Turner Bequest

Presentation by Dr Selby Whittingham, Secretary of The Independent Turner Society,  on the Occasion of the 150^th Anniversary of the House of Lords Report on the Turner Bequest to the Parliamentary All-Party Arts & Heritage Group at the House of Lords on 29 November 2011.

I wish to express my thanks to Lord Crathorne for inviting us to discuss the Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on its 150^th anniversary.

If that Report had not been made, there might be no Tate Britain on Millbank today and the National Gallery of British Art might still be at South Kensington, attached to the V&A.  It was acted on instantaneously, but fatally one vital condition of Turner’s will was never fulfilled.

My aim is to give the main facts objectively and to show their continuing relevance.  However the debate about how Turner’s wishes should be treated is inevitably coloured by subjective preconceptions, so I will say a word about mine.

I began as an admirer of Ruskin and then of Turner’s watercolours at Manchester, where I became a curator after completing a classics degree.  Like others I found the Turner display at the Tate then unsatisfactory.  But I was even more  unhappy about the one at the National Gallery, where the idea of a separate room for the Turners was abandoned 80 years ago (though there were still 118 oils there in 1946)  and instead Turners and Constables alternated on the walls.  I am an admirer of  both artists, but the juxtaposition of the two did each no favours, making Constable look dull and Turner meretricious.  

Yet it is this idea that artists must be seen in the context of their contemporaries – derived from the tenets of art history rather than  the lessons of one’s eye – that governs the Tate’s view today in complete disregard of what Turner made a condition of his main bequest.

Dido building Carthage

Sun rising through vapour

He had, it is true, left two pictures to hang between two by Claude, an arrangement which the National Gallery boasts of adhering to, while silent about its disregard of the terms of the main bequest - for a wing to be built at the National Gallery in which his 100 or so remaining finished oil paintings should be kept within it unmixed with others and constantly, and this should  be done within 10 years of his death.

What should be done with the unfinished pictures, watercolours and drawings?  While the terms of the gift of the finished pictures could not be clearer, the fate of these was less so, as Turner had written a codicil himself about them.  So his executors took the matter to the Chancery court to be decided.  

In 1856 Vice-Chancellor [Richard Torin] Kindersley issued an order saying that “all the Pictures, Drawings and Sketches by the Testator’s Hand, without Distinction of finished or unfinished, are to be deemed as well given for the Benefit of the Public.”  Again the wording was careful, though it has led to disagreement.

The Director of the National Gallery claimed that the decree absolved it of any obligation to carry out Turner’s conditions, whereas some of his executors – John Ruskin and George Jones RA notably – disagreed.

Exactly a year later Lord St Leonards raised the matter in the House of Lords. Like Turner, he was the son of a barber, albeit a more educated one.  He had been Lord Chancellor when Turner’s will first came to court in 1852.  The old DNB said that “within his limits he as nearly realised the ideal of an infallible oracle of law.”  Another said that “in all questions of real property” he was “an infallible authority.” 

His speech (filling over 9 columns of Hansard)  is reprinted in “The Case for a Turner Gallery” published by the Turner Society in 1979 and subsequently by myself in “An Historical Account of the Will of J.M.W.Turner, R.A.”  He recited the terms given in the will and codicils and how no wing of the National Gallery had been built for the pictures.  He had written to Sir Charles Eastlake, Director of the National Gallery,  who was evasive, but “there could be no doubt from the tenor of his note that the opinion of Sir C.Eastlake was that the pictures were held subject to no conditions.”

St Leonards continued: “Even supposing that the terms of the will were to some extent inoperative in law", he contended that "the nation having got possession of the pictures was bound to comply with the conditions".  But there was nothing in the decree of Vice Chancellor Kindersley to favour the view which seemed to be taken  by Sir C. Eastlake.  That decree declared that the finished pictures were well given by Turner to the Trustees of the National Gallery, which implied that the nation could not hold them except by complying with the conditions. If ever an intention was clearly and strongly expressed by a testator, so as to render escape from its injunctions impossible, it was the direction of Turner that the National Gallery trustees should not have possession of his pictures unless and until they had built a gallery for their reception.  No attempt had been made to build a gallery, and instead of keeping the pictures entire in one collection, according to the provision in the codicil of 1848, the trustees had put a certain number of them in what had been called the ‘dark holes’ of Marlborough house.

For the government the veteran Marquess of Lansdowne, a trustee of the National Gallery, replied.  He began by making a joke:  “Although Mr Turner could draw everything else – there was one thing which he could not draw – namely a will.”  This, however, was irrelevant as the bequests to the National Gallery were drawn by his lawyers and crystal clear.  “He could undertake to say”, he continued, “for the present Government, and he thought he might undertake to say as much for their successors, that the great object of Turner would never be lost sight of.”  Vaguely he talked of facility to study the pictures, “but whether it would be in a separate building or in a gallery built for them in connection with the future National Gallery, it was impossible at present to say.”

  

Nothing happened either for Turner or the National Gallery, which after 4 or more reports remained stuck in the 6 rooms to the left of the main entrance to the present building, though with a large room added  (since demolished) behind the entrance not for Turner but for the old masters.  Turner’s deadline loomed.  In May 1861 the Keeper wrote to St Leonards that another room about 300 feet long could be added equivalent to 4 of that new room in length but much greater in width.  A design for this survives by Sir James Pennethorne, the government architect.

On 27 June 1861 St Leonards initiated another debate in the House of Lords.  He repeated that the nation had a legal obligation in the case of Turner’s Gallery, as it had acknowledged by its actions over the first bequest. He added:  “But there were higher obligations – moral obligation and national honour.”  EarlGranville replied for the government, saying that rooms had been built at South Kensington in 1859, whereby “the paintings were … showed in a manner in which they had never been seen before.” 

LordOverstone, a trustee of the National Gallery, expressed his dissatisfaction with this reply.  There should be strict compliance with the wishes of testators. The South Kensington rooms did not fulfil Turner’s intentions, and, if he could have foreseen the present state of things, he would have cancelled his bequest.

On 8 July a Return was made by the National Gallery to the Treasury minuting a meeting that day of its Trustees -  The Director (Eastlake), Lord Monteagle in the chair, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Overstone, The Accountant General of the Court of Chancery (William Russell – cousin of Lord John Ruseell) and Thomas Baring MP.  This importantly stated that no time limit for the Turner Gallery had been mentioned when the pictures were received in 1856.  However, “grave Doubts …supported by high legal Authority, have been raised, whether the Necessity of observing that Condition does not still bind the Trustees, and whether the fulfilment of it is not indispensable, in order to prevent a forfeiture by default of performance.”  

In short, “whether that trust be considered as created by the Will itself, or by the Decree of the Court of Chancery, or as dependent upon the combined Authority of both, these pictures are held by them under an obligation, binding alike on legal and moral grounds, to see that the undoubted object of the Testator is fulfilled.”

On 10 July John Ruskin wrote to St Leonards that he had always understood that by the 1856 decree “the pictures which were to be taken by the public were to be taken under, and subject to, the conditions prescribed by the testator. “  Secondly, “That the public became, by that arrangement, possessors of a larger number of pictures than the testator intended, does not appear to me to invalidate the obligation to carry out the conditions attached to the possession of the smaller number.”

St Leonards called for copies of the will and decree to be printed and circulated to the House.  On 15 July the Government appointed a Select Committee  “To Consider and Report in what Manner the Conditions annexed by the Will of the late Mr. Turner, R.A., to the Bequest of his Pictures to the Trustees of the National Gallery can best be carried out”  and then to do the same with regard to the 1847 Vernon Gift of British pictures.  In the event there was no time to consider those, and later Vernon’s nephew bitterly complained that his uncle’s wishes (rashly not put in legally binding form) had been ignored.

The committee consisted of  9 Liberals and 9 Conservatives, chaired by the Lord President of the Council, Earl Granville.  It included the Earl of Derby, Leader of the Opposition, who had appointed St Leonards Lord Chancellor in 1852 and had invited him again in 1858.  There were besides two other former Lord Chancellors, Cranworth and Chelmsford, neither of whom queried St Leonards’ opinion, other ministers, such as Lord Lansdowne, and 9 museum trustees.

The witnesses were Sir Charles Eastlake and Ralph Wornum, Director and Keeper of the National Gallery, Richard Redgrave RA, Keeper of Art at South Kensington (where the Turners were exhibited in a National Gallery outpost), the Architect to the Office of Works, Pennethorne, and lastly Lord Overstone, committee member and National Gallery trustee.

Eastlake had been a friend of Turner, but much less so of some of his executors.  His wife had called Turner’s “a very stupid will”. He has been recently honoured by the National Gallery for his role in building up its collection  of Old Masters.  

However, his roles of Director of the National Gallery and President of the Royal Academy conflicted, when both competed for the whole of the present National Gallery building.  The Art Journal wrote after his death, “His timidity was so great, that he seldom did right because of his continual dread of doing wrong.”  When one asks whether he thought the terms of wills in general, and Turner’s in particular, should be honoured, one is baffled. One minute he said Yes, and the next No.  Like so many today, he wanted to have it both ways – to have the credit of being moral and yet the freedom to act as he liked.

The Keeper, Wornum, was more robust.  He described the unfinished pictures as “not of any value whatever … mere botches.”  Evidently only the 103 finished pictures were considered for hanging when Pennethorne was asked for his estimates.

Richard Redgrave was even more forthright, and an appendix was annexed to the Report giving his views on “how the law relating to gifts and bequests should be altered.”   To Lord Overstone he expostulated, “you are assuming that Turner’s will is to over-rule what is best in the opinion of the trustees, what is best in the opinion of the director, what is best in the opinion of the Government, and what is best in the opinions of those who are able to judged under the altered circumstances which Turner could not have foreseen.”  

However the majority of trustees supported St Leonards, not the curators.  “Putting entire collections, such as those of Turner and Vernon,” Redgrave continued, “ would be putting little monarchies in the republic of art.” Too many of the pictures were “caviare to the multitude.”  “It is rather an injury to a man to have such an excessive number of his works exhibited at one view.”

Norham Castle, Sunrise

Some of the pictures were inferior, but he declined to say which.  In fact one of the unfinished ones dismissed by Wornum, Norham Castle – Sunrise,  is the best-selling postcard at the Tate.  What is caviare to the multitude today are the wordy catalogues by curators, not the pictures. 

Whereas Overstone thought Turner wanted his pictures near the old masters – as indicated by his first bequest – Redgrave, on no evidence, thought he wanted them with the modern British ones, so that his wishes were carried out with them at South Kensington with the rest of the British School.

The Committee sat on 16, 18,19, 23 and 29 July.  Lord St Leonards’ views about the obligations imposed by the will were accepted unanimously, and Redgrave’s rejected.    The only disagreement was as to whether the Turner Gallery should be built immediately (though that could hardly be completed by 19 December) or deferred until the question of the National Gallery site was settled.   The first was supported by St Leonards, Stanley of Alderley and Monteagle and opposed by Granville, Lansdowne, Salisbury, Hardinge, Foley and Overstone.  Lansdowne and Foley, however, switched to supporting St Leonards’ compromise motion.

The Report stated that under the will and Court decree the nation had 362 pictures and many watercolours “and the nation ought … to carry out the conditions annexed to the gift in like manner as the conditions annexed to the gift of the two pictures now between the two Claude’s, have been complied with.” 


Secondly, that “no further delay should take place in providing a room or rooms for the reception and exhibition of his pictures and drawings … in connexion with the National Gallery, to be called ‘Turner’s Gallery.’”  


Thirdly, that “it is  expedient that the finished pictures by Turner should be forthwith deposited and properly hung in one of the rooms of the present National Gallery”. 


Fourthly, that, unless there was “some reasonable prospect of seeing” a worthy National Gallery building,  “it appears desirable steps should be  forthwith taken for making the limited addition to the present Gallery suggested by Mr Pennethorne.”  

The Report was accepted by the Government, Opposition and National Gallery. The finished pictures were squeezed into the West room at Trafalgar Square in September-October.  All the recommendations were at first heeded but Turner’s Gallery was never built.  Yet Wornum boldly stated in The Turner Gallery book (1861-2) that “the conditions of the painter’s will are now fulfilled.”  The same response was given when the Foundling Hospital, one of the charities Turner named as beneficiary if his conditions were not met and the pictures sold, wrote to the gallery at the end of the year.  This was the first of a series of fraudulent replies by the authorities made over the generations.

[n.b. The presentation had to end here, as the Autumn Financial Statement was being given in the chamber of the House of Lords.  Before that Leolin Price CBE QC spoke for some minutes on legal aspects].

Since 1861 

Even when the Royal Academy moved out of the building in Trafalgar Square in 1869, the National Gallery had far too little room.  The radical First Commissioner of Works, Acton Smee Ayrton, complained that there were too many Turners.  Lord Cowper-Temple and Thomas Baring reiterated that Turner’s wishes should be honoured.  Lord St Leonards was now 89, though reputedly could still vault over his garden fence.  He wrote to The Times reiterating his opinion.

Five years later he died, as had almost all of Turner’s executors. In 1882 a Bill was introduced allowing the National Gallery to lend works which had been received 25 or more years earlier regardless of whether the terms of a bequest forbad that. This was clearly retrospective legislation directed specifically to include the Turner Bequest, received 26 years earlier. It also tacitly accepted that the terms of that bequest forbad loan and either were or might still be operative.

Light and Colour

The Bill became an Act the following year after the briefest of debates in the House of Lords, the only speakers being Earl Granville and Viscount Hardinge, now chairman of the National Gallery trustees. These had been among the most sceptical members of the 1861 committee. As a consequence next year 30 finished and 2 unfinished Turner oils were lent to provincial museums, where many remained for over 60 years.  These included the now famous Light and Colour thought essential to understanding Turner.

Extensions continued to be made to the National Gallery, but not for Turner. In 1897 the Tate opened as an outpost of the National for works by artists born after Turner. 

In Trafalgar Square Ruskin’s efforts had caused a large display of watercolours to fill rooms in the “basement”, where some remained until 1932, Sir Charles Holmes, former Director, uttering imprecations on those who let them go.  

In an interregnum between directors in 1905 the unfinished oils, of which only two or three were exhibited,  were “discovered” in the stores.  In fact an official had for years been trying to draw attention to them.  17, including some late finished ones banished to the provinces, were lent “temporarily” to the Tate and produced a sensation as anticipating modern art.

The following year the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Sir Lionel Cust, wrote a long letter to The Times. “Lack of money, lack of official sympathy, and, above all, and worst of all, lack of national interest nullified the effects of Turner’s specific intentions …”   He then proposed that ground at the back of the Tate “might be used in part for the building of a real Turner gallery, in which the works of the great English painter could be collected together.”

A contradiction lay at the heart of this idea which has persisted ever since.  Cust talked of collecting the works together as did others, but it soon became clear that the proposal was to divide them between Trafalgar square and Millbank.  Secondly, he referred to the exhibition at the Tate as “carrying still further the violation of Turner’s wishes,” though he was proposing to do the same to a much greater extent.  The National Portrait Gallery of course was also short of space and it was in the interest of both it and the National Gallery to remove most of the Turners from Trafalgar Square.

His suggestion bore fruit.  Sir J J Duveen offered to pay for a Turner wing at the Tate to reunite the bequest.   One of the National Gallery Trustees, Alfred de Rothschild, objected to the move and took legal advice, which was that the 1883 Act empowered a loan but not a transfer.  So, basing it on the fiction that it would only be a temporary loan, the bulk of the pictures and drawings were moved to the Duveen wing of the Tate which opened in 1910.  That comprised  9 rooms, including one very large one, though Turner lost the 4 bottom ones after the 1928 Tate flood, after which the drawings were moved to the British Museum.

The merits and legality of this move were debated at length in the correspondence columns of The Times 1906-10.  Maurice Brockwell, a cataloguer at the National Gallery, pointed out that the move of the pictures from South Kensington to Trafalgar Square in 1861 “was either necessitated by legal requirements or was an absolute farce”.  By the same token the move to the Tate must be wrong.  To those complaining of the immorality of this Charles Stokes, a writer on art, replied, “The ‘national honour’ is so little concerned with matters of art that it may well be left out of the discussion.” 

Then in 1916 a Bill reached its Third Reading which would allow the sale of Turners.  It was proposed to sell 40 oils and 200 watercolours in order to pay for the Duke of Sutherland’s Titians, which in the event were not for sale. This was supported by D.S.McColl, recent curator of the Tate,  trustees of the National Gallery such as the Marquess of Lansdowne and Earl Curzon,  and Lord Courtney of Penwith,  who as a very liberal treasury minister  had piloted the 1882-3 Bill.  It was opposed by a bevy of Royal Academicians headed by Sir William BlakeRichmond, A.J.Finberg, the leading Turner scholar of the first half of the last century, William White, first curator of the Ruskin Museum, Sir ClaudePhillips, curator of the Wallace Collection,  Viscount Burnham, the Duke of Westminster and other peers.  The 1861 Report was not mentioned and the debate was about whether donors’ wishes in general should be honoured or not.

In 1939 the authoritative biography of Turner by A.J.Finberg was published by Oxford University Press. He devoted the last chapter to a history of The Turner Bequest.  He stated that “the time has come for a general recognition of the injustice that has been done to Turner by the nation’s evasion of the obligation imposed upon it by the acceptance of his bequest.”  After the war this was echoed by others, such as Lord Beaverbrook, and later John Walker, sometime Director of the National Gallery of Art at Washington, in his book on Turner in a section headed “Betrayal.” 

In 1975 Sir John Betjeman proposed that the Turners should be moved to the Fine Rooms of Somerset House, and gained the support of Lord Clark, Sir Hugh Casson and Henry Moore, who became President of the Turner Society, founded to press for the bequest, divided between the National Gallery, Tate and British Museum, to be reunited in a separate gallery.  Lady Birk, minister at the Department of the Environment, convened a meeting and working parties were set up.  These concluded that the rooms were totally unsafe for paintings.  Shortly after it was decided that they were perfectly safe for the Courtauld Gallery pictures.

Then Sir Charles Clore and his daughter offered to build a new Turner wing at the Tate, which opened 25 years ago next April Fool’s Day.  In the Queen’s speech it was said that the bequest was “brought together at last and on display as he [Turner] would have wished.”   This claim was as fraudulent as the one made by the National Gallery in 1861. The pictures retained at the National Gallery were deceptively loaned to the Clore for 6 months, not kept there “constantly”.  As in 1861 the curators must have known that they were engaged in deception, as I had raised the issue repeatedly with Dr Martin Butlin of the Tate in the preceding years.

For others – architects, exhibition experts, Turner scholars - the fact that the Clore was quite unfit for purpose was of more moment, and is not now disputed by the Tate, which, partly as a consequence, has for the last decade abandoned any pretence to a constant display, removing the oils from the reserve galleries, opening the main galleries to works by other artists, and either storing or sending on exhibition many of the oils, so that often only a quarter of the finished pictures which Turner willed should be shown constantly together are on view in the Clore.  At a hearing on arts finance of the Culture Select Committee earlier this year Dame Vivien Duffield repeated that she now wished she had given the money for purposes other than the Clore Gallery.

What should be done now?  I think any new plan should be based on two premises.

The Fighting Temeraire

1. If the Turner Gallery was really treated as a major asset and advertised as such, it could attract huge numbers of tourists to London. Julian Spalding, who is unfortunately detained by an L.S.Lowry project, persuaded me to write A Vision of the First Proper National “Turner’s Gallery”, in which I try to show how that might be done. A short time ago artists polled about which artist they regarded as most influential today put Turner second.  Some years ago another poll voted “The Fighting Temeraire” the nation’s favourite picture.  Because of this esteem his name has been borrowed – for the Turner Prize and Turner Contemporary.  But where do you see the name “Turner Gallery”?
2.  The Turner Gallery should be genuinely as close to what Turner wanted as is now practical. The main objection to that is the one raised by Richard Redgrave in 1861 and  satirised by Anthony Trollope in The Warden.   However the basic idea of keeping a permanent collection of an artist’s works is one which many artists have had and is of timeless validity.  If, say, Raphael had given works on such a condition, we would surely be disappointed if his wishes had been undone.  In Turner’s case there is the added argument that the pictures make more sense if seen together – that is if there is sufficient space to show them intelligibly.

However circumstances have changed both with regard to the National Gallery and to the Bequest.Turner would have envisaged an enlarged National Gallery like the Alte Pinakothek at Munich, which is unchanged since built and still has a large Rubens Room. 


The National might have had a Raphael Gallery for the Cartoons.  And instead of being rigidly historical, it could have had a Tribuna or Salon Carrế as at the Louvre, in which his two pictures between Claudes would have made sense.  Instead the National – and Tate Britain -  are arranged by schools and centuries and are ever expanding in contents and buildings, so that they undergo periodic rearrangements.  A permanent wing to one artist gets in the way by impeding such rearrangement and upsetting the balance of representation aimed at. 

The Turner Bequest meanwhile was greatly enlarged in 1856 by the addition of the unfinished pictures and drawings.  That had no effect on what happened – or failed to happen – until 1905, when the unfinished oils began to be valued and exhibited.


As for the drawings, the national collections of watercolours are at the V&A and BritishMuseum.  The National Gallery did not collect them, and, though the Tate does, it has few watercolours.


After 1856 it was debated whether the drawings should be put in the British Museum, as happened after 1928, but it was decided that the priority was to keep the bequest together.  When the Tate asked for the drawings back from the British Museum in the 1980s, Lord Eccles told me that this would happen over his dead body.  


To Turnerians, although not to some curators, this seemed absurd.  However the claim of the Tate to show Turner in his British context fails, because that is just not what happens with regard to the watercolours.  But rightly the claims of the integrity of the bequest have trumped the claims of art historians about context.

If such a collection were received today, worth several billion, it would surely be treated as I suggest.  Some have acknowledged the validity of these aims, but doubt that they can be achieved.  That depends on whether there is a will to.  Is there still the public apathy mentioned by Sir Lionel Cust in 1906? 


When the foundation stone for the National Theatre was laid in Cromwell Road by Bernard Shaw, he said:  “People sometimes ask me, ‘Do the English people want a national theatre?’  Of course they do not.  They have got a British Museum, a National Gallery, a Westminster Abbey, and they never wanted any of them.  But once these things stand, as mysterious phenomena that have come to them, they are quite proud of them, and feel that the place would be incomplete without them.”

I think the same would be the attitude to a first rate Turner Gallery.  Once erected, no one would want to go back to what we have now.  But, if the status quo prevails, people will go on complaining as they have done every one of the last 5 generations.

If the dream of a proper Turner Gallery – the word used by Cust in 1906 – is to be realised, Parliament representing the nation has to bring that about.  It is no use leaving the matter to the galleries.

In 1969 Jennie Lee,  the first Arts Minister,  answered a question in the Commons by referring to the 1861 Report without implying that it was no longer applicable.  Having ceded her seat to your President, whom I am sorry not to see here today, and elevated as Baroness Lee in 1975 she signed the TurnerSociety’s petition calling for action.  Regrettably her successors have been deaf to that.  On a delegation to one, Lord Donaldson – whose interest, it must be said was in music – I remember him chiding Henry Moore for getting into such a lather over what he evidently considered a rather minor matter.

A defence made by the Tate, rehearsed tamely in ministerial replies, has been that however bad the Clore has been as a gallery, it has promoted the publication of a lot of catalogues.  A major fault in the status quo is that the scholarly and curatorial tail wags the Turner dog.  The play’s the thing, not donnish marginalia, however interesting they are to a few.  


In 1976 Robert Medley annoyed the curators in an article in The Spectator saying they put their ambitions first, whereas he wanted to see Turner complete and unedited. Lord Bruce of Donington, one of the Turner Society’s first Vice-Presidents, quoted the adage that experts should be on tap, not on top.  Another Vice-President,  Sir Hugh Casson, who had been a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, commented that board discussion always ended by saying, “Leave it to the Director.”

The curators’ interest does not always coincide with the public’s, as I learnt as a young curator. In their “Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts” Merryman and Elsen have cautioned potential benefactors, about museum trustees and curators, “under their suave, solicitous manners lie strongly beating avaricious hearts (selflessly avaricious on behalf of their museum;  institutional avarice is the most ruthless kind).”

I suggest Turner’s fate has been left for too long to the galleries and that Parliament, which has legislated for the present situation, needs to reconsider and to look at the evidence, not just what the galleries tell it.

A New Select Committee

I suggest that a new Select Committee should be appointed to consider the matter thoroughly.  The House of Lords has many members qualified to consider the artistic, museological, moral and legal questions this would raise.  I would hope that this would result, first, in legislation to preserve the integrity of the bequest by vesting it in a Turner Bequest Trust, just as there is a Chantrey Trust. 

Secondly,  a really fine Turner Gallery should be erected. What and where that should be should only be considered after a new Report.  A mistake we made in 1975 was to do the reverse, a major reason for the inadequate brief for the Clore.

Turner, of course, provided for a wing of the National Gallery, albeit in the years 1832-48 for his own gallery attached to his almshouse,  indicating that he regarded keeping his works together a higher priority than a presence in the National Gallery beyond that of the two pictures of his first bequest. 


Ruskin evidently favoured a separate gallery, and the 1861 report carefully said that the Turner Gallery should be “in connexion with” the National Gallery.  In similar circumstances an American museum erected a building connected to the main one by a tunnel.

    

It might take at least 5 years before any money were required.  There is now the Lottery Money, a lot of which has been wasted on failed museum projects.  Moreover Tate Britain still badly needs more space, and money will have to be found for further extensions.  Yet the vacated Clore rooms would be available free. 


Do we want to see a repeat of what happened in the 19^th century when new extensions were repeatedly built for the National Gallery but never, in blind disregard of the 1861 Report, for Turner?

What should a new committee consider?

What should a new Select Committee consider?  I suggest the following.

1. It should commission a valuation of the Bequest.  When I was at Manchester I got Evelyn Joll of Agnews to value its Turners, the resulting high valuation coming as a surprise to the gallery, which has since made much more of its Turners.  But more importantly such a valuation would highlight how a few oils are worth maybe £20, 30, 50 or more millions, whereas there are scribbled sketches worth scarcely £100.  A statistic which has repeatedly confused debate is the total number of oils and drawings. In 1992 I suggested that, if all the finished pictures were then worth about £177m, the five at the National Gallery that should be in the Turner Gallery might be worth £50m.  One would have to multiply those figures for today’s values.
2. It should ask for a return to be made detailing the history of lending each work – in particular of the finished paintings and more particularly still of the dozen most valuable.  How many of the last have been permanently on view and where – at the Tate or National Gallery? 
3.  Turner’s will and the 1856 decree clearly need to be looked at.  To these I have added all Turner’s and his lawyers’ drafts which I dug up at the Public Record Office and which cast a light on their thinking. 
4. The Acts of Parliament from 1883 to 1992 which have governed the Bequest, and the debates preceding these.
5. So too the debates preceding them and the various official reports on the museums, such as the Massey Report of 1944.
6. The history of the treatment of the Bequest from 1851 to the present.  I have recorded that in some detail, dispelling the myths that the failure to honour Turner’s wishes was due to his greedy cousins, to Turner, his executors, lawyers or whoever rather than the Nation
7. The investigation and decision of the Charity Commission 2000-2005 concerning the windfall of £25m insurance money which accrued following the theft of 2 Turners in 1994.  At first the Commission said that the money belonged to the Turner Bequest , but was then persuaded it belonged to the Tate by reference to the 1992 Museums & Galleries  Act.  Quite how it reached that decision has remained a confidential one between itself and the Tate, though the Tate Director acknowledged there was a public interest in knowing the details.
8. The National Gallery and Tate would of course want to give their evidence in favour of the status quo, which is what the Clore Gallery was designed to maintain.  “Everything has changed so that everything may remain the same.”  The first chairman of the Turner Society, Allan Pearce, brother of Lord Pearce, in 1987 wrote a Ballad of the Status Quo.  At first, like others, he hoped the Clore provided the answer, but like others before he died he agreed that it had not.
9. Their evidence would raise further issues.

• What should be the representation of the British School in general, and of Turner in particular, at the National Gallery.  Should British art stop with Turner’s death, as now?  Should the Turner representation include more than the two pictures with the two Claudes?  If so, is the present selection, arbitrarily fixed in 1967, as representative as it should be?  I would say definitely not.
• What should be public policy towards gifts, and in particular those of collections, made with attached conditions?  I wrote an article about that for Professor Norman Palmer QC, founder of the Institute of Art and Law,  in the International Journal of Cultural Property.  These issues are much discussed in America, but hardly at all here.  Of course there was the House of Lords Commission some years ago on the Burrell Collection, which produced evidence of general application, and it seems a great pity that all that has never been published in printed form.
• Should loan exhibitions, involving risk to the works and high entrance charges to see works supposed to be free to see, be as frequent as they are now?  Is the European policy of Movement – constantly travelling exhibitions – to be supported, or are the arguments against permitting loans of important works, voiced in Parliament earlier last century by the Earl of Crawford and others, be reconsidered?
• Also needing investigation as part of this or another enquiry is the fate of the Royal Academy’s Turner Fund, which was absorbed  into its general funds in 1997 as a result of the Charities Act, so that Turner’s purposes, as defined by Lord St Leonards, are now also void.

Moral Arguments:  Turner’s heirs more immoral than the Galleries

Meanwhile the museums blame everything on the avarice of Turner’s cousins. This is an example of attack as the best means of defence and a red herring.  In fact they have received far more through the intervention of Turner’s heirs and their surrender of their claim to the unfinished oils and his watercolours & drawings.  


Turner’s wishes for his almshouse, which his heirs challenged, failed because of the Mortmain laws. There is a case for a Mortmain law applicable to museums, as all the greatest works of the past disappear into them, impoverishing the art market and creating an insoluble problem of space for museums, where acquisitions will always exceed the space to exhibit them. 

In his maiden speech in the Commons just after Turner died (1853) the future Prime Minister and son of a member of the 1861 committee, Lord Salisbury, argued that, if the recipients failed to honour the terms of gifts, the gift should revert to the donor or his heirs.  


The idea has merit.  John Ruskin in 1869 wrote to his American executor, Professor Charles Eliot Norton: “If my next of kin go into chancery, fight them until there’s no money left – and then, give up the Turners for my drawings – it will be a lovely lesson to the nation on the beauty of law – far more useful to them than any Turners.”


Turner’s interests do not enjoy the backing which the powerful Jewish lobby has calling for restitution of works appropriated by the Nazis.

Glaucus and Scylla

One such work was Turner’s Glaucus and Scylla,  which was seized in 1943  and in 1966 acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas.  The museum agreed to return this to the heir, who sold it in 2007 for $5.7m, the museum then buying it back.  Arguably it would be a valuable lesson if the British nation had to do this for one of the Turner Bequest’s works.  That might concentrate minds, which otherwise seem set on continuing fudge. 

Whatever happens, I feel sure that the Clore dispensation will not be the final one.  There will be renewed calls for Turners to be sold, something which the 1992 Act permits on certain grounds.  More works will very likely be damaged, stolen or destroyed while on loan. 

Appendix:  Why is there little protest?

Why is not more protest and uproar today?

1. The Clore Gallery was designed to torpedo the protest and succeeded.  But that is a wasting factor.  In 1981 I said that the Clore had put back any hope of a proper Turner Gallery for 30 years,  a period which is now up.
2.  Ignorance proceeding from the long and complicated history.
3. There has been a prevailing liberalism in museum as well as other matters, so that restrictions on what they can do have progressively been lessened over the last century.
4. There is no ready-made Turner lobby, as there is for the Elgin Marbles, Lane Bequest, Barnes Foundation or Burrell Collection. The Turner scholars are in hock to the Tate.  One told me 30 years ago that his priority was to get his views published, and concerns over the Bequest came a poor second, and in that he spoke for others.  Moreover Turner fans have sometimes admired the watercolours or oil sketches more than the finished oils with which Turner was most concerned, albeit there is now a greater recognition that that led to a partly false understanding of Turner.
5.  Turner falls between two stools – old art (the prime concern of the National Gallery) and contemporary art (the prime concern of the Tate).  In recent weeks Artinfo has published two Turner stories: one appeared under Renaissance & Old Masters, the other under Impressionists and Modern.

Transcript reproduced with the kind permission of; 

Dr Selby Whittingham, Secretary, The Independent Turner Society, Turner House, 153 Cromwell Road, London SW5 0TQ, United Kingdom. selbywhittingham@hotmail.com

http://www.jmwturner.org/