LIGHT AND DARKNESS.
1840 TO 1851.
Turner was now sixty-five years old, and his decline as an artist was to
be expected from failing health and stress of years. For little less
than half a century he had worked harder and produced more than any
other artist of whom we have any record. Nor would he rest now, although
his failing powers of body and mind required stimulants to support their
energy.
Mr. Wilkie Collins informed Mr. Thornbury that, when a boy--
“He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers
seeing Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown
sherry at the Academy lunch) seated on the top of a flight of
steps, astride a box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like
a Mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now
touched with his brush and now receded from. Yet, in spite of
sherry, precarious seat, and old age, he went on shaping in some
wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every
pin’s head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale.”
We have spoken of Turner as declining as an artist, but we are not sure
that he did so till about 1845, when, Mr. Ruskin says, “his health, and
with it in great degree his mind, failed suddenly.” Down to this time
his decay seems to us to have been more physical than artistic, but with
the physical weakness there had been, we think, for some time a
deterioration of the non-artistic part of his mind. His decay, though so
unlike the decay of others, appears to us to have nothing inexplicable
about it if we consider him as a man who had never had any sympathy with
the current opinions and culture of his fellows, and who, by some
strange defect in his organization, was unable to think without the use
of his eyes. That his eyesight failed there is no doubt, but that it did
not fail in the one most essential point for a painter, viz., perception
of colour, is, we think, proved by his latest sketches in water-colour,
which show none of that apparently morbid love of yellow which appears
in his later oil pictures, and testify to that perfect perception of the
relations and harmonies of different hues which can only belong to a
healthy sight. Instead of declining, this faculty of colour seems to
have increased in perfection almost to the last. If we compare the
sketch in the National Gallery of a scene on the Lake of Zug, done
between 1840 and 1845, with one of the ‘Rivers of England’ _Dartmouth_,
two drawings wonderfully alike in composition and in general scheme of
colour, no difference in this faculty can be observed; the later drawing
is only a few notes higher in the scale. As Mr. Ruskin says, “The work
of the first five years of this decade is in many respects supremely and
with _reviving_ power, beautiful.”
But still the decline of his non-artistic mind, never very powerful, had
been going on for years, or at least such reasoning power as he
possessed had exercised less and less control over the imperious will of
his genius, which impelled him to pursue his efforts to paint the
unpaintable. He had begun by imitation, he had gone on by rivalry, he
had achieved a style of his own by which he had upset all preconceived
notions of landscape painting, and had triumphed in establishing the
superiority of pictures painted in a light key, but he was not content.
His progress had always been towards light even from the earliest days,
when he worked in monochrome. Sunlight was his discovery, he had found
its presence in shadow, he had studied its complicated reflections,
before he commenced to work in colour. From monochrome he had adopted
the low scale of the old masters, but into it he carried his light; the
brown clouds, and shadows, and mists, had the sun behind them as it were
in veiled splendour. Then it came out and flooded his drawings and his
canvasses with a glory unseen before in art. But he must go on--refine
upon this--having eclipsed all others, he must now eclipse himself. His
gold must turn to yellow, and yellow almost into white, before his
genius could be satisfied with its efforts to express pure sunlight.
So he went on to his goal, becoming less “understanded of the people”
each year, painting pictures more near to the truth of nature in sun and
clouds, and less true in everything else. But it was about the
everything else that the people most cared. They did not care for
sunlight which blinded them, and to which the truth of figure, and sea,
and grass, and stone, had to be sacrificed. They liked pictures which
could give them calm enjoyment, records of what they had seen or could
imagine, not of what Turner only had seen, and what seemed to them
extravagant falsity.
Such, roughly put, was the condition of things when a champion arose to
scatter Turner’s enemies to the four winds. He, Mr. Ruskin (1836), an
undergraduate at Oxford, of the age of seventeen, was one not of “the
people,” but of those comparatively few lovers of art and colour who saw
and appreciated the artistic motives of Turner, and who reverenced, as a
revelation of hitherto unrecorded, if not undiscovered, beauties of
nature, those pictures at which the world scoffed. We cannot here enter
further into the discussion involved, but the attitude of the two
parties, the one represented by “Blackwood’s Magazine,” and the other by
“Modern Painters,” can be judged by the following extracts. The noble
enthusiasm aroused by the treatment of _Juliet and her Nurse_ by the
critics, had suggested a letter in 1836, which gradually increased into
a volume, not published till 1843, and in the meantime the undergraduate
had gained the Newdegate, and earned the right to call himself “A
Graduate of Oxford” on his title-page.
This is what Maga said in August, 1835, of Turner’s picture of _Venice,
from the porch of Madonna della Salute_, a picture in his earlier
Venetian style:--
“Venice, well I have seen Venice. Venice the magnificent, glorious,
queenly, even in her decay--with her rich coloured buildings,
speaking of days gone by, reflected in the _green_ water. What is
Venice in this picture? A flimsy, whitewashed meagre assemblage of
architecture, starting off ghostlike into unnatural perspective, as
if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the
only attempt at richness in the picture). Not Venice, but the boat
is the attractive object, and what is to make this rich? Nothing
but some green and red, and yellow tinsel, which is so flimsy that
it is now cracking..... The greater part of the picture is white,
disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the boats,
with their red worsted masts, are as gewgaw as a child’s toy, which
he may have cracked to see what it was made of. As to Venice,
nothing can be more unlike its character.”
[Illustration: VENICE. THE DOGANA.
_In the National Gallery._]
This is what the Graduate of Oxford says, after stating his
dissatisfaction with the Venices of Canaletti, Prout, and Stanfield:--
“But let us take with Turner, the last and greatest step of
all--thank Heaven we are in sunshine again--and what sunshine! Not
the lurid, gloomy, plaguelike oppression of Canaletti, but white
flushing fulness of dazzling light, which the waves drink and the
clouds breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of joy. That
sky--it is a very visible infinity--liquid, measureless,
unfathomable, panting and melting through the chasms in the long
fields of snow-white flaked, slow-moving vapour, that guide the eye
along the multitudinous waves down to the islanded rest of the
Euganean hills. Do we dream, or does the white forked sail drift
nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue sea between us with
the fulness of its wings? It pauses now; but the quivering of its
bright reflection troubles the shadows of the sea, those azure
fathomless depths of crystal mystery, on which the swiftness of the
poised gondola floats double, its black beak lifted like the crest
of a dark ocean bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from the
kindling surface, and its bent oar breaking the radiant water into
a dust of gold. Dreamlike and dim, but glorious, the unnumbered
palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow sea--pale ranks of
motionless flame--their mighty towers sent up to heaven like
tongues of more eager fire--their grey domes looming vast and dark,
like eclipsed worlds--their sculptured arabesques and purple marble
fading farther and fainter, league beyond league, lost in the light
of distance. Detail after detail, thought beyond thought, you find
and feel them through the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as
indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed; secret in fulness,
confused in symmetry, as nature herself is to the bewildered and
foiled glance, giving out of that indistinctness, and through that
confusion, the perpetual newness of the infinite and the beautiful.
“Yes, Mr. Turner, we are in Venice now.”
Unfortunately the brave young champion was too late, the eloquent voice
that could translate into such glowing words the dumb poetry of Turner’s
pictures had scarcely made the air of England thrill with its musical
enthusiasm when black night fell upon the artist. The sudden snapping of
some vital chord, of which that same Graduate of Oxford only last year
pathetically wrote, took place, and the glorious sun of his genius
disappeared without any twilight; he was dead as an artist, and dying as
a man. Neither his work nor his life could be defended any more. But the
voice that was raised so late in his honour did not die, its vibrations
have lasted from that day to this; and if the champion himself seems to
be in some need of a defender now, if mouths that once were full of his
praise are silent or raised only for the most part to depreciate, it is
only what came to Turner and what comes to all who use their imagination
too freely to enforce their convictions. A time must come when the
spirit of analysis will eat into the most brilliant rhetoric; the false
and true, which combine to make the most beautiful fabric of words,
cannot wear equally well. To us it is always painful to differ from Mr.
Ruskin, to whom we owe the grasp of so many noble truths, the memories
of so many delightful hours; and if a time has come when our faith in
his dogmas is not absolute, and we feel that he has misled us and others
now and again, we cannot close reference to him and his works in this
little book without testifying to the great and noble spirit which
pervades his work, and recording our admiration of a life devoted to the
service of art and man and God with a passionate purity as rare as it is
beautiful.
[Illustration: VENICE, FROM THE CANAL OF THE GIUDECEA.
_Exhibited in 1840. South Kensington Museum._]
But before night fell, in the interval between 1840 and 1845, Turner
painted a few pictures of remarkable beauty both in colour and
sentiment--pictures which no other artist could have painted, and which
we doubt if he could himself have painted before--pictures generally
attempting to realize his later ideal of Venice, which even now, in
their wrecked beauty, fascinate all who have patience to look at them,
and watch the apparent chaos of yellow and white and purple and grey
gradually clear into a vision of ghost-like palaces rising like a dream,
from the golden sea. Besides these he painted at least three others of
unique power: one a record of what few other men could have had the
courage to study or the power to paint; one showing the passion of
despair at the loss of an old comrade; and another the boldest attempt
to represent abstract ideas in landscape that was ever made. We allude
to the _Snowstorm_; _Peace, Burial at Sea_; and _Rain, Steam, and
Speed_.
Mr. Hamerton says, in connection with the first of these:--
“Let it not be supposed that these works of Turner’s decline,
however they may have exercised the wit of critics, and excited the
amusement of visitors to the Exhibition, were ever anything less
than serious performances for him. The _Snowstorm_, for example
(1842), afforded the critics a precious opportunity for the
exercise of their art. They called it soapsuds and whitewash, the
real subject being a steamer in a storm off a harbour’s mouth
making signals, and going by the lead. In this instance, nothing
could be more serious than Turner’s intention, which was to render
a storm as he had himself seen it one night when the ‘Ariel’ left
Harwich. Like Joseph Vernet, who, when in a tempest off the island
of Sardinia, had himself fastened to the mast to watch the effects,
Turner on this occasion, ‘got the sailors to lash himself to the
mast to observe it,’ and remained in that position for four hours.
He did not expect to escape, but had a curious sort of
conscientious feeling, that it was his duty to record his
impression if he survived.”[45]
Of the second, which was painted to commemorate Wilkie’s funeral, it is
related that Stanfield complained of the blackness of the sails, and
that Turner answered, “If I could find anything blacker than black I’d
use it.”[46]
The history of his late Swiss sketches and the drawings he made from
them has been recently told by Mr. Ruskin in his valuable and
interesting notes to his collection of Turner’s drawings exhibited last
year (1878), and these notes and the almost equally interesting notes of
the Rev. W. Kingsley, contained between the same covers, testify not
only to the supreme beauty of his later work, but also to the nobler
motive which inspired its production, viz. the desire to “record” as far
as he could what he had seen after “fifty years’ observation.” The days
of strife and emulation were over, and a humbler, sweeter spirit made
him “put forth his full strength to depict nature as he saw it with all
his knowledge and experience.” Characteristically, as all through his
life, this better spirit showed itself rather in his water-colours made
for private persons, than in those oils which he exhibited for the
judgment of the public.
We wish we had space here for Mr. Ruskin’s splendid description of
Turner’s picture of _Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying_--a
work which seems to us to illustrate what we have said of his manner of
decline in a remarkable way. There is no doubt about its splendour of
colour, the grandeur of its sea, and the force with which its sentiment
of horror and wrong and death is conveyed; but it shows a childishness,
a want of mental faculties of the simplest kind, which is all the more
extraordinary when brought in contrast with such gigantic pictorial
power. The sharks are quite unnecessary, the bodies in the water are too
many, the absurdity of the chains appearing above it is too gross; the
horror is overdone and melodramatic, or, in a word, one of his finest
pictorial conceptions is spoilt for want of a little common sense, of a
little power to place himself in relation to his fellows and see how it
would appear to them. Again, we cannot help wishing that he had had a
friend at his elbow like Stanfield, who would have saved him from the
laughter of small critics. He was not fit to manage such a work on such
a subject by himself.
In his picture of _War--the Exile and the Rock-limpet_, with its extract
from the “Fallacies of Hope”--
“Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like
A soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone
Amidst a sea of blood ...
...But can you join your comrades?”
we see the same mental helplessness. It verges on the sublime, it verges
on the ridiculous. We should be sorry to call it either; but it is
childish--not with the grand simplicity of Blake, but with the confused
complicity of Turner. Mr. Ruskin says that Turner tried in vain to make
him understand the full meaning of this work, and we are not surprised.
Such pictures as these had occurred now and then all through his
career--pictures in which the means employed were utterly inadequate to
express the sentiment duly, such as the _Waterloo_,--pictures in which
the accumulation of ideas was confused and excessive, as the _Phryne
going to the Bath as Venus, Demosthenes taunted by Æschines_; and he had
shown some hazy symbolism in connection with shell-fish in these
verses:--
“Roused from his long contented cot he went
Where oft he laboured, and the ... bent,
To form the snares for lobsters armed in mail;
But men, more cunning, over this prevail,
[Illustration: THE SLAVE SHIP.
_In the possession of Miss Alice Hooper, of Boston, U.S._]
Lured by a few sea-snail and whelks, a prey
That they could gather on their watery way,
Caught in a wicker cage not two feet wide,
While the whole ocean’s open to their pride.”
But now these “failures,” for failures they were, however fine the art
qualities they possessed, became chronic, and the rule rather than the
exception; and this is to us the greatest tragedy in the whole of his
career--the spectacle of a great painter, the very slave of his genius,
compelled to paint this and paint that at its bidding without being able
to distinguish between what was great and what was little, what sublime
and what ridiculous, almost as mighty as Milton and Shelley one moment,
and as poor as Blackmore or Robert Montgomery the next. He appears to us
in these last days like a great ship, rudderless, but still grand and
with all sails set, at the mercy of the wind, which played with it a
little while and then cast it on the rocks.
Rudderless, masterless, was he also as a man. We are very loth to
believe the terrible picture of moral degradation supplied by the “best
authority” to Mr. Thornbury, and quoted in the first chapter of this
volume; but there is no doubt that he lived by no means a reputable life
in his old age. As to how he met with Mrs. Booth, at whose little house
by the side of the Thames, near Cremorne, he lived for some time before
his death, we have not cared to inquire, nor do we intend to repeat the
usual stories about it; nor will we venture an opinion as to how often
he took too much to drink or what was his favourite stimulant, or what
other excesses he committed. His whole faculties had been absorbed in
his art; and when this failed him--when he became broken in health and
failing in sight--he had no store of wise reflection to employ his
mind, no harmless pursuits to follow, no refined tastes to amuse him,
nor, as far as we know, had he any hope of any future rectification of
the unevennesses of this world. Some of his friends he had lost by
death, many were still living and ready to cheer his last years if he
would have had them, but he would not. His secretiveness and love of
solitude clung to him to the last.
He did not, however, lose his love of art and his desire of acquiring
knowledge relating to it. It was in these last years, 1847-49, that he
paid several visits to the studio of Mr. Mayall, the celebrated
photographic artist, passing himself off as a Master in Chancery, and
taking very great interest in the development of the new process which
had not then got beyond the daguerreotype. To the interesting account of
these visits printed by Mr. Thornbury,[47] we are enabled by Mr.
Mayall’s kindness to add that at a time when his finances were at a very
low ebb in consequence of litigation about patent rights, Turner
unasked, brought him a roll of bank-notes, to the amount of £300, and
gave it him on the understanding that he was to repay him if he could.
This, Mr. Mayall was able to do very soon, but that does not lessen the
generosity of Turner’s act.
Notwithstanding, however, such bright glimpses as this, his last years
must have been sad and dull, and his greatest source of happiness was
probably the knowledge that whatever critics might say of his later
works, there were a few men like Mr. Munro, Mr. Griffiths, the Ruskins,
father and son, who appreciated them, and that his earlier pictures not
only kept up their fame but rose in price. Though in decline, his fame
was as great as almost he could have wished. Two offers of £100,000 he
is said to have refused for the contents of Queen Anne Street; £5,000
for his two _Carthages_. The greatest of all his triumphs was perhaps
when he was waited upon by Mr. Griffiths, with an offer from a
distinguished Committee, among whom were Sir Robert Peel, Lord Hardinge,
and others, to buy these pictures for the nation. This is the greatest
instance of his self-sacrifice, which is well attested; for he refused
to part with them because he had willed them to the nation. He might
have got the money and his wish also, but he refused. The recollection
of this, though it occurred some years before he died, should have
afforded him some pleasant reflections.
It had been long known that Turner had another home than that in Queen
Anne Street, and he had shown considerable ingenuity in concealing it,
for he used to go out of an evening to dinner with his friends when he
so willed, and met them at the Academy and other places. Almost to the
last he could be merry and sociable at such gatherings, and there is a
very pleasant account of a dinner in 1850 at David Roberts’ house, given
in a note to Ballantyne’s life of that artist, at which Turner was. It
is a memorandum by an artist from the country, and describes Turner’s
manner as--
“Very agreeable, his quick bright eye sparkled, and his whole
countenance showed a desire to please. He was constantly making or
trying to make jokes; his dress, though rather old-fashioned, was
far from being shabby.” Turner’s health was proposed by an Irish
gentleman who had attended his lectures on perspective, on which he
complimented the artist. “Turner made a short reply in a jocular
way, and concluded by saying, rather sarcastically, that he was
glad this honourable gentleman had profited so much by his lectures
as thoroughly to understand perspective, for it was more than he
did.” Turner afterwards, in Roberts’ absence, took the chair, and,
at Stanfield’s request, proposed Roberts’ health, which he did,
speaking hurriedly, “but soon ran short of words and breath, and
dropped down on his chair with a hearty laugh, starting up again
and finishing with a ‘hip, hip, hurrah!’.... Turner was the last
who left, and Roberts accompanied him along the street to hail a
cab.... At this time Turner was indulging in the singular freak of
living, under the name of Mr. Booth, in a small lodging on the
banks of the Thames.... This, though now cleared up, was a mystery
to his friends then, and Roberts was anxious to unravel it. When
the cab drove up he assisted Turner to his seat, shut the door, and
asked where he should tell cabby to take him; but Turner was not to
be caught, and, with a knowing wink, replied, ‘Tell him to drive to
Oxford Street, and then I’ll direct him where to go.’”
Turner not only kept his secret from his friends, but from Mrs. Danby,
who, says Mr. Thornbury--
“One day, as she was brushing an old coat of Turner’s, in turning
out a pocket, she found and pounced on a letter directed to him,
and written by a friend who lived at Chelsea. Mrs. Danby, it
appears, came to the conclusion that Turner himself was probably at
Chelsea, and went there to seek for him, in company with another
infirm old woman. From inquiries in a place by the river-side,
where gingerbread was sold, they came to the conclusion that Turner
was living in a certain small house close by, and informed a Mr.
Harpur,[48] whom she and Turner knew. He went to the place and
found the painter sinking. This was on the 18th of December, 1851,
and on the following day Turner died.”
So died the great solitary genius, Turner, the first of all men to
endeavour to paint the full power of the sun, the greatest imagination
that ever sought expression in landscape, the greatest pictorial
interpreter of the elemental forces of nature, that ever lived. His
life, and character, and art, complex as they were in their
manifestation, were as simple in motive as those of the most ordinary
man. Art, fame, and money were what he strived for from the beginning
to the end of his days, and those days were embittered at the end by
fallacies of hope with regard to all three. Critics laughed at him, he
was given no social honour, (neither knighted nor made President of the
Royal Academy), and his money was useless. For the meanness and
isolation of his existence he had no one to thank but himself, but this
was also, as we hope we have shown in the course of these pages, the
natural result of the motives of his life.
[Illustration: THE ROOM IN WHICH TURNER DIED.]
The nobleness of his life consisted in his devotion to landscape art,
and this should cover many sins. He found it sunk very low: he left it
raised to a height which it had never attained before. That he could
have done this by painting falsely is absurd. The falsity of his works
is just of that kind which comes from almost infinite knowledge of
truth. He knew little else but art and nature, and he knew these by
heart. He could make nature, and this confidence in his creative power
led him sometimes into strange errors, which no one else could have
made, such as putting the sun and moon in impossible positions in the
same picture, and making boats sail in opposite directions before the
wind; but how much more truth of natural phenomena has he not given even
in such pictures than can be found in any literal transcript of nature!
His colour appears to many to be untrue; but this is greatly due to his
clinging from first to last to one central truth--the sun. It was that
which gave the pitch to his light, and his colour too, as in nature. To
that great light all must be subservient; it is not the local colour of
an object in the foreground, or the strength of shade of a particular
cave, that controls the chiaroscuro and colouring of nature, but the
sun. So all things were sacrificed to this; the green must go from the
grass, and the shadows must become scarlet, rather than this truth
should be lost. His preference for harmonies of blue, red, and yellow,
to the exclusion of green, never giving, as Mr. Leslie pointed out, the
“verdure” of England, is remarkable; he is the only artist we know who,
instead of the usual “bit of red,” to correct the green of a landscape,
introduces a bit of “green” (generally harsh crude green), to correct
its too great redness. (See, for instance, the apron of the woman in the
left-hand corner of his drawing of Rouen Cathedral for the “Rivers of
France.”) His constant fault, and, as we think, an inexcusable one, is
the careless drawing of his figures. It is not an excuse to say that
they must not be painted so as to draw attention from the landscape;
first, because Turner in his earlier pictures showed that he could
introduce well-finished figures without doing this; and secondly,
because Turner’s figures in his later pictures do this by their badness.
This carelessness gradually grew on him, because he would not take pains
with them. He could draw very small figures very well, giving more
spirit and essence than any other artist, in a touch. He could indicate
a shamble, a strut, a march, lassitude, confidence, any physical or
mental quality of a figure as easily as he could a bough or a cloud; but
when he had to draw a figure to which time must be given, to perfect a
definite, complex, organized form, he scamped it. His indication of the
spirit of animals is often wonderful, as in the deer in _Arundel Park_,
and the dogs in _Troyes_.
Of Turner’s mind and character apart from his art not much can be said
in praise. The former we have already said so much about that we need
only say here that although not of a very high order, except in
sensibility and perception, he showed now and then capacities which
might have been turned to good account by more generous training.
Although his jokes were mainly practical, or of that kind which is
understood by the term “waggery;” a few good things which he said have
been reported, such for instance as that “indistinctness was his forte;”
and though his poetry is generally miserable, it here and there contains
a fine expression. It is remarkable, however, how both his wit, and what
is good in his poetry, are connected with his art. He never said a thing
worth recording about anything else, and the few good bits in his poetry
are all reflections of a pictorial image. The utter helplessness of his
mind, when he tried to put his reasoning into words, is shown by Mr.
Hamerton, in one wonderful extract. (See his “Life of Turner,” p. 143.)
We do not wonder that his attempts at teaching (though he is said at one
time in his youth to have got as much as a guinea a lesson) and his
lectures as a professor of perspective were failures.
As to his character, it was mainly negative, on all points except art
and money. The best part of it was the tenderness of his heart; but
though we have no doubt about this fact, or that he could occasionally
in his later years be generous even in money,[49] this does not raise
our opinion of him much, for he had more than he wished to spend. If he
was remarkable for kind and generous impulses, he was still more
remarkable for the success with which he, in general, controlled them.
We cannot dispute Mr. Ruskin’s assertion that he never “failed in an
undertaken trust,” but we have yet to learn that he ever undertook one.
If it be really true that, unasked and without any question of
repayment, he gave a sum of many thousand pounds on more than one
occasion to the son of one of his friends and patrons, such an act
deserves more accurate record and complete proof. The money was repaid
in both cases, it is said.
He showed his best disposition in his kindness to children and animals,
and his fellow-artists. Of the last he always spoke kindly, and to young
or old was ever just and kind and patient. Poor Haydon said that he “did
him justice;” he assisted many a young man with a useful hint, and once
took down one of his pictures at the Academy to find a place for one of
an unknown man. He took great interest in the founding of the Artists’
Benevolent Fund, and meant his accumulated wealth to be spent in a home
for decayed artists.
There is no doubt that long before he died he felt the uselessness of
wealth and a desire to dispose of his own in a good way. The only proof
we have of his notions of a good way is his will, and that, as we have
already said, is not an unselfish document, and the codicils which he
added to it from 1831 to 1849 do not show any increase of unselfishness.
On the contrary, he revoked his legacies to his uncles and cousins, and
left his finished pictures to form a Turner Gallery, and money to found
a Turner medal and a monument to himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The will and its codicils were so confused that all the legal ability of
England was unable to decide what Turner really wanted to be done with
his money, and after years of miserable litigation, during which a large
portion of it was wasted in legal expenses, a compromise was effected,
in which the wishes of the parties to the suits and others concerned,
including the nation and the Royal Academy, were consulted rather than
the wishes of the testator: his desire to found a charity for decayed
artists, the only thing upon which his mind seems to have been fixed
from first to last in these puzzled documents, was over--thrown, and his
next of kin, the only persons mentioned in his will whom he certainly
did not mean to get a farthing, got the bulk of the property (excepting
the pictures). We have no doubt it was quite right; we are very glad the
nation got all the pictures and drawings, finished and unfinished, and
the Royal Academy £20,000; that there are a Turner medal and a Turner
Gallery, and we think that the next of kin should have had a great deal
of his money: but surely the greatest fallacy of all Turner’s hope was
that his will would be construed according to his intentions.
Two of his wishes with regard to himself were, however, fully carried
out--his desire to be buried in St. Paul’s and the expenditure of £1,000
on his monument. His funeral was conducted with considerable pomp and
ceremony, his “gifted talents,” to use his own words, “acknowledged by
the many,” and many of his fellow-artists and admirers followed him to
the grave; nor amongst the crowd were wanting a few old friends who in
their hearts still cherished him as “dear old Turner.”
[Illustration: “DATUR BORA QUIETI.”]
[Illustration: decorative bar]
INDEX.
(_The Names of Paintings and Drawings are printed in Italics._)
Page
Academy, Royal, School of, 15
Academy Club, 108
Academy, in St. Martin’s Lane, 13
Academy, in Soho, 15
Almanacks, drawings for, 47
_Alps at Daybreak_, 113
_Apollo and Python_, 67, 107
_Apuleia and Apuleius_, 69, 76, 93
_Army of the Medes_, 49
Artists’ Benevolent Fund, 139
_Arundel Park_, 137
_Banks of the Loire_, 111
Basire, 44
_Battle of the Nile_, 49
_Bay of Baiæ_, 97
Bible, Illustrations of, Finden’s, 98, 99
_Birmingham_, 33
“Blackwood’s Magazine”, 124
_Bonneville_, 53
Booth, Mrs., 131
Boswell’s “Antiquities”, 14
“Britannia Depicta”, 47
Britton, John, 22
Burnet, John, 50
_Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons_, 118
Bushey, 18, 23
_Buttermere, Lake_, 41
Byron, Illustrations to, 98
_Calais Pier_, 53
_Caligula’s Palace and Bridge_, 97
Canaletti, 114
_Carthage_, 70
_Carthage, Decline of_, 93
_Carthage, Dido building_, 93, 113
Chantrey, 108, 109, 110, 112
_Chateau de St. Michel_, 53, 54
_Chester_, 33
_Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_, 97
_Chryses_, 48
Claude Lorrain, 50, 61, 63, 113
Collins, Wilkie--Description of Turner, 121
_Cologne_, 99, 107
Composition, Turner’s method, 105, 106
Constable’s _Opening of Waterloo Bridge_, 100
Constable’s _Whitehall Stairs_, 100
Continent, Second Tour on the, 76
Cooke, Dispute with, 58, 101
Letter from, 101, &c.
“Copper-plate Magazine,” drawings for, 32
Cozens, J., 21, 26, 27, 67
_Crossing the Brook_, 80, 84, 93, 94
Crowle, Mr., early patron of Turner, 14, 16
Danby, Mrs., 134
Daniell, 26
_Dartmouth_, 122
_Datur hora quieti_, 113
Dayes, 26, 28
De Loutherbourg, 27, 38, 39, 49, 86
Devonshire, Tour in, 79
_Dido and Æneas_, 93
Dragons, 70-74
Eastlake, Sir Charles, 83
Edridge, 15, 23, 27
_Egglestone Abbey_, 94
Egremont, Lord, 76, 108, 109, 110
“England and Wales”, 104
Engravings coloured at Brentford, 14
Exeter, Turner’s visit to, 84
_Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen_, 53
“Fallacies of Hope”, 130
_Falls in Valombrè_--Illustration of “Jacqueline”, 114
Farnley, 45, 46, 108
Fawkes, 44, 45, 76, 112
_Festival of the Vintage of Macon_, 53
_Fifth Plague_, 49
Finden’s Illustrations of the Bible, 98, 99
_Fishermen at Sea_, 34
_Fishermen Coming Ashore_, 34, 35
_Fishing Boats in a Squall_, 50
Fonthill, drawings of, 48
_Frosty Morning_, 89
_Funeral of Sir Thomas Lawrence_, 111
Gainsborough, 23, 24, 27, 38
_Gawthorpe_, drawing of, 45
Girtin, 15, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28
_Glacier and Source of the Arvèron_, 53
Glover, 27
_Goddess of Discord_, 52, 72
Greene, Thomas (extract from Diary), 35
Griffiths, 132, 133
Hakewills, The, 109
Hakewill’s “Picturesque Tour”--Illustrations to, 98, 99, 103
Hamerton, 31, 39, 48, 104, 128
Hammersmith, Turner’s life at, 86
Hand Court, Turner’s Studio in, 32
_Hannibal Crossing the Alps_, 66, 76
_Harbour of Dieppe_, 99
Hardinge, Lord, 133
Hardwick, Architect, 15, 25
Harpur, Henry, executor, 8
Harpur, Mrs. Turner’s aunt, 8
Harrison, employed by, 32
Haydon, 139
Hearne, 15, 23, 26
Heath, C., 109
_Helvoetsluys_, 100
Henderson, Mr., 16, 26, 28
_Heysham Village_, 94
Higham, T., 94
_Hornby Castle_, 64, 94
Howard (R.A.), Portrait by, at Heston, 88
Hunt, W., 15
Italy, First Visit to, 92
Italy, Picturesque Tour of, Hakewill’s, 98, 99, 103
_Jason_, 48, 74
Johns, Ambrose, 83
Jones, 108
Letter to, 109, 112
_Juliet and her Nurse_, 118, 124
_Jumièges_, 116
Kingsley, Rev. W., Notes of, 129
_Lambeth, Archbishop’s Palace at_, 32
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, Turner’s generosity to, 99
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, death of, 111
Lectures on perspective, 133, 138
Leslie’s Autobiographical Recollections, 100
Lewis, Engraver, quarrel with Turner, 57
“Liber Studiorum”, 52, 55, 66, 89, 107
_Light-towers of the Hève_, 115
_Little Devil’s Bridge_, 62
_Loretto Necklace_, 111
Lowson, Newby, 22
Maiden Lane, 10
Malton, Thoma, 15, 20, 25
_Margate Church_, early drawing of, 13
Margate, School at, 15
Marlow, 23
Marshall, Mother’s maiden name, 6
Marshall, Uncle, 8, 13
“Mawman’s Tour”, 47
Mayall, Mr., 132
_Mercury and Argus_, 118
_Messieurs les Voyageurs on their return from Italy_, 111
Miller, T., 23
“Modern Painters”, 124
Monro, Dr., 15, 18, 23, 24, 25, 27, 112
_Moonlight_, 34
Morland, 27, 38
_Morning on the Coniston Fells_, 41
Munro of Novar, 118, 132
_Narcissus and Echo_, 48
Narraway, 18, 32
National Gallery, Drawing in, 94
_Neptune’s Trident_, 103
_Norham Castle_, 41
_Orvieto_, 110, 111
Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, 66, 68, 69, 108
_Oxford_, Pictures of, 86
_Oxford, Scene near_, early drawing, 14
Palice, Mr., Drawing Master, 15
_Pantheon, After Fire_, 34
_Peace, Burial at Sea_, 128
Pearce, Miss, 83
Peel, Sir Robert, 133
_Pembury Mill_, 62
Perspective, Professor of, 75
Petworth, 76, 108, 109
_Phryne_, 130
Pindar, Peter, 82
Pine, 23
“Pocket Magazine,” drawings for, 32
Poetry, Turner’s, 67, 68
Porden, 15, 16
Poussin, Nicolas, 63
“Provincial Antiquities,” Illustrations to, 92
Pye, John, 94
Radcliffe, Engraver, 94
_Rain, Steam, and Speed_, 128
Rawlinson’s “Turner’s Liber Studiorum”, 60
_Redcliffe Church, Bristol_, 84
Redding, Cyrus, 78, 82
Reeve, Lovell, description of Turner when young, 31
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 25
_Richmond_, 94
“Richmondshire, Dr. Whitaker’s History of”, 94
_Rising Squall_, 34
Ritchie, Leitch, 116
“Rivers of England”, 94, 96
“Rivers of France”, 115, 116
Roberts, David, 23, 133
Rogers, Illustrations to, 99, 113, 114
Rome, 109, 110
_Rome, from the Vatican_, 97
Rooker, 23
_Rouen Cathedral_, 137
Ruskin, J., 39, 40, 48, 61, 73, 121, 122, 124, 132
Ruskin, J., his Collection of Turner’s Drawings, 94, 129
Sandycombe Lodge, 85, 86, 101
_St. Vincent’s Rocks, Bristol, View near_, 34
Sandby, Paul, 23
Sandby, Tom, 23
School, First, at New Brentford, 13
Scott, Sir Walter, 92, 99
Shaw, Dr., 8
_Shipwreck, The_, 50, 54
_Slave Ship, The_, 129
Smith, John Raphael, 15, 23
_Snowstorm_, 128
Society of Artists, 13
Solus Lodge, 86
_Solway Moss_, 62
“Southern Coast”, 47, 84, 99
_Spithead_, 54
Stanfield, 120, 128
_Sun rising through Vapour_, 54, 113
Switzerland, Sketches in, 54
_Téméraire, The Fighting_, 118
_Temple of Jupiter_, 93
_Tenth Plague_, 49
Thomson, of Duddingstone, 92
Tomkison, 13, 16
_Tornaro_, 113
_Totnes_, 94
Townley, 45
Trimmer (Vicar of Heston), 86, 87, 88, 91, 101, 108, 111
Trimmer, Miss, attachment of Turner to, 89, 90
_Troyes_, 137
“Turner’s Cribs”, 85
“Turner Gallery” in Harley Street and Queen Anne Street, 85
“Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views”, 32
Turner’s Gift, 78, 112
Turner, Charles, engraver, quarrel with Turner, 58
Turner, Price, uncle, 84
Turner, Thomas Price, first cousin, 84
_Ulysses and Polyphemus_, 70, 107
Vandevelde, 28, 50
Varley, 23, 24
Varnishing days, 99, 108
Venice, First pictures of, 114
Sketches in National Gallery, 114
_Venice from Madonna della Salute_, 124
Venice, later pictures of, 126
_Venus and Adonis_, 52
Vergil, 70
Vignettes, 113
_Vision_, from “Voyage of Columbus”, 114
Wales, First Tour in, 32
Walker, J., 32
_War, the Exile and the Rock Limpet_, 130
_Warkworth Castle_, 43
_Waterloo_, 130
Watts, Alaric, 23, 31
Wedmore’s “Essay on Girtin”, 24
Wells, W. F., 18, 55, 112
_Westminster Abbey_, early drawing of, 14
“Whalley, Parish of,” drawings for, 41
_What you Will_, 97
Wheeler, Mrs., 18
Whitaker, Dr., 41, 44
Wilkie, Sir D., 112, 128
Will, Turner’s, 112, 139, 140
Wilson, 23, 27, 38, 49
Wolcot, Dr., 82
_Wreck of the Minotaur_, 50
Wyatt, Print Publisher, of Oxford, 86
_Wycliffe_, 94
Yorkshire, Tour in, 34, 40
CHRONOLOGY OF TURNER’S LIFE.
Date. Page
1775. Born, 23rd April 6
1784. Drawing of Margate Church 13
1785. Goes to School at Brentford 15
1789. Student of Royal Academy 32
1791. First exhibits at Royal Academy 32
1792. First Tour in Wales 32
1792. Studio in Hand Court 32
1794. First engraving from Turner published 32
1793 or 1797. First exhibits in oil 34
1794. Noticed by the Press 34
1797. Tour in the North of England 40
1799. Elected A.R.A. 39
1799. Removes to Harley Street 75
1800. Visits Scotland 53
1801 or 1802. First Tour on Continent 53
1802. Elected R.A. 39
1804. Second Tour on Continent 76
1805. Paints _The Shipwreck_ 50
1807. Commences “Liber Studiorum” 55
1808. Professor of Perspective--Takes House at Hammersmith 75
1811. Exhibits _Apollo and the Python_ 67
1811 or 1812. Visits Devonshire 79
1812. Town address changed to Queen Anne Street 75
1814. Goes to Twickenham 75
1814. Commences _Southern Coast_ 84
1815. Exhibits _Crossing the Brook_ and _Dido Building Carthage_ 93
1819. First visit to Italy 92
1823. “History of Richmondshire” published 94
1824. “Rivers of England” published 94
1823. Exhibits _Bay of Baiæ_ 97
1826. Leaves Twickenham 101
1827. Quarrels with Cooke 101
1827. “England and Wales” commenced 104
1828. Visits Rome 109
1829. Exhibits _Ulysses deriding Polyphemus_ 107
1830. Death of his Father 111
1830. Illustrations to Rogers’s “Italy” published 113
1831. Makes his Will 112
1833. Exhibits first Venetian Picture 114
1833. “Rivers of France” commenced 115
1839. Exhibits _Fighting Téméraire_ 118
1843. Publication of “Modern Painters” 124
1851. Death 134
[Illustration: decoration]
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
The Fighting Temeraire=> The Fighting Téméraire {pg 1}
Similiar stories could=> Similar stories could {pg 22}
Glacier and Source of the Arveron=> Glacier and Source of the Arvèron
{pg 53}
Yours must truly,=> Yours most truly, {pg 110}
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Absalom and Achitophel.”
[2] Mr. Cyrus Redding met him there in 1812, and Sir Charles Eastlake
then or after then. There is no engraved drawing by him from Devonshire
till the _Southern Coast_, which began in 1814, or picture, till the
_Crossing of the Brook_, exhibited in 1815.
[3] Mr. Thornbury treats this as an absurd tradition, but it is
supported by an account given by Dr. Shaw of an interview between him
and the artist, and printed by Mr. T. pp. 318, 319. “May I ask you if
you are the Mr. Turner who visited at Shelford Manor, in the county of
Nottingham, in your youth?” “I am,” he answered. On being further
questioned as to whether his mother’s name was Marshall, he grew very
angry, and accused his visitor of taking “an unwarrantable liberty,” but
was pacified by an apology, and invited Dr. Shaw to give him “the favour
of a visit” whenever he came to town.
[4] He was called “William” at home.
[5] See “Notes and Queries,” 2nd series, v. 475, for the true version of
this story.
[6] Wornum.
[7] Dr. Thomas Monro, of Bushey and Adelphi Terrace, physician of
Bridewell and Bethlehem Hospitals, a well-known lover of art and patron
of Edridge, Girtin, Turner, W. Hunt, and other young artists. He erected
monuments at Bushey Church to Edridge and Hearne.
[8] This gentleman is described by Mr. Thornbury as Mr. _H_arraway, a
_fish_monger in Broad_way_.
[9] This took place in 1836.
[10] Mr. John Britton, publisher, and author of “Beauties of Wiltshire,”
&c., &c.
[11] Perhaps the Earl of Essex.
[12] See Memoir prefixed to “Liber Fluviorum.”
[13] “Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views,” London, 1854.
[14] See also Mr. Wedmore’s interesting essay on Girtin for a story
about Turner and Girtin’s drawing of the _White House at Chelsea_.
[15] Whether father or son does not appear.
[16] Down to 1851 the Exhibition, in common parlance, always meant the
Exhibition of the Royal Academy.
[17] His first exhibited oil picture, according to Mr. S. Redgrave. See
“Dictionary of Artists of the English School.”
[18] According to most accounts his first exhibited oil picture.
[19] See Whitaker’s “Parish of Whalley,” vol. ii. p. 183.
[20] See also Willis’s “Current Notes” for Jan. 1852.
[21] In a letter from Andrew Caldwell to Bishop Percy, dated 14th June,
1802, printed by Nicholls in his “Illustrations of the Literary History
of the Eighteenth Century,” vol. viii. p. 43, Turner is spoken of as
beating “Loutherbourg and every other artist all to nothing.” “A painter
of my acquaintance, and a good judge, declares his pencil is magic; that
it is worth every landscape-painter’s while to make a pilgrimage to see
and study his works. Loutherbourg, he used to think of so highly,
appears now mediocre.”
[22] The names of these pictures are given as printed in the Catalogue.
[23] Rawlinson.
[24] See saying of Turner’s reported by Mr. Halstead, and printed in
note in Mr. Rawlinson’s “Turner’s Liber Studiorum, Macmillan and Co.,
1878,” from which excellent work most of the above information is
derived.
[25] Not issued till the 10th part, or over five years from the
publication of the first.
[26] Only a portion of it, the picture.
[27] The only picture exhibited at the Academy by this artist. It was
called _A Landscape, with Hannibal in his March over the Alps, showing
to his Army the Fertile Plains of Italy_. As its year of exhibition was
1776, it would be interesting to learn where Turner saw this picture.
Where is it now? Our information on the subject is derived from
Redgrave’s “Century of Painters.”
[28] Thornbury, p. 236.
[29] He became Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy in this
year.
[30] Turner seems to have paid a visit to the Continent in 1804, as Mr.
Thornbury refers to some powerful water-colour Swiss scenes of 1804 at
Farnley, p. 240.
[31] There is no record of a visit by Turner to the Isle of Man.
[32] Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas,” suggested by a picture of ‘Peele
Castle in a storm,’ painted by Sir George Beaumont.
[33] “Past Celebrities,” by Cyrus Redding, vol. i.
[34] Thornbury, p. 152.
[35] See Wornum, “Turner Gallery,” p. xv., for a Catalogue of Turner’s
Gallery in 1809.
[36] He is said to have been his own architect for both houses.
[37] See Thornbury, p. 224.
[38] See Thornbury, p. 223.
[39] Called in the Catalogue _Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817_.
[40] _Helvoetsluys_: _the City of Utrecht, 64, going to sea_.
[41] Turner had a picture of the same subject in another room. The two
artists had agreed together that each should paint it.
[42] Leslie’s “Autobiographical Recollections,” vol. i. pp. 202, 203.
[43] They are printed as given by Thornbury.
[44] In his first will he only leaves two pictures to the Nation, the
_Sun Rising through Mist_ and the _Carthage_, and on condition that they
were to be hung side by side with the great Claudes.
[45] Hamerton, pp. 286-87.
[46] Ibid., p. 292.
[47] Thornbury, pp. 349-51.
[48] Mr. Harpur, the grandson of the sister of his mother, one of his
executors.
[49] We are informed by Mr. J. Beavington Atkinson, to whom we are
indebted for other interesting facts in connection with Turner, that he
was not ungrateful to his early friends, the Narraways of Bristol, but
supplied them from time to time with sums of money, and that at his
death there was a sum owing by one of the family who wished to repay it,
but was informed by the executors that Turner had left no record of any
such debt.