A winter's afternoon at Petworth

PERSONAL COLUMN LORD EGREMONT

It is a dull winter's afternoon with dark clouds scudding before a whistling south-west wind. The wind at Petworth can make a strange noise as it strikes and soughs round the house— more such noise than I have heard in any other house. I don't know why this is so, but it is. Perhaps it is because the wind comes through some gap in the Downs and the house is the first important obstacle that it meets. Indoors my wife and I sit by the fire in the White Library discussing Christmas plans. I ask her not to give me an expensive Christmas present: I cannot afford it this year. I read an article in a magazine about middle age.

I retire to the Turner Room to catch up with, correspondence by one of two large windows. It is still dull outside and the wind goes on whistling. But the whole room seems to be lit up inside from Turner's pictures corus- cating on lion-coloured walls and reflected in a big rococo looking-glass set between the windows. Light was the ally with which Turner carried all before him, filling his pictures with impalpable and haunting presences.

Turner's patron at Petworth was George Lord Egremont. This Lord Egremont was humane, cultured, distinguished both as a patron of the arts and as an agriculturist; observant, spritely, accurate, shrewd, eccentric, benevolent, well grounded in the classics, of literary and artistic bent, highly competent in business and all practical affairs, a leading landowner and agricultural reformer, Lord Lieutenant of his county in the most literal sense of the term, and a winner of five Derbys and five Oaks, all but one with horses bred by himself.

Burke spoke of him as 'delighting to reign in the dispensation of happiness.' This was true. But he was shy, and he preferred the com- pany of artists and agriculturists to that of grandees. Egremont was one of very few of his kind who appreciated Turner rightly. He had a character which did not include a wish to look well in the sight of posterity. His help and hospitality to painters and men of letters has nevertheless secured for him a lasting reputation as a great patron of the arts.

I start on my correspondence. Here's a letter from a friend who has bought a house in Aldeburgh with title deeds showing that from 1799 to 1833 it belonged to the Honourable Percy Charles Wyndham. Can I tell him any- thing about this relative of mine? I pad round to the Muniment Room and do a bit of research. I return to the Turner Room and write : 'Percy was a younger son of the 2nd Earl of Egremont. He was born in 1757 and died in 1833. He was endowed with West Indian sinecures. He sat in Parliament for Chichester and then for Midhurst. In 1790 the 3rd Earl of Egremont bought the Midhurst constituency for £40,000 and gave it to Percy.

`Percy was a Foxite and Egremont was not. Percy would vote one way in the House of Commons and Egremont the other in the House of Lords—an example of a pocket- borough patron and his nominee voting on opposite sides without recrimination. Percy when he died left behind him, among other things, eighty-eight pairs of stockings. He never married but, so far as I can make out.had a mistress called Elizabeth Jones.

'That is all I know about Percy Charles Wyndham.'

My next letter is to another friend about arrangements for him to come to stay with us for Christmas." Suddenly in my mind a delayed-action bomb, undoubtedly set by that magazine article about middle age, goes off. I glumly realise that this will be my forty- eighth Christmas. I am depressed. The mind meanders. I stare out of the window. The late afternoon sun has come out, illuminating the park and the lake with rays reflected from the water rippled by the wind, the oaks and beeches, the does and the bucks, in a breath- taking light. On the wall in front of me is a picture by Turner of the same scene, which hasn't changed since he painted it. The picture is more breathtaking still. When it was fatuously said to Turner about one of his pic- tures : 'Yes, but, you know, I never see sunsets as you paint them,' No,' said Turner, 'but wouldn't you like to!' He could be as rude as only a shy, brilliant curmudgeon could be. He was mad about painting but resented re- marks from people who weren't. When a friendly visitor to Turner's gallery, the Rev Mr Kingsley, told him that his mother had liked his picture Snow Storm: Steamboat of a Harbour's Mouth, Turner snubbed him: 'I didn't paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like: I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture.'

`But my mother once went through such a scene, and it brought it all back to her.'

'Is your mother a painter?'

'No.'

'Then she ought to have been thinking of something else.'

Yet, curiously enough, Turner often said that if he could have begun life again he would rather have been an architect.

As I sit in the Turner Room I can see deer in the park outside. Their ancestors are in Turner's picture on the wall in front of me— with two bucks fighting. Those bucks are fight- ing for the does. In fallow deer circles, winner takes all. Turner would have felt sorry for the bucks thus excluded from the enjoyment of feminine society.

Turner was the miserly son of a miserly London barber: 'Dad never praised me except for saving a shilling.' But, outside painting, pre- occupation • with concupiscence exceeded even his passion for money. Turner and Carew, the sculptor, were once fishing in the lake at Pet- worth, when Carew, in his blunt Irish way, broke silence and said :

`Turner, they tell me you're very rich.'

'Am I?'

'Yes; everybody says so.'

`Ah! I would give it all up again to be twenty years of age again.'

'What! Do you like it as well as all that?' `Yes, I do.'

When he had it he wasn't particular about the way he enjoyed it. There are legends about sordid carryings-on in squalid brothels and taverns in Wapping. After Turner's death RuS- kin was going through the sketches and draw- ings that were part of the treasury which Turner had left to the nation. Ruskin was startled to find some very erotic sketches which 'from the nature of their subjects it seemed un- desirable to preserve,' recorded W. M. Rossetti,

who had been helping Ruskin authority his task. So

a Ruskin burned them on the uthority of the trustees of the National Gallery. Turner's private life was his own business and about it, the trustees of the National Gallery thought, the rest of us should mind ours.

About Turner and money, the engraver Lupton, who was a contemporary, said :. 'In

the sale of his pictures he always took a high

moral position. When asked the-price of ,a pic- ture by a purchaser he would say two hundred

guineas. The reply has been, "No. I will give you one hundred and seventy-five." "No. I won't take it." On the morrow the applicant for the picture has come again. "Well, Mr Turner, I suppose I must give you your price for that picture : the two hundred guineas." Mr Turner has been known to reply : "Ah that was my price yesterday, but I have changed my mind also; the' price of the picture today is

two hundred and twenty-five guineas." The applicant went away, and perhaps the next day was glad to have the picture at another in- creased price.' Well, that was Turner's own business too—doubly so.

But in a more understanding and, I trust, a more compassionate age many would prefer to know as much as possible about a great man in order to understand the whole. I wish Ruskin hadn't burned those sketches.

The windows in the Turner Room darken. The sun sets behind the western horizon of the park.

One night in 1834 when the artists Turner, Constable, Phillips and Leslie and Leslie's family were staying at Petworth, their host put on a fireworks display in the park. For all I know they may have watched it from the

windows of the room in which I am, sitting.

Leslie's small daughter was there. As the rockets soared into the sky, Leslie's little girl squeaked up and said : 'Won't God be shot?'

This pleased Constable's personal belief in the artistic supremacy of the skies. It is not re- corded that Turner said anything; but what he might have said was that God was out of sight just now, because 'The Sun is God' is what Turner said when he was dying.

The curtains in the Turner Room are drawn. Lights are turned up. There is now nothing to remind me of the outside except the picture opposite, ever glowing, and the whistling of the wind.

I return to my letters.