Author: By Carol Troyen

Date: SUNDAY, January 3, 1999

Page: M1

Section: Books

`Went to see Mr. Turner. What an artist! What a nasty-looking fellow he is,'' wrote young Blanche Sully of Philadelphia in 1837, after she and her artist father had been to J. M. W. Turner's gallery in London. ``Looks as though he had not an idea. Beside that, so careless and dirty that I would not pick him out of a gutter. Yet he can paint so magnificently!''

Many who knew Turner felt compelled to comment on these contradictions. Emerson saw him as ``a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly but as true a worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed.'' Although Turner's speech was more ``like a costermonger's than a courtier's,'' he was Lord Egremont's favorite artist and frequent house guest. From 1807 on, he held the prestigious post of professor of perspective at the Royal Academy in London, even though, as painter C. R. Leslie commented, he looked more like ``the captain of a river steamboat.''

Even his biographers, united in their admiration for Turner's art, disagree about his character. A. J. Finberg, author of the canonical study of Turner (1939), found him a magnificent painter but not an exciting man. Andrew Wilton, Turner's most perceptive biographer (1987), saw him as Dickensian in his eccentricity, partaking of high life and low, shuttling furtively between the urban squalor of his domestic arrangements and the gentility of the country houses in which he was a frequent guest. Anthony Bailey defends him as a ``good story'' precisely because of these contradictions, and in his well-researched, readable, and frequently eloquent biography, ``Standing in the Sun,'' makes good his claim.

The man contemporaries would honor as ``England's greatest landscape painter'' was born in 1775, in a seedy neighborhood in the heart of London. His father, a wigmaker, promoted his son as a prodigy and hawked his drawings from his shop; his mother, who grew increasingly unstable through Turner's childhood, died in Bedlam. After being farmed out to various relatives, Turner at 14 was enrolled in the Royal Academy schools. There he blossomed, eagerly absorbing lectures on the parallels between painting and poetry (a theme that would resonate with him his whole life); and as eagerly embarking upon the sketching tours into the countryside that were deemed essential to the training of aspiring landscape painters.

Turner's first travels, through England and Wales, yielded picturesque if unexceptional records of local scenery. However, after the peace of Amiens (1802) made continental travel possible again, Turner went to France. It was on this trip abroad (the first of many) that he found his vocation as a painter of sublime landscapes. His epic theme -- the confrontation of man and nature -- whether rendered with the you-are-there urgency of a violent storm at sea (``Calais Pier'') or presented in the guise of a lesson from ancient history (``Snow Storm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps'') forever transformed lowly landscape painting into a genre of universal significance.

From the beginning, Turner was fortunate in his patrons. He was first befriended by Thomas Monro, who ran an informal drawing academy for young artists, providing them with meals, models, and materials, and buying their works. When Turner was 25, the duke of Bridgewater hired him to paint a seascape; other highborn patrons would follow. Turner's greatest supporter was George Wyndham, third earl of Egremont, whose country house, Petworth, in Sussex, Turner visited frequently in the 1820s. Bailey presents an entertaining picture of Egremont's eccentric menage, filled with animals, babies, wandering artists -- and pictures. Egremont would eventually own some 20 Turner oils; Petworth was also the setting for more than 100 of Turner's sparkling watercolors, painted for no client but himself and reflecting his happy time there.

By this point, Turner was earning the equivalent of about $130,000 per year. However, he was often miserly -- rarely did he serve guests more than brown sherry and biscuits -- and was said to drive a hard bargain. ``Turner's palm is as itchy as his fingers are ingenious,'' sniffed Sir Walter Scott. Bailey argues persuasively that Turner's attitude toward money stemmed from a childhood that alternated between want and plenty, and cites numerous occasions when he was sensitive to need in others. Urging a patron to buy a less than first-rate work from a struggling artist, he insisted, ``It is pretty, and he is a poor man with a large family.''

Turner was less benevolent toward his mistresses. The first, Sarah Danby, he installed in lodgings near his Harley Street studio about 1799. Although she bore him two daughters, she remained a shadowy figure in his life, and it is not certain when their relationship ended. Turner neglected her and his daughters in later years, though Bailey suggests that one of the girls is lovingly included in several paintings from the 1810s. About 1830, Turner took up with Sophia Booth, a plump, comfortable widow who ran a boardinghouse in the resort town of Margate. As with Sarah Danby, few of his friends met her; though she was with him when he died in 1751, she did not attend his funeral.

Turner's swings between meanness and generosity, between furtive and expansive behavior, were most apparent on varnishing days, when artists put finishing touches on their work just prior to the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition. On these occasions, Bailey notes, ``the hedgehog turned . . . into a peacock.'' Turner's behavior was both amusing and appalling: He spit on his pictures, rubbed them with snuff, and wiped them with stale beer and tobacco juice, all to make them glow at the expense of his neighbors'. He would ``touch up'' another artist's work if its palette affected his adversely. At the same time, he gave helpful tips to fledgling painters, sometimes even adding a few strokes to their pictures, knowing that his involvement would mean a quicker sale and at a higher price.

Turner's celebrity -- and the healthy market for his work -- continued through the 1820s. But by the end of the next decade, his reputation had begun to wane. Victoria was on the throne, merchants had replaced the aristocracy as the country's powerbrokers (and as its chief arts patrons), and Turner was dismissed as old-fashioned. The grand, imaginative landscapes that fellow-artist John Constable had deemed ``golden visions, glorious and beautiful'' were now derided as ``soapsuds and whitewash''; the public preferred paintings that told a sentimental story, and whose fidelity to nature could be measured not in grand pictorial gestures but in literalness of detail.

Vindication ultimately came through the efforts of the brilliant young critic John Ruskin, promoter of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1843, he began publishing ``Modern Painters,'' a celebration of landscape painting and an impassioned defense of Turner. Although Turner suspected Ruskin of seeing ``more in my pictures than I ever painted,'' he was clearly gratified to have such an energetic champion to introduce his work to a new generation of patrons, and to immortalize it in prose. Ruskin makes frequent appearances in Bailey's book; however, his importance for Turner never quite comes into focus. It was Ruskin who molded the modern image of Turner as the quintessential Romantic painter, publishing the probably apocryphal story of Turner having himself lashed to the mast of a ship during a violent storm, better to experience, and then depict, nature's full wrath. And it was Ruskin who burned Turner's erotic drawings after the painter's death, deeming them an unseemly legacy of such a noble artist.

Turner arranged his own immortality by bequeathing to England the contents of his studio: more than 100 finished paintings and over 19,000 drawings and watercolors. Though his will languished for years in Chancery Court -- another episode out of Dickens -- Turner's intentions ultimately triumphed, and his pictures now hang, gloriously, in London's Tate Gallery. His work continues to fascinate connoisseurs and critics. Bailey's is one of two biographies of Turner to appear in Britain last year, and while occasionally hampered by an excess of detail, it nonetheless provides an intriguing picture of a difficult and supremely talented man whom Ruskin rightly deemed ``the greatest of his age.''