entitled “Fallacies of Hope” that only ever seems to have existed as short extracts in many of the Exhibition catalogues published between 1812 and 1850, the last year Turner exhibited at the Academy. Yet the title of this supposedly epic poem, and often the verses themselves, indicate the artist’s general view that all hopes of successfully defying the forces of external nature, of overcoming the inherent weaknesses and contradictions of human nature, and of religious redemption, are fallacious. In the particular case of Hannibal the verse reminds us of the central irony of the Carthaginian general’s life, that for all his immensely successful effort to cross the Alps into Italy, eventually he would entirely nullify his achievement by allowing his own strength and that of his countrymen to become weakened by a life of idleness and luxury at Capua. As a result, the Carthaginians would fritter away their chances of ever defeating the Romans.
Clearly this irony was directed at Turner’s empire-building countrymen, warning of the perils that awaited them if they similarly put their own selfish interests above those of the state. At a time when Britain was still at war with Napoleon, this was a highly relevant message. The idea that the citizens of a given nation should eschew self-interest, vanity and luxury in pursuit of the common good was frequently encountered in eighteenth-century Augustan poetry, from whence Turner undoubtedly derived it. He was to repeat that old-fashioned message repeatedly after 1812 in many increasingly innovative images. These not only represent Carthage but also further great empires such as Greece, Rome and Venice, whose downfall because of individual self-interest might similarly serve as warnings to England. Such political moralism externalised Turner’s belief, stated in a letter of 1811, that it is the duty of a poet – and therefore by implication a poetic painter as well – to act as a moral seer.
The 1812 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps received some very favourable comments. For example, the American painter Washington Allston called it a “wonderfully fine thing”, declaring that Turner was “the greatest painter since the days of Claude”. Yet Turner’s art was not always received so rapturously. Throughout the 1800s it had been severely criticised by the influential connoisseur, collector and artist Sir George Beaumont, who professed to be alarmed both by the liberties Turner took with appearances, and by the increasingly bright tonalities he employed. Probably Beaumont was secretly jealous of Turner’s great artistic success, having once himself been called the “head of the landscape [school]”, a mantle that Turner had easily assumed during the 1790s and 1800s. Because of his distaste for Turner’s pictures, Beaumont did his utmost to discourage other collectors from buying them. Turner was understandably infuriated by this, although by the early 1810s he already enjoyed a loyal following that was prepared to pay high prices for his works.
In the 1813 Royal Academy Exhibition Turner displayed an unusually fine rural scene, Frosty Morning (Tate Britain), which for once gives us not a grand statement but a small slice of everyday life (unfortunately the painting has now lost the glazes used to convey the hoariness of the frost). Also on show was a picture first exhibited in Turner’s own gallery in 1805, a dramatic riposte to Poussin’s Deluge. In 1814 the artist exhibited two works, one of which, Apullia in search of Appullus (Tate Britain), contained a veiled attack on Sir George Beaumont. And in 1815 Turner displayed two of his greatest paintings to date, Crossing the Brook and Dido building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, both of which are discussed below. Turner called Dido building Carthage his “chef d’oeuvre”, and when he came to draw up the first version of his will in 1829 he requested that the canvas should be used as his winding-sheet upon his death. He even asked one of his executors, Francis Chantrey, as to whether that condition of the will would be carried out. To his eternal credit Chantrey replied that the stipulation would be respected but immediately added that “as soon as you are buried I will see you taken up and [the canvas] unrolled”. Turner saw the funny side of the situation and thereupon amended his will to bequeath the painting to the National Gallery to hang alongside the very seaport view by Claude that had moved him to tears when it was in the Angerstein collection.
It is not surprising that Turner particularly esteemed Dido building Carthage. He had long wanted to paint a seaport scene worthy of comparison with Claude, and with the painting he succeeded (just as in Crossing the Brook he painted his most successful Claudian landscape to date). Yet Dido also probably summarised everything he was trying so hard and so opaquely to articulate in the perspective lectures. With its mastery of perspective, its superb exploration of light, shade and reflections, its moral contrast between life and death (as represented respectively by the teeming city and solemn tomb), and its total congruence of time of day, meaning and pictorial structure, it is certainly far more eloquent than any of Turner’s tortuous verbal discourses.
J. M. W. Turner, The Bay of Baiae: Apollo and the Sibyl, RA 1823, oil on canvas, 145.5 × 239 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U. K. The painting was exhibited with the inscription “Waft me to sunny Baiae’s shore”. Turner’s friend, the painter George Jones, knowing the actual landscape to be far more prosaic than depicted here, wrote the words “SPLENDIDE MENDAX” (“Splendid lies”) on the frame. Turner was delighted and said “all poets are liars”, a statement that makes clear his equation of painting and poetry. He left the inscription on the frame for many years.
William Radclyffe, after J. M. W. Turner, Deal, Kent, 1826, line engraving on copper made for the “Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast” series, The British Museum, London, U. K.
Two years later Turner exhibited the companion to Dido building Carthage, namely The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (reproduced below). In the intervening 1816 Royal Academy show he displayed two complementary pictures of a Greek temple. In one of them (Duke of Northumberland collection) he portrayed the building as it appeared in a ruined state under contemporary Turkish domination, while in the other (reproduced here) he depicted it as it had probably looked in ancient times. The ruined building is appropriately represented in evening light, for metaphorically its day has passed. In the pendant the artist showed the reconstructed building in dawn light, thus using the rebirth of day not only to suggest constant renewal within the ancient world but equally to hint at the future restoration of Greek liberty. This latter subject was immensely important to him, for he wholly shared the views of one of his favourite Augustan poets, James Thomson, that Greece was the ancient home of liberty and democracy. In 1812 Turner had been forcibly reminded of the subjugation of contemporary Greece by the publication of the second Canto of Byron’s poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, in which the loss of Greek liberty is lamented. The two 1816 paintings might therefore well have been their creator’s most open statements of his identification with liberty and democracy to date.
Turner lived through the greatest period of political upheaval in European history. His affinity with demands for political and religious freedom in his own time first seems to have found expression around 1800 in works alluding to contemporary struggles for liberty in Britain and abroad. During this period he was hoping to gain election as an Academician, and many of the leading Royal Academicians, such as Barry, Fuseli and Smirke, were known to hold libertarian opinions. By painting such pictures he may have been simultaneously courting their votes. Around that time Turner’s most sympathetic future patron, Walter Fawkes, even held republican convictions, although he later moderated his stance (at least publicly). There can be absolutely no doubt that the similarity of their political views strengthened the bond between Turner and Fawkes after 1808. Moreover, the painter is known to have read banned radical political literature in the early 1820s. He would continue subtly to express his libertarian views during the rest of that decade as the Greeks struggled for their freedom and demands for parliamentary reform in Britain quickened. In a number of works made between 1829 and 1833 Turner would even allude to the latter struggle, the major British political issue of his entire lifetime. In one such design – a watercolour representing a parliamentary election in Northampton – he would even make his sympathies with the reform of Parliament quite clear, for the drawing shows the election of Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reformist administration of Earl Grey. In several works made after the attainment of Greek independence in 1830, Turner would celebrate that rebirth of freedom (for example, see a watercolour