Gradually, the boy who grew up in the seventies, and who knew golden 'Orvieto' by heart, began to form a mental picture of the man Turner, gathered from the pictures and caricatures of him, and the innumerable stories, some untrue, many exaggerated, that have collected about the hairdresser's son who became the world's greatest landscape painter.
His friend and patron, Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, made a caricature of Turner which shows him as a little man, 'in an ill-cut brown tail coat, striped waistcoat and enormous frilled shirt, the feet and hands notably small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost level with his waist.' Yes, Turner was an odd man, odd in looks, rough in manner. When he had passed middle age the world meant very little to him. He cared for nobody: he was hardly interested in Ruskin's magical extravagance of eulogy. 'My own admiration,' said Ruskin, 'was wild enthusiasm, but it gave him no ray of pleasure. He loved me, but cared nothing for what I said.' About the time that Ruskin was lecturing the world for not admiring Turner, and lashing himself into ecstasy over his idol, the idol was seen on board the old Margate steamer, studying sky and water, and eating his lunch of shrimps out of a huge red handkerchief laid across his knees.
Turner lived outside the world—in his dreamland. When the buoyancy of youth had passed; when 'dad' was dead, he grew more morose, more untidy and more exclusive, but his dream did not change. No! it became more mystical, more subtle, more unrealisable to his ageing eyes. Was he not in dreamland on that Varnishing Day of the Royal Academy of 1846 when George Parrott made a humorous sketch of him. There were four varnishing days in those halcyon times, and it was Turner's habit to send in his pictures merely laid in with white and grey, and to finish them on the walls. We see him in Parrott's Varnishing Day sketch at the age of seventy-one, a short, thick-set, clumsy figure, with ruffled silk hat upon his head and gingham propped against a chair—painting on a large picture, engrossed, oblivious of everything happening around. 'I am told,' says Scarlett Davies, 'it was good fun to see the great man whacking away with about fifty stupid apes standing round him, peeping into his colour-box and examining all his brushes and colours.'
Plate IV. Yacht Racing in the Solent, No. 2 (1827) Tate Gallery
He was in dreamland while the 'stupid apes' watched him.
Did they hope to discover the dreamer's secret? Ah, gentlemen, you did not find the secret in the colour-box. And the dumb poet could never have told in words how he produced his pictures, although when he sold one he was wont to say, 'I've lost one of my children.'
The dumb poet!