banal sense. He is revealed as a man of his moment, and very aware of how his moment is evolving, both in art and politics and in the wider culture. It’s rare that one finishes a modern biography feeling that the subject has been enhanced and not merely dissected. McKern and Spall can step aside. The real Turner is onstage.