TURNER’S RELATIONS WITH MR. H. FAWKES
N the death of Mr. Walter Fawkes Farnley Hall passed to his son, Mr. Francis Hawksworth Fawkes. He was a boy when Turner first became friendly with the family. He had romped, walked, shot with Turner, and had sat at his elbow while he was making many of the wonderful drawings in the Farnley Collection. No doubt young Hawksworth was one of the party in the carriage which Turner insisted upon driving tandem from the shooting tent on the Farnley moors, and which he managed to capsize “amid shouts of good-humoured laughter"—an exploit which earned the artist the nickname of “Over-Turner.” It was to young “Hawkey” that Turner called one day in 1810, when he stood on the terrace at Farnley watching the storm rolling and shafting out its lightning over the Wharfedale hills—the storm effect he was to paint in his picture of Hannibal Crossing the Alps. The same boy sat watching him for three hours as he sat one morning between breakfast and lunch-time making the beautiful drawing of A First-Rater taking in Stores, the artist all the time “working like a madman” and “tearing up the sea with the eagle-claw of a thumbnail.” It was young Hawksworth who induced his father to buy the large oil painting of Dort from the exhibition of 1818.
After Turner’s death, Mr. Hawksworth Fawkes furnished Thornbury with the following account of his connection with the great artist. “When Turner was so much here (at Farnley) in my father’s lifetime, I was but a boy, and not of an age to appreciate or interest myself in the workings of his mind or pencil. My recollection of him in those days refers to the fun, frolic, and shooting we enjoyed together, and which, whatever may be said by others of his temper and disposition, have proved to me that he was, in his hours of distraction from his professional labours, as kindly-minded a man and as capable of enjoyment and fun of all kinds as any that I ever knew.
“Though often invited, Turner never came here after my father’s death; and, as I have seldom gone to London, our meetings since I had learnt his value had been few and far between: but up to the last time that I saw him, about a year before his death, he was always the same to me that I had known him in my boyhood, always addressed me by my boy name, and seemed ever anxious to express in his kindness to me his attachment to my father, and still glowing recollections of his ‘auld lang syne’ here.”
Thornbury says that when Mr. Hawksworth Fawkes visited London “he would go and sit in the Queen Anne Street gallery for hours, but he was never shown into the painting-room. On one occasion he invited Turner to dinner at a London hotel, when he took, as was his wont latterly, a great deal too much wine. For once he became vain, and, staggering about, exclaimed, ‘Hawkey, I am the real lion—I am the great lion of the day, Hawkey.’”
After Mr. Walter Fawkes’s death one of those wonders of the North, a goose-pie and presents of game were sent to Turner from Farnley regularly at Christmas time. The twenty-fifth pie was already packed when the news reached Farnley of the painter’s death. The three last letters Turner wrote to Mr. Fawkes acknowledging these annual presents have been preserved and published. In the one written on the 24th December, 1849, Turner finishes by saying: “I am sorry to say my health is much on the wane. I cannot bear the same fatigue, or have the same bearing against it, I formerly had—but time and tide stop not—but I must stop writing for to-day, and so I again beg to thank you for the Christmas present.” In the letter dated 17th December, 1850, the aged artist wrote: “Old Time has made sad work with me since I saw you in town. I always dread it with horror now. I feel it acutely now, whatever (it is)—gout or nervousness—it has fallen into my pedestals, and bid adieu to the marrow-bone stage.” These words, and indeed all the letter, are written in Turner’s curiously involved and confused style, but it was evident that the great painter’s career was nearly run. He died on the 9th December of the following year, and was buried eleven days later in the crypt of St. Paul’s beside Sir Joshua Reynolds, with all the magnificence due to his genius.
THE FARNLEY HALL COLLECTION
T will be seen from the foregoing account of the personal relations between Mr. Walter Fawkes and Turner that the Farnley Hall Collection is mainly concerned with Turner’s work between the years 1804 and 1821. These works, therefore, belong to what Mr. Ruskin has described as Turner’s first period, when “he laboured as a student, imitating successively the works of the various masters who excelled in the qualities he desired to attain himself.” This classification of Mr. Ruskin’s is evidently made in the interests of Turner’s later work, the period Mr. Ruskin admired most. But the parti-pris and insufficiency of a classification which dismisses the period during which the paintings and drawings of the Farnley Hall Collection were produced as one of mere imitation of the old masters are sufficiently exposed by a glance at the illustrations with which the present publication is enriched. To speak of the creator of the The Passage of Mont Cenis, Scarborough, Otley from the Chevin, and The Valley of the Wharfe from Caley Park as a mere imitator seems to me quite absurd. My own view is that Turner’s period of imitation and apprenticeship had come to an end by the time he was thirty years of age (1805). By that time he was a complete master of every form of pictorial expression. The period between his thirtieth and forty-fifth years was the period of his freshest and happiest inspiration, as well as that of his soundest and most perfect workmanship. His oil paintings produced during these years are as solidly and carefully worked as those of the old Flemish and Dutch masters. They are built to defy the centuries. A picture like the so-called Pilot Boat (Shoeburyness Fisherman hailing a Whitstable Hoy)—painted more than a hundred years ago—is a model of perfect craftsmanship. It has no cracks, and Time has only mellowed the exquisite pearly harmonies of its colour and the indescribable charm of its wonderful surface. The Trout Stream, the Spithead, and Frosty Morning, have the same gift of immortality. It is only Turner’s later paintings which have cracked and faded and tarnished, and lost the “unthrifty loveliness” with which they were dowered when they were first exhibited.