My answer to the pertinent question put by Helen James in her letter (Was JMW Turner’s mother really ‘mentally ill’?, 27 November) is that whatever illness Mary may have had would have been greatly increased by the frustration that she must have felt with her circumstances in the mean lodging in Covent Garden, which her husband lacked the ambition to better. These contrasted with the comfortable Islington home in which she grew up and with the even more prosperous circumstances of her relations. I have discussed those in the Genealogists’ Magazine, the British Art Journal and now in my publication for Turner 250: Happy Birthdays! JMW Turner and Prince George on Richmond Hill. Since I wrote the last, a plaque was erected on the site of the house of the uncle of Turner in Brentford, where he was sent to escape the bedlam at home and where, like Beethoven at a similar age at Bonn, he acquired lifelong cultured friends.
Dr Selby Whittingham
Secretary, the Independent Turner Society
Regarding artistic rivalries, including that between JMW Turner and John Constable (28 November), in 1969 I met Francis Bacon at a health hydro in Surrey. He claimed to have been sent by his agent to dry out. His unaffected friendliness overcame my awe at encountering the great painter. In my first Mini, I drove him to see the Turners at Petworth House, where there happened to be a William Blake exhibition as well. He was dismissive of Blake as an artist, preferring the poetry. But the surprise was his little concern for the Petworth Turners, which he hadn’t seen before. I prefer Constable, he said. The following day he felt obliged to go to Guildford (by himself) for a glass of burgundy.
Paul Collins
Horton cum Studley, Oxfordshire
It’s refreshing to read that Constable’s work is worth more than chocolate box decoration. It’s worth studying his Dedham Vale at the National Galleries of Scotland. A fine landscape, but concealed in the rocks below a towering tree a very small and wretched hut and an old lady in red cradling a baby. Countryside misery and poverty in the age of the Enclosure Acts.
Martin Argles
London
Following previous concerns about Jonathan Jones’s Freudian interpretations of Millet, it’s a joy to be able to celebrate his recent superb pieces on Caravaggio (24 November), and on Constable and Turner.
John Caperon
Crowborough, East Sussex
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