TURNERIANA

Speranza

One of the most famous bonfires in British art history, the destruction in 1858 of sheaves of erotic paintings by J. M. W. Turner, by the horrified critic J. Ruskin, never happened.

Some have been poring over thousands of Turner drawings and paintings, matching the survivors with the Victorian inventories and records.

Everybody is now convinced there was no bonfire, despite Ruskin's claim that he burned a mass of works of art, sparing only a bundle wrapped in brown paper and neatly labelled "kept as evidence of a failure of mind only".

It looks as if the notoriously prudish Ruskin, who worshipped Turner to the point of idolatry, could not bring himself to destroy his work.

Instead he buried them in paper, interring them in a tortuous numbering system he devised himself, or in the case of some detailed anatomical details of women's genitals, folding over the page to conceal them, undoubtedly with a shudder of revulsion.

 

Some have now peered at 30,000 sheets of paper.

Everybody is sure that the bonfire never happened.

Almost all the allegedly missing drawings appear to be safe and sound.

There are a few very small gaps in the notebooks, but Ruskin sometimes tore some sheets out for display, and there are some losses due to ancient damage.

But everybody is now pretty convinced there is no substantial gap in the collection.

For well over a century nobody has questioned the story.

It became as well-known and often repeated as the burning of Byron's journals or of Richard "Arabian nights" Burton's letters and diaries.

There seemed no reason to doubt it.

Ruskin, executor of Turner's tangled estate, admitted, indeed, boasted of his vandalism.

Frank Harris reported a later conversation with Ruskin in which the critic described the destroyed works of art as "painting after painting of Turner's of the most shameful sort - the pudenda of women - utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable".

Ruskin himself wrote to his supposed companion of the matchbox, Ralph Warnum: "I am satisfied that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner's reputation (they having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity) and for your own peace."

"And I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction and I hereby declare that the parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December 1858."

But some have gone back to Warnum's diaries for December 1858 and found nothing sensational, no meetings with Ruskin on the relevant dates, no bonfire.

 

Indeed three years after the alleged fire, some found evidence to a parliamentary committee that the dodgy drawings not only survived, but were causing concern because they could not be displayed while the National Gallery stores - before the creation of the Tate Gallery - were bursting under the weight of Turner material.

In an essay in the British Art Journal it is argued that there were many reasons why Ruskin might have claimed the destruction: crucially, the introduction of the first Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which provoked paranoia about art images and anxiety that curators could be prosecuted for works in gallery collections.

The speculation about Turner's sex life, which so appalled Ruskin, continues. He never married, and had no acknowledged children.