Turner by Franny Moyle

Author:Franny Moyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-11T11:21:51+00:00

15. The overturner

July 28th. ‘Papa, Mama, Sally and Sophy dined at Cassiobury. Mr Eden there and Turner. Mr Capel passed by . . .’1

Dr Thomas Monro’s son Edward scribbled this note in his diary in 1809. The Monros had acquired a country ‘cottage orné’ at Bushey, close to George Capel-Coningsby, the Earl of Essex’s, Hertfordshire seat, Cassiobury, two years previously. The Essex and Monro families were firm friends, and much of Bushey’s appeal was its walking distance from the larger estate.

The summer routines saw Edward and his younger brother Henry walking to Bushey from Adelphi Terrace, their belongings going on ahead in a cart, in much the same way that a younger Turner and Girtin had walked to the Monros’ previous country house in Fetcham. For the first two summers of their occupancy of the cottage, the Monro family worked hard making extensive improvements to the house. Edward’s diaries describe a particularly active 1808 when even the hottest summer in fifty years, boasting 96 degrees in the shade, could not stop their progress: curtains were hung, grates installed, a well was cleaned and a lake cleared. The rooms were papered, Dutch tiles were laid and doors and floors fitted. Dr Monro’s precious drawings were hung in the ante-room. Gravel went down in the drive, and plants and turf were delivered from Elstree to lay around the house.

While his family was in situ, Monro dashed back and forth from London in a carriage or a smaller one-horse whiskey, so called because it could whisk around another vehicle. While at Bushey he indulged his favourite pastime: drawing. This, along with haymaking and cricket, were the main diversions offered at both Bushey and nearby Cassiobury during the long summer days.

By the summer of 1809 the house was fit for guests and Dr Monro began to bring friends with him. The painters Thomas Hearne and Henry Edridge were regulars, as was Joseph Farington.

The group of men drew all sorts of things. Edward noted that Henry, keen to become an artist, sketched his father on 2 July 1809. On the 5th, Edridge made a portrait of Hearne. On the 7th, Edridge, Hearne and Farington returned to town and ‘Henry mimicked Farington’. It was not long before they were back again. Typically they walked and sketched in the grounds at Cassiobury; they went to Harrow Weald and drew there, as well as at Bushey Mill and the lecture house at Watford. These were summers defined by conviviality and camaraderie.

Turner visited the Monros at Bushey too. His warm feelings towards Monro and Bushey are suggested by his ownership of four charcoal sketches by Monro from this period, today still in the possession of Turner’s family. One a landscape with trees, another featuring sheep, a third a view of a cottage and another a landscape with shepherds and sheep, all suggest days out in the fields, under a summer sun.

During these excursions, conversation returned again and again to art. When Turner was not one of the party, it was the discussion of his work that brought out strong opinions.

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