CHAPTER XLV

1839: AGED SIXTY-FOUR

'THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE,' AND A SEA-PIECE ON A VISITING-CARD

A party of the Academy Club were journeying to Greenwich, on their annual visit, when the steamer passed a tug with an old battleship in tow.

'There's a fine subject for you, Turner,' said Clarkson Stanfield, And Turner, who could take a hint from anybody, looked, chuckled, ruminated, no doubt made a pencil sketch, and the result was 'The Fighting Téméraire.'

She was launched at Chatham Dockyard in 1798: she had been the second ship in Nelson's division at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Sold out of the service at Sheerness in 1838, she was now being towed to Rotherhithe to be broken up. Her career was ended, but Turner has made the memory of the old wooden warrior immortal. 'The Fighting Téméraire' is too well known to be described. Pages and pages have been written about the picture with scornful comments that the sun and the mast are in the wrong places, and I know not what else. The mast, of course, should not be abaft the funnel; this curious error, or perhaps intention on Turner's part so that nothing should interfere with that black note, was corrected by J. T. Willmore, in his engraving. The 'Téméraire' as popular. No abusive voice, says Ruskin, was ever raised against it. 'And the feeling was just, for of all pictures and subjects not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted.'

An admirer who tried to purchase the 'Téméraire,' had a long interview with Turner in Queen Anne Street, but the painter could not be induced to put a price upon the picture, although he offered to take a commission of the same size at two hundred guineas. There is the usual Varnishing Day story told about the 'Téméraire.' Geddes, who had a portrait hung above, realising that his picture was killed by the dazzle of Turner's sunset, prepared to introduce a showy carpet into the floor of his portrait. He had laid it in with a flat, bright tint of vermilion when Turner appeared. 'Oh, ho! Mr. Geddes,' he cried, and seizing his palette knife loaded on orange, scarlet and yellow. Returning the next day Turner found that the bright vermilion ground in Geddes's picture had been converted into a 'rich, quiet, sober-coloured Turkey carpet.'

Less popular, because it makes no appeal to pathos or sentiment, was another exhibit of this year, with another of the unwieldy titles, 'Ancient Rome, Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus, The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Cæsars restored,' with this quotation, obviously Turner's own composition:--

'The clear stream, Aye--the yellow Tiber glimmers to her beam, Even while the sun is setting.'

If only Agrippina, with the ashes of her husband and the bodies of her suite were absent, what a lovely vision this would be with the rosy bridge, the yellow fairy-like building, and the full moon riding in the evening sky. Yet why ask to have the figures taken away? They are Turner; it is all Turner, a glorious Turner, still in the hour of his splendour, and quite careless of the fact that it was at Brindisium, not Rome, that Agrippina landed. Northcote, who had a dark subject picture hanging above 'Ancient Rome,' said, 'You might as well have opened a window under my picture.' Turner was always opening a window to a poet's land, which, if it has no earthly habitation, exists, eternally, in that place where all beautiful things dwell--the imagination. The Sketch-Books of this period are as crowded with drawings as the court of Agrippina with figures. In the 'Venice' Book of 1839 against a water-colour entitled by Ruskin 'Venice: Sunset sketch with turned edge,' he has appended this note: 'Preserve this drawing exactly as it is, as evidence of the way he worked; the turned edge of the paper painted upon.'

The 'Venetian Fishing Boat' also shows the 'way he worked,' when working for his own pleasure, not for exhibition--green water, violet hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny sail--lovely.

On a packet which contained a number of drawings in a Sketch-Book, now labelled 'Miscellaneous,' Ruskin inscribed the following: 'Thirty-four pieces of paper, some double. Pencil Outline. Rubbish; only worth looking at for references. It contains many late scrawls of German scenery. Studies of Germany, etc.'

What may have seemed rubbish to Ruskin, pencil scrawls, etc., may have been of vital importance to Turner. How these Sketch-Books evoke the man and the moment. In one of them is 'A Study for a Sea-Piece,' scrawled on a visiting-card, above the name of Mr. J. M. W. Turner, 47 Queen Anne Street, Harley Street. The number of studies of the sea he made during his life certainly exceeded the number of visiting-cards he used.