Varnishing Days

...He was extremely secretive...

...The situation was not improved by Turner's habit of not allowing his oil paintings to dry, painting over wet pigment, and by his use of different types of color (or alien substances like spit and snuff) with the result that his painting would start to crack and flake off...

...Short and compact, with a beaked nose, bright eyes, bandy legs, and huge feet, he looked like a pilot or coachman...

...Turner's own favorite among his works was Dido Building Carthage, one of his golden visions...

...It is told that, during the Academy's formal dinner, Turner was sitting next to an art-loving bishop, who started rhapsodizing on Homer's felicities, going on and on...

...About one of Turner's Venice paintings Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic...

...And that was about the early paintings, before Turner really got going...

...Or they could be light pastoral idylls, like those of Claude Lorrain, his own favorite painter...

...William Hazlitt called his paintings "tinted steam" and "pictures of nothing, and very like...

...but he treated them abominably...

...Ruskin singled out Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying— Typhoon Coming On as the one picture on which Turner's immortality would rest...

...For Turner, they became show-off occasions where he challenged both the dead masters and his contemporary colleagues...

...the novelist Edmond de Goncourt later wrote, "To me it seems like a painting by a Rembrandt who was born in India...

...But his accompanying illustrations made up for such deficiencies...

...Varnishing Days" lasted five days and were instituted to allow the artists to make final adjustments to their paintings...

...His portrait of Jessica from The Merchant of Venice "looks like a lady getting out of a large mustard pot," according to one critic, and was hence known simply as The Mustard Pot...

...He would recall a storm he had seen two years previously in Yorkshire, transfer it to the Alps, and have Hannibal get caught up in it, as seen in Hannibal Crossing the Alps...

...When told that the thing was starting to peel off, his only comment was "I forgot this entirely, and do not think I should have remembered, but for you...

...Which, come to think about it, was very rude of Ulysses...

...The next day Turner came back and transformed his red spot into a water buoy...

...Paul's took this seriously enough to comment, at Turner's death, that he "would not read the service over him, if he is wrapped in that picture...

...The painting had to be sold, however, because of the grim-ness of the topic...

...In another case, Turner had cut out a paper sketch of a figure from his exercise book and just pasted it on...

...As a professor of perspective, he was hard to follow, muttering away, not altogether coherently, in his cockney accent...

...No other living artist comes close to the magical powers that Mr...

...One of his specialties was topographical paintings of country houses, which allowed him to travel all over England and made him a wealthy man...

...According to Mrs...

...Not only did he challenge his col-leagues—in his attempt to capture what Ackroyd calls "the vaporous sub-lime"—but Turner was also willing to challenge the elements, whether this meant traveling for days on horseback in Yorkshire in wild weather, hanging out the window of a speeding train, or being tossed in rough seas...

...Ruskin's father bought the painting for his son, as a reward for writing Modern Painters, and Ruskin hung it in his dining room...

...As the Academy librarian noted, though he couldn't hear him, "there is much to see at Turner's lectures...

...His famous claim that he had ordered the sailors to lash him to the mast of a steamboat off Harwich, where he stayed for four hours in a howling storm, is probably invented...

...He never married, but had a penchant for widows, first a Mrs...

...When a customer, not understanding why Turner wouldn't sell the painting despite being offered a fortune, asked him what he wanted to do with it, Turner replied, "Be buried in it, to be sure...

...His great advocate was the young John Ruskin who, in Modern Painters, hailed him as "a prophet of God sent to reveal to man the mysteries of His universe...

...As for the critical reaction, Turner was hailed as Britain's leading landscape painter, but when he became more experimental, the critics were quick to pounce...

...Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus from his fast-escaping galley, while the blinded giant is roaring in agony on top of his rock island...

...The red spot sucked up all the attention in the room...

...Turner entered, took one look at Constable's work, got his palette, "and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word...

...He has been here, and fired a gun," Constable commented...

...Like most artists, Ackroyd notes, Turner was no intellectual, but he was very well read in the self-educated fashion...

...His paintings could be pessimistic and deeply misanthropic, with the shipwreck as a favorite symbol...

...Turner was an arch romantic with the required penchant for the sublime in nature, for catastrophe, for man's fight against the elements...

...Others condemned his use of yellow: He was compared to a cook who adds curry to everything, and to a hepatitis sufferer...

...In one instance, a customer complained that part of the sky in his new oil painting had been painted with watercolor and was coming off in his handkerchief...

...There were holes in the ceiling and mildew on the walls...

...The painting is a golden vision, a tour de force of light effects with just a touch of operatic vulgarity in all its splendor...

...His long titles—one of them contains 51 words of contorted, self-made poetry—were one of his ways of lending literary weight to landscape painting, then considered a lesser genre...

...If Turner felt threatened by another painting, he would ratchet up the odds, as in a celebrated instance in 1832 where John Constable was putting the finishing touches on his The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, which was hanging next to a Turner marine...

...The Dean of St...

...Danby and then Sofia Caroline Booth, a landlady in Margate, with whom he lived for the last five years of his life in a Chelsea cottage, where he pretended to be a pensioned naval officer and was known locally as Admiral Booth...

...Upon which Turner, with a sly smile, interrupted the learned man and told him that his painting was not based on Homer at all, but on the popular music hall lines: "I sing of the cave of Polypheme / Ulysses made him cry out / For he ate his lamb, drank his wine / And then he poked his eye out...

...But his feel for weather was extraordinary...

...Turner reveals with such ease," wrote the Times enthusiastically...

...They were kept in his gallery in Queen Anne Street, which in the beginning was very elegant, but which he let decay by being stingy with heat...

...Not surprisingly, Turner is considered a conservationist's nightmare...

...Six tailless cats from the Isle of Man didn't help, either...

...Turner loved his paintings, and refused to sell many of them...

...Booth, "With the exception of the first year, he never contributed one shilling" to the household...

...Turner was also a cockney character...

...Having started out as a watercolorist and painter of theatrical scenery, he emerges here as both a groundbreaking artist, who does new and unknown things, and a shrewd businessman who knows what his cos-turners want—and delivers...

...The greatest 19th-century British painter, Turner is a biographer's dream and an obvious choice in Peter Ack-royd's admirable Brief Lives series...

...His tightfistedness has been often remarked on...

...His behavior on the Academy's varnishing days is legendary...

...He freely mixed genres, history painting with landscape painting, and ranged from classically inspired landscapes to paintings of the Industrial Revolution to apocalyptic dreamscapes, which explains why, at various times, he has been called the first impressionist, the first symbolist, and the first abstract painter...

...He had a spyhole in the wall, so he could make sure that people did not make notes when visiting...

...It was found among his paintings in Queen Anne Street, covered in mildew and rot...