Light and Atmosphere: Turner's Interior of a Great House
During the lockdown and its sequels, while reading a biography of Joseph Mallord William Turner (‘Standing in the Sun - A life of J.M.W. Turner’ by Anthony Bailey) and a book about the English artist’s later oil paintings and watercolours (‘The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner’ by Sam Smiles), I went diving into the Tate Britain’s collection online and discovered ‘Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle’. Its subject matter, rather unexpected from an artist known mostly for his landscapes and marine paintings and particularly appealing to someone who hasn’t been able to visit another person’s house for a while now, drew me in almost immediately.
Joseph Mallord William Turner. Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle. c.1830. Photo © Tate
But whose house is this?
The painting is still known by many with a different title – ‘Interior at Petworth’, as a result of being associated with Petworth House (the Sussex seat of one of the artist’s greatest patrons, Lord Egremont) when it entered the National Gallery collection at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is still discussed and reproduced with the old title in widely read books, such as ‘Learning to Look at Paintings’ by Mary Acton, even though it has been forty years or so since the room was identified and assigned to East Cowes Castle, the Neo-gothic castle that architect John Nash built for himself on the Isle of Wight. Here Turner stayed several times, more often than not on his way to and from Petworth House.
Although, at first glance, the painting seems to represent no recognisable room, there are more defined architectural elements. Let your eyes wonder about and you’ll recognise a coved ceiling, an arched doorway flanked by curved corners with niches (the left one with a statue in it), a rather tall, gilded mirror above a fireplace on the left and a deep bay window on the right. By contrast, the objects depicted in the foreground are so blended together that identifying them proves a far more challenging task. Anthony Bailey, who likes the Petworth theory still, in the previously mentioned biography writes about several unruly dogs (did someone set the dogs on Turner?) “pulling at an orange table-cloth”, and Lord Egremont’s catafalque with on the side his coat of arms – no less! Alas, so far, I’ve spotted only an armchair next to the fireplace on the left, a single small white jumping dog and an overturned stool next to the supposed casket.
Like all the other works executed during the 1830s and associated with John Nash’s household, this interior is not a room portrait but a room impression. The light, coming in from the bay window on the right and the space (apparently a conservatory) behind the arch at the end of the room, gives this interior a visionary quality that is closer to our sensibility than to that of most of the artist’s contemporaries. In fact, as often as not, visitors to the annual Royal Academy exhibitions were annoyed, art critics and connoisseurs offended by such indistinctness.
Although today’s viewers may easily appreciate such bold and original view, there is the risk of overlooking the work that went into the production of this painting, however unfinished. Just as the brushwork is truly assured, despite looking free and effortless to the casual eye, so the composition is anything but spontaneous. While holding the position of Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, Turner had lectured on how to arrange colours to represent space and control composition. In this painting, for instance, he recreated the grand atmosphere of a drawing room just manipulating its colours – the arch at the very back recedes because surrounded by cold white and grey and blue, whereas the objects (and possibly dogs) in the foreground come forward because painted in warm red and orange. But what about the bright, emerald green brush strokes in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting? They remain the most mysterious element of the painting.
East Cowes Castle was demolished in about 1950 but an exact copy exists in County Galway, Ireland: Lough Cutra Castle. As the Irish castle’s website states that it’s possible to rent it for weddings and the likes, I wonder what its drawing room looks like and if a guest may have taken at some point a photo of it. Is there on the market a ‘Turner’ filter yet? If not, someone should really create it. Considering how familiar, after so many months of restricted movements, we have all become with the way the light bounces around our living (or, if you live in a great house, drawing) rooms, I reckon it could be quite successful.
