The second birth of JMW Turner

Summary

JMW Turner baffled his contemporaries. At the beginning of his career he was a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted tyro who joined the Royal Academy Schools at 14, and at 15 became the youngest painter ever to have a picture accepted for the RA Summer Exhibition. But at the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible. All those wafty emanations of light, colour and atmospherics had no precedent and no explanation. John Ruskin thought his late work displayed “distinctive characters in the execution, indicative of mental disease”. A fellow painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, thought that “Turner’s pictures always look as if painted by a man who was born without hands” who had “contrived to tie a brush to the hook at the end of his wooden stump.” One critic was inspired by Turner’s ochre depictions of the ruins of Rome to brush off his Latin: the paintings, he said, were “cacatum non est pictum” – crapped not painted. The man himself was equally mystifying. For the last five years of his life he had been living with a woman named Sophia Booth, a twice-widowed guesthouse landlady 20 years his junior. Although he had a grand albeit dusty residence-cum-gallery in Marylebone, the pair lived as man and wife – though they never married – in a house by the river (“a squalid lodging, in a squalid part of what at best is squalid Chelsea”, according to a newspaper report) and was taken for a retired seaman known as Admiral Booth: the local children called him “Puggy”. Just as his neighbours had no idea that the squat old man dressed in black was in fact the most famous painter in England, nor did they have any idea of his means. Not only had he accrued great wealth but as well as the big house in Queen Anne Street there was also land in Dagenham and a pub, The Ship and Bladebone, in Wapping, which he would visit anonymously at weekends. At 20, he was investing money from the sale of his watercolours in Bank of England stocks and his finances were to remain a topi...