During the varnishing days for an exhibition at the British Institution in 1835, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), a squat, unprepossessing, difficult man, stood before his canvas at dawn with an array of brushes and vials at his feet. Turner had a tendency to submit for exhibition barely roughed-in paintings, then rework them on the wall in the days prior to the opening. This was not fecklessness on his part but a calculated tour de force, a piece of theatrical one-upmanship staged for the benefit of his fellow artists. An account, by E. V. Rippingille, of Turner completing his iconic Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), appears in James Hamilton’s biography of the painter, recently out in paperback:1
For the three hours I was there—and I understood it had been the same since he began in the morning—he never ceased to work, or even once looked or turned from the wall on which his picture hung. All lookers-on were amused by the figure Turner exhibited in himself, and the process he was pursuing with his picture. . . . In one part of the mysterious proceedings Turner, who worked almost entirely with his palette knife, was observed to be rolling and spreading a lump of half transparent stuff over his picture, the size of a finger in length and thickness. . . . Presently the work was finished: Turner gathered his tools together, put them into and
