As a ten-year-old, J.M.W.Turner (JMWT) was sent to live with an uncle in Brentford, probably because his mother was mentally unstable and his sister had a fatal illness. He stayed for about a year [1] and there met Mrs Sarah Trimmer (see above, in a 1790 portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, held in the National Portrait Gallery), becoming a close friend of her son Henry (three years younger than JMWT), who was later to become the vicar of Heston [2]. Henry Trimmer was an artist as well as a priest and it is thought that he received training in drawing from his mother. She was well-qualified to do so, as she was [3]:
..the only daughter of the artist Joshua Kirby (1716-1774) and his wife, Sarah Bull (c.1718-1775). She was educated by her father and at Mrs Justiner’s School for Young Ladies in Ipswich. In 1755 the family moved to London; acquaintances there included Thomas Gainsborough, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and William Hogarth.
A very well-connected lady, then, for an aspiring artist to meet, especially as her father had also been tutor in linear perspective to the Prince of Wales (later George III), a subject that was to interest JMWT. We do not know how frequently JMWT visited the Trimmer home, but Sarah Trimmer’s interests in education, and in art and nature, must have influenced him. Hers was a strong voice in the way children should be taught in the early Nineteenth Century and she published influential books [3]:
Although Trimmer advocated conservative views, later students of educational methods and children’s books credit her with two innovations that became commonplace in the nineteenth century. She popularized the use of pictorial material in books for children.. [and] ..Trimmer’s other innovation was the use of animals, birds, and the natural world in stories she called fables.
Perhaps her best-known book was An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature and Reading the Holy Scriptures adapted to the Capacities of Children published in 1780, five years before JMWT went to stay in Brentford. Given that the book was aimed at children and their education, it must have been a topic of conversation in the Trimmer household and one imagines that JMWT read the book and perhaps discussed its contents with both Henry and Sarah. What would JWMT have made of the following passages [4]:
The trees and plants in general would die without air; and we should have no winds, which are very useful, as I told you before, in respect to blowing the ships along, and driving the clouds about, so that they may break and fall in different places on the dry land, instead of returning back to the sea, from whence the sun draws the vapours that form them. The wind is a great stream of air, and though it sometimes does mischief, yet it is of great use, as the air would become extremely unwholesome if it were to remain still and motionless.
Neither is the world all land; for there are vast hollow places between the different kingdoms, and they are filled up with water. The largest waters.. ..are called oceans, lesser ones seas, and there are others yet smaller, which run in among the land, that are called rivers; there are, besides, smaller pieces, called ponds, ditches, brooks and others.. ..These generally spring out of the earth, and are at first only little streams, but run along till they join with others, and are increased by the rains that fall, and so in time become great rivers like the Thames.
It is likely that it was Sarah Trimmer who took JMWT to Margate [1], accompanying her children, as her son John was ill with consumption and sea air was thought to be good for the health, especially for lung diseases. Imagine then how a woman who could teach drawing, who was familiar with the London art world, who believed in the importance of illustrations in books [3], and who wrote a book about education that encouraged children to look at all aspects of the natural world, would have on JMWT.
Familiar with ships on the Thames, he now saw the sea, and boats setting sail on longer voyages. These images must have made a strong impression on the young boy and spurred his need to record what he saw. Some watercolour paintings of Margate, from a little after JMWT’s initial visit, survive and one is shown below. I have no idea whether this was one of the pictures that appeared in his father’s shop, and which exposed JMWT’s work to potential buyers and those who could enhance his prospects as a budding artist, but one could easily imagine that such a precocious talent was recognised by those who saw these early works.
If Sarah Trimmer was an influence on the development of JMWT as an artist, and as a close observer of the natural world, her evangelical Christianity seems to have had a lesser significance. Perhaps JMWT found this kind of religious thinking to be too limiting for his fast-developing vision and revolutionary spirit?
[1] James Hamilton (1997) Turner: A Life. London, Hodder & Stoughton
[2] http://www.bhsproject.co.uk/families_trimmer.shtml#HST
[3] Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg (2004) Trimmer [née Kirby], Sarah. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22740
[4] Mrs Trimmer (1780) An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature and Reading the Holy Scriptures adapted to the Capacities of Children. London, Dodsley.
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