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Turner Painted a Red Buoy on Top of Constable's Picture Hours Before the RA Opened
The Royal Academy in early nineteenth-century London held its annual exhibition for two months every summer. The paintings were hung in the Great Room at Somerset House, then later at the new Trafalgar Square building from 1837. In the three days before the exhibition opened, members of the Academy were allowed to come in and varnish their pictures: clean off the dust, freshen the colours, and (in practice) make last-minute revisions to the work itself. These were the Varnishing Days, and they were where the public reputation of British landscape painting was decided. On Varnishing Day in 1832, John Constable was at the Academy working on The Opening of Waterloo Bridge from Whitehall Stairs, a painting he had spent the previous decade preparing. His picture was 130 by 218 centimetres, a riot of crimson barge cloths, gold ceremonial uniforms, and white sky over the Thames. Hung directly next to it, on the same line, was J.M.W. Turner's Helvoetsluys, a grey seascape of Dutch warships in a calm sea. The Buoy The story is recorded in C. R. Leslie's Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, published in 1843, six years after Constable's death. Leslie was at the Academy that morning and saw what happened. Turner came in late, looked at the two paintings hanging side by side, walked back to the storage room, and returned with his palette and a brush. He stood in front of Helvoetsluys for several minutes without speaking. Then he loaded a brush with red lead, walked up to his own painting, and applied a single bright red dab to the centre of the grey sea. He stepped back, looked at the result, picked up his palette, and walked out without speaking to anyone. The red dab read as a buoy. Against Turner's grey palette, it was almost violently visible. Hung next to Constable's red-and-gold spectacle, the buoy now pulled the eye of any visitor walking through the room directly into Turner's painting first. The crimson barges in Constable's picture, the centrepiece of his composition, became visual support for Turner's one dab of paint. Constable returned shortly after. He looked at what Turner had done, and said: "He has been here, and fired a gun." What Turner Did Next The story has a coda that is often left out. Turner returned to the Academy on the morning of the public opening, two days later, with a single sable brush. He worked on the dab for about a minute. Leslie describes him "passing the brush again over the spot, lightly and tentatively, as if shaping it." When he stepped back, the dab had been worked into the form of a small painted buoy, with rope and waterline visible. Leslie's account ends there. Turner did not explain. He never publicly discussed the incident. The painting Helvoetsluys hangs today in the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, and the buoy is still there in the centre of the grey sea. J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839. National Gallery, London. Turner painted ships in their final voyages; the Temeraire is being towed to the breakers in the painting many British viewers still consider his masterpiece. What Was at Stake Constable and Turner were almost exact contemporaries. Constable was born in 1776, Turner in 1775. Both had been admitted to the Royal Academy schools as young men. Both had spent their working lives painting British landscape. Both had, by 1832, become the two living British painters who would define what landscape painting could be for the rest of the century. Their reputations had developed differently. Turner had been a child prodigy. He was admitted to the Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited at the Royal Academy from the age of fifteen, was elected an Associate at the youngest possible age, and was a full Academician by twenty-six. By 1832, he had been a Royal Academician for thirty years. Constable had had a slower career. He was not admitted as an Associate until 1819, when he was forty-three. He became a full Academician only in 1829, in his fifty-third year, and only by a single vote. The Hay Wain (1821), now considered his most famous painting, had hung at the Royal Academy in 1821 to faint praise and had failed to sell. It was eventually bought by a French dealer for the equivalent of £250 and shown at the 1824 Paris Salon, where it won a gold medal and influenced Delacroix. What the Painters Were Doing By 1832, the two painters had been moving in opposite stylistic directions for a decade. Constable was committed to the close observation of specific places: the Stour Valley in Suffolk where he had grown up, the area around Hampstead Heath where he lived in his later years, the cathedral at Salisbury. His paintings were built from extensive plein-air sketches and developed at the easel over months. The Hay Wain shows a specific stretch of the River Stour at a specific moment, with weather and light correct for that moment. Turner was moving toward an art of atmospheric effect divorced from any specific location. His paintings of the 1820s and 1830s show ships, harbours, and landscapes that are increasingly subordinated to the effects of light and weather. By the 1840s, the late watercolours and oils would dissolve almost entirely into colour, with the subject becoming a kind of armature for the chromatic event. The Varnishing Day buoy was a comment on this difference. Constable's painting had been built from specific observation; Turner's grey sea was a more abstracted vision. The single dab of red was Turner saying, in effect: my painting can absorb a single intervention and remain itself. Constable's painting could not survive a similar intervention. The two approaches were not equivalent. The Long Quarrel The buoy was not the only flashpoint between them. The two painters had circled each other for years. Constable had voted against Turner's election to several Academy committees. Turner had made disparaging remarks about Constable's painting in conversation. Both knew the other was a serious rival, and both treated the other with the careful hostility of equals. The buoy story has survived, while most of the other flashpoints have been forgotten, because the buoy captures something specific about the difference between them. Turner could not paint Constable's kind of picture, and Constable could not paint Turner's. The buoy was a moment in which Turner deliberately stepped onto Constable's territory and demonstrated that, on Constable's own wall, Turner's grey could win. What Survived The Opening of Waterloo Bridge hangs in the Tate Britain. Helvoetsluys hangs in Tokyo. The Hay Wain is in the National Gallery. The Fighting Temeraire is in the same building. Constable died in 1837, aged sixty, of indigestion. Turner died in 1851, aged seventy-six, in a Chelsea cottage where he had been living under an assumed name. Both bequeathed substantial bodies of work to the nation. The Constable estate produced the holdings now spread between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery. The Turner bequest, larger and more contentious, eventually produced the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain and the Turner Prize. The buoy is still on Helvoetsluys. It is approximately one centimetre across. The painting around it is now nearly two hundred years old, and the red has darkened slightly, but the dab is still visible from across the room. It is the smallest piece of paint in British art that has ever done more work.
Strawberry Thief: The Print Morris Refused to Make the Cheap Way
Strawberry Thief is the William Morris pattern most people can name without knowing they can name it: thrushes stealing fruit from a kitchen garden, printed in 1883 and still turning up on cushions, tote bags and, these days, framed prints. What gets left out of the story is how it was made, and why that method was never going to make Morris money. A garden, and the birds raiding it The design shows thrushes taking fruit from a kitchen garden, based on birds William Morris watched at Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire house he had rented since 1871. He named the pattern after what the birds were doing. It was first printed as a textile in 1883, by which point Morris & Co. had been running for over two decades and had moved well beyond the furniture and stained glass that had originally funded it. Why Morris did the dyeing himself By 1883, Morris had already spent years teaching himself the chemistry behind the colours in his textiles. In the mid-1870s he set up a small dye house at Queen Square in London and, for a period, dyeing took up much of his working life. This was not standard practice for a Victorian manufacturer. Most textile firms bought their dyeing in from specialists and moved on. Morris wanted to control the process himself, which meant learning it from scratch rather than delegating it. By the time Strawberry Thief went into production, that hands-on approach to colour and printing was carried out at Merton Abbey, the workshops Morris & Co. had set up south of London in 1881. The firm made a point of doing the slow version of things: hand block printing rather than mechanised rollers, dyes worked out in-house rather than bought as a finished formula. It is one reason the pattern still reads as dense and layered rather than flat. The economics never worked None of this was cheap. Morris rejected the factory methods that had made Victorian textiles affordable for most households, on the grounds that machine production degraded both the object and the person making it. The trade-off was cost: hand dyeing and hand block printing could never compete on price with a mechanised roller press, and Morris & Co.'s customers were, by necessity, wealthier than the "ordinary people" Morris said he wanted to furnish. He was open about the contradiction. By most accounts, Morris proved a better craftsman than an economist: the firm's products stayed a luxury for people who could afford handmade goods, while the factory-made alternatives he despised kept getting cheaper and more widely bought. A pattern like Strawberry Thief, worked out under his own dyeing regime at Merton Abbey rather than farmed out to a cheaper contractor, was a direct product of that choice. It survived not because it made commercial sense at the time, but because the design itself was strong enough to outlast the balance sheet that produced it. What is actually for sale now Morris's original textiles and wallpapers are in museum collections, and reissued versions of the pattern (as fabric, as wallpaper) are sold by companies with a licence to the archive. What we sell in our Strawberry Thief collection is different again: a framed fine art print of the public-domain design, made to order in the UK, sized for a wall rather than a roll of wallpaper or a metre of curtain fabric. It is one pattern among the wider William Morris collection, which covers his other repeat designs from the same decades. If you want to see Morris's actual textiles and dye work rather than a reproduction, our guide to where to see William Morris in the UK lists the collections that hold them. Strawberry Thief was never going to be an inexpensive pattern to produce. That it exists at all, in the form Morris intended, tells you something about which of his two goals (dignified handmade objects, and objects most people could afford) he was actually willing to compromise on.
Géricault Painted the Raft of the Medusa From a Government Cover-Up
On 2 July 1816, the French frigate Medusa ran aground on the Bank of Arguin, off the coast of present-day Mauritania. The ship had been carrying troops, settlers, and supplies to re-establish the French colony at Saint-Louis in Senegal, returned to France by the British under the terms of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, had been appointed for political reasons by the restored Bourbon government despite having spent twenty years out of service. He had run aground because he had refused to listen to his more experienced officers. There were not enough lifeboats. Six lifeboats carried 250 officers, sailors, and first-class passengers safely to shore. The remaining 147 people were placed on an improvised raft, twenty metres long and seven metres wide, constructed from the ship's masts and yards lashed together. The raft was to be towed to shore behind the lifeboats. Several kilometres from the wreck, the lifeboat crews cut the towlines and left the raft to drift. The Thirteen Days The raft drifted for thirteen days in the open Atlantic. The 147 people on board had a small supply of biscuits, several barrels of wine, and no fresh water. By the second night they had begun to fight; by the fourth night they had begun to die. The strong attacked the weak. The wine was drunk. The biscuits ran out. By the fifth day, some of the survivors had begun to eat the bodies of the dead. On the thirteenth day, the brig Argus, which had been sent to look for them, sighted the raft by accident. Fifteen of the original 147 were still alive. Five of those died within days of rescue. The final ten survivors gave depositions on their return to France. The Cover-Up The Bourbon government had every reason to suppress the story. Chaumareys was a Bourbon appointee. The decision to cut the towlines had been made by Bourbon-appointed officers. The whole episode was an indictment of the restored monarchy's policy of placing political loyalists rather than competent officers in command of military vessels. Two survivors, Henri Savigny (the ship's surgeon) and Alexandre Corréard (an engineer), wrote a detailed published account of the disaster. The account appeared in November 1817, titled Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse. It was a sensation. The book was attacked by royalist journals, defended by liberal ones, and circulated rapidly through Parisian society. Both authors were dismissed from government service shortly after publication. Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (one of the Insane Portraits series), c. 1822. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Géricault painted ten psychiatric patients at the Salpêtrière in the years after The Raft. Géricault Théodore Géricault was twenty-six in 1817 when he read the Savigny and Corréard book. He was the son of a wealthy Norman family, trained as a painter under Carle Vernet and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and was already known for several large equestrian paintings he had shown at the 1812 and 1814 Salons. He had recently returned from a year in Italy, where he had studied Caravaggio's Roman religious paintings and the late Michelangelo Sistine ceiling. Géricault was a liberal and was furious about the Medusa cover-up. He decided to paint the raft for the 1819 Salon, in a deliberately massive scale that would make the picture impossible to ignore. The Method The painting that resulted is 491 by 716 centimetres. It is the largest painting Géricault ever made and one of the largest paintings of the nineteenth century. The composition shows the moment of rescue: the survivors on the raft sighting the Argus on the horizon, the figures arranged in a rising pyramid from the dead at the front to the figure waving a cloth at the back. Géricault prepared the picture obsessively. He shaved his head so that he would not be distracted by his own appearance and would have to stay in the studio. He had a carpenter build a scale model of the raft. He read every account of the disaster he could find. He visited the morgue at the Hôpital Beaujon to study the colour and decay of corpses. He bought severed limbs from the morgue and arranged them in his studio to study at length. He interviewed Savigny and Corréard at length. Corréard appears in the final painting: he is the figure in the centre-left, standing with his arm outstretched, pointing toward the horizon where the Argus has been sighted. Géricault hired the surgeon Savigny as a technical consultant. The carpenter who built the raft model also built the studio model of the rescue. What the Painting Shows The Raft was hung at the 1819 Salon in October 1819. The reception was sharply divided. Liberal critics praised it as a political statement. Royalist critics attacked its size and its colouring. The painter Antoine-Jean Gros, an older neoclassicist whose own work had once held the avant-garde position Géricault now occupied, said the painting was "the corpses of the Bourbons painted by a former Bonapartist." The picture did not sell at the Salon. Géricault had hoped it would be purchased by the government for the Louvre. It was not. He exhibited it privately in London in 1820, where it drew large paying audiences and made him roughly the equivalent of £20,000 in modern money over a six-month exhibition run. The painting was eventually acquired by the Louvre in 1824, the year of Géricault's death, for a price that was lower than what he had been paid in private London ticket sales. It has hung there since. The Short Career Géricault produced about 300 paintings and several thousand drawings in his lifetime. He died in January 1824, aged thirty-two, from complications of a riding accident. The Raft was the only major political painting of his career. After it, he had moved to a smaller scale: a series of psychiatric patient portraits made at the Salpêtrière in 1821 to 1822 (ten paintings, of which five survive), several lithograph series, and the equestrian studies that had always been his side interest. The early death has been a kind of biographical asset to his reputation. Géricault is the founding example of the doomed Romantic painter: huge ambition, formal innovation, political engagement, dead at thirty-two. The model carried through Delacroix (who modelled for one of the figures in The Raft), through Manet a generation later, through Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and into the modern myth of the painter who burns hot and brief. What the Raft Did The Raft of the Medusa was the first large-scale modern history painting that took its subject from contemporary news rather than from classical or biblical history. The convention of nineteenth-century history painting had been to ennoble the present by allegorising it: to paint a Napoleonic victory, but with the figures dressed in Roman costume. Géricault refused the convention. He painted a contemporary disaster as a contemporary disaster, with the survivors named, the captain identifiable, the political failure visible. The painting changed what large-scale public painting could be. Within a generation, Delacroix would paint the 1830 Revolution (Liberty Leading the People, 1830) on a similar scale and with a similar refusal of allegorical distancing. Manet would paint the execution of Maximilian in 1867 on the same Raft-scaled canvas. The line of large modern history paintings of the next century has its origin in the wall of the 1819 Salon. The Raft also stayed politically useful. It became a reference point in French left-wing politics through the nineteenth century, an image that liberal papers would invoke whenever a Bourbon (later, a Napoleonic, later, a Bonapartist) regime committed an avoidable disaster. The painting did the political work Géricault had built it to do. The Bourbon regime fell in 1830. Chaumareys, the captain who had grounded the Medusa, was court-martialled and given three years in prison: a sentence that Géricault's painting had helped make politically necessary.