Turner, the master of light with women always in the shadows

At 60, Turner was liberated in all senses of the word. He had never married and his father, with whom he had lived all his life, had died. His mother, long consigned to an asylum, was also dead. A mistress had been discarded and two illegitimate daughters ignored. With no family entanglements, he was now free to live with the woman he loved, Sophia Booth. Turner, yet to embark upon some of his greatest work, had found happiness at last.

A portrait of the artist at work at the Royal Academy by William Parrott

These final years are also the subject of Mr Turner, the latest film from the director Mike Leigh. Screening at the London Film Festival next month, it stars Timothy Spall in the title role. We see the vim and vigour of Turner’s old age and are introduced to the women in his life.

Spall spent three years preparing for the part, even learning to paint. His portrayal won him the best actor award when the film premiered at Cannes in May. As Spall has pointed out: “He was a funny-looking fat little man and so am I.”

So who was this funny-looking fat little man? He was certainly small (5ft 3in) and unprepossessing. The painter John Constable said Turner was “uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind”. He could be gruff, monosyllabic and charmless, particularly with the opposite sex. Women were subservient: he slept with them, drew them and used them as servants.

“His treatment of women certainly offends our 21st-century sensibilities,” says James Hamilton, his biographer, whose study, Turner: A Life, has just been reissued. “He wasn’t interested in any distractions. I think the only long-term relationship he had was with his father. But he found real contentment with Mrs Booth — she made no demands on him and gave him the freedom he needed to paint.”

Turner himself was scathing about wedlock: “I hate married men, they never make any sacrifice to the arts, but are always thinking of their wives and families, or some such rubbish of that sort.” On another occasion, perhaps thinking of his mother’s mental illness, he wrote in a sketchbook: “Women is [sic] doubtful love.” His paintings were his children: the term “my darling” was only ever used for his picture of 1839, The Fighting Temeraire, which he never sold.

Fascinated by the effects of sun and light, water and colour, he was prolific and obsessive, leaving more than 19,000 works to the nation in his will. He wasn’t interested in mere depiction, but evocation. A simple idea, but one that caused consternation among the public. Constable dismissed his canvases as “tinted steam”, while the essayist William Hazlitt viewed them as “works of nothing”.

Perhaps Turner was destined to be misunderstood in all aspects of his life. Despite his fame and his membership of the Royal Academy, he received no knighthood. Both praised and pilloried, the painter remained inside and outside society, a figure of the Establishment and an oddball. “He wasn’t conventional in either his private life or his artistic life. He was never a gentleman artist,” says Hamilton.

Perhaps because he was no gentleman. The son of a barber, Turner was born in 1775 in London’s Covent Garden and retained a Cockney accent all his life. Realising his son’s precocious talent, his father put his drawings in his shop window where they won immediate recognition. By 25, Turner was an academician and was attracting powerful patrons. Although he had considerable talent for portraiture, as his self-portrait of circa 1799 shows, he did not pursue it.

He turned instead to land and seascape but it wasn’t just the outlines on his canvases that were blurred: he had managed to use soapsuds and whitewash on his private life. After Turner’s death, the art critic John Ruskin wrote to a journalist embarking upon a biography of the late painter. He urged him not to exclude Turner’s “dark side”.

That dark side, those mistresses and illegitimate daughters, was revealed with the publication of his will. As were the erotic drawings, found among the bequest.

As Turner’s biographers have noted, his love life followed a pattern: women fell into his path. When his close friend John Danby died, he took up with his widow. Turner was 25 and Sarah Danby some 10 years his senior. He later set her up in her own home in north London and their relationship lasted 15 years, producing two daughters, Evelina and Georgiana.

His growing wealth enabled him to keep his distance from domesticity: he acquired his own house and studio in Harley Street and hired a relation of Sarah, Hannah Danby, to keep house for him. At 23, Hannah was unmarried and she would devote the next 40 years of her life to him. Whether or not they were lovers is uncertain. What is clear is that they were master and servant — as all his relationships seemed to be. “Turner talked of making a sacrifice to the arts,” says Hamilton, “and expected others to do so, too.” Sarah, Evelina, Georgiana, Hannah and Sophia all paid a price.

It was another widow, Sophia Booth, who became his final companion. They had met in the early 1830s when he took a room in the boarding house she ran with her husband in Margate, where he loved to paint. After John Booth’s death in 1833, they became lovers. They later set up home in Chelsea, and Turner went by the name of Mr Booth. For all this domestic bliss, however, Turner still kept up the pretence of living in the West End where the faithful Hannah kept house for him. To safeguard his privacy, he would refuse to give the cab driver instructions in front of his friends when hailing a cab back to Chelsea.

So many unanswered questions remain about Turner’s domestic life. He called Sophia Booth his “handmaid of art”, but was she his great love or an object to keep the bed warm? Whatever his faults, he inspired loyalty and devotion. Perhaps he recaptured the effervescence of youth with her, a quality seen in his late painting. Still, she met his every need. “She understood that painting was his first and only mistress,” says Hamilton.

By all accounts it was she who kept vigil by his bedside as he weakened. When he was close to death, witnesses recall him staggering to his bedroom window to see the light, proclaiming: “The sun is God.” They also record that as Turner died, the morning sun flooded the room.