Turner - Softcover

Hamilton, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812967917 ISBN 13: 9780812967913

Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

J.M.W. Turner was a painter whose treatment of light put him squarely in the pantheon of the world’s preeminent artists, but his character was a tangle of fascinating contradictions. While he could be coarse and rude, manipulative, ill-mannered, and inarticulate, he was also generous, questioning, and humane, and he displayed through his work a hitherto unrecognized optimism about the course of human progress. With two illegitimate daughters and several mistresses whom Turner made a career of not including in his public life, the painter was also known for his entrepreneurial cunning, demanding and receiving the highest prices for his work.

Over the course of sixty years, Turner traveled thousands of miles to seek out the landscapes of England and Europe. He was drawn overwhelmingly to coasts, to the electrifying rub of the land with the sea, and he regularly observed their union from the cliff, the beach, the pier, or from a small boat. Fueled by his prodigious talent, Turner revealed to himself and others the personality of the British and European landscapes and the moods of the surrounding seas. He kept no diary, but his many sketchbooks are intensely autobiographical, giving clues to his techniques, his itineraries, his income and expenditures, and his struggle to master the theories of perspective.

In Turner, James Hamilton takes advantage of new material discovered since the 1975 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, paying particular attention to the diary of sketches with which Turner narrated his life. Hamilton’s textured portrait is fully complemented by a sixteen-page illustrations insert, including many color reproductions of Turner’s most famous landscape paintings. Seamlessly blending vibrant biography with astute art criticism, Hamilton writes with energy, style, and erudition to address the contradictions of this great artist.

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James Hamilton is an art historian and biographer. Formerly a Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, he is now the university curator and honorary reader in the history of art at the University of Birmingham in England. He organized and wrote the catalogue of the exhibition "Turner and the Scientists" at the Tate, and his biography of J. M. W. Turner was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Award.

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One

maiden lane and brentford

1775-1790

William Turner, the baby's father, had rural, distant roots. He had come, no more than ten years earlier, from the deep west of England, from the small country town of South Molton, at the foot of Exmoor, in Devon. His own father, John Turner, had been a wigmaker and barber in South Molton, and one of sufficient status to be entrusted with the care and teaching of boy apprentices by the church wardens and the justices of the peace of the parish. When John Turner died, in 1762, he left tidy provision for his wife and seven children. Two sons at least, John and William, were grown up by this time. The eldest son, John the younger, was bequeathed all of his father's working tools; his best suit, hat, and wig; and a guinea, with the expectation that he would follow in his father's footsteps. In the event it appears that John Turner the younger became a saddler and, later, a wool comber and poorhouse guardian. William, who was born in 1745, received only "my white coat" and a guinea payable when he became twenty-one. The five other children-Eleanor, Price, Mary, Joshua, and Jonathan-were also bequeathed a guinea each, payment to be delayed until their twenty-first birthdays. South Molton was suffering a serious population decline in the late 1760s and early 1770s, through the gradual weakening of the market for the heavy cloths, such as serges and felts, that were a specialty of the town. This may have been the spur that prompted William to take his white coat with the guinea in its pocket and make for London. He settled just off Covent Garden and, following his father's example, set up in business as a barber and wigmaker.

Mary Marshall, J.M.W. Turner's mother, came from a family of London butchers. They can be traced as far back as her maternal great-great-grandfather, John Mallard, a skinner from St. Botolph-extra-Bishopsgate. His son Joseph Mallard (died 1688) lived at St. Leonard's, Eastcheap, on the edge of the highway down which the cattle from Essex and beyond were driven for slaughter and sale at Smithfield. Joseph Mallard's son, Mary's grandfather, another Joseph Mallard (died 1741), gained his freedom from apprenticeship in 1697 and was described when he died as a "Citizen and Butcher." At the same time, according to the spelling in his will, he and his family had become Mallord, and this form generally, though not consistently, applied from then on. Joseph Mallord moved with his family north and west out of the City to the clearer air of the salubrious parish of St. Mary's, Islington, and diversified his wealth and invested in property. At his death he owned four houses in Wapping and four acres of marshland at Barkingside, north of Redbridge. His only surviving child, Sarah, who married William Marshall, an Islington salesman, stood to inherit all this and to pass it on in turn to her four children: Joseph Mallord William, Sarah, Mary (born 1738 or 1739), and Ann.

When William Turner and Mary Marshall met, around 1770, William-slim, healthy, chatty, and eager, with an engaging Devon brogue-was in his mid-twenties. Mary has been described as a housekeeper, a sufficiently vague, meaningless, but polite term for a single woman in her thirties. Both were well over the normal age for a first marriage in the late eighteenth century, and for Mary the end of her marriageable and childbearing years was approaching. Her elder sister, Sarah, had already married, and her elder brother had moved away from Islington to follow his grandfather's trade of butcher in the prosperous community of New Brentford.

William and Mary, as proudly named an English coupling as any might be, married at St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, on August 29, 1773. In applying at Lambeth Palace for a license to marry without banns, William swore that he was a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor, Mary a thirty-four-year-old spinster, and he had lived for the "four weeks last past" in the parish of St. Paul, Covent Garden. Although this was a marriage between property-owning citizens and members of the deracinated working trades, it was a marriage of free choice and optimism. William the barber had landed Mary the solid London citizen's granddaughter; Mary, the older woman with little hope of inheriting any share of her grandfather's estates and with rapidly receding chances of marriage, had found William the plucky, hardworking young man from a far county.

According to the only surviving physical description of him, written after William Turner's death,

he was . . . spare and muscular, with a head below the average standard, small blue eyes, parrot nose, projecting chin, and a fresh complexion indicative of health, which he apparently enjoyed to the full. He was a chatty old fellow and talked fast; and his words acquired a peculiar transatlantic twang from his nasal enunciation. His cheerfulness was greater than that of his son, and a smile was always on his countenance.

If we can rely on the fact that William Turner was a cheerful, smiling gossip, he would have been the right stuff for the barber's trade, which has always required cheerfulness, flattery, and the ability to engage customers' interest for as long as it takes to cut their hair.

Knowledge of the character and appearance of Turner's mother is even thinner and heavily embellished by hearsay. Turner's first biographer, Walter Thornbury, built his picture of Mary Turner around the sometime existence of an unfinished portrait of her by her son, "one of his first attempts." Thornbury writes:

The portrait was not wanting in force or decision of touch, but the drawing was defective. There was a strong likeness to Turner about the nose and eyes; her eyes being represented as blue, of a lighter hue than her son's; her nose aquiline, and the nether lip having a slight fall. Her hair was well frizzed . . . and it was surmounted by a cap with large flappers. Her posture therein was erect, and her aspect masculine, not to say fierce.

This portrait has not been traced-and Thornbury had not seen it-so we can only take his uncorroborated account at face value. To his description of this fierce, masculine, erect figure, Thornbury adds that Mary Turner had been "a person of ungovernable temper." This was a trait that, in part, her son inherited.

William took Mary to live in rooms at the southwest end of Maiden Lane, number 21, where he had been a tenant since Lady Day, March 25. The house was part of a line of dwellings built on the edge of the site of Bedford House, demolished in 1707. Maiden Lane is about halfway between the Strand and Covent Garden Piazza and runs parallel to both. Unlike their wide, light-filled expanses, it was then narrow, noisy, and dark. Running east-west, it was pretty much in shadow, and quite apart from the rubbish its inhabitants threw out, it collected muck from the market when it rained and backwash from the rudimentary sewers. Its name derived from the fact that it was the place where prostitutes lingered.

The Turners' rooms were rented from the auctioneer Joseph Mooring, who had used the building for sales and exhibitions. In 1765 and 1766, Mooring had let them to the Free Society of Artists, and from 1769 the Incorporated Society of Artists had used it as a school of painting, drawing, and modeling. In the basement was William Wootten's Cider Cellar, a drinking place described in 1750 as a "midnight concert room, to which you descended by ladder to the concert-room, which, in another house, would have been the kitchen, or the cellar; and the fittings of the place were rude and rough."

This rowdy house in Maiden Lane was, nevertheless, a sensible place for a barber and wigmaker to be. One hundred yards to the north, around London's flower and vegetable market, was a community of shops,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812967917
• ISBN 13: 9780812967913
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 496
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar