CHAPTER LVI

VICISSITUDES OF THE TURNER BEQUEST

'In the name of God, Amen. I, Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A., of Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, in the County of Middlesex, Esquire, do make and publish and declare this to be, and contain my last Will and Testament....

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 pictures 100 Unfinished pictures including mere beginnings 182 Drawings and sketches in colour and in pencil including about 300 coloured drawings 19,049 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.'

It would take too long to continue the narrative of Ruskin's labours: the four hundred cabinets designed by him to contain the drawings; his privately printed catalogue; the official catalogue; his division, interesting but bewildering, of the Exhibited water-colours into groups; his notes upon them, delightful to the dilettante, but of little service to the student.

The Unexhibited drawings were arranged by Ruskin in three hundred and eight parcels, and classified by him according to his theory of their artistic value.

71 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'R,' meaning, right in intention.

124 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'M,' meaning, middling value.

108 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'O,' meaning, entire rubbish.

5 were marked as unexamined.

Never was man less suited to the task of cataloguing, which should be absolutely methodical and entirely unfanciful, than John Ruskin. In a letter to the Keeper (Mr. R. N. Wornum), enclosing his catalogue, Mr. Ruskin referred to the lettering on the parcels as horrible, and added, 'I never meant it to be permanent.'

For long it seemed as if the neglect of the tin boxes, containing the parcels of unexhibited drawings, would be permanent. Mildew formed on them, 'the contents of the tin boxes were in a dirty state, with broken pieces of old sealing-wax, tattered fragments of string, dusty brown paper, etc., etc.' In 1862 Ruskin, with the assistance of Mr. George Allen, effected a kind of spring cleaning. 'I've got the mildew off,' he wrote, 'as well as I could, and henceforth I've done with the whole business; and have told them they must take it off themselves next time or leave it on--if they like.' When Mr. E. T. Cook, who, in his book on the _Turner Drawings_, did so much to arouse public interest in the 'buried Turners,' saw the tin boxes in 1904, the 'mildew was on.' But the period of neglect of the unexhibited portion of the Turner Bequest was nearly at an end.

In 1905 Mr. A. J. Finberg was invited by the Trustees of the National Gallery to classify the '19,049 pieces of paper' chronologically, to re-arrange the Sketch-Books in order, and to compile a chronological and descriptive _Inventory_ of all the unexhibited Turner sketches. Later it was decided to include the whole collection of exhibited drawings and sketches. The work occupied Mr. Finberg's entire time for four years, and the result was made public in 1909, when a _Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest_ was published as described in Chapter IV. The exhibited water-colours, as well as all the sketches, are included in the _Inventory._ Perhaps for the sake of accuracy, it would have been better if Ruskin had never touched the seven tin boxes. In following the communings of Turner with nature, he disintegrated many of the Sketch-Books (over 150 were dismembered), removed a leaf here and there, omitted to number them, gave the sketches Ruskinian titles, and made the task of re-arranging them in chronological or topographical order almost impossible. Mr. Finberg allows himself the following gentle and amusing reproof of his great predecessor: 'The question of dates had little or no interest for Mr. Ruskin; on such questions he is, as M. Cherfils grimly remarks, "_plus que sobre._"'

In 1878, when a selection of nearly three hundred drawings and sketches were exhibited on the ground floor of the eastern wing of the National Gallery, the Turner water-colour rooms became a place of pilgrimage; still more so when additional rooms were added, and the sepia drawings for the _Liber_ were displayed. The collection was changed quarterly, and for years many made a point of visiting those little rooms each time that the change was made. Who did not love the 'delight drawings'? who did not wonder anew each visit at their beauty? Students copied and re-copied them, desiring nothing better in life than to sit there, through long days, trying to follow the Master's vision.

So the years passed. Turner was a classic; his environment was fixed. It seemed as if no alteration would ever be made in the crowded gallery where his oil pictures hung, overflowing into the adjoining room, or in the series of little rooms on the ground floor which we visited at each re-hanging, greeting the water-colours at each encounter like the faces, loved and lost awhile, of old friends. It was enough to know when we missed them, that they would return again, and that the 'buried Turners,' the Sketch-Books with their thousands of pages, each containing something of the Master's work, were being cared for. Turner was firmly settled in his niche in the Temple of Fame. It seemed that nothing more could ever happen to him.

Then suddenly, in the month of May 1906, something did happen: something that made the art sensation of the year.

That event was the exhibition of the 'unfinished' oils by Turner at the Tate Gallery.