4

PAINTER: ‘PAINTING IS A STRANGE BUSINESS’

The mid-nineteenth-century art world ebbed and flowed with deep and loving friendships, legal and social conflict, high worldly success, miserable failure, riches and poverty. Turner found commercial and artistic success when he was barely old enough to shave; Haydon had ‘a genius for failure’; Landseer, an angel with the paintbrush, was an unstable paranoiac with a drug dependency. This chapter looks at painters, against a complex backcloth of the lives of unpredictable individuals: their instances of failure; their manifest opportunities for hope and generosity; and the shudder of the juggernaut success and its effect upon them.

The architect and draughtsman Joseph Gandy ARA was a firecracker whose temperament upset the public face of the Academy. He painted visionary architectural fantasies, creating on large sheets of paper alarming and congested urban landscapes that devour the acres, all planning nightmares that could never be adequately contained in brick and stone. A few of them did escape into reality, and one survives intact: Doric House, on Sion Hill in Bath. Constable believed that Gandy had been ‘hunted down . . . most cruelly and unfairly’ in his attempt to find due recognition for his visionary architectural conceits. He had worked for John Soane, a man of equally splenetic temperament, and it may be that they found themselves to be kindred souls in their furies. But Soane, as a successful architect, could harness chance and trouble to his own purposes, a talent that Gandy always failed to grasp: ‘I never have any idle moment . . . to spare from work to keep my family alive, or being destroyed in a sea of trouble’, he wrote. With his wife and ultimately nine children, Gandy moved from address to address in Soho in perpetual flight from the consequences of financial imprudence. Soane, not a naturally generous man, paid up when Gandy was in trouble: he gave Mrs Gandy £100 when her husband was carried off to the Fleet Prison for debt in 1816. ‘Mrs Gandy called to say her husband had surrendered and they were all starving’, Soane noted in his diary. After being imprisoned for debt a second time in 1830, the Royal Academy listened sympathetically to his plea for help by allowing him a pension due to his ‘total want of professional employment’. Constable was one of the few who supported Gandy when he applied to become an Academician:

Another melancholy letter of poor Gandy’s was read [to RA Council]. It was very strangely worded – much like a person in distraction. He mentioned his having dreadfull symptoms of a discharge of blood from his mouth – sometimes in quantities and always a constant spitting of it – this will I fear dispense you & me of fulfilling our proper attention . . . [Westmacott] said he was a ‘bad-mannered’ man – & was rude to any gentleman or nobleman, who found fault with his designs – & ‘that he would not alter his drawings’ &c. This has much enhanced Gandy with me!!

Benjamin Robert Haydon, however, was a uniquely difficult artist. Peppery, vain, debt-ridden, self-destructive and casting himself perennially in the role of victim, he nevertheless combined a flair for figure drawing with a particular talent for creating complex and arresting compositions in his historical narrative paintings. Coming to maturity as an artist just as the fashion for historical painting, the ‘Grand Manner’, was on the wane, he failed, or perhaps refused, to recognize that to make a decent living in the 1820s and 1830s he might have been better off choosing landscape or domestic subjects, genre or portraits. But no: he wanted to draw younger artists into the web of history painting, even as its purpose and audience was ebbing away. John Singleton Copley’s Death of the Earl of Chatham (1779–81), a painting of contemporary secular history raised to the condition and scale of a Baroque altarpiece, had been exhibited and engraved in the 1780s, and sold by lottery with acclaim for 2,000 guineas in 1806; thirty years later Haydon found it difficult even to give his history paintings away. The fact that his paintings were not so accomplished as Copley’s would not have registered with Haydon.

Haydon’s rigour as an artist, while destructive in the long run, was what attracted the engraver John Landseer to him in 1814 as a tutor for his sons, one of whom was one day to be the distinguished artist Edwin Landseer. Some years earlier Haydon had taught Charles Eastlake, an artist destined for the worldly and artistic success that Haydon craved. Eastlake, as a knight of the realm, president of the Royal Academy and director of the National Gallery, would become the sort of stuffed shirt that Haydon instinctively both wooed and loathed. ‘Eastlake and his Brother spent the evening’, Haydon wrote in his diary in 1809:

Young Eastlake has determined on being a painter, which he should never [have] thought of, he says, had he not seen my Picture [Dentatus]. I hope he may be eminent. If before I die I can but see the Art generally improved and all in the right road, I shall die happy.

Haydon characteristically saw himself as the centre of interest: the words most used in his diary must be ‘I’ or ‘my’. He was determined to found a dynasty, to be art’s Abraham: ‘My great object is to form a School’, he proclaimed,

deeply impregnated with my principles of Art, deeply grounded in all the means, to put the clue into the hands of a certain number of young men of genius that they may go on by themselves . . . so that we may raise old England’s head to honour & glory & greatness in Art.

Haydon’s charges for teaching were modest: he drew up an agreement with the parents of one pupil to give him three years’ tuition for 200 guineas. He never gave up his determination to keep alive the subject of the Grand Manner of painting into the next generation. To an audience at the London Mechanics’ Institute he proclaimed in January 1836:

If there be any noble-minded boy who hears me, who is resolved to devote himself to keep alive the historical feeling . . . from utter decay; let me tell him his bed will not be a bed of roses, and his habitation as often a prison as a palace; but if he be of the true blood . . . neither calumny nor want, difficulty nor danger, will ever turn him aside from the great object of his being.

Landscape painting Haydon scorned. During an interview in 1835 with the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to discuss a commission to decorate the chamber of the House of Lords with paintings depicting Good and Bad Government, Melbourne teased him:

‘Suppose we employ Callcott?’
‘Callcott! My God, a Landscape Painter! Come, my Lord, this is too bad’.

Haydon loved the grand gesture. Temporarily in funds in 1814 when he sold his Judgement of Solomon for 700 guineas, he was able to pay off his baker, tailor, coal merchant and wine merchant at a stroke. However, he also owed money to the radical poet Leigh Hunt, who happened, at this moment of Haydon’s good fortune, to be in Surrey County Gaol for debt. Leigh Hunt refused Haydon’s offer of money, but enquired after Judgement of Solomon. In a trice Haydon had the 140-square-foot painting rolled up and sent to the prison for two days ‘to relieve the tedium of confinement’. Then he had it sent to Cold Bath Fields Prison, where the radical orator John Hunt was being held, to cheer him up. He held open house at his studio from time to time, one visitor being Turner who, probably in 1823, made a pencil study of Haydon’s enormous Raising of Lazarus, with colour notes, indicating that it was done in front of the painting.

When he painted genre scenes, such as the topical Punch, or May Day (1829) or Waiting for the Times (1831), Haydon did so with verve and an oblique sense of drama and narrative pace. In Waiting for the Times bloodymindedness and impatience meet: one man is taking too long to read a Times report of the vote on the Reform Bill, and he knows it. We cannot see him, but we can tell a great deal about his attitude from the way he sets his legs. The other is waiting, his patience rapidly evaporating, his knuckles clenched over his umbrella handle. Nearly a quarter of the surface of the painting is taken up by a broadsheet newspaper, only very slightly crumpled, as if this were a mid-twentieth-century collage, while one of the two active protagonists is visible only from the knees down. A charming still life of port or sherry decanters stands on one table, another table is set for dinner, and through the window is a street view straight out of northern Renaissance art. But this is also Manet avant la lettre; a quiet Parisian Belle Époque restaurant translated to 1830s London. Manet, northern Renaissance, twentieth-century abstraction, and a scene that has a touch of Harold Pinter about it: with all these cross-currents to express, and painterly ideas well ahead of their time, it is no wonder that Haydon found the world to be confusing and dysfunctional.

To the world, however, it was Haydon who was dysfunctional. Cocky and overconfident when things were going well for him, and cast-down, miserable and vindictive when his troubles beset him, he could spin like a weather-vane. He would take issue with fellow artists not only in personal letters, but in letters to the editor of The Times for all to read. Here he is in May 1835:

Sir, Will you permit me to ask Sir Martin Shee [president of the Royal Academy] why he places all his figures on tip-toe? This is a question of perspective, can lead to no controversy, and can be settled by a mathematical demonstration in one minute, and will be very interesting to artists. I mean nothing offensive in the world.

And he could annoy his potential subjects by his persistence. Writing again and again to the Duke of Wellington for the loan of his blue frock coat, his trousers, his boots and spurs, sword and sash, glove and cocked hat as props for a painting of the hero of Waterloo surveying the battlefield at dusk, the duke responded with a profound hope that there would be ‘some cessation of note writing about Pictures’.

A redeeming feature in Haydon, which prevented him from strangling those he saw as his oppressors, was his firm religious faith and non-violent nature. ‘Let me not die in debt’ was one of his regular prayers, and he probably would not have done so had he not at last succeeded in killing himself in 1846. At that time winds of change were already beginning to blow in a fashion for the modern-life subjects that members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded 1848) would soon come to paint, and his Waiting for the Times would most certainly not have been out of place among them, or out of its time.

A method Haydon adopted to avoid low-level, short-term debt was to go to the pawn shop. This was time-wasting and debilitating. Following his first lecture on the art of painting at the London Mechanics’ Institute in September 1835, he pawned his £10 suit, receiving £2.15s for it; then his spectacles for five shillings; then his tea urn for ten shillings. ‘Harrass, threats, harrass’ was how Haydon succinctly described the problems that beset him. Haydon was no unknown. His status in the world of art was assured, and it would have been a very different place without him. Nevertheless, so insecure and volatile was his profession that one evening he might be lecturing to hundreds in an important London institute and receiving thunderous applause, and the next morning be served with a court order to repay a £50 debt. After Landseer’s generous and accommodating patron the Sixth Duke of Bedford had sent Haydon a fiver to get his suit out of pawn for a lecture, the prime minister’s messenger brought him £70 ‘to relieve . . . present difficulties. You must not think me hard if I say . . . that I cannot do this again.’

Haydon’s justification for his disordered way of life was his determined, hopelessly unrealistic and impossible sense of purpose, which was undoubtedly the root of his problem. In a prayer that rolls all his demands on the Almighty into one, he made in 1814 ‘one request more’. It was not to be the last, of course:

spare my life till I have reformed the taste of my Country, till great works are felt, ordered, & erected, till the Arts of England are on a level with her Philosophy, her heroism & her poetry, and her greatness is complete.

Haydon’s long-suffering wife Mary had all this to put up with in running their home in Lisson Grove. With their nine children, five of whom died in infancy, Haydon was as uxorially prolific as Gandy. When they married in 1821, Haydon described Mary as having ‘the simplicity of a child, the passion of an Italian Woman, joined to the wholesome tenderness & fidelity of an English one’. She also had the fortitude necessary to cope with a demanding and unpredictable husband, modelling for him, attending his lectures, joining him on a cold, wet and miserable Channel crossing to visit the battlefield of Waterloo, and putting up with his long-running infatuation with the author Lady Caroline Norton. Benjamin and Mary had been on the brink of disaster together many times, none more so than in June 1834 when, after the failure of the exhibition of his painting The Reform Banquet, they faced ‘executions, poverty, misery, insult and wretchedness . . . Mary packing up her little favourite things – expecting ruin at creeping pace.’ Some of their children’s clothes, and Mary’s favourite gown bought for £40, were pawned by her husband for £4. In the hours before he killed himself, overwhelmed by his obsession with money, he wrote to Mary:

God bless thee, dearest love. Pardon this last pang, many thou hast suffered from me; God bless thee in dear widowhood. I hope Sir Robert Peel will consider I have earned a pension for thee.

Haydon failed spectacularly. That there are few engravings after his work suggests that he was impossible to deal with and was a no-go area for most engravers. Nevertheless he saw himself as a great artist, the sole guardian of the Grand Manner:

The art is becoming a beastly vulgarity. The solitary grandeur of History painting is gone. There was something grand, something poetical, something touching, something inspiring, something heroic, something mysterious, something awful, in pacing your quiet Painting room after midnight, with a great work lifted up on a gigantic easel, glimmering by the trembling light of a solitary candle, ‘when the whole world seemed adverse to desert’ [Wordsworth]. There was something truly poetical to be devoting yourself to what the Vulgar dared not touch, holding converse with the great Spirit, your heart swelling, your Imagination teeming, your being rising.

The watercolour painter John Varley was, like Haydon, never a member of the Royal Academy, although he did exhibit there early in his career. He was told by his discouraging father that ‘limning or drawing is a bad trade’, but persevered nevertheless; he found tuition in landscape sketching and portrait drawing as a young man in London, and dedicated himself to improving his art. Only three years younger than Turner, his and Turner’s early careers have marked similarities. Both took themselves off to the high ground around London to draw – Turner to Hampstead, Varley to Stoke Newington and Tottenham; both found experience in travelling farther afield on bold sketching tours in search of the picturesque – Turner to Bristol, Varley to Peterborough; both ventured into the mountains of Wales and brought back vivid evocations of the wild landscapes that thrilled visitors to the Royal Academy. Both Turner and Varley studied and drew from watercolours and engravings in the collection of the physician of the insane, Thomas Monro; both took pupils to help themselves pay their way.

However, while Turner’s practice was to analyse rules of art and to rework and rewrite them, Varley tended to follow an accepted practice and stick to it. Indeed, he formulated ‘accepted practice’ himself, publishing in 1816 a guide to technique – his own – for other artists to follow. Varley’s Treatise on the Principles of Landscape Design is a clear introduction to painting an accomplished watercolour, but the difficulty that it brought its author was that it also became his cage. Varley’s watercolours lack the variety, impulse and aggression of Turner, and his inability or unwillingness to wrestle with the difficult and bulky art of oil painting further limited his interest to the market.

John Varley was a charming, generous, loving man. He fostered the art of generations of pupils, including William Henry Hunt, and Elizabeth Turner, the daughter of Dawson Turner, a friend and confidant of his unrelated namesake J. M. W. Turner. Dawson Turner ran a successful bank in Yarmouth, Norfolk, and was himself a generous host, prolific correspondent and distinguished amateur botanist. Elizabeth Turner described Varley’s charm and effectiveness as a teacher, while inadvertently evoking the in-built limitations of his art:

It is not enough to tell you that we have been delighted with this most singular man: I must try to describe his character a little, it is so rare and extraordinary . . . Not only has he, with most unwearied diligence, sought to show us every way of copying his drawings, he has also tried to make us compose, and explained to us all those principles of composition, which after many years of hard fagging, he discovered himself.

Varley, a gentle giant who ‘could never learn how to use his strength’, had a bizarre side to his character that puzzled many who knew him, and turned others away. He was a convinced astrologer, one who would quiz acquaintances mercilessly for the time, date and place of their birth so he could assess their horoscopes. He himself made it clear that he had been born at the Old Blue Post Tavern, Hackney, on 17 August 1778, 18 degrees 56 minutes, Sagittarius ascending – William Blake inscribed this detail on his idealized portrait of Varley in the National Portrait Gallery. With astrology as his obsession, Varley attempted to link facial features with star signs, publishing his Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy in 1828.

While he was popular as an exhibiting watercolourist during the 1810s and 1820s when the art was passing through a particularly active phase, this buoyant period could not last. Varley had been one of the founders of the Water-Colour Society in London in 1804, a group which immediately touched the heart and pocket of a new audience for small-scale, modestly priced, domestic pictures. This was not quite the heights of the Royal Academy, but it held an accessible and interesting annual exhibition which attracted a paying audience (one shilling entry) and spawned rival groups eager to cash in on the trend. Varley showed forty-two watercolours in the 1805 exhibition – out of a total of 275 – and in that and surrounding years sold his work successfully. Each exhibition might earn him £150–£200, his prices being modest, at around £5 a picture. Varley would churn his watercolours out – they were known in the Society as ‘Varley’s Hot Rolls’.

But Varley had other difficulties: he was married to an unpredictable, spendthrift wife, Esther Gisborne, who despised him. She nevertheless somehow bore him eight children, but Varley’s own inability to control his finances took him and his family into hard times, leading to his bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt in 1820, and further threats and near-imprisonments in his later years. His fellow artists had some feeling of affection and care for Varley, Constable among others buying his drawings and listening to this engaging Ancient Mariner who seemed to live in a world of his own:

I have bought a little drawing of John Varley, the conjuror – who is now a beggar – but a ‘fat & sturdy’ one. He told me how to do landscape & was so kind as to point out all my defects. The price of the little drawing was a guinea & a half – but a guinea only to an artist. However, I insisted on his taking the larger sum – as he had clearly proved to me I was no artist!!

Living artists had to look after themselves and each other in the first half of the nineteenth century, and pick up friendly and sympathetic assistance where they could, both in prize money and in charity through the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Society of Arts and artists’ benevolent insurance schemes. When a painter failed, such as Joseph Gandy, Benjamin Robert Haydon or John Varley, he failed alone, with a weeping family pleading the artists’ benevolent funds for relief; when a sculptor failed, however – Charles Rossi or E. H. Baily, for example – he failed for dozens, bringing not only misery on his family, but dissolution on his studio and unemployment on his assistants. Successful artists, from Gainsborough and Reynolds to Martin and Turner, had their own means of displaying their work outside the annual public exhibitions, either in their own galleries, in their homes or through engraved reproduction. Other opportunities included word of mouth and proud display by a patron. The work of sculptors such as Flaxman and Chantrey was readily seen in popular public settings, principally St Paul’s Cathedral. They had an economy of a different nature to that of painters, operating on an industrial scale, creating products such as portrait busts or church monuments that demanded the existence of a purchaser. Thus the prospect of payment and the financial status of the client were generally clear for the sculptor before the work was conceived (see chapter 5).

The Royal Academy was not always a friendly place for artists to be. Haydon suffered there; Constable had suspicions that feelings among Academicians were stacked against Gandy when he stood year after year for election. Constable himself had long suffered disdain and rejection there. It was thought that the keeper of the Academy, Henry Thomson RA, had spiked Gandy’s chances; that Gandy ‘was one of the victims of Thompson’s [sic] caprices’. Thomson was only very briefly keeper, between 1825 and 1827 – a highly influential post that had responsibility not only for the Academy’s property and its growing collection of ‘Diploma works’, but also for the management of the Schools. Animosity within the Academy could be poisonous. Thomson was widely loathed: Thomas Lawrence wrote vehemently that ‘for envious hatred, and low, busy, toiling, crafty mischief, there has existed in the Academy no Iago like that man’. John Soane was also well known to be spiteful and unpleasant; James Northcote was ‘a vain man, of a contracted mind . . . not over good-natured’. John Martin hated the Royal Academy. Turner detested Constable, and indeed it seems to have been mutual: Francis Chantrey, distinguished Academician, wrote in 1826 to Constable, by now a highly esteemed Associate, about their colleague, the widely revered Turner. Marked ‘Private’, with a double underlining, Chantrey’s letter to Constable says pithily:

I wish particularly to know by return of post if you entertain the opinion or that you ever said ‘Turner’s pictures are only fit to be spit upon.’
Very truly yours, F. Chantrey.

Haydon put many of his fellow artists in a state of apoplectic rage, and cruelly attacked the Academy: ‘He stabbed his mother! He stabbed his mother’, Turner muttered on hearing the news of Haydon’s suicide. ‘Mother’, here, in Turner’s emotional and unfettered response, was the Academy, where Haydon had studied but to which he was never admitted as an Associate. Such are the energies released when people of temperament and genius meet within a limited and fluctuating market, and try with mixed success to club together to support themselves and each other, and express their ambitions. However, one does sometimes wonder why any self-respecting person would want to join such a rabble. Discord spread over to the British Institution. At its private view in 1818 James Ward observed that ‘only Callcott & Jackson there of the RA. Haydon shunned by them. Am blamed by them for speaking to him but find the comfort of forgiving injuries above such considerations.’ Constable had a punch-up at the Institution with Thomas Phillips in 1828:

Mr Phillips likewise caught me by the other ear, and kicked & cuffed me most severely – I have not yet recovered. I have heard so much of the higher walks of art, that I am quite sick. I had my own opinions even on that – but I was desired to hold my tongue and not ‘argue the point’.

The Academy was nevertheless a society in which a sick or destitute member artist, or his widow and family, would find benevolent support through the Academy’s charitable funds. Failing or sick artists who were not Associates or Academicians could, on paying premiums, have recourse to the Artists’ Annuity Fund, later titled the Artists’ Benevolent Fund – also known as the Artists’ Joint Stock Fund and the Artists’ Fund of Provident Care. This was a private insurance scheme, set up in 1810 and later subject to mergers and rivalries, which paid benefits to members in distress, or to their dependents after their deaths. The Benevolent Fund’s birth was a matter of controversy, the Royal Academy being seen to have drowned out existing benevolent schemes of the past century for artists and diverted charitable funds exclusively to its own members. John Pye, untiring campaigner for artists, put the case for the independent funds with clarity:

At the beginning of the present century, almost every class of British subject enjoyed the advantage of a fund for the protection of the superannuated of their number; such for example the musical funds, the theatrical funds, and the like. [There was] no fund for the community of British artists.

The Academy, Pye added, ‘protected against the evils of pauperism its own members only’. He went on to say that those countless artists who were not elected to the Academy, ‘the great body of British artists’, were suffering as a consequence, appearing to be ‘the singularly unfortunate children of neglect and improvidence’. By 1844 the Artists’ Benevolent Fund had established itself fully and was, according to Pye, protecting ‘upwards of 300 artists’.

The Fund was supported by contributing artists, by dealers in art such as Rudolf Ackermann and Dominic Colnaghi, and by patrons including the king, the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Bedford, Sir John Swinburne and Sir John Julius Angerstein. Samuel Whitbread was another active contributor: he spoke energetically at the Fund’s 1814 annual dinner, and demonstrated how political opponents such as he himself and the Tory MP Charles Long, who was chairing the dinner, nevertheless had ‘but one mind’ when drawn together by art. In a speech which ‘produced an electrical effect on the meeting . . . their applause was unbounded’, Whitbread also praised the Duke of Wellington, who was a hero in artists’ eyes for having recovered the paintings plundered from Spain and Portugal by Napoleon during the Peninsula War.

Early minutes of the Fund, initially under the chairmanship of the aged landscape painter Anthony Devis, show that its president was drawn from each branch of the arts in rotation (i.e. painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving), and that four years’ membership, with regular payment of premiums, should secure claims made by a deceased artist’s family.¹⁷⁰ Premiums were on a sliding scale: £2.2s.5d for entry at age twenty, £9.10s for entry at age fifty. The Fund amended and polished its rules as the years progressed, so that in 1817 we read that an artist would have to be ill for a full month, but could then receive relief at £6 per month, and that after a year on sickness benefit, provided he had been a member for five years, he would become superannuated on an annual pension of £60, or on death £40 a year for dependents. This is a reasonably generous payment of an early form of social security, the profession of artist looking after its own. While the early membership appears to have been dominated by engravers, as a result of the Academy not admitting them, it gradually took members from all branches of art, including Francis Chantrey (1810), the watercolour painters John Glover and Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1817), and ‘senior’ oil painters Henry Howard RA, Richard Ramsay Reinagle ARA, John Martin (all 1822), and Edwin Landseer (1824). Martin served energetically as the Fund’s secretary in the 1830s and 1840s. The Fund had its own private medical arm, the physician and pioneer homeopath David Uwins, brother of the painter Thomas Uwins RA, whose ‘offer [to the Fund] to attend members and their families gratuitously during any sickness they may endure . . . is most gratefully accepted’.

The Fund’s account books show that its money was well managed, turnover being £625 in 1810, rising to £2,688 seven years later. Among the artists’ widows and families who were relieved by the Fund were Anne Legé, widow of the sculptor Francis Legé who died in 1837, and John Varley’s widow who received a pension after her husband’s death in 1843. This was not the difficult and spendthrift Esther – she had died in 1824 – but Varley’s second wife, the gentler Delvalle Lowry. Francis Legé, who we will meet again in chapter 5, was a loyal assistant to Francis Chantrey, serving him for twenty-two years. While Chantrey had himself been a subscriber to the Fund since 1810, there seems to be no record of contributions from Legé. Thus, it looks as if Chantrey’s benefit was passed on to Anne Legé, as Chantrey’s own accumulated riches put him and his wife far beyond the need for charity. Over the years 1816 to 1844 the Fund expended £8,150 on widows’ pensions alone.

Fund supporters had a rollicking good time at the annual dinners, usually held at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street, near Covent Garden. Such was the social level of art in London at this period that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Frederick Robinson, took the chair at the seventeenth annual dinner in 1826 and presided over toasts and speeches, songs and laughter, as the evening progressed into the small hours. When a toast was raised to the king, the Chancellor, probably slightly drunk by now, reported that the monarch ‘possessed a heart open as day to melting charity’ towards art and artists. The glee ‘Hail Star of Brunswick’ was sung in the king’s honour as his annual contribution of 100 guineas was reported to thunderous cheers. Robinson took the opportunity to lobby for better exhibition space for the Royal Academy, then still at Somerset House in ‘apartments . . . which were inadequate for the display of those works which the public showed so much anxiety to behold’. The Chancellor made the point that he trusted that ‘at no distant day a building would be erected worthy of the Arts, and commensurate with the wealth and grandeur of the metropolis of this great and free country’. The building that Robinson was so publicly lobbying for came about ten years later when the new National Gallery, part-occupied by the Royal Academy, was completed in Trafalgar Square. At the Fund’s annual dinner in 1836, the chairman on that occasion, Lord Ashburton, continued to press the economic value of the arts by reminding the audience that ‘four fifths of the manufactures of the country were partially dependant on the arts’. The painter Richard Reinagle pointed out that the Academy had spent £150,000 in prizes to artists and on maintaining prize-winners in Italy: ‘the whole of this money had been obtained by the exhibitions, without a shilling aid from the government.’ All of this has an early twenty-first century feel about it. There is also a modern feel about the fact that one charity, established to give money to artists facing poverty, should be in bitter dispute with another, the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, with its very similar title to the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, both of which ostensibly pursued the same aims.

John Pye, in his long and justificatory account of the Fund’s progress, had no hesitation in accusing the Royal Academy of hijacking the administration and exhibiting of art, and rolling into this grand heist the responsibility for running benevolent funds for artists. This was all very well for Academicians and Associates, but it left the widows of artists excluded from the Academy – and this meant all engravers – out in the cold. Turner maintained a close and personal interest in the workings of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, and was also the Royal Academy’s auditor from 1824 to 1839, and again for five years from 1841. Assiduous in his attention to detail, he made sketchbook notes listing pensions paid out and donations received, from Christmas 1818 to 1823. In the pages following the copious Academy figures there are thirty-six pages of erotic drawings, a subject which he evidently took up with a sigh of relief after all those sums.

A careful and attentive steward of a charitable cause for artists, Turner was also careful with his own money. His sketchbooks carry many details of financial transactions, concerning sales not only of paintings and prints, but also opaque details of his own investments. During the 1810s he bought Bank of England consols (consolidated 3 per cent annuities), presumably with the income from sales of his pictures, totalling almost £1,500. His holdings came and went: in 1814, he made a loss on the sale of £50 of reduced 3 per cent annuities at the rate of 68¼ per cent, receiving just £34.2s.6d, less the commission to his stockbroker, William Marsh, of 1s.3d. Receipts for these transactions he tucked away in the pocket of the sketchbook. Generous though he was to the Academy with his affection and his time, Turner nevertheless had his moments of meanness. In 1839, at the Christie’s auction of the painter John Jackson’s effects, he bought for £2.10s a palette said to have belonged to Hogarth, and tried to decide if he should give it or sell it to the Academy. Constable soon got wind of this, lacing his retort to C. R. Leslie with a touch of malice:

He has got poor Eastlake ‘in secret’ to enquire if the Academy paid for the silver plate and glass case, in which is the palette of Sir Joshua. I told him no, all the attendant expenses was borne by me – £5 or £6 for the plate, the case 3.3.0 – he will be greatly annoyed by being obliged to take my folly as a precedent.

An artist at the extreme opposite to Gandy, Haydon or Varley on the scale of social and professional success is Augustus Wall Callcott, the painter whose name once caused Haydon momentary anguish with the prime minister. Personable and polite, Callcott slipped upwards through the levels of the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1790s, with evident talent and without attracting envy from fellow students or disapproval from his teachers.

Henry Thomson, later so reviled, told Farington that Callcott was ‘a modest, well behaved young man’. The talented son of a Kensington builder, Callcott used the trade connections that his father had developed with Lord Holland to gain regular access to the tradesmen’s entrance of Holland House, to find experience in picture repair and copying, and to make tentative social and business contact with this influential Whig family. He was the ideal of the young artist who benefited, as Pye had noticed, from the liberality of collectors who allowed access to their collections to the young and interested.

Callcott came to specialize in landscape, and developed a manner of brightly lit painting that Turner was pioneering and which caused such upset to the taste of Sir George Beaumont. This refreshing new luminous manner drew Beaumont to bracket Turner and Callcott together and to dismiss them both as ‘white painters’, a stigma that temporarily at least stopped Callcott in his tracks and kept him aloof from the Academy in 1813 and 1814. While Callcott’s technique was slow and his prices modest, he did gradually find himself in the mainstream as a painter by being bought early in his career by knighted collectors including Sir John Leicester, Sir Richard Payne Knight and Sir Thomas Lister Parker, and later on by John Sheepshanks and Robert Vernon. For good or ill, Callcott was a bargain: he charged Leicester just 150 guineas in 1807 for his 9-foot-long canvas Market Day, twice the size and half the price that Leicester had paid Turner for The Shipwreck the year before.

Callcott was careful and orthodox in his choice of subjects, delicate with his patrons, and cautious in the way he planned his life. He married late; he was forty-eight when in 1827 at last he took a wife. But his choice of wife, a woman of strong opinion and rich experience of life, art and travel, surprised many. Maria Graham, the widow of a naval officer, was a member of a small and exclusive group of women writers, and of an even more exclusive group of women artists. She was already a published author, lionized and admired in London, Edinburgh and Rome, where in 1819 she had sat for her portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. In Rome she mixed with British visitors, including Francis Chantrey, Thomas Moore, Turner, Lawrence and the man of the future, Charles Eastlake. She also met Sir Humphry Davy, who ‘talked to me a great deal about colours when we met in Rome’.

‘The intrepid Mrs Graham’, as Lady Holland called her, met and married Augustus Wall Callcott within a year of her return home after four subsequent years in Chile and Brazil. Callcott was by now at the centre of the intellectual, artistic and musical circles of Kensington, the vibrant artistic hub west of London that would, in time, seduce Brunel. He was rising as an authoritative figure in the Royal Academy: Constable said of him gnomically: ‘in painting he is a correct, sound – and just – bigot’. For Callcott, the marriage to Maria had all the appearance of an excellent career move, while to Lady Holland, who thought she had Augustus’s best interests at heart, it was ‘a bad prospect’. From childhood, Maria had suffered from intermittent tuberculosis. After her marriage to Augustus the illness worsened gradually, and by the early 1830s she was more or less confined to her rooms. However, with long friendships running deep into London’s literary and artistic society, she could twitch on her threads and draw people including Rev. Sydney Smith, Samuel Rogers and Edwin Landseer to her salons, where, as Richard and Samuel Redgrave put it:

Lady Callcott mostly supported the conversation. She was somewhat imperious in her state chamber; the painter being more of a silent listener, until some incident of travel, some question of art, roused him up to earnest interest or wise remark.

Maria was a shadow of the young woman who in December 1812 had come to London as a new, celebrated author; in November 1840, she described herself miserably as ‘a dying woman shut up in my bedroom never more to leave it!’ From this diminished perspective, Maria Callcott became angrier and angrier. The Callcotts had a curious marriage: she a strong personality, he quiet and reserved, slow-performing, deliberate and reliable. From her sofa, she was far from the dangers of the Tivoli hills, where she had braved gangs of bandits lying in wait for travellers; the noisy Piazza di Spagna in Rome, where Lawrence had painted her romantic portrait; or the harbour of Valparaiso, where in 1822 she buried her first husband and went aboard the Rising Star, the first steamship to enter the Pacific. She was instead reduced to making cutting remarks about her visitors, among them Harriet, the daughter of Samuel Rogers: ‘Miss Rogers . . . is growing large and coarse.’ Augustus tried hard to cheer her up. He invited young painters to bring the works they were about to send to the Academy, and ‘to range them before the sick lady . . . that she might have a sight at least of some portion of the coming exhibition’.

One of the many friends who visited her was Edwin Landseer. He had in 1840 suffered a nervous breakdown which threw a shadow over the rest of his life. This admired artist, charming and prodigious, had become watchful, terrified and beset by demons, fantasies and paranoia through dabbling in the occult and attempting to cope with his fame and demands from patrons. While Landseer rallied and continued to paint, producing some of his greatest works, drink and drugs got the better of him. Maria Callcott expressed her concerns:

Edwin himself thrown back – again we have to lament over talents misapplied, and curse ‘ill weaved ambition’ and so kind and generous a heart too! Jesse [Edwin’s sister and housekeeper, Jessica] with all her gentleness and talent is always like an incubus. Why? I can’t tell unless it be the total want of tact & practice of conversing.

Maria’s concerns about Landseer were shared by many in the world of art. In her direct voice, made the more resonant by the close echoes in her closed world, she touched on Landseer’s breakdown. Landseer had been a child prodigy with an ambitious and energetic father who recognized the boy’s genius, which he was determined to foster. In an age of increasing specialization in art, Edwin’s unmatched talent for drawing animal subjects, guided by the irascible and unreliable Benjamin Robert Haydon, directed him to study cows in the fields around Marylebone, lions in the Zoological Gardens, and dogs and horses everywhere.

By 1840, at the age of thirty-eight, Landseer had reached a pinnacle in both his art and its reception. His aristocratic patrons included the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire and the Marquess of Abercorn; among his meritocratic patrons were former prime minister the Duke of Wellington, current prime minister Lord Melbourne and the author whose writing characterized the age, Sir Walter Scott. Among businessmen he counted as his collectors the horse dealer Robert Vernon; John Sheepshanks, the Leeds cloth manufacturer’s son; the ship-builder William Wells; and John Gillott, the Birmingham pen-nib manufacturer. Landseer crossed every boundary among the rich, finding collectors of his work in money old and new. He had many admirers among prominent fellow artists and writers, including the sculptors Francis Chantrey and John Gibson, his own early mentor Benjamin Robert Haydon, J. M. W. Turner, Charles Dickens, and hard-to-please Royal Academicians who nevertheless elected him to the high status of Academician in 1831. He became quite a character in Academy circles. Constable spotted him with William Wells, in a hansom cab trotting spiritedly along the Strand, soon after the 1829 Academy exhibition had opened. Constable, who was making the same journey in an omnibus, made a quick sketch of the moment in a letter to his friend the painter C. R. Leslie, ‘all waving our catalogues in the air’.

But vanity got him in the end. Constable remarked in an aside to Leslie that he had invited Landseer and a fellow Academician, George Newton, to meet Leslie at the Academy,

neither of whom came – or sent any message – and as I class them both with the nobility (they having adopted their habits), I sat up ’till twelve to receive them.

Harriet Martineau pointed out waspishly when she met Landseer in 1834:

There was Landseer, a friendly and agreeable companion, but holding his cheerfulness at the mercy of great folks’ graciousness to him. To see him enter a room, curled and cravatted, and glancing round in anxiety about his reputation, could not but make a woman wonder where among her own sex she could find a more palpable vanity.

When Landseer caught the eye of Princess Victoria, who invited him to paint her pet dogs Hector and Dash, she described him in her diary as ‘an unassuming, pleasing and very young-looking man, with fair hair’. Thereafter it was Edwin Landseer who was engaged to immortalize one royal dog after another, as well as a menagerie of royal stags, hinds, parrots and princes. Thus, his debilitating nervous breakdown shocked his many friends and admirers, and those who aspired to own his paintings.

For an artist active in London in the late 1830s and 1840s, royal patronage was the apogee. The nation had a new beautiful young queen, lighthearted, competent at painting in watercolours, and such a relief from that long sequence of Hanoverian kings. The rich mixture of royal, aristocratic, trade and peer patronage of the sort enjoyed by Edwin Landseer was at this period unique. Landseer was everybody’s. Talent, like virtue, might be its own reward, yet unlike virtue it always pay handsomely in addition. In Landseer’s case, however, it went further than that: not only did he have the patronage of the queen, the dukes, most especially the Duke of Bedford, and the others above mentioned, but he also enjoyed that duke’s warm and understanding friendship, as well as the close loving comfort over nearly fifteen years of the duchess, the duke’s second wife, Georgina. This friendship produced a daughter, Rachel.

One of the triggers of Landseer’s collapse was that the Duchess of Bedford refused, once she had been widowed in 1839, to marry him. The duchess was ‘highly vulgar and capricious’, in Thomas Moore’s view, and the focus of much gossip. She was fond of practical jokes, ‘to a degree not very becoming of a Duchess in the nineteenth century’. Moore had observed her some years before she and Landseer met:

I remember hearing various tricks she played upon a poor artist who visited Woburn, to make drawings from the Duke’s pictures – among others she had a goose put into his bed, & had given it brandy to make it a more skittish and troublesome bed-fellow – but it only made the poor goose sick, & the poor artist, who was a humane man, took care of it & nursed it all night.

Landseer may not himself have suffered such indignities at Woburn, but the mental difficulties he encountered after the Duchess rejected him were further rooted in an excess of success, an inability to enable supply to meet demand, and perhaps uncertain contact with reality in life, even though he could vividly describe it in paint.

Among Landseer’s initial attractions to some of his patrons was the fact that his prices, like Callcott’s, were low in relation to those of his peers, and failed increasingly to reflect his standing. Landseer would charge for a thoroughbred what Vernon might just accept for a winded carthorse. Giving away his drawings as if they were toffees for children, Landseer was criticized by fellow artists for risking damage to the structure of the art market. His friend the painter Frederick Goodall chided him: ‘you must have given away hundreds of pounds, Landseer.’ Francis Chantrey took him to task when in 1836 he painted a portrait of the sculptor’s dog, Mustard. ‘Now on the score of Money,’ Chantrey wrote:

a delicate question to a high-spirited young Dandy who can live on Air – I have to request that you will do yourself and your profession justice without one word about friendship, delicacy or Stuff. This I insist upon, and with this you must comply or I no longer remain Yours sincerely, F. Chantrey.

Mark this, Mister Landseer!

Chantrey generously persisted when Landseer came up with an insufficient figure:

I always expected that the proper and remunerating price would at least have been two hundred guineas – you say one hundred and fifty. The question between us stands thus – either I must feel endebted to you 50 Gns or you will feel under the obligation to me for the like sum . . . I remain your debtor for the sum above named which I shall seek an early opportunity of discharging.

However, it is clear from the account that Landseer opened at Gosling’s Bank in January 1827 that he was not quite as vague and unbusinesslike as Chantrey seems to suggest. With an initial deposit of £250 Landseer shows that he was really quite organized in his financial affairs and kept a careful eye on money matters. Remarkably, the entries over the following forty-three years until his death have survived in the archive of Barclays Bank, now held in a low-rise glass and steel building on an industrial estate outside Manchester, behind a branch of Tesco. It is a curious place to discover that in July 1827 Landseer’s lover the Duchess of Bedford paid the artist £50, and two months later her husband paid him 50 guineas (£52.10s). This puts some flesh on the bones of the letter to Landseer in which the Duke of Bedford insisted that the price he asked for his portrait of the Duchess ‘is quite ridiculous’, and that as a consequence he would pay £50 into Landseer’s account at Gosling’s. This was certainly a generous gesture from a kindly, cuckolded old duke. Bedford evidently paid 50 guineas rather than pounds, but overlooking that fact, for the portrait of the duchess Landseer received a total of over £100 from husband and wife. A further entry in December 1827 shows Landseer earning £180 from the Duke of Northumberland for Highlanders Returning from Deerstalking. These are significant, but not huge, sums for a 25-year-old artist at a breakthrough point in his career, but not comparable with Turner, who at about the same age in 1804 had earned 300 guineas for The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon.

Over the first eight years of the bank account, Landseer’s income went up from £582 in 1827, to £832 in 1830, and to £1,158 in 1835. This is not by any measure a spectacular rise, nor a particularly stupendous income. But while he may have been confused about the value of his work, out of a combination of good nature, modesty and initial surprise, Landseer earned enough to be the ‘high spirited Dandy’ of Chantrey’s observation. He did not ‘live on Air’. His income from the sale of copyrights of his paintings to engravers became, with the help of others, organized and systematic, and by this means he became the centre of a prosperous business, which further enriched a network of dealers and craftsmen. As a direct result of the spectacular growth in interest in his work by engravers and dealers in the 1840s, Landseer’s income rose dramatically. His growing wealth came both from the commissions from patrons, and from the marketability, through reproduction, of his art. In 1840 we see payments into his Gosling’s account of £105 (100 guineas) each from the print dealers George Moon, and Hodgson and Graves, with 300 guineas coming from Hodgson and Graves the following year. While this may not have been Landseer’s only bank account, it does give clear evidence for the steep rise in interest in him, not only from print dealers, but from patrons also. In 1840, the year of his reported mental breakdown, and 1841, he received payments from the Marquess of Abercorn, the Duke of Beaufort, John Marshall, John Sheepshanks, Sir Henry Wheatley and others totalling £1,436, and cash payments of £662. Adding income from investments of £577, the Gosling’s account shows that across these two years he earned £3,201, perhaps £160,000 in today’s money. Financial success seemed inviolable: in 1846 Landseer earned £6,850 from four paintings alone – £2,400 for the sale of the paintings themselves, one being Stag at Bay, and £4,450 in total for their copyrights. The Art-Union doubted that this was a wise investment, but it is nevertheless an important example of price inflation and bravura in the market: ‘It is, we imagine, utterly impossible that the sale of the engravings can be such as to return so prodigious an outlay.’

For Landseer’s pocket, mental collapse was a prelude to ample cash flow. Year on year, Landseer got richer and richer. His investments tell their own story as they grew. In 1830 a £500 investment in consols yielded £26; by 1847 with year-by-year income the capital had grown to £14,200, bringing him £224.0.5d interest at 3½ per cent. By October 1850 the value had increased again to £24,200, and by 1868 to £50,000 with further shareholdings in English and Indian Railway and Russian and Anglo-Dutch Bonds of a few thousand pounds each. Over thirty-eight years, £500 had become £50,000, in the steadiest of investment portfolios. Payments in the Gosling’s accounts identifiable as from engravers and print dealers, principally Graves and Co., totalled over £17,500.

Landseer’s nervous breakdown, whatever that may mean medically, was a severe blow to the artist and his friends; it became the catalyst to a change of manner, mood, expression and priorities in his art. The problem was, flatly, that many people had many thousands of pounds riding on Landseer, and their anxiety was that this milch cow might cease to produce the goods. Landseer wrote of his ‘self-torture’ to his friend Count d’Orsay. This was not wholly ironic:

My unfinished works haunt me – visions of noble Dukes in armour give me nightly scowls and poking . . . Until I am safely delivered, fits of agitation will continue their attacks.

Landseer’s breakdown, however, led to the beginning of a more rigorous way of doing things in his business as an artist. The guardian angel who stepped out of the shadows at the right time was Jacob Bell, a failed artist who had turned successfully to business when he followed his father into pharmacy. He became a pioneer in the mass marketing of pharmaceuticals and the founder of the Pharmaceutical Society. Bell and Landseer had known each other since the 1820s when Bell dragged Landseer away from the gambling tables and got him to see sense. For Landseer’s illness, Bell prescribed European travel and ‘blue pills’ – that is, the popular preparation ‘calomel’, or mercurous chloride; for his art, meanwhile, he recommended and delivered a means of greater efficiency, an organized way of running his studio and a certain crispness with dealers and engravers. Bell firmly increased Landseer’s prices, and was the pivotal figure in many negotiations, drawing together artist, engraver and publisher:

Boys has just been here and consented to give our price for the copyright of the Royal Mother and Brats . . . Moon has called on me to pay 200 gns for Breeze . . . If Graves consents to what he originally seemed anxious to give, I shall close: it is my policy to be quite independent and not to appear at all anxious to dispose of the copyrights.

When Landseer won prizes at foreign exhibitions, it was Bell who took care of the money. A teasing letter from his good friend Charles Dickens, writing from Paris in January 1856, assured ‘My Lanny’ that the prize money which came with the Grande Médaille d’Honneur which Landseer had won at the 1855 Paris Esposition Universelle was safely in Bell’s hands. To Dickens, Landseer was ‘my Lanny’; Clarkson Stanfield ‘my Stanny’.

Standing on the sidelines of the business arrangements and painting his pictures, Landseer could only shout and stamp when things failed to go his way. His correspondence is full of anger and frustration which the artist may partly have brought on himself through pressure of work and unexpected distractions. In 1844 he is strongly warned by an intermediary of the potential consequences of crossing Robert Vernon:

I have just heard from my friend Mr Vernon, that the picture painted for him, by you, upon which I had the pleasure of seeing you about two years ago, has not yet been added to his collection . . . I assure you I am exceedingly disappointed and distressed . . . first, because I learn the non delivery of the Picture has been a source of great annoyance to Mr Vernon . . . I can observe by Mr Vernon’s conversation with me that he considers himself both ill treated and neglected by you in this matter; and I really believe it will vex you to hear this, as much as it has done me.

The demands of engravers to have paintings in their workshops for extended lengths of time gave further twists of frustration to Landseer. The collector Martin Blackmore, a supporter and steward of the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, wrote to Charles Lewis, who was engraving Landseer’s Collie Dogs, a painting that Blackmore owned. The agreed time for the work had been two years, and Blackmore felt he had released the painting for long enough already. When Lewis asked for it again, Blackmore was terse in his response:

My room is now arranged & I do not mean to let the picture go away again unless my friend Sir Edwin Landseer sends me a letter requesting me to let it go to the engravers for a short time. You will learn from me perhaps that it is quite proper that engravers should keep something like a consideration for owners of pictures & not treat them as if they had no right or title to their own property. You may spare yourself any more applications for only to Sir E. L. will I listen, and for him I will do anything.

Lewis seemed to be fated to annoy Landseer’s patrons, a rash talent. He angered the artist when he retained one of the Duchess of Bedford’s paintings for longer than was tactful. However, Landseer’s other issues with the duchess may have coloured his response to Lewis:

I have been expecting to see you, or to hear something of the condition of the various works you have in progress (from me). My object in writing was, is to say the Duchess (dow[ager]) of Bedford is impatient to have the Pictures of the Equestrian sons home immediately. Pray let me know when they can be returned to C[amden] Hill as I must give a positive answer to her Grace without delay.

‘Painting is a strange business,’ Turner reflected towards the end of his life. He had the talent not only to paint but the sense to invest his money and to diversify by having income from investment and from engraving, as well as from sales of his paintings, to rely on. Supported from his youth by his enthusiastic small-businessman father, Turner rapidly became a success from a business point of view and never looked back. However, where Landseer succeeded with his royal patrons and hit the jackpot, Turner consistently failed again and again. He did, briefly, have a royal patron in 1819. A press report in the Literary Gazette, announcing Turner’s arrival in Rome that year, clearly states that this was the case:

Mr Turner, the English painter, has arrived here. It is said that he is as great in landscape painting as Sir Thomas Lawrence in portrait . . . Mr Turner is to paint the most striking views of Rome, for his royal highness the Prince Regent.

This may have been the motivation for the sixty or seventy studies of the city and environs which Turner drew in magnificent potential detail, but left largely incomplete. Only seven subjects were completed and engraved, but this was long after faint talk of the Prince Regent’s interest seems to have faded. Those seven went off to Walter Fawkes, probably as a gift.

Another brush with royalty came for Turner two or three years later in August 1822, when he travelled by sea up the east coast of England from London to Leith to cover, as a journalist might, the official visit to Scotland of the new king, George IV, his putative patron as Prince Regent in 1819. This was to be the first visit to Scotland by a reigning monarch for 115 years, since the 1707 Act of Union. Turner drew busily in and around Leith and Edinburgh, catching the most important moments of the visit, and came subsequently to make five paintings on mahogany panels as the beginnings of a cycle representing the royal progress. The prime purpose of the paintings may have been commercial, to create images which would fix the iconography of the visit and be engraved for wide circulation: hence perhaps the use of mahogany, strong enough to withstand the rough treatment the paintings would risk during their years in the engraver’s workshop. In the event, this was a second commission with royal connections that failed for Turner, and once again everything turned to ashes.

The commission that he did at last obtain from George IV through the intercession of Sir Thomas Lawrence was to paint The Battle of Trafalgar (1822–4). This smacks of a diplomatic offer: Turner had his pride and could only watch perplexed as lesser artists like George Jones or Sir Martin Archer Shee got the royal nod to produce paintings for the monarch. The Battle of Trafalgar overwhelmed the Ante-Room in St James’s Palace, where it hung for only five years before being taken off to the Royal Hospital at Greenwich. It has been in Greenwich ever since, moving across to the National Maritime Museum when that was opened in 1937.

Turner knew by now where he stood with British royalty: nowhere; or if anywhere, only in Greenwich. The French were, however, different. In 1844 the King of the French, Louis-Philippe, came to England on a royal progress, a state visit to Queen Victoria. Louis-Philippe was the first French monarch to visit Britain since the fourteenth century, so this was a huge step forward in improving Britain’s long and bellicose relations with the French. It was thirty years since Napoleon had been vanquished, and it seemed now as if the unstable post-war years were coming to an end. Turner and Louis-Philippe had known each other since the first decade of the 1800s, when the then Duke of Orléans lived in exile in Twickenham. They were only two years apart in age, had extensive experience of travel in common, and had already exchanged gifts: a set of engraved Picturesque Views in England and Wales from painter to prince; a diamond-encrusted snuffbox from prince to painter. Interestingly, at about 5 foot 3 inches tall, they were roughly the same height, so could with some equality look eye to eye. As in 1822 in Leith when waiting for George IV, Turner was on the quayside in Portsmouth when Louis-Philippe arrived. He made many quick pencil sketchbook studies and, perhaps some days later, a group of seven or eight pen-and-ink and watercolour drawings, including an eloquent image of the king stepping out of his ship to walk down the gangplank. From these studies derived a pair of atmospheric canvases of the scene in Portsmouth harbour with high aerial perspective, and a further pair which two years later Turner altered and turned into a whaling subject, and exhibited them as such.

We do not know if Turner and Louis-Philippe met in 1844, but in the autumn of 1845, when the artist was travelling along the Channel coast in northern France, he visited the town of Eu, where the king had a château. There they met, and together these old acquaintances ‘passed the pleasantest of evenings in chat’. But if there was ever a commission in the offing from the French king, before or after this final meeting, it also turned to ashes, and the watercolour studies and the two aerial canvases sank into the piles of the artist’s studio. The latter were, years later, wrongly assumed to be Venice subjects. The other two canvases, I suggest, Turner thoughtfully reconfigured: to one he added the head of a whale and a ship’s flag; to the other a touch of flame and a gang with a large saw. In both he put a certain chilliness into the air. Thus he converted two fine canvases of a royal arrival in the shallows of Portsmouth harbour into rather unconvincing evocations of partying and working in the depths of the South Atlantic. To each he gave a ludicrous Tristram Shandyish title: Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! another Fish! and Whalers (boiling Blubber) entangled in Flaw Ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves. For Turner, the Louis-Philippe paintings began with a bang, but, like the King’s Visit to Edinburgh series twenty years earlier, ended in disappointment. Whatever it was that prompted Turner to make these four paintings – misinterpretation of a kind remark of the king? a misunderstanding of the king’s taste and requirements? self-delusion? – it soon evaporated, and Turner was left with the four paintings. Endeavouring to extricate himself, like his whalers entangled in ‘flaw ice’, he altered two and exhibited them as a pair at the Royal Academy. Nobody bought them: Turner had misjudged the market. Despite his unparalleled success, Turner could also fail.