Turner's Golden Visions

by C. Lewis Hind

Turner's long will, with the complicated codicils which he added to it, fills eleven closely printed pages of an Appendix to Thornbury's Life. It is a confused and involved document, and the lawyers spent years and much money endeavouring to effect a compromise between the contesting parties. Ruskin succinctly summed up the litigation thus: 'The nation buried with three-fold honour, Turner's body in St. Paul's, his pictures at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery.'

If love governed the world, if we lived for one another, it would have been quite possible to carry out, at once, Turner's wishes, which are sufficiently plain, in spite of the muddle of the will. He desired that the nation should have his pictures, that they should be kept together in a room or rooms added to the National Gallery to be called 'Turner's Gallery,' to be built within a period of ten years; that his fortune should be devoted to founding a Charitable Institution for unfortunate artists; that provision should be made for Hannah Danby and Mrs. Booth; that the Royal Academy should be given funds to found a Turner Medal, and that the testator should have a fitting monument in St. Paul's and a fine funeral. Turner had revoked his legacies to his next of kin: they were to have nothing. As Monkhouse justly remarks, the will was not exactly an unselfish document. Apart from his generosity to unfortunate brothers of the brush, and his care, no more than his duty, for his mistress housekeepers, it was devised to perpetuate his own fame, and to disregard his relatives.

In 1856 the Vice-Chancellor made an order which took the place of the will. The nation obtained all the works of art by his own hand, and the Royal Academy a sum of twenty thousand pounds for the Turner Medal and Scholarship. The real estate went to the heir-at-law, and Hannah Danby and Mrs. Booth received their portions. The plates, engravings and copyrights, and the rest of the property, were divided among the next-of-kin.

In 1854 the removal of the pictures and drawings from Queen Anne Street to the National Gallery began; in 1856 a final delivery was made, and in 1858 the catalogue delivered by the assessors, Sir Charles Eastlake, the President of the Royal Academy, and Mr. Knight, the secretary, consisted of the following works:—

Finished pictures100
Unfinished pictures including
mere beginnings182
Drawings and sketches in
colour and in pencil including
about 300 coloured
drawings19,049
19,331

Of the oil-paintings thirty-four were almost immediately placed on exhibition. Additions were constantly made, until by May 1857, the exhibited works had reached the number of one hundred and five. That, in brief, is the early history of the exhibited portion of the Turner Bequest, as given in the preface to the Inventory. The whole history, including the exhibition of a number of the water-colours at Marlborough House and the Victoria and Albert Museum, would require a long chapter to tell in detail.

I must now turn to the 19,049 drawings and sketches with which the name of Ruskin is for ever associated. He has told the story in his inimitable way in the preface to the fifth volume of Modern Painters. In 1857 he received notice that permission had been obtained for him from the Trustees of the National Gallery to arrange, as he thought best, the Turner drawings belonging to the nation. 'On which,' says Ruskin, 'I returned to London immediately.'

'In seven tin boxes in the lower room of the National Gallery, I found upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another. Many on both sides; some with four, five or six subjects on each side (the pencil point digging spiritedly through from the foregrounds of the front into the tender pieces of sky on the back); some in chalk, which the touch of the finger would sweep away. (The best book of studies for his great shipwrecks contained about a quarter of a pound of chalk debris, black and white, broken off the crayons with which Turner had drawn furiously on both sides of the leaves; every leaf, with peculiar foresight, and consideration of the difficulties to be met by future mounters containing half of one subject on the front of it, and half of another on the back.) Others in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid coloured drawings among them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the edges, in capes and bays of fragile decay; others worm-eaten, some mouse-eaten, many torn half-way through; numbers doubled (quadrupled, I should say) up into four, being Turner's favourite mode of packing for travelling; nearly all rudely flattened out from the bundles in which Turner had finally rolled them up, and squeezed them into his drawers in Queen Anne Street. Dust of thirty years' accumulation, black, dense and sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed and crumpled edges of these flattened bundles, looking like a jagged black frame, and producing altogether unexpected effects in brilliant portions of skies, whence an accidental or experimental finger-mark of the first bundle-unfolder had swept it away.... With two assistants, I was at work all the autumn and winter of 1857, every day, all day long, and often far into the night.

'The manual labour would not have hurt me; but the excitement involved in seeing unfolded the whole career of Turner's mind during his life, joined with much sorrow at the state in which nearly all his most precious work had been left, and with great anxiety, and heavy sense of responsibility besides, were very trying; and I have never in my life felt so much exhausted as when I locked the last box, and gave the keys to Mr. Wornum in May 1858.'