Authors: Matthew Plampin
‘I’m most honoured, Mr Turner, to be granted your society once more. The man of the hour. The Rembrandt of our age – greater than Rembrandt, so the newspapers would have it.’
He wishes it had been me, Will thinks. He wishes me dead instead of Tom. He mumbles something.
Beau is scrutinising him now. ‘You
are
different, I must admit. Urbane, very nearly. Who’d have thought that such a change could be brought about? What can the secret possibly be?’
This riles Will. ‘Damn hard work,’ he replies curtly – and has a strong desire to add, ‘d’you know of it?’ But he restrains himself; forces himself to remember the task at hand; and realises that he hasn’t the first idea how to begin.
‘An old friend of yours is here, you know,’ Beau tells him. ‘An erstwhile benefactor of yourself and Mr Girtin. The gentleman, in fact, through whom we all came to be associated.’ He pauses. ‘The esteemed Dr Monro.’
The urge to flee returns. Will absolutely does not want to encounter the mad-doctor in here, alongside Beau Lascelles, with a gaggle of spectators assembled at the summit of the viewing platform stairs. Their artistic connection ended some time ago, but Will has since had cause to call upon Monro’s professional influence. Only last Christmas, the doctor arranged a visit to Bethlem Hospital, to the Incurables’ Ward, without an entry being put in the book. Will sat in that bare cell for the better part of an hour. Mother didn’t move from her straw bed, and gazed over at him with no more recognition or feeling than if his chair were empty. He left in a state of dull distress, resolving not to go again.
Dr Monro, though, isn’t anywhere to be seen. Will looks back to Beau. This is not an innocent mistake. The villain is implying knowledge – letting on that he’s uncovered that which Will and Father have done their level best to contain, and could tell others if he so wished. He’s trying to intimidate.
A riposte, for once, is right there in Will’s mind – ready for utterance in the same mock-casual tone used by the nobleman.
You here by yourself then, Mr Lascelles? No other members of your family interested in attending? That younger sister, perhaps?
The elopement is nearly two years old, but allusion to it would still smart. All tolerance of her situation finally exhausted, Mary Ann deserted her father’s London home in the early morning with an armful of clothes, married her paramour in the nearest church and absconded forthwith to Swansea. Tom, thought Will immediately, as Father read him the details from one of his gutter rags, he’s gone back for her; but that couldn’t be right. He wed his goldsmith’s girl the previous October. Their stories had diverged for good. Mary Ann’s choice, at any rate, was almost as inappropriate: the son of a Leeds merchant, some distance beneath her, and a terrible mortification for her family. Rumour held that the Lascelles’ chances for advancement, for royal preference, had taken a grave knock – that the much-prized earldom had been shifted years beyond their reach. Hinting at this humiliation would be a blow to match Beau’s own. It would show him the true change in William Turner.
But no. Again Will resists. He decides to be direct and dispense with this matter as quickly as he can. ‘I’m told a buyer is needed,’ he says, ‘for the grand piece upstairs. For the …’ What the devil is it called? ‘For the Idatropolis. Might you be interested?’
Beau is equally direct – and firmly, decisively negative. ‘Mr Turner, I’m afraid that I cannot consider it. Where would it
go
, for heaven’s sake? I am an art collector, a connoisseur. What use do I have for a public showpiece? An exhibit of these proportions? Should I put it up in Hanover Square, perhaps, and charge sixpence a peep?’
‘Mr Lascelles, if you won’t—’
‘Could
you
not take it? You’re having a private gallery built, so they say, on the side of your new house, to accommodate your legions of admirers. Up behind the fine gates of Harley Street. Quite an enterprise. What reserves of capital you must have at your disposal. Could you yourself not find space?’
More knowledge of Will’s affairs. The fellow plainly makes it his business to learn everything that he can. Will frowns, both at this and at the absurd impracticality of his suggestion. ‘It don’t need to be
displayed
,’ he says. ‘Preserved only. Safeguarded for the future.’
Beau shakes his head. He is becoming angry. ‘I cannot bring myself to look at it. There you are. That’s the truth. I have been in here for twenty minutes and I cannot even mount the damned stairs.’
Will blinks; he notes the strain gathering in the nobleman’s voice. Something rather different has been broached. He stays quiet.
‘It killed him, Mr Turner. Can you honestly deny this? The act of producing it, this inexplicable thing here – it hastened his death. He would never do what was wise.
Never
. I had him leave this damned city as often as I could – to Wales, to the coast. I bought the drawings that resulted. I ordered more, more than my father’s houses can reasonably hold. And I had him stay at Harewood – every summer, nearly. The Yorkshire air is a tonic. So very clean. One could see the good it did him, day upon day. Hear it in his breaths.’
Now Will must speak. ‘He coughed still,’ he says, ‘as I recall.’
Beau stares at him. Understanding connects them like a bright bolt. All at once that turbulent, peculiar week is resurrected; the harshness, the abruptness of its conclusion; the family’s subsequent omissions, and their calculated munificence; the two tiny figures, the young artists together, drawn on the mossy bank beside the castle. Instead of spitting forth venomous threats, however, or vows of ruin, the nobleman folds straight away into fresh dejection. His talk grows mournful, of the sort Will has been listening to all afternoon: youthful genius so cruelly attenuated, the potential left unfulfilled, the great dearth inflicted upon the world.
Promise Denied
.
Will nods along – increasingly aware, for his own part, of the contrast between their last conversation, his ejection with menaces, and this uncomfortable truce. Between a time when Tom Girtin was alive, away in a rowing boat with Mary Ann Lascelles; and one where he is dead, buried not two hundred yards from where they stand, in the yard of St Paul’s. The pain of it surprises him. He saw Tom over the intervening years, of course, on many occasions – at the Academy Exhibition, and in a miscellany of coffee houses and taverns, streets and hallways. Their final meeting was at the Key the previous June, deep within a large and boisterous group. Just back from France, Tom was visibly weary, but as usual he had much to communicate. Learning of Will’s own travel plans, he offered his advice on the sights of Paris and the landscape surrounding it; on where to stay, who to seek out, what to eat and drink. Will made a few notes, and gave his thanks – neglecting to mention that his initial goal, and his priority by an enormous distance, was not the Champs Elysées or the Tuileries or even the Louvre, but the Val d’Aosta.
Then Tom sat back and clapped his hands against his thighs, as if perceiving something obvious, missed through stupidity. ‘You should have come with us. By God, Will, why on earth didn’t you? It would’ve been marvellous. We would’ve claimed those boulevards as our own.’
‘Perhaps,’ Will answered, rising to leave. ‘Perhaps.’
This is what’s there, mostly: mundane encounters that merge in the mind, into a jumble of art gossip, trivial discourse and foolish, interminable debate. Nothing as sharp as that long-past summer. Will thinks of the night in the ice house and the lurching piggyback that followed; the feel of him there, of his back and his trembling arms, the sweat-slicked curl at the nape of his neck. These are moments, now, that only he can attest to. That live on in him alone. Heaviness collects in Will’s stomach; the buckling of his left knee makes him list slowly to the side. Beau Lascelles winds up his eulogy, makes some excuse or other and departs. A minute elapses, maybe longer; and an attendant is attempting to prise Will from the wall, where he’s perilously close to dislodging a view of St-Germain-en-Laye with his shoulder.
Morland is there, swatting the attendant away. ‘What did he say, Turner? Will he do it?’
Will rights himself and the skewed print. He lifts a forefinger to release the hot tear that swims in his left eye. ‘He will not.’
This sends the reprobate painter marching past the coin box and through the main doors, loudly declaring an intention to break every window in the blackguard’s carriage. The others receive the news more philosophically, trying to console themselves with talk of a fund for a permanent structure, designed especially for Tom’s panorama, which could be built up in Islington or one of the adjacent villages. Such a thing, they agree, must surely be possible.
The hall is closing. The viewing platform has already been cleared and the attendants are preparing to herd them, the last remaining visitors, out into the street. Will steps around the artists, peering back up the stairs, and manages to locate that fine passage of sky above the Monument. He wedges his hands into his pockets. Sniffs hard. Gives it ten seconds of his best attention.
A dazed crowd hangs in rags along the pavement, listening to the set-breakers begin their work inside. Morland returns, panting, claiming to have split the lip of a Lascelles footman – and proposing more drink, another tavern, a last tribute to Tom Girtin that will carry them to dawn and beyond. But Will is already off, back towards Charing Cross – towards Harley Street and the easels Father will have arranged in his painting room, standing in a circle with twelve feet of pacing space left in their centre. He waves a general farewell, deciding on colours and brushes, keeping that passage locked in his mind: the blackness of the rain storm, the shock of open blue, and then the paper lantern cloud, golden white, lit so perfectly by the sun.
Will & Tom
combines the historical facts of J.M.W. Turner’s visit to Harewood House in the summer of 1797 with a number of elements either invented or unverifiable. Most prominent among the latter is Thomas Girtin’s presence in Yorkshire that year. Girtin had by then embarked upon the seasonal routine that governed the life of the professional landscape painter – touring in the spring and summer to gather in his materials, then working up paintings in the autumn and winter. He’d been to Harewood in 1796 and would go again in 1799, 1800 and perhaps 1801 as well, but it has never been established that he was there at the same time as Turner. It remains a clear possibility, though, and may explain the two figures in the foreground of Turner’s eastern view of Harewood Castle; who they are, at any rate, if not why they’re there. Across his six watercolours of the Lascelles estate, Turner was careful to present a picturesque rural idyll, filled with farmhands, haywains and wandering deer – which makes the sketcher and his companion, the sole intrusion of the outside world, all the more curious.
Girtin’s brief biography contains many blank passages. Only two of his letters survive, and a handful of sketched likenesses; and a single, quintessentially Romantic portrait by John Opie, dating from around 1800. He was certainly adept at charming potential patrons, assembling a list of well-placed, often aristocratic admirers. But there were also signs of dissatisfaction with the system he was obliged to serve; rumours of radical and even revolutionary sympathies that ensured his exclusion from the Royal Academy, regardless of his obvious talent. Although prepared to accept the ongoing patronage of Beau Lascelles, other noblemen were turned down – notably Lord Elgin, who in 1799 was looking to recruit a draughtsman to accompany him on his embassy to Constantinople. Turner refused this commission also, on financial grounds; for Girtin, however, there appears to have been another element involved. He told a friend that when calling on Elgin he was kept waiting ‘many useless hours … between the hall and the presence-chamber’ – like a tradesman, basically, or a servant. This he could not accept.
After Girtin’s death on 9 November 1802, most probably from asthma, accounts of his character quickly diverged. A truly committed artist, claimed his supporters, as radical in technique as original in sensibility, poised to equal Turner if not surpass him; a reckless libertine, countered others – including his erstwhile master, Edward Dayes – slapdash in his work, whose excesses shortened his life. It is impossible to discuss him now without mentioning the quote attributed to Turner in old age: ‘If Girtin had lived, I should have starved.’ This is generally understood to be excessively kind – easy charity to a long-dead rival by the most successful painter of his generation, who was prone, in his later years, to occasional outpourings of sentimentality. What is certain, however, is that our view of Thomas Girtin as an artist, based as it is on two hundred or so watercolours, will always be incomplete.
Bolton Bridge
, his one documented oil painting, thought to demonstrate his superiority to Turner when shown at the RA in 1801, is lost; as is the
Eidometropolis
, the extraordinary work that dominated his final years.
A vast circular canvas measuring 18 by 108 feet, the
Eidometropolis
was characterised as the ‘connoisseur’s panorama’ on account of its sophisticated light effects – which appears to have deterred the popular audience Girtin had hoped for. Those who did see it, though, were amazed.
The Morning Herald
remarked that ‘the Briton stands enraptured … in seeing his native place, the glory of the world, so finely and truly portrayed.’ Obituarists asserted that this project, rather than his late watercolours, represented the true pinnacle of Girtin’s artistic achievement. Despite this approbation, at the end of its nine-month run at Spring Garden the immense painting was left unclaimed. Girtin himself had given no indication of his wishes. Panorama were regarded as ephemeral, as entertainments to be consumed rather than artworks to be treasured and preserved; and it was on these terms that the
Eidometropolis
seems to have been sold, to the entrepreneur James Thayer. It was taken to the continent and exhibited in Paris, Amsterdam and Lyon. In 1807 there was a fire at Thayer’s warehouse, destroying much of his stock – including Tom Girtin’s panorama, it is assumed, as at this point it disappears from history. Had it survived, the
Eidometropolis
would now undoubtedly be counted among the foremost works of English art.