He lingered thus for about a year; then the end came suddenly. On the 14th July 1903, Mrs. Pennell found him dressed and in his studio. “He seemed better, though his face was sunken, and in his eyes was that terrible vagueness. Now he talked, and a touch of gallantry was in his greeting, ‘I wish I felt as well as you look.’ He asked about Henley, the news of whose death had come a day or two before.... There was a return of vigour in his voice when Miss Birnie Philip brought him a cup of chicken broth, and he cried, ‘Take the damned thing away,’ and his old charm was in the apology that followed, but, he said, if he ate every half-hour or so, as the doctor wanted, how could he be expected to have an appetite for dinner? He dozed a little, but woke up quickly with a show of interest in everything.” But on the evening of the 17th, he suddenly collapsed, and was dead before the doctor could be fetched to him.
TURNER’S HOUSE. CHEYNE WALK.
Turner’s last days in this same Cheyne Walk were almost as sad, almost as piteous as Whistler’s, but there is a haze of mystery about them, as there is about some of his paintings, and he had no butterfly past of dandyism to contrast painfully with the squalor of his ending. Born over the barber’s shop kept by his father in Maiden Lane, Strand, he mounted to the seats of the immortals without acquiring by the way any taste for personal adornment, or for the elegancies or little prettinesses so beloved by little artists in his home surroundings. His soul was like a star, and could not make its heaven among the dainty chairs and tables and nice wall and mantelpiece ornaments of the drawing-room. On Stothard’s advice (Stothard being one of the customers at the shaving shop) Turner’s father made him an artist; he studied under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and later, Blake was one of his pupils. Growing in reputation, he lived by turns in Harley Street, at Hammersmith, at Twickenham, and is described in middle age as bluff and rough-mannered, and looking “the very moral of a master carpenter, with lobster-red face, twinkling staring grey eyes, white tie, blue coat with brass buttons, crab-shell turned-up boots, large fluffy hat, and enormous umbrella.” From about 1815 onwards, he had a house that is no longer standing at 47 Queen Anne Street, Harley Street, and here, in 1843, when Turner was sixty-eight, a Mr. Hammersley called on him and has described (I quote from Mr. Lewis Hind’s Turner’s Golden Visions) how he “heard the shambling, slippered footstep coming down the stairs, the cold, cheerless room, the gallery, even less tidy and more forlorn, all confusion, mouldiness, and wretched litter; most of the pictures covered with uncleanly sheets, and the man! his loose dress, his ragged hair, his indifferent quiet—all, indeed, that went to make his physique and some of his mind; but above all I saw, felt (and feel still) his penetrating grey eye.”
Somewhere between 1847 and 1848 Turner strangely disappeared from his customary haunts; his Queen Anne Street house was closed, the door kept locked, and his old housekeeper, Hannah Danby, could only assure anybody who came that he was not there, and that she simply did not know where he had gone. For the next four years or so, until he was dying, no one succeeded in discovering his hiding-place. Now and then, in the meantime, he would appear in a friend’s studio, or would be met with at one of the Galleries, but he offered no explanation of his curious behaviour, and allowed no one to obtain any clue to his whereabouts. He went in 1850 to a dinner given by David Roberts, and was in good spirits, and bubbling over with laborious jokes. “Turner afterwards, in Roberts’s absence, took the chair, and, at Stanfield’s request, proposed Roberts’s health, which he did, speaking hurriedly, but soon ran short of words and breath, and dropped down on his chair with a hearty laugh, starting up again and finishing with a ‘Hip, hip, hurrah!’... Turner was the last who left, and Roberts accompanied him along the street to hail a cab. When the cab drove up, he assisted Turner to his seat, shut the door, and asked where he should tell cabby to take him; but Turner was not to be caught, and, with a knowing wink, replied, ‘Tell him to drive to Oxford Street, and then I’ll direct him where to go.’”
The fact is he was living at Cremorne Cottage, 119 Cheyne Walk. He was living there anonymously; a Mrs. Booth, whom he had known many years before when he stayed at her Margate boarding-house, was keeping house for him, and he was known in the neighbourhood as Admiral Booth, a rumour having got about that he was a retired naval officer fallen on evil days. This was the time of which the father of the Greaves boys had spoken to Whistler—the days when Mrs. Booth used to come with Turner to the waterside and he would row them over to Battersea. Though all his greatest work was finished, Turner painted several pictures here; he frequently rose at daybreak, and, wrapped in a blanket or a dressing-gown, stood out on the roof, leaning over the railing to watch the sunrise and the play of light on the river opposite. He used the room on the second floor as his studio, and in that room, on the 19th December 1851, he died. Some months before his death, he was seen at the Royal Academy’s private view; then, tardily responding to a letter of friendly reproach that David Roberts had addressed to him at Queen Anne Street, he came to Roberts’s studio in Fitzroy Square. He was “broken and ailing,” and had been touched by Roberts’s appeal, but as for disclosing his residence—“You must not ask me,” he said; “but whenever I come to town I will always come to see you.” When Roberts tried to cheer him, he laid his hand on his heart and murmured, “No, no! There is something here that is all wrong.”
His illness increasing on him, he wrote to Margate for Dr. Price, an old acquaintance of his and Mrs. Booth’s, and Price, coming up, examined him and told him there was no hope of his recovery. “Go downstairs,” he urged the doctor, “take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” But a second examination only confirmed Dr. Price in his opinion.
It must have been at this juncture that Turner’s hiding-place was discovered. His Queen Anne Street housekeeper, Hannah Danby, found a letter left in the pocket of one of his old coats, and this gave the Chelsea address. She went with another woman and made inquiries round about Cheyne Walk till it was clear enough to her that the Mr. Booth to whom that letter was directed was none other than Turner, and acting on her information Mr. Harpur, Turner’s executor, journeyed at once to Chelsea, and arrived at 119 Cheyne Walk to find Turner sinking fast. Towards sunset, on that wintry day of his dying, he asked Mrs. Booth to wheel him to the window, and so gazing out on the wonder of the darkening sky he passed quietly away with his head on her shoulder.