Turner does the light fantastic

Turner's Venice

5 April 2012

It is almost blasphemous, in Venice, to recall the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo, to think of stinks and miasmas, jail fever and cholera, when her still, stale, waters are disturbed - but it is indeed of Kipling's sonorous line that I have invariably been reminded by her rank canals.

Venice, however, drives most Englishmen of literary bent into absurd hyperbole. Shelley had it that she lies, the Ocean's nursling, underneath Day's azure eyes, Wordsworth that, bright and free, she is espousè¤ to the everlasting sea.

In Venice, opined Evelyn Waugh, we are drowning in honey, and for Truman Capote, a man of more vulgar appetite, when there it is as though we bolt a whole box of liqueur chocolates. And in Oxford and Islington, of course, the cognoscenti never use her name, but murmur, as a shibboleth, La Serenissima.

Stink, nevertheless, she does and did, and in centuries long before ordure and rubbish were cleared from the streets of any city in northern Europe, northern European visitors complained bitterly of La Serenissima's appalling stench.

John Howard, the great international prison reformer of the later 18th century, advised that it was not safe to stay there for longer than four days, and Goethe compared her unfavourably with the immaculate canal cities of Holland.

As in other Italian towns on the Grand Tour, every dark door and stair stank of the emptied bowel and bladder, and those who carefully examine the paintings and drawings of Canaletto and Tiepolo can only conclude that many of the figures in them have their backs to us because they stand against a wall to pee.

Morally, too, Venice was deplored, dubbed "the Brothel of Europe".

Though early in the 19th century, when she was the pawn of great nations and deep in economic decline, she may not quite have matched the 10,000 prostitutes of Naples, she was notorious for her courtesans, women described by one English traveller as "so loose that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow".

Venice also had something of a reputation as the Sodom of her day and the beardless English boy on the Grand Tour was cautioned to protect himself as much "from the lusts of men as the affections of women", for, though dalliance with either might well result in syphilis, effeminacy (far worse) would be the further fearful consequence of coquetry with men: "Guard the lad from foreign vice" was the exhortation of one experienced traveller to the parish clergymen and tutors employed as companions on the Tour.

To raise these ghosts of Grand Tour Venice may seem perverse in the context of a laudatory exhibition devoted to Joseph Mallord William Turner's three short sojourns there, for they were very short and he had more important things to do than concern himself with the whores and mephitic exhalations of the place - five days in 1819, perhaps nine in 1833, and exactly two weeks in 1840.

Did he know, one nevertheless wonders, of John Howard's advice to stay no more than four days? And the ghosts are prompted by a suggestion made in the exhibition catalogue that "Venice, in particular, may have been a destination he associated with erotic possibility".

The presence, the writer continues, in watercolours made in 1840, of women in a state of undress, "is clearly an indication that the 65-year-old had not lost his sexual appetite". Clearly? Surely it is one thing for an artist of that age to include in his work motifs that had by 1840 long been the commonplace of painting, and quite another for a man of that age, short, stout and notoriously shabby (the Morning Chronicle had years earlier described him as a "tubby little man" with all the signs of feeding well, and the inside leg measurement of his tailor-made trousers was only 19 inches), to clamber into the bed of a luxurious Venetian whore?

For Turner's sake, I would like him to have experienced the charms and expertise of a Venetian quiver - far more dexterous than the wiles of Mrs Booth, his landlady, no doubt - but was his arrow up to it? And could he spare the time?

Time was always the most precious of Turner's resources. In the five Venetian days of 1819 he not only painted a group of exquisite watercolours, but filled some 160 sketchbook pages with pencil drawings and multiple jottings, laying down a store of information, accurate notes and references for pictures that he might later paint in his London studio.

Quite how he maintained so steady a hand against the rhythm imposed by the gondolier and the sudden wash of passing craft, we must wonder - but Edward Lear managed the same disturbances while painting, as he did, perched on mules and donkeys.

Not content with the city's sights, the Grand Canal and the Bacino, Turner explored its galleries and churches, making thumbnail notes of paintings and altarpieces by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese - and cursory though these notes may at first glance seem, they indicate intense scrutiny and the rooting of an aesthetic response that was to remain a lurking influence until the end of his life.

During the nine days of the 1833 visit, Turner ventured further down the byways of the city and to its more distant districts. He plunged into yet more churches, including the tenebrous confusions of St Mark's, and filled almost 200 sketchbook sheets with notes; he may also have made jottings on loose sheets, but with these and some remarkable nocturnal studies, even the most expert of experts seem at odds and unable to determine whether they date from this year or the longer visit of 1840.

Some of the notes are so economic and schematic as to be intelligible only to Turner - it was on this visit that young William Callow, almost his rival in turning Venice into a painter's commodity, witnessed Turner still sketching in the gloaming after sunset.

Of the 150 watercolours tied to these nine days, we suppose that all were begun on the spot and most finished in the hotel room that he had converted into a studio - though finished is perhaps not the word for them: I am convinced that Turner sometimes had the knack of knowing when a watercolour should be left unfinished, and sometimes did not, then, in attempting to develop it, and spoiled it, though leaving it still unfinished.

Turner was late in adopting the view of Venice as a stock-in-trade. In 1819 he was 44 and the most famous painter in Britain, recently renowned for such academic classical machines as Dido building Carthage and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, for neither of which had he felt it necessary to visit north Africa.

He was much travelled in Britain, but much less in France, the Low Countries and Germany, and not at all in Italy - and thither he was drawn, not by Venice, but by Rome. Industrious though he was in Venice in 1819, he made surprisingly little use of his observations and on his second exploration of Italy, in 1828, avoided the city altogether.

As a subject, it did not have the long historic weight of Rome - and Turner was at least as much a painter of morally didactic history as of landscape - nor could he, seeing himself as heir to Claude and Poussin, yet see himself as successor to Canaletto.

There has always been much talk of the effect that Venetian light had on his work in 1819 and subsequently, but this is wisdom exaggerated after the event, for there is evidence of interest in intense light in paintings executed before he went to Venice.

Light of peculiar clarity is what we expect to see there, so we feel compelled to see it in Turner's pictures, too, and impose our vision on his; any visitor to Stockholm or Copenhagen has seen light of a clarity as astonishing as in Venice, and even in post-industrial London, from any central bridge over the Thames one can occasionally see dawns, sunsets and other effects, particularly of stormy light that, were the buildings better, would be as dramatic.

Two late paintings of Portsmouth in 1844, once thought to be of Venice (and bravely included in the exhibition), make the point that Turner's light was primarily his own, an imaginary creature and not an adjunct to topography.

It was the 1833 visit that bore the first substantial fruit and made Venetian views Turner's almost annual contribution to the Royal Academy's Summer exhibitions. These, suffering the requirement of recognition that could, in the vapours of Turner's imagination, be altogether lost in other subjects, are, some of them, desperately bad and so self-caricatural that it is impossible to take them seriously.

There is evidence that Turner himself regarded at least part of his formal Venetian output as potboilers - if the idiot public "will have such scraps instead of important pictures", he said to a friend after this visit, "they must pay for them".

And pay for them they did, his compromise between his own and the public's taste ensuring him a comfortable income. Even so he sought to wean the public on to pictures that were loose and atmospheric. " Atmosphere is my style," said Turner in 1844, and "indistinctness is my fault" in 1845, almost three decades after William Hazlitt had accused him of "abstractions".

Hazlitt did not know how intuitively perceptive he was when he rebuked Turner for representing the air through which we see nature, rather than nature itself - but 1815 was a little early for understanding so advanced a painter.

In 1842 another critic wrote that the views of Venice "have a gorgeous ensemble ... produced as if

by throwing handfuls of white, and blue, and red, at the canvas, letting what chanced to stick, stick; and then shadowing in some forms to make the appearance of a picture". This comment is usually interpreted as an insulting irony, but to me it seems pure perception and true understanding, the first fumbling recognition that in Turner we had a painter capable of exploiting, even giving priority to, the physical properties of paint.

In his views of Venice, Turner, "lord of the poetical smear", was not weighed down by memories of Claude, Roman history, the tedious poetry of the now mercifully neglected Thomson, nor his own dread verse, banal, but ambitious far beyond the limits of his ability.

Though occasionally reminding himself with episodes of pomp and circumstance and theatre that he was a proud painter of history, in most of his Venetian work he retreated into pure painting, free and utterly at ease when not in topographical competition with Canaletto or in atmospheric competition with Boningoverworkedton, the much younger but short-lived genius whose limpid records of the city must not be forgotten as a profound influence on Turner.

Occasionally in his oils, but wonderfully often in his watercolours, Turner gave us a Venice that was translucent in the light and vapour, the shadows contre-jour pellucid, the shadows of night diaphanous.

In this exhibition of the essential Turner at his most uncluttered, exquisite and marvellous, we see him anticipate Monet's first venture into Impressionism, see him out-Whistler Whistler's fireworks, see such bravura and abandon with the medium, whether it be oil or watercolour, that all painting since must seem superfluous. Sick with envy and, given the choice, prepared to sell my soul for one of them, at Turner's elbow not once did I think of the Limpopo.