Dali House

Sotheby’s sale of Old Master Paintings coming up in London tomorrow is relatively small but promises a very loud boom when the hammer drops on three of the works included. The presence of any one in a public auction might cause global tectonic quivers — to have all three is rather astonishing. And this is ignoring a pair of Brueghels also on the block.

Least of the three is “Storm Clouds over Hampstead”, a fine watercolour by John Constable, one of his wonderful big-sky pictures. Then there’s Francisco de Goya’s “Equestrian Portrait of Don Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia”.

Both of these have compelling stories behind them, which I’ll relate in an upcoming post, but the best yarn of all belongs to JMW Turner’s “Virginia Water”, seen above. The watercolour was loaned out for a show at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2004 — its first public appearance since the 1880s.

Dali House gave Turner a special welcome early on, and seeing a rarity like this painting emerge from a private collection seems historic. Someone needs cash badly. Someone else ought to have it. The price it’s estimated to fetch: £500,000 to £700,000.

In 1828 Turner hurled himself at the feet of King George IV and grovelled like a chimney sweep. He left his self-esteem hanging in the wardrobe back at his studio on Queen Anne Street and took the buggy out to Virginia Water so he could sit on the shore of the lake, swatting off the midges of late spring, and sketch the monarch fishing. He needed to sell His Maj a painting — badly.

Embarrassingly, this was not a new experience for Turner.

Six years earlier he’d trekked all the way to Scotland in the dead of August and filled two sketchbooks with glimpses of the king’s visit to Edinburgh and other spots. The plan was to do a series of engravings, but interest — royal or otherwise — was not forthcoming, and Turner abandoned the project in the form of four unfinished paintings.

Then in 1823 a friend at Windsor Castle pulled some strings and got Turner the job of painting HMS Victory engaged in the Battle of Trafalgar. The work was completed the following year, truly magnificent and the biggest canvas he ever produced.

The royal court said, “No, thanks.” It just wasn’t quite right.

So in 1828 Turner tried again to catch the king’s fancy, and he tried real hard.

It’s April 23, St George’s Day, the king’s official birthday and — surely this must be auspicious — it’s Turner’s birthday too.

He perches on the lake’s south bank, toward the east end, ensuring he has George’s fancy “Chinese” pavilion in the picture. The royal boathouse is on the right. And here comes the mightiest fisherman in the land, even though it’s Turner who’s angling for the main prize.

The boat, with its 20 oarsmen and wrap-around awning and flying the royal standard as a signal that His Majesty is on board, is accompanied by a fancy barge carrying a military band, of all things on these gentle waves, and a pair of buoys bearing the Cross of St George.

Turner adds to the scene two mallards, a pun on his middle name, Mallord, and thus a waggish signature. (A second watercolour, whereabouts lost long ago, had the ducks being chased off by a “royal” swan.) Getting some wildlife in the shot is important, as well as the grand sweep of the landscape. The king loves the outdoors — he’ll go crazy when he sees this.

The resulting pictures are glorious, full of the light Turner absorbed during his time in Italy. The lake is like glass, like Venice’s lagoon at noon.

JMW offers “Virginia Water” to the Royal Collection, and possibly the second version as well, reportedly asking 80 guineas. The royal court says, “No, thanks.”

When George IV dies in 1830 from too much laudanum and being very fat, the paintings are engraved for The Keepsake Annual, which any old fool can buy for a shilling or two.

Virginia Water, though two miles long and covering 130 acres, is all but lost in the 14,000-acre Windsor Great Park, but that suited George IV fine when it was re-engineered to suit his tastes. He wanted complete privacy, and good luck to anyone who came out from London to prod him for a decision. They’d never find him.

The lake — which the residents of the adjacent village of Virginia Water evidently call “Virginia Water Lake” — was man-made in 1753, but it was William, Duke of Cumberland, the third son of George II, who subsequently made the area something to behold. He turned the place into Eden, along with his deputy park ranger Thomas Sandby, the architect who, with his younger brother Paul Sandby the painter, lived in Windsor.

Royalty has romped around Windsor Great Park since Henry III in the 1200s. In the 1980s Princess Diana watched the blokes play polo on Smith’s Lawn nearby. Even more recently, the young royals of the Harry Potter films have shot scenes around Virginia Water and, more to the point of this post (fishing), somebody once caught a 58-pound pike!

Long ago Virginia Water was but a stream, named in honour of either Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, or the American colony.

Once dammed up, the stream begat the lake.

Henry, the brother of George III, stripped a Saxon settlement on Bagshot Heath of its big stones and built a waterfall at the west end called the Cascade, complete with a fanciful “Robber’s Cave” hidden among the boulders.

The old watercolours in this post are by either Thomas Sandby (1721-99) or Paul (1730?-1809) and come from the excellent ThamesWeb.co.uk.

Everything about Virginia Water’s reconstruction was fanciful. George III’s “madness”, which turned out to be untreated porphyria, ensured that things got off to a surreal start, and George, Prince of Wales and “Prince of Pleasure”, brought to the project an untethered extravagance.

While Dad was ailing in a castle full of women, the Prince Regent escaped to Cumberland Lodge in the park, and then, while it was being rebuilt following a fire, to Thomas Sandby’s place, the Lower Lodge. It was a temporary arrangement that lasted almost until the day he died.

George built the fantastic Royal Pavilion in Brighton, pictured here, and he loved fishing on the Thames, but the first was too public and the second became too humiliating after one of the newspapers published a cartoon of the “King-Fisher” baiting a lady, so Virginia Water got his undivided attention.

To give the lake setting a bit more of the trendy Eastern exoticism that was suggested by the ornate Chinese pavilion already on China Island at the far east tip, George erected a bigger and better one, a Fishing Temple that spared none of the taxpayer’s expense. The emperor had become so rotund that his fishing expeditions demanded considerable comfort.

With three octagonal spires and dragon-crowned turrets, the pavilion — until it fell to bits in 1936 — occupied an islet of its own on the site of Henry III’s old manor lodge.

Wafting back and forth out on the lake was a small royal fleet, including the fishing yacht, the barge for the orchestra, the miniature man-of-war Victorine, and the Mandarin, George’s fabulous Chinese junk.

In 1749 Paul Sandby depicted the 40-foot vessel that became the Mandarin arriving at the Bells of Ousely on the Thames. It was dragged out of the river and across miles of dirt to one of the other man-made lakes in Windsor Great Park, Great Meadow Pond or Obelisk Pond.

There, or perhaps on Virginia Water itself, which was just being created, the “hulk” was rebuilt as a Chinese junk, after a rich fashion, with dragons painted on the sides and lanterns trimming the deck.

If the outfitting took place on Great Meadow Pond, it’s likely that the Mandarin returned there to die as well, following a catastrophic flood in 1768 when the dam that created Virginia Water collapsed. In 1783 someone reported that it was basically rotting at its dock on Great Meadow Pond. The king’s junk might actually now lie at the bottom.

In its glory days, though, the Mandarin plied Virginia Water with all the pomp and dignity that a rich man’s artless folly could muster. It would have swept past the other whimsies ashore, like Fort Belvedere and its “ancient ruins”.

Fort Belvedere up on Shrubs Hill could be seen from the lake in those days, but the forest that the Standbys sowed has drawn a curtain around it since, probably to the mixed feelings of its current tenants.

The Duke of Cumberland had the “fort” built in the early 1750s, some years after his bloody victory over Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Battle of Culloden. He planned it as a folly but seems to have taken it quite seriously.

The duke and his guests, including the Georges II and III, could mount the flagstaff tower and gaze across seven counties, noting Windsor Castle and St Paul’s Cathedral in the process.

There was a menagerie with gazelles and other fleet animals, no doubt nervous when the summer house was later enlarged to serve as a hunting lodge. It was given a decidedly military edge, including 31 cannon that continued to fire salutes until 1907 when royalty dropped by, such as Queen Victoria.

In 1929 Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales, moved in, the fort a gift from his father, King George V. Edward stayed on even after he ascended the throne in turn in 1936, but of course King Edward VIII had his little “American problem”, and that same year the prime minister came to Belvedere with a paper for Ed to sign, abdicating power so that he could marry Wallis Simpson, the woman he loved.

The Crown has since rented the fort out to less worthy but wealthier tenants, including the Emir of Dubai in the 1970s and, currently, Canadian billionaire Galen Weston and his wife Hilary, a former lieutenant-governor of Ontario.

Back to George IV’s day, quickly, before we’re shoaled on nostalgia’s coast.

George decided that the lakeside would benefit from some pretty Roman ruins like he’d seen on the continent once, so, to the horror of the state bookkeepers, the remains of an ancient temple in Leptis Magna, near Tripoli in Libya, were crated up and hauled to England.

The whole affair was an immense nuisance that got stretched out for years by red tape and apathy (described at length on the Virginia Water website), but eventually the stones were “arranged” in suitable disarray at the foot of the Belvedere property: two lines of granite columns poking up from a rubble of shards.

Why not something “Egyptian”, too? “The Women of England” celebrated Victoria’s jubilee by erecting an obelisk, along with a statue of Prince Albert, her consort, at the far end of Smith’s Lawn.

And finally, to further burnish the lake’s cabinet-of-curiosities appeal, in 1958 “the people of Canada” gave Queen Elizabeth II a 100-foot-tall totem pole to remind her that the province of British Columbia was 100 years old.

To be fair, the people of Canada probably expected the carved tower of red cedar to be erected someplace prominent, like at the British Museum or out from of Buckingham Palace. But you can imagine the discussion behind closed royal doors: “Where can be stick this crazy thing?” “I know just the place!”

And so it came to be that a beaver, a thunderbird, a man in a large hat and their friends came to Wick Pond. It’s quite possible that, on a clear or windy day, the totems at the top of the totem pole can even catch fleeting glimpses of Virginia Water.