Dali House

This is a companion piece to my Google Earth travelogue about the great English impressionist. The GE post is here.

“The painter of light”, “the great pyrotechnist”, one of the finest landscape artists in English history, if not the best, Joseph Mallord William Turner produced more than 20,000 paintings and drawings in his lifetime, and his frequent rambles across Europe happen to make him a perfect subject for Google Earth.
JMW Turner was celebrated in his own time, and deluged with commissions, but he was also the Jackson Pollock of his day, scathingly reviled for “hurling soapsuds and whitewash” at canvases with a mop – even Queen Victoria thought him mad – and his foul temper and reclusiveness lost him many friends. Just five foot four inches tall, he was hobbit-like in size, but he was the artistic giant of the early 19th century. The heir of the classic traditions of European art produced many paintings considered overtly revolutionary. He portrayed the great themes of the era, but even in his monumental 1812 work “Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps”, Hannibal and his men hardly figured at all. Turner’s real subject, the obsession of his life, was light itself. Just as the great cultural flowering of Romanticism began, Turner was praised by the French impressionists, Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Renoir formally acknowledging “that [we] have been preceded in this path by a great master of the English, the illustrious Turner”.
“All that is vital in modern art,” the art critic Haldane Macfall wrote in 1920, “was born out of the revelation of Turner.” He was, as has been noted often and with affection, the last of the Old Masters and the first of the New.

Birthplace
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born here at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, by his claim on April 23, 1775, the Feast of St George, patron of England, and Shakespeare’s birthday. Doubt lingers over the accuracy of the date. (”Turner’s Birthplace” by JW Archer is shown here.) He was baptised at nearby St Paul’s Church on May 14.
His father William, to whom he was always close, was a wigmaker who switched to barbering as wigs fell out of fashion, and his clientele extended to the city’s literary and artistic elite. Turner grew to manhood observing Britain’s “beautiful people” and quite early on began selling paintings to members of the nobility, yet he never painted portraits of these grandees, as had Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, the leading artists during his youth.
His father always showed an understanding of the boy’s artistic endeavours, hanging his paintings in the window of his shop and ultimately giving up his business to manage his son’s career and finances.
Turner’s mother Mary (nee Marshall) suffered from emotional instability, and in 1786, following the death in childhood of her daughter Mary Ann, she was committed to a mental hospital, where she died in 1804.

Bethlem Royal Hospital
The emotionally instability of Turner’s mother Mary was no doubt worsened by the death of her daughter Mary Ann in 1786, when she was committed to the original “Bedlam” in Bromley. Turner was himself still a boy at the time. His mother died here in 1804.
Founded in 1247, it is one of the world’s oldest hospitals for the care and treatment of people with mental health problems.

Brentford
At age 11 Turner was sent to spend most of 1786 with a maternal uncle here in Brentford, possibly because of his mother’s mental aberrations and confinement to a mental hospital. Brentford had a reputation in those days for political radicalism, and its influence may have emerged in Turner’s later paintings, but his formal education was quite limited, a small measure received here at John White’s school.
Turner coloured engravings and explored the countryside around Twickenham. Turner Society chairman Eric Shanes has noted that, after squalid covent Garden, the countryside upriver to Windsor and downriver to Chelsea “must have struck the boy as Arcadian [and] done much to form his later visions of an ideal world”.

Margate
Turner’s first signed and dated drawings from nature were made in and around this Kent holiday resort on the Thames estuary in 1786, where he was attending school after his sojourn in Brentford. The surviving works have been called “remarkably precocious, especially in their grasp of the rudiments of perpsective”.
In 1833 Turner’s interest in Margate took on fresh impetus when he became the lover of local lady Sophia caroline Booth, widowed that year. She rented a cottage in Chelsea in the 1840s and he stayed with her there, and ultimately died there. After his death she said they’d lived together for 18 years as husband and wife, as Mr and Mrs Booth (it’s been suggested she didn’t even know his real name or fame), and that Turner never once contributing money toward their mutual welfare. He took to identifying himself as “Admiral Booth” while frequenting the taverns of Chelsea.

The Royal Academy
Britain’s Royal Acadaemy of Arts was founded at the royal palace, Old Somerset House, in 1771 with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president, the man next to whom Turner would ultimately be buried. It moved here to New Somerset House in 1780, then to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square in 1837 and finally in 1869 to its current premises in Burlington House, Piccadilly.
Turner himself briefly served as the academy’s acting president, late in his life, but he was involved with it early on. In 1789, just 14, he was personally interviewed by Sir Joshua and admitted to the Plaister Academy of the Royal Academy Schools, then the only regular art training establishment in Britain, and a year later exhibited a watercolour for the first time here, “The Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth” (seen above). The boy earned money for his lessons by painting scenery at the Pantheon Opera House on Oxford Street, an experience that influenced his later dramatic use of light and the positioning of characters as if on a stage.
By 1795, having specialised thus far in watercolours and drawings, he became interested in oil painting, and one of his first, “Fishermen at Sea”, was hung at the Royal Academy the following year. In November 1799, only 24, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and three years later a full member (there are never more than 90), and began signing himself JMW Turner rather than W Turner, but his participation in Academy affairs was minimal.
He developed a reputation early on for being unsociable and even volatile. John Constable once dined with him at the academy and found him “uncouth” but with “a wonderful range of mind”. (He and Turner had a huge falling-out in 1831 when Constable, then on the RA’s hanging committee, swapped one of his paintings in a show for one of Turner’s. “Turner opened upon him like a ferret,” a witness said, and “slew him without remorse”, but no one sympathised with the conceited Constable.)
In 1807 Turner was elected the academy’s Professor of Perspective, a subject he would teach here for many years, and in July 1845, as the eldest academician, he was chosen as interim president while the incumbent was ill.

Sunningwell
The artist stayed with a maternal uncle here in 1789, sketching from nature in the surrounding Oxford countryside. Bacon’s Tower was the subject of his first signed and dated watercolour, in 1787. Meanwhile, though his first oils were sombre, they immediatey revealed his preoccupation with the contrasting effects of light and atmospheric effects such as storms and rainbows. Turner soon digested the lessons of his predecessors, making their themes his own and treating them in a completely personal manner. He was taking the traditional styles apart and extracting their essence.

Bath Abbey
In 1791, on the first of his more than 50 sketching tours across Engand and abroad, Turner produced his famous drawing of the abbey while staying with a friend of his father, John Narraway, the man who purchased Turner’s first exhibited painting, “The Archbishop’s Palace”.

Llanthony Abbey
The young Turner first toured south and central Wales in 1792 and returned to the south three years later. He visited the country five times in all, compelled by the unique landscapes he found there. Two years later he earned seven and a half guineas for three paintings of Llanthony Abbey. His watercolour “Caernarvon Castle” sold for an astonishing 40 guineas in 1799. In 1808 he sketched along the River Dee.
Llanthony Abbey, in a secluded valley of the Black Mountains, began as an Augustinian chapel that offered refuge in a storm to the knight William de Lacy, who became patron of the church soon after built here. It hosted many famous visitors before “barbarous people” forced its closure in about 1135, but a renewed endowment by the de Lacy family brought canons back from Gloucester and ushered in a great rebuilding, the remains of which stand today.

Rochester Castle
Turner’s drawing of Rochester Castle became, in 1794, the first engraving made from one of his works – it was published in Copper Plate magazine – but he also did a large oil of the castle that year.

Carisbrooke Castle
Turner first visited the Isle of Wight in the early summer of 1795, his sketches earning him commissions for engravings from various nobles. The seven sketches he made in 1827 were particularly remarkable in that they were all on two rolls of canvas and only separated well after his death.
Carisbrooke, once the capital of the Isle of Wight, has above it this Norman castle, bought by Edward I in 1293. Its chapel was restored in the last century as a memorial to King Charles I, who was once imprisoned here.

Norbury Park
Turner spent time in 1796 sketching around Brighton and here on William Lock’s estate in the Mole Gap above Dorking, which Lock purchased in 1774, landscaping it as parkland with breathtaking views from the top of the North Downs.
The house is now in private hands, but Surrey County owns most of the estate and it’s popular for walking and cycling. Its “Druids Grove” of yew trees is mentioned in the Domesday Book. The engraving shown here is not by Turner.

The Needles
Turner’s first visit to the Isle of Wight in 1796 produced “Fishermen at Sea off the Needles” (seen here), which sold immediately for a commendable £10. No one, it’s been persuasively argued, has come close to Turner in expressing the fundamental behaviour of water.
The Needles, west coast remnants of the limestone ridge that once joined the Isle of Wight to the mainland, appear on the left of the picture. William Lock, Turner’s friend and patron from Norbury Park near Dorking, also had an estate close to this shore, which is now home to an amusement park.

Knockholt
The cottage of William Wells, whose daughter Clara put Turner up in the late 1890s, has been described as “the first of many Turner boltholes” outside London during his life. The painting shown here is of Colchester Castle, off to the east on the coast.

64 Harley Street
When he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Art in autumn 1799 Turner moved from his parents’ home in Covent Garden to 64 Harley Street, lodgings he initially shared with JT Serres, a painter of marine scenes, then later occupying solely.
Though he was always secretive about his personal life, he was long believed to have taken as a mistress, at about the same time, the recently widowed Sarah Danby, at least 11 years his senior. They never lived together, but Turner helped support her children – she was thought to have given him three, beginning with a daughter, Evelina, in 1801 and 10 years later Georgiana, though recent research has cast doubt on all but his intended (then revoked) endowment to Sarah, and it’s been suggested that Sarah was in fact protecting her unmarried neice, and even that the father of the children could have been Turner’s own father!
In 1804 Turner opened a gallery of his own here to exhibit his works, one of which, “The Shipwreck”, sold in 1800 for a handsome £315. On the other hand, a critic called his Thames sketches “crude blotches”. The profile of Turner seen here is by George Dance, 1800.

Dolbarden Castle
Turner sketched the ruins of this ancient fortress (whose name is sometimes spelled Dolbadern) in 1800, on one of his Welsh tours in the decade previous.

Fingal’s Cave
on his first tour of Scotland in 1801 Turner produced numerous drawings and watercolours, including extraordinary studies of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa (unfortunately invisible on the 2006 GE image). The sea cave, formed within lava flows, stretches 250 feet into the rock and its roof is 70 feet above the sea. Discovered by Sir Joseph Banks (who was heading for Iceland), it would also inspire Mendelssohn’s Hebridean Overture in 1829, and Jules Verne paid a visit three decades later, perhaps seeking access to the centre of the earth.

“Fingal’s Cave”
Click the image to see it much larger.

Turner’s “Fingal’s Cave” was exhibited in 1832 and later cited as “one of the most perfect expressions of romanticism”. It was his first painting to go to the United States, but there remained unsold for 13 years, and when its eventual buyer complained that it was “indistinct” in its execution, Turner famously replied, “You should tell him that indistinctness is my forte.”
Turner returned from his 1801 Scottish tour via the Lake District and Chester, furiously sketching all the way. Also on interest that year, his painting “Dutch Boats in a Gale” – praised as superior to Rembrandt – fetched a colossal 250 guineas. Two years later he was complaining, though proudly, that his paintings were selling as fast as he could churn them out them and he had commissions for the next 20 years.

St Gotthard Pass
The 1802 Treaty of Amiens temporarily halted hostilities between France and England, enabling Turner to visit the Continent for the first time. In Paris he visited the studios of David and Guerin, and at the Louvre viewed the treasures Napoleon had looted in his conquests and spent time copying old masters like Poussin and Titian. But, having been beguiled by the mountains of Scotland and Wales, Turner was enthralled by the Alps, visiting St Gotthard and the Val d’Aosta, and ultimately bringing more than 400 sketches home from his travels in France and Switzerland, during which he also took in Schaffhausen and Basel.
He returned to Paris in 1832 and met the great Eugene Delacroix (who found him “silent, even taciturn, morose at times, close in money matters, shrewd, tasteless, and slovenly in dress”), then two years later toured Meuse, Moselle and the Rhine, and swept through France and Switzerland again in 1836. His last trip abroad was to Deppe and the coast of Picardy in the autumn of 1845.
The St Gotthard (or Gothard) Pass was a mediaeval track across the Alps frequented by pilgrims in the mid-13th century, then merchants from Lucerne, Zurich and Basel bound for the rich towns of fertile Lombardy. A mule track only widened for carriages in the early 19th century, the pass is now traversed in a few hours by the St Gotthard railway, built jointly by Italy, Germany, and Switzerland in 1871.

Dent d’Oche
Turner found a particular attraction to nature’s violence, particularly storms at sea and here in the Alps, which he first saw in 1802, both on the Swiss side and at the 7,200-foot, double-toothed Dent d’Oche in Haute Savoie, France. The three sets of watercolours that resulted from his 1841 trip to Switzerland, writes Turner Society president Eric Shanes, “are among the painter’s greatest creations, for in the immensity, beauty and solitude of the Alps he clearly found some solace at the thought of dying … The visible universe becomes filled with primal energy”.
In 1844, fresh from a meeting in London with Charles Dickens, Turner again took in Switzerland, along with Heidelberg and the Rhine.

The Grisons
Though Turner toured the Alps in 1802, there is no evidence that he visited the area represented in this picture, or that he actually witnessed an avalanche. Instead, the stimulus for creating “The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons” (shown here) may have been reports of an avalanche that occurred at Selva in the Grisons in December 1808, killing 25 people.
Yet far from attempting reportage, Turner created an almost abstract scene of clearly overwhelming elemental forces. His contemporary, the art critic John Ruskin, said of the painting below, “No one ever before had conceived a stone in flight, and this, as far as I am aware, is the first effort of painting to give inhabitants of the lowlands any idea of the terrific forces to which Alpine scenery owes a great part of its character, and most of its forms. Such things happen oftener and in quieter places than travelers suppose.”

Reichenbach Falls
Long before Sherlock Holmes plunged into this abyss, Turner felt its pull. He saw the spectacle on his alpine sojourn in 1802 and painted “The Great Fall of Riechenbach,in the Valley of Hasle, Switzerland” (seen here), two years later.
The geological features are expertly rendered, as is the behaviour of the water, forming into a fine spray at the foot of the waterfall.

Isleworth
The placemark rests above Syon Park in Isleworth, since I can find no trace of Sion Ferry House, where the artist lived for a year beginning in May 1805. He had a boat built here so he could cruise the Thames sketching nearby river scenes, such as “Goring Mill”, above, and “The Thames Near Isleworth”, below.
“Turner lived in a cellar,” Henri Matisse once said. “Once a week he had the shutters suddenly flung open, and then what incandescence! What dazzlement! What jewels!”

Sheerness
In December 1805 Turner visited Cape Trafalgar in Spain to see where the British Navy under Admiral Lord Nelson had defeated a combined Franco-Spanish force three months earlier. The military triumph confirmed England’s maritime supremacy and removed the threat of Napoleonic invasion, although Nelson was killed by a French sniper.
Turner made numerous sketches of Nelson’s flagship, Victory, carrying the slain commander home, when she anchored off Sheerness. The result was “The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory” (shown here). It was shown in his own gallery in 1806 but criticised as a “crude, unfinished performance”, so he reworked it for exhibition at the British Institution in 1808. This work is not to be confused with his fuller depiction, “The Battle of Trafalgar” of 1823, commissioned by King George IV.

Norham Castle
Norham Castle was built in 1121 by Bishop Ranulph Flambard of Durham as the administrative centre for his most northern territory. It was repeatedly under seige from the Scots, who finally captured it in 1327, then returned it to the bishop shortly after, then largely destroyed it. Due to its strategic importance, Henry II ordered it rebuilt in stone, but it was repeatedly attacked, and by the end of the 16th century was a mess, but when James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, it lost its strategic importance and was left to fall into ruin.
Here, Turner’s “Norham Castle, Sunrise”, painted circa 1835-40.

Hammersmith
In the winter of late 1806 Turner took over a house here at 6 West End, Upper Mall. He was at the time working on his stirring “Battle of Trafalgar”, which would have its first viewing here.
Here, “Aldborough, Suffolk”, from one of his treks about that time.

Queen Anne Street
In 1810 Turner moved around the corner from Harley Street to 47 Queen Anne Street West. He renovated the place and a decade later installed a gallery of his own here, where he had regular exhibits and accumulated sales. Here, “Fall of the Tees, Yorkshire”, from a northern excursion.

Twickenham
Turner had a small villa built somewhere here along Sandycoombe Road in 1811, to his own design but with advice from a friend, the architect Sir John Soane. He called it first Solus Lodge, then Sandycoombe Lodge, seen below.
It still stands, though it’s been much altered since his time, and a private group of admirers called Friends of Turner’s House takes great pride in the local St Margarets river frontage, with its swath of large 18th-century houses and gardens, including York House, Orleans House and Marble Hill House.
While living in Twickenham, amid considerable and rapidly growing wealth, Turner befriended Louis-Philippe, the exiled King of the French and godson of Louis XVI, who had settled here with his brothers. (Louis later chanced a return tp the throne, then abdicated in 1848. Queen Victoria put him up as the “Count of Neuilly” at Claremont, where he died in 1850.)

“Decayed” artists’ home
Turner was a penny-pincher but did attempt philanthropy, and early on proposed “Turner’s Gift”, a “college for decayed English artists”, i.e., a home for penniless old painters, at his second Twickenham property, a half acre here on First Common Road, now Fifth Cross Road, to be funded by his estate. His surviving relatives staged a war of the will, however, and it never came to be, even though Turner had held onto the plot when he sold his Twickenham home, Sandycoombe Lodge, in 1826.

Plymouth
Turner toured the West Country in 1811, 1813 and 1814, collecting inspiration for his planned “Southern Coast” etching series. On the middle trip he was much feted by the citizens of Plymouth and treated his friends to picnics and boat excursions in stormy weather.
Turner was on one occasion accosted by a naval officer who pointed out that a ship he’d drawn in Plymouth port had no portholes. “Of course not,” the artist said. “If you climb Mount Edgecumbe and look at the vessels against the light, you’ll see that you cannot perceive the portholes.” The sailor sought assurance that Turner knew there were portholes. “Of course I know that,” he said, “but my job is to draw what I see, not what I know.”

Cockermouth Castle
Turner made the first of several visits here in August 1808 at the invitation of his patron Lord Egremont, who later often hosted him at Petworth House in Yorkshire. The castle overlooking the Cumbrian hometown of William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian was built atop a Roman fort about 1225, attacked and partially destroyed by Robert the Bruce in 1315 and beseiged unsuccessfully by Royalists in the Civil War.