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_ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHIES OF
THE GREAT ARTISTS._
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JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER
ROYAL ACADEMICIAN.
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ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHIES
OF
THE GREAT ARTISTS.
TITIAN From the most recent authorities.
_By Richard Ford Heath, M.A., Hertford Coll. Oxford._
REMBRANDT From the Text of C. VOSMAER.
_By J. W. Mollett, B.A., Brasenose Coll. Oxford._
RAPHAEL From the Text of J. D. PASSAVANT.
_By N. D’Anvers, Author of “Elementary History of Art.”_
VAN DYCK & HALS From the most recent authorities.
_By Percy R. Head, Lincoln Coll. Oxford._
HOLBEIN From the Text of Dr. WOLTMANN.
_By the Editor, Author of “Life and Genius of Rembrandt”_
TINTORETTO From recent investigations.
_By W. Roscoe Osler, Author of occasional Essays on Art._
TURNER From the most recent authorities.
_By Cosmo Monkhouse, Author of “Studies of Sir E. Landseer.”_
THE LITTLE MASTERS From the most recent authorities.
_By W. B. Scott, Author of “Lectures on the Fine Arts.”_
HOGARTH From recent investigations.
_By Austin Dobson, Author of “Vignettes in Rhyme,” &c._
RUBENS From recent investigations.
_By C. W. Kett, M.A., Hertford Coll. Oxford._
MICHELANGELO From the most recent authorities.
_By Charles Clément, Author of “Michel-Ange, Léonard, et Raphael.”_
LIONARDO From recent researches.
_By Dr. J. Paul Richter, Author of “Die Mosaiken von Ravenna.”_
GIOTTO From recent investigations.
_By Harry Quilter, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge._
THE FIGURE PAINTERS OF THE NETHERLANDS.
_By Lord Ronald Gower, Author of “Guide to the Galleries of Holland.”_
VELAZQUEZ From the most recent authorities.
_By Edwin Stowe, B.A., Brasenose Coll. Oxford._
GAINSBOROUGH From the most recent authorities.
_By George M. Brock-Arnold, M.A., Hertford Coll. Oxford._
PEUGINO From recent investigations.
_By T. Adolphus Trollope, Author of many Essays on Art._
DELAROCHE & VERNET From the works of CHARLES BLANC.
_By Mrs. Ruutz Rees, Author of various Essays on Art._
[Illustration: JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER.
_From a sketch by John Gilbert._]
“_The whole world without Art would be one great wilderness._”
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TURNER
BY W. COSMO MONKHOUSE
_Author of_ “_Studies of Sir E. Landseer._”
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NEW YORK:
SCRIBNER AND WELFORD.
LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON,
1879.
(_All rights reserved._)
CHISWICK PRESS:--C. WHITTINGHAM, TOOKS COURT,
CHANCERY LANE.
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PREFACE.
The late Mr. Thornbury lost such an opportunity of writing a worthy
biography of Turner as will never occur again. How he dealt with the
valuable materials which he collected is well known to all who have had
to test the accuracy of his statements; and unfortunately many of the
channels from which he derived information have since been closed by
death. Mr. Ruskin, who might have helped so much, has contributed little
to the life of the artist but some brilliant passages of pathetic
rhetoric. Overgrown by his luxuriant eloquence, and buried beneath the
_débris_ of Thornbury, the ruins of Turner’s Life lay hidden till last
year.
Mr. Hamerton’s “Life of Turner” has done much to remove a very serious
blot from English literature. Very careful, but very frank, it presents
a clear and consistent view of the great painter and his art, and is,
moreover, penetrated with that intellectual insight and refined thought
which illuminate all its author’s work.
He has, however, left much to be done, and this book will, I hope, help
a little in clearing away long-standing errors, and reducing the known
facts about Turner to something like order. To these facts I have been
able to add a few hitherto unpublished; and it is a pleasant duty to
return my thanks to the many kind friends and strangers for the pains
which they have taken to supply me with information. To Mr. F. E.
Trimmer, of Heston, the son of Turner’s old friend and executor; to Mr.
John L. Roget; to Mr. Mayall, and to Mr. J. Beavington Atkinson, my
thanks are especially due.
In so small a book upon so large a subject, I have often had much
difficulty in deciding what to select and what to reject, and have
always preferred those events and stories which seem to me to throw most
light upon Turner’s character. On purely technical matters I have
touched only when I thought it absolutely necessary. This part of the
subject has been already so well and fully treated by Mr. Ruskin in
numerous works, too well known to need mention; by Mr. Hamerton in his
“Life of Turner,” and “Etching and Etchers;” by Messrs. Redgrave in
their “Century of English Painters,” and by Mr. S. Redgrave in his
introduction to the collection of water-colours at South Kensington,
that I need only refer to these works such few among my readers as are
not already acquainted with them. I would also refer them for similar
reasons to Mr. Rawlinson’s recent work on the “Liber Studiorum.”
I should have liked to add to this volume accurate lists of Turner’s
works and the engravings from them, with information of their
possessors, and the extraordinary fluctuation in the prices which they
have realized, but this would have entailed great labour and have
swelled unduly the bulk of this volume, which is already greater than
that of its fellows. Fortunately this information is likely to be soon
supplied by Mr. Algernon Graves, whose accurate catalogue of Landseer’s
works is sufficient guarantee of the manner in which he will perform
this more difficult task.
The edition of Thornbury’s “Life of Turner” referred to throughout these
pages, is that of 1877.
W. COSMO MONKHOUSE.
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CONTENTS.
PART I.
1775 TO 1797. DAYS OF EDUCATION AND PRACTICE.
CHAPTER I.
Page
Introductory 1
CHAPTER II.
Early Days--1775 to 1789 6
CHAPTER III.
Youth--1789 to 1796 20
PART II.
1797 TO 1820. DAYS OF MASTERY AND EMULATION.
CHAPTER IV.
Yorkshire and the young Academician--1797 to 1807 38
CHAPTER V.
The “Liber Studiorum” and the Dragons 55
CHAPTER VI.
Harley Street, Devonshire, Hammersmith, and Twickenham 75
PART III.
1820 TO 1851. DAYS OF GLORY AND DECLINE.
CHAPTER VII.
Page
Italy and France--1820 to 1840 92
CHAPTER VIII.
Light and Darkness--1840 to 1851 121
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TURNER.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The task of writing a satisfactory life of Turner is one of more than
usual difficulty. He hid himself, partly intentionally, partly because
he could not express himself except by means of his brush. His
secretiveness was so consistent, and commenced so early, that it seems
to have been an instinct, or what used to be called by that name. Akin
to the most divinely gifted poets by his supreme pictorial imagination,
he also seems on the other side to have been related to beings whose
reasoning faculty is less than human. When we look at such pictures as
_Crossing the Brook_, _The Fighting Téméraire_, and _Ulysses and
Polyphemus_, we feel that we are in the presence of a mind as sensitive
as Keats’s, as tender as Goldsmith’s, and as penetrative as Shelley’s;
when we read of the dirty discomfort of his home and of the difficulty
with which his patrons, and even his relations, obtained access to his
presence--how even his most intimate friends were not admitted to his
confidence--we can only think of a hedgehog, whose offensive powers
being limited, is warned by nature to live in a hole and roll itself up
into a ball of spikes at the approach of strangers.
We are used to having our idols broken; but we still fashion them with a
persistency which seems to argue it a necessity of our nature, that we
should think of the life and character of gifted men as being the
outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace we perceive
in their works. It is this habit which makes any attempt to write a life
of Turner pre-eminently unsatisfactory, for his refined sense of the
most ethereal of natural phenomena is not relieved by any refinement in
his manners, his supreme feeling for the splendour of the sun is
unmatched by any light or brilliance in his social life; his extreme
sensibility, a sensibility not only artistic but human, to all the
emotional influences of nature, stands for ever as a contrast to his
self-absorbed, suspicious individuality. There is of course no reason
why a landscape painter should be refined in manner or choice in his
habits. There is no necessary connection between the subjects of such an
artist and himself, except his hand and eye. He lives a life of visions
that may come and go without affecting his life or even his thought, as
we generally use that word. The most tremendous phenomena of nature may
be seen and studied, and reproduced with such power as to strike terror
into those who see the picture, and yet leave the artist unaltered in
demeanour and taste. Even those men of genius who, instead of employing
their imagination upon nature’s inanimate works, devote themselves to
the study of man himself, socially and morally, do not by any means
show that relation between themselves and their finest work that we
appear naturally to expect.
But all this, though it may explain much, still leaves unsatisfactory
the task of writing the life of a man of whom such passages as the
following could be sincerely written:--
“Glorious in conception--unfathomable in knowledge--solitary in
power--with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and
morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to
men the mysteries of the universe, standing, like the great angel
of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon
his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand.”--_Modern
Painters_ (1843), p. 92.
“Towards the end of his career he would often, I am assured on the
best authority, paint hard all the week till Saturday night; and he
would then put by his work, slip a five-pound note into his pocket,
button it securely up there, and set off to some low sailor’s house
in Wapping or Rotherhithe, to wallow till Monday morning summoned
him to mope through another week.”--THORNBURY’S _Life of Turner_
(1877), pp. 313, 314.
The contrast is too great to make the picture pleasant, the facts are
too few to make it perfect; to make it one or the other, it would be
necessary to do as Turner did, and rightly did, with his perfect
drawings--suppress facts that jarred with his scheme of form and colour,
and insert figures or mountains or clouds that were necessary to
complete it; but a biography is nothing if not real--it belongs to the
other side of art. The task would be rendered lighter, if not more
agreeable, if we were frankly to accept the principle of a dual nature,
and cutting up our subject into halves, treat Turner the artist and
Turner the man as two separate beings; and there would, at first sight,
seem to be no more convincing proof of this duality than is afforded by
Turner. He had an exquisitely sensitive apprehension of all physical
phenomena, and was able to hoard away his impressions by the thousand in
that wonderful brain-store of his, until they were wanted for pictures.
He stored them with his eye, he reproduced them with his hand and
memory. These three were all of the finest, and seemed to act without
that process which is necessary to most of us before we can make use of
our impressions, viz., the translation of them into words. This process
is as necessary for the nourishment of most minds as digestion for the
nourishment of the body, but to him it appears to have been almost
entirely denied. He had grasp enough of his impressions without it, to
enable him to analyze them and compose them pictorially; but he could
not give any account of them or of his method of composition, and they
had no sensible effect on his conversation.
He thus lived in two worlds--one the pictorial sight-world, in which he
was a profound scholar and a poet, the other the articulate, moral,
social word-world in which he was a dunce and underbred. In the one he
was great and happy, in the other he was small and miserable; for what
philosophy he had was fatalist. The riddle of life was too hard for his
uncultivated intellect and starved heart to contemplate with any hope;
he was only at rest in his dreamland. When he came down into this world
of ours from his own clouds, he brought some of his glory with him, but
without any cheerful effect; for it came but as a foil to ruined
castles, the vice of mortals and the decay of nations.
Yet, while at a first view this distinction between Turner as a man and
Turner as an artist seems complete, further study shows that the man had
a great and often a fatal influence on the artist, and that this was not
without reaction both serious and deep, and so we find that his art and
himself are no more to be divided in any human view of him than were his
body and his soul when he was yet alive. For these reasons we shall keep
as close together as possible the histories of his life and his art, a
task always difficult and sometimes impossible on account of the
scantiness of trustworthy data for the one and the almost infinite
material for the other.
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