The charmer who knew how to turner profit
The painter of Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner was a grunter, a scratcher, a picker of nails, a spitter on canvases and a kicker of chairs. A man you’d gladly have on your walls – but not to dinner.
In this biography, Moyle does much to rehabilitate the reputation of the snorting, squinting, uncouth screen Turner and to restore him as a stalwart of the Royal Academy, the favourite of aristocratic patrons, and a self-made businessman with a townhouse and a country villa.
While not shying from Turner’s supposed habit of spitting on his paintings as he worked to loosen the paint, Moyle reminds us that he could also be a charming schmoozer, a greaser of palms – not with promissory notes or coins but with his own watercolours. He knew their value and gave them out as inducements to members of the Royal Academy to elect and promote him.
The character sketch given by Turner’s great champion John Ruskin may be nearest the mark: ‘Everybody had described him to me as coarse, boorish, unintellectual, vulgar… I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentleman: good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual.’
What Ruskin misses, but Moyle writes about so persuasively, is Turner’s ambition, taking on more commissions, publishing enterprises, money-making wheezes and lectureships than he could ever find time for. Moyle has him sketching, sketching, sketching, before breakfast and after dinner and every hour in between. A holiday meant working without the interruptions and distractions of town. It meant Yorkshire in abominable rain, the Alps in bad inns and snowstorms, Portsmouth in a squall. He always travelled with an umbrella to keep off the rain – with a concealed dagger in its handle to beat off highwaymen and bandits.
The book occasionally suffers from the stilted phrasing of a Victorian romance: mentors do not die, they ‘expire’; children do not get ill, they ‘succumb’; a baby is not fathered, but ‘sired’.
Perhaps a greater failing is Moyle’s workaday descriptions of paintings – a blow when there are few illustrated (only 30-odd in a 450-page book). This is the Fighting Temeraire: ‘Turner depicted the old ship fully masted, the sun setting brilliantly in the distance. The paddles of a single black tug, pulling the old wooden ship of the line behind it, churning an otherwise glassy and nearempty river.’
The word-sketch does little to call the painting vividly to mind. But it is perhaps too great a thing to ask any writer to do in prose what Turner did so magically in paint.