The man with the umbrella, 1775

Also known as Avalanche Jenkinson, Puggy Booth and Old Pogey

Only about three weeks ago, my wife and I settled down to watch Mike Leigh’s movie Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall as the early 19th-century British artist J.M.W. Turner. (In my head this came out only a couple of years ago, but it turns out it was 11…) What I hadn’t realised was that a big anniversary was coming up – this week marks the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth (like Shakespeare, another artistic genius who came into the world on 23rd April).

Spall portrays him as taciturn, grumpy and with a complicated love life, all of which turn out to be spot on. Here’s what Turner’s first proper biographer, Walter Thornbury, said in his Life of J. M. W. Turner, published ten years after the artist’s death in 1851, giving a great snapshot of both his appearance and his psychology:

Stumpy, slovenly, lame, often not over-clean in dress, awkward and unconciliatory in habits, and suspicious of pseudofriends, greedy relations, selfish legacy hunters and concealed enemies, he had not the manner of one who either could or cared to win the favour of the general world; but by those who really knew and understood him he was beloved. In the circle of his friends he was ever cheerful and social, delighting in fun, and a most welcome companion at all times. How could one expect courtly demeanour from Turner? He was scantily educated; his early life was spent in bitter struggles for bare subsistence; and his middle life was passed in drawing for engravers, and in struggling for fame with the black ghosts of the old masters that then filled the galleries of English noblemen; while his latter days, uncheered by the companionship of a wife, were consumed in the pursuit of various ideals. Now his acquired habits of parsimony had grown inveterate, and he could not unfreeze himself into hospitality. Let us not forget that no man ever endured more that was qualified to petrify the heart than Turner.

As for that early life: Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 in Covent Garden, London. His father William was a barber and wig-maker from humble roots in Devon; his mother Mary Marshall came from a family of tradespeople near London. Those ‘bitter struggles for bare subsistence’ were made harder by the loss of J.M.W.’s only sister when he was still under ten himself and Mary’s struggles with mental illness – she was to die in Bethlem Hospital (‘Bedlam’) in 1804.

As a child, Joseph (known in the family as William) was often farmed out to Marshall relatives west of London and in Margate, Kent – a town he would forever be connected with. Turner showed very early artistic prowess – a child genius, really – and from his proud father selling his early drawings in the barber shop window, he progressed rapidly: at the age of 14 he became the youngest ever student at the Royal Academy of Art.

Turner painted and sketched constantly, especially on tours around Britain and all across Europe. His father remained his closest friend, living with him for three decades until his death in 1829 – a major, depressive blow to Turner that is explored in Mike Leigh’s film. It also explores his messy love life, particularly relationships with his housekeeper Sarah Danby and, later, the widow Sophia Booth. Turner never married, although he is believed to have had two daughters, and in the last few years of his life he lived in Chelsea as ‘Admiral Booth’ (or ‘Puggy Booth’ as the local boys called him).

(Turner seems to have attracted nicknames. Among some of his friends he was known as Avalanche Jenkinson, which he adopted himself in letters. It was bestowed on him by his artist friend Harriet Carrick Moore. And friends at Cowley Hall in Middlesex called him ‘Old Pogey', though possibly not to his face.)

Turner died in Chelsea of cholera in 1851 at the age of 76, leaving behind him an astonishing collection of more than 500 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours and… 30,000 sketches. Although his background was humble, he amassed a fortune from sales of his work, but he was also determined that his output should be saved for the nation. Today the Turner Bequest forms an essential part of the collections of Tate Britain and the National Gallery, and he is also commemorated through the famous Turner Prize and the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate.

Of course, here at Histories I like to find first-hand accounts to let figures from the past speak for themselves. With Turner, it’s tricky: his taciturnity in life is reflected in the relatively small amount of written material he left behind. There is a collection of letters, many only published in 1980, but they are mostly brief and functional, offering only fleeting glimpses of the man.¹

When Walter Thornbury – who does not seem to have met Turner himself – began work on his biography, he turned of course to many of the artist’s friends.² One of them, the art critic and polymath John Ruskin, one of Turner’s most ardent supporters, responded with this rather brilliantly succinct summary of the man:

Fix at the beginning the following main characteristics of Turner in your mind, as the keys to the secret of all he said and did:

Uprightness.
Generosity.
Tenderness of heart (extreme).
Sensuality.
Obstinacy. (extreme).
Irritability.
Infidelity.

And be sure that he knew his own power, and felt himself utterly alone in the world from its not being understood. Don’t try to mask the dark side.

An interesting, honest set of keywords to describe a real person! And below, I have ferreted out some brief anecdotes about Turner to exemplify these characteristics…

Turner on Varnishing Day by William Parrott, 1846

Uprightness

Ruskin said of Turner, “He never broke a promise or failed in an undertaken trust.” He was scrupulous in his business dealings, known to have refused large sums of money for his works so they could be saved for the nation.

Generosity

When an aspiring artist named Bird sent a picture to the Royal Academy (RA), the Hanging Committee said it was good work but there was no space to hang it. According to Thornbury’s sources, Turner, who was on the committee, “growled out his displeasure”. “We must find a good place for this young man’s picture,” he said. His colleagues maintained this was “impossible” – so Turner took one of his own works off the wall and put Bird’s up instead.

Here’s another story, this time told by Ruskin – and there are many others:

At the death of a poor drawing-master, Mr. Wells, whom Turner had long known, he was deeply affected, and lent money to the widow until a large sum had accumulated. She was both honest and grateful, and after a long period was happy enough to be able to return to her benefactor the whole sum she had received from him. She waited on him with it; but Turner kept his hands in his pocket. “Keep it,” he said, “and send your children to school and to church.” He said this in bitterness; he had himself been sent to neither.

Tenderness of heart

One of Turner’s few close friends was fellow artist George Jones. On one occasion he injured his leg, and Turner fussed around him with “kind anxiety”. Thornbury writes:

He was untiringly assiduous in obtaining everything that could tend to recovery, and he took the greatest pains to enlist every member of the household who might be useful, and that with an unselfish, hearty effectiveness that was as zealous as it was warm-hearted.

He was an animal lover, too: as a child he acquired the nickname ‘Old Blackbirdy’ because he refused to let other boys steal birds’ nests from the hedges. At the height of his success, he had a house in Queen Anne Street, central London, “full of tailless Manx cats”. And Jones recounted Turner’s concerns when enjoying his hobby of angling:

Every fish he caught he showed to me, and appealed to me to decide whether the size justified him to keep it for the table or to return it to the river; his hesitation was often almost touching, and he always gave the prisoner at the bar the benefit of the doubt.

Sensuality

As well as his complicated personal relationships, Turner produced many drawings of nudes which seem to have troubled his High Victorian fanboy Ruskin. In fact, Ruskin claimed that he had conspired with the keeper of the National Gallery, Ralph Wornum, to burn many of them after Turner’s death. In 1858, he wrote to Wornum:

I am satisfied that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner’s reputation, (they having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity) and for your own peace. And I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction; and I hereby declare that the parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December, 1858.

However, perhaps Ruskin kept them aside for private enjoyment… in 2004 Turner expert Ian Warrell conducted a meticulous study which pretty much proved that no such fire took place.

Obstinacy

Turner’s obstinacy was legendary. His friend the sculptor Francis Chantrey was often rebuffed when he tried to buy Turner’s paintings. In the case of ‘The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire’, painted in 1817, Turner told him it was £500… then when offered that, doubled it to £1000… then £2000.

“Why, what in the world, Turner, are you going to do with the picture?” asked Chantrey.

“Be buried in it, to be sure,” Turner replied. (He wasn’t: it hangs in Tate Britain.)

Turner also squabbled regularly with people. Thornbury tracked down a series of letters between Turner and a publisher/engraver called William Bernard Cooke, for example, where things got heated over payments relating to a series of topographical engravings of England’s south coast made from Turner’s work. Here’s just a small bit of a long letter Cooke wrote which doesn’t put Turner in the best light:

On Saturday last, to my utter astonishment, you declared in my print-rooms, before three persons who distinctly heard it, as follows:—“I will have my terms! or I will oppose the work by doing another ‘Coast!’” These were the words you used; and everyone must allow them to be a threat.

Irritability

Another friend, a Mr Rose from Jersey, reported this little tale from the 1840s:

On one occasion I had the audacity to ask him if he painted his clouds from Nature… The words had hardly passed my lips when I saw my gaucherie. I was afraid I had roused a thunder-storm; however, my lucky star predominated, for, after having eyed me for a few moments with a slight frown, he growled out, “How would you have me paint them?” Then seizing upon his fishing-rod, and turning upon his heel, he marched indignantly out of the house to the water’s-edge.

Infidelity

In Mr Turner, there’s a scene which is clearly based on a little anecdote in Thornbury’s book:

There was one… who mourned and wondered at Turner’s absence from Queen Anne Street… and that was poor Mrs. Danby—the guardian of his murky house, the servant who had for so many long years of rain and sunshine been faithful to his interests. She was deeply troubled by Turner’s mysterious disappearance; she was sure he was ill, but yet knew not how to find him amid the labyrinths of London. At last, one day, as she was brushing an old coat of his, in turning out a pocket she found and pounced upon a letter addressed to him by a friend who lived at Chelsea. There, then, she felt sure he must be; and it was her duty to sally forth and discover him.

And Chelsea of course was where he could be found with Mrs Booth.

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I’ll give the last word to Mr Rose, who describes a scene which makes me think of Peter Sellers’ Chance the gardener at the end of Being There…³

I fancy I can see him trudging down the avenue something after the manner of Paul Pry,⁴ by which I mean that an umbrella invariably accompanied him. Rain or sunshine, storm or calm, there was that old faded article tucked under his arm. Now, the umbrella answered a double purpose, for by some contrivance the stick could be separated from the other parts; this then formed a fishing-rod, being hollow, with several joints running one into the other. I have seen him sitting patiently for hours by the side of a piece of water belonging to the property… when fortune favoured him in securing any of the finny tribe… he appeared as much pleased as a boy from school.

1. Also, Oxford University Press have hidden them behind a ludicrously expensive paywall.

2. Thornbury was a journalist and some later writers have sneered at the anecdotes in his book – but he does seem to have been pretty thorough and, well, doesn’t every biography rely upon slightly imperfect memories?

3. And look at the picture above – his umbrella! Many other accounts of him mention it as his constant companion.

4. A character in an 1825 play who left an umbrella behind in places as an excuse to sneak back and eavesdrop.