Creating Immortality: Turner, Soane, and the Great Chain of Being

wo of Romanticism's ascendant themes were the hope for a transcendental death-the presumed destiny of the artist of genius and the belief that all things in the natural world, both organic and inorganic, were linked in a rationally designed, hierarchical order: a chain of being.' J. M. W. Turner married these themes in a work called Interior at Petworth, painted around 1837 (fig. 1).2 Through symbol and association, the painting represents the artist's hope that the transformation of nature through art was the means to immortality. Within a space that is a protagonist in its own right, Turner framed an allegory about art, in which a naturalistic model of the world's creation was a metaphor for the transformative powers, and ultimate triumph, of the artistic imagination.3 Interior at Petworth is an unprecedented conflation of Romantic landscape and domestic architectural interior. The room's structural frame-with its wide golden moldingsappears intact. But rays of orange and yellow light and an overlapping curtain of emerald sweep through the room with a freedom that emphasizes its exposure and abandonment. This interior, desolate and disordered, is generally believed to express Turner's grief over the death in 1837 of George Wyndham, the third earl of Egremont, and lord of Petworth House in Sussex.4 As an art collector, patron, and host, Lord Egremont had provided Turner with a second home of artistic plenitude commensurate with his greatest aspirations. The room Turner depicted here is in part a synthesis of the actual spaces and decor at Petworth-or at least the artist's representations of them.5 But conspicuous elements in the painting diverge so significantly from the circumstances of Petworth and its owner that they assert the presence of a conception that transcends literal references to time or place. The centrality of the light-filled archway in Turner's painting is emphatic. Yet this monumental doorway did not exist at Petworth. The white/yellow radiance contained within it floats above a chaotic-looking staffage in the foreground, which includes a lidded golden bowl, a plumed hat, an amorphous mound of orange, umber, and yellow, at least three small dogs, a table turned on its side, and a large piece of furniture-perhaps an open coffin-with an escutcheon propped against it. Below and to the left of the escutcheon is a curious addition to this already diverse assemblage: a group of what appear to be living sea creatures, most of which are rendered in near-phosphorescent white (fig.2). Also puzzling is a spectral configuration of the Three Graces, who hover to right of the large gilt mirror on the left (fig. 3), their cool transparency an antithesis to the fiery density below. Although Lord Egremont possessed an extensive sculpture collection, a group of the Three Graces was not part of it.6 However, as symbols, which I believe is their role here, these maidens were understood by Turner's favorite philosophical poet, Mark Akenside (1721-1770), to be the muses of the fine arts. And for Akenside, whose verses will be discussed in more detail later, they also presided over another, more profound act of creation: the evolution of the earth.7 This essay aims to distill the guiding principles behind Turner's Romantic convergence of art, history, science, and myth. The painter's own method of composing will serve as a conceptual guide. To orchestrate the various streams of imagery and thought that coalesce in Interior at Petworth, Turner used the strategy of associationism, an aesthetic principle especially prevalent in eighteenth-century architectural and landscape theory.8 Its proponents held that the image of a form-a triumphal arch, for instance-when mediated by natural effects, could inspire a sequence of historical or emotional connections in the observer's mind.