"Turner was unquestionably, in his best time, the greatest master of
water color who had ever lived. He may have been excelled since then in
some special departments of the art, in some craft of execution, or in
the knowledge of some particular thing in nature; but no one has ever
deserved such generally high rank as Turner in the art of water-color
painting. His superiority even goes so far that the art, in his hands,
is like another art, a fresh discovery of his own.
[Illustration: TURNER.]
"The color, in his most delicate work, hardly seems to be laid on the
paper by any means known to us, but suggests the idea of a vaporous
deposit, and besides the indescribable excellence of those parts of
Turner's water-colors which do not look as if they were painted at all,
there is excellence of another kind in those parts which exhibit
dexterities of execution. Nor is the strange perfection of his painting
in water color limited to landscape; his studies of still life, birds
and their plumage, bits of interiors at Petworth, etc., are evidence
enough that, had he chosen to paint objects rather than effects, he
might have been as wonderful an object painter as William Hunt was,
though in a different and more elevated manner." Thus writes Philip
Gilbert Hamerton.
Turner was born April 23, 1775, in Maiden Lane, London, over a barber
shop, in which his father, William Turner, lived and worked. The latter
was an economical, good-natured, uneducated man, who taught his boy to
be honest and saving.
The mother, Mary Turner, belonged to a family of Marshalls or Mallords
near Nottingham, superior in position to the family of William Turner.
She had an ungovernable temper, and is said to have led the barber "a
sad life." Later, she became insane, and was sent to an asylum.
The boy William very early began to show his skill in drawing. In his
first school at New Brentford, when he was ten years old, his birds,
flowers, and trees on the walls of the room attracted attention, so that
his schoolmates often did his work in mathematics for him while he made
sketches. His father had intended him to be a barber, but, perceiving
the lad's talent, encouraged him, hung his drawings in his shop windows,
and sold them for a few pence or shillings each.
At twelve years of age, William was sent to "Mr. Palice, a floral
drawing-master" in Soho; at thirteen, to a Mr. Coleman at Margate, where
he loved and studied the sea; and at fourteen, to the Royal Academy.
Meanwhile, he earned money by coloring prints, making backgrounds and
skies for architects' plans, and copying pictures for Dr. Munro, who
lived in one of the palaces on the Strand. This physician owned many
Rembrandts and Gainsboroughs, with sketches by Claude, Titian,
Vandevelde, and others.
This house proved a valuable place for study to the barber's son, who
considered himself fortunate to receive half a crown and a supper for
each evening's work.
When pitied by some one in later life, because of the hard work of his
boyhood, he said, "Well! And what could be better practice?"
In 1792, when he was seventeen, he received a commission from Mr. J.
Walker, an engraver, to make drawings for his _Copperplate Magazine_,
and soon after from Mr. Harrison for his _Pocket Magazine_. To make
these sketches, the youth travelled through Wales, on a pony lent him by
a friend, and on foot, with his baggage in his handkerchief tied to the
end of a stick, through Nottingham, Cambridge, Lincoln, Peterborough,
Windsor, Ely, the Isle of Wight, and elsewhere.
"The result of these tours," says W. Cosmo Monkhouse, "may be said to
have been the perfection of his technical skill, the partial
displacement of traditional notions of composition, and the storing of
his memory with infinite effects of nature."
His first water color at the Royal Academy Exhibition was a picture of
Lambeth Palace, when he was fifteen, and his first oil painting at the
exhibition, according to Redgrave, the "Rising Squall, Hot Wells," when
he was eighteen. Hamerton thinks "Moonlight," a study in Milbank, was
his first exhibited work in oil. "The picture," he says, "shows not the
least trace of genius, yet it has always been rather a favorite with me
for its truth to nature in one thing. All the ordinary manufacturers of
moonlights--and moonlights have been manufactured in deplorably large
quantities for the market--represent the light of our satellite as a
blue and cold light; whereas in nature, especially in the southern
summer, it is often pleasantly rich and warm. Turner did not follow the
usual receipt, but had the courage to make his moonlight warm, though he
had not as yet the skill to express the ineffably mellow softness of the
real warm moonlights in nature."
At twenty-one, Turner hired a house in Hand Court, and began to teach
drawing in London and elsewhere at ten shillings a lesson. But he soon
grew impatient of his fashionable pupils, and the teaching was
abandoned.
At twenty-two, he journeyed into the counties of Yorkshire and Kent, and
soon produced "Morning on the Coniston Fells," in 1798; "Cattle in
Water; Buttermere Lake," 1798; and "Norham Castle on the Tweed." Twenty
years afterward, as he was passing Norham Castle, with Cadell, an
Edinburgh publisher, he took off his hat to the castle. Cadell expressed
surprise. "Oh," said Turner, "I made a drawing or painting of Norham
several years ago. It took; and from that day to this I have had as much
to do as my hands could execute."
In Yorkshire, the rising young artist, natural and genial in manner,
though small and somewhat plain in person, made many warm friends. He
was often a guest at Farnley Hall, owned by Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes, who
afterward adorned his home with fifty thousand dollars' worth of
Turner's pictures.
Mr. Fawkes's son speaks of "the fun, frolic, and shooting we enjoyed
together, and which, whatever may be said by others of his temper and
disposition, have proved to me that he was, in his hours of distraction
from his professional labors, as kindly-hearted a man, and as capable of
enjoyment and fun of all kinds, as any I ever knew."
Mrs. Wheeler, a friend in these early years, says: "Of all the
light-hearted, merry creatures I ever knew, Turner was the most so; and
the laughter and fun that abounded when he was an inmate of our cottage
was inconceivable, particularly with the juvenile members of the
family."
Somewhere between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, a sorrow came
which seemed completely to change Turner's nature. While at the Margate
school, he had fallen in love with the sister of a schoolmate; the love
had been reciprocated, and an engagement followed a few years later.
During a long absence in his art work, their letters were intercepted
by the young lady's stepmother, who finally prevailed upon her to become
engaged to another. A week before the wedding, Turner arrived at
Margate, and besought her to marry him; but his betrothed considered
herself in honor bound to the new lover. The marriage proved a most
unhappy one, and Turner remained a disappointed and solitary man through
life.
His art now became his one absorbing thought; he worked early and late,
often rising for work at four o'clock in the morning, saying sadly that
there were "no holidays for him."
In 1799, when he was twenty-four, he was made an associate of the Royal
Academy, and a full academician in 1802. Hamerton says: "His election is
the more remarkable, that he had done nothing whatever to bring it
about, except his fair hard work in his profession. He was absolutely
incapable of social courtiership in any of its disguises. He gave no
dinners, he paid no calls, he did nothing to make the academicians
believe that he would be a credit to their order in any social sense.
Even after his election, he would not go to thank his electors, in
obedience to the established usage. 'If they had not been satisfied with
my pictures,' he said to Stothard, 'they would not have elected me. Why,
then, should I thank them? Why thank a man for performing a simple
duty?' His views on the subject were clearly wrong, for the rules of
good manners very frequently require us to thank people for performing
simple duties, and the academicians were not under any obligation to
elect the young painter so soon; but how completely Turner's conduct in
this matter proves that he can only have been elected on his merits!...
"His elevation to the full membership was of immense value to him in his
career, and he knew this so well that he remained deeply attached to the
Academy all his life. He was associate or member of it for a full
half-century, and during fifty years was only three times absent from
its exhibitions."
This year, 1802, he removed to 64 Harley Street, taking his plain old
father home to live with him. He took his first tour on the Continent,
this year, making studies of Mont Blanc, the Swiss lakes and mountain
passes. The exhibitions of 1803 to 1806 contained, among other pictures,
"The Vintage at Macon," the celebrated "Calais Pier" in a gale; "The
Source of the Arveiron," "Narcissus and Echo," "Edinburgh from Calton
Hill;" his famous "Shipwreck," now in the National Gallery; and the
magnificent "Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the
Garden of Hesperides," also in the National Gallery.
In 1807, Turner began, at the suggestion of his friend, Mr. W. F. Wells,
the _Liber Studiorum_, issued in dark blue covers, each containing five
plates, the whole series of one hundred plates to be divided into
historical, landscape, pastoral, mountainous, marine, and
architectural. The work was intended as a rival to Claude Lorraine's
_Liber Veritatis_.
After seventy plates had been published, the project came to an end in
1816, because of disagreement with engravers, and lack of patronage. The
principal pictures were "AEsacus and Hesperia," "Jason," "Procris and
Cephalus," the "Fifth and Tenth Plagues of Egypt," "Christ and the Woman
of Samaria," "Rizpah," "Raglan Castle," the "River Wye," "Solway Moss,"
"Inverary," the "Yorkshire Coast," "Mer de Glace," the "Lake of Thun,"
"St. Gothard Pass," the "Alps from Grenoble," "Dunstanborough Castle,"
and others.
"So hopeless and worthless did the enterprise seem, at one time," says
M. F. Sweetser, "that Charles Turner, the engraver, used the proofs and
trials of effect as kindling paper. Many years later, Colnaghi, the
great print-dealer, caused him to hunt up the remaining proofs in his
possession, and gave him fifteen hundred pounds for them. 'Good God!'
cried the old engraver, 'I have been burning bank-notes all my life.'...
In later days three thousand pounds had been paid for a single copy of
the _Liber_."
"The most obvious intention of the work," says Monkhouse, "was to show
Turner's own power, and there never was, and perhaps never will be
again, such an exhibition of genius in the same direction. No rhetoric
can say for it as much as it says for itself in those ninety plates,
twenty of which were never published. If he did not exhaust art or
nature, he may be fairly said to have exhausted all that was then known
of landscape art, and to have gone further than any one else in the
interpretation of nature....
"Amongst his more obvious claims to the first place among landscape
artists are his power of rendering atmospherical effects, and the
structure and growth of things. He not only knew how a tree looked, but
he showed how it grew. Others may have drawn foliage with more habitual
fidelity, but none ever drew trunks and branches with such knowledge of
their inner life.... Others have drawn the appearance of clouds, but
Turner knew how they formed. Others have drawn rocks, but he could give
their structure, consistency, and quality of surface, with a few deft
lines and a wash; others could hide things in a mist, but he could
reveal things through mist. Others could make something like a rainbow,
but he, almost alone, and without color, could show it standing out, a
bow of light arrested by vapor in mid-air, not flat upon a mountain, or
printed on a cloud.... If we seek the books from which his imagination
took fire, we have the Bible and Ovid; the first of small, the latter of
great and almost solitary power. Jason, daring the huge glittering
serpent; Syrinx, fleeing from Pan; Cephalus and Procris; AEsacus and
Hesperia; Glaucus and Scylla; Narcissus and Echo. If we want to know the
artists he most admired and imitated, or the places to which he had
been, we shall find easily nearly all the former, and sufficient of the
latter to show the wide range of his travel. In a word, one who has
carefully studied the _Liber_ has indeed little to learn of the range
and power of Turner's art and mind, except his color and his fatalism."
In 1808, Turner was appointed professor of perspective in the Royal
Academy, which position he held for thirty years, though he rarely gave
lectures to students, owing to his confused manner and obscurity in the
use of language. Ruskin says: "The zealous care with which Turner
endeavored to do his duty is proved by a large existing series of
drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely colored, all by his
own hand, of the most difficult perspective subjects; illustrating not
only directions of line, but effects of light, with a care and
completion which would put the work of any ordinary teacher to utter
shame. In teaching generally, he would neither waste time nor spare it;
he would look over a student's drawing at the Academy, point to a
defective part, make a scratch on the paper at the side, say nothing. If
the student saw what was wanted, and did it, Turner was delighted; but
if the student could not follow, Turner left him."
Turner this year moved to the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, where his garden
extended to the Thames. In this he had a summer-house, where some of his
best work was done. He still retained the Harley-Street house, and
lived in it much the life of a recluse. Mr. Thornbury tells the
following incident:--
"Two ladies called upon Turner while he lived in Harley Street. On
sending in their names, after having ascertained that he was at home,
they were politely requested to walk in, and were shown into a large
sitting-room without a fire. This was in the depth of winter; and lying
about in various places were several cats without tails. In a short time
our talented friend made his appearance, asking the ladies if they felt
cold. The youngest replied in the negative; her companion, more curious,
wished she had stated otherwise, as she hoped they might have been shown
into his sanctum or studio. After a little conversation he offered them
wine and biscuits, which they partook of for the novelty, such an event
being almost unprecedented in his house. One of the ladies bestowing
some notice upon the cats, he was induced to remark that he had seven,
and that they came from the Isle of Man."
Turner was fond of his pet cats, and would let no harm come to them.
After he had moved, in 1812, to 47 Queen-Anne Street, one of his
favorite pictures, "Bligh Shore" was used as a covering for a window. A
cat desiring to enter the window scratched the picture severely, and was
about to be punished for the offence, by Mrs. Danby, the housekeeper,
when Turner said, "Never mind," and saved the cat from the whipping.
At his house in Twickenham, which he bought and rebuilt in 1813 or
1814, calling it Solus Lodge on account of his desire to be alone, and
afterwards Sandycomb Lodge, the boys named him "Blackbirdy," because he
protected the blackbirds in the adjacent trees, not allowing their nests
to be robbed. Turner sold this place after having owned it about twelve
years, because his aged father, whom he always called "Dad," was always
working in the garden and catching cold.
The eccentric artist must have been at this time quite rich, as well as
famous. He had painted "The Sun rising in Mist," in 1807; the well-known
"Wreck of the Minotaur," in 1810; "Apollo killing the Python," in 1811;
"Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps in a Snowstorm," in 1812; and
"Crossing the Brook," and "Dido building Carthage," in 1815. "The first
('Crossing the Brook')," says Monkhouse, "is the purest and most
beautiful of all his oil pictures of the loveliness of English scenery,
the most simple in its motive, the most tranquil in its sentiment, the
perfect expression of his enjoyment of the exquisite scenery in the
neighborhood of Plymouth. The latter ('Dido building Carthage'), with
all its faults, was the finest of the kind he ever painted, and his
greatest effect in the way of color before his visit to Italy."
It is said that "Crossing the Brook" was painted for a gentleman who
ordered it with the promise of paying twenty-five hundred dollars for
it, but was disappointed in it when finished, and refused to take it.
Turner was afterwards offered eight thousand dollars for it, but would
not sell it.
In 1815, the artist, now forty years old, was again disappointed in
love. He wrote to one of his best friends, Rev. H. Scott Trimmer, vicar
of Heston, concerning his sister, Miss Trimmer: "If she would but waive
her bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer instead of expecting
one, the same (Sandycomb Lodge) might change occupiers." But Miss
Trimmer had, at this time, another suitor, whom she married, and Turner
never again attempted to win a wife.
In 1817, "The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire" was exhibited, a
companion piece to the Building of Carthage. Years later, Sir Robert
Peel, Lord Hardinge, and others, offered twenty-five thousand dollars to
Turner for the two pictures, intending to present them to the National
Gallery. "It's a noble offer," said the painter, "but I have willed
them." He had already made his will, privately, giving these and other
pictures to the nation.
The artist is said to have once remarked to his friend Chantrey, the
sculptor: "Will you promise to see me rolled up in the 'Carthage' at my
burial?"
"Yes," was the reply; "and I promise you also that, as soon as you are
buried, I will see that you are taken up and unrolled."
In 1819, Turner made his first visit to Italy, after which his works
became remarkable for their color. In 1823, says Monkhouse, "he
astonished the world with the first of those magnificent dreams of
landscape loveliness with which his name will always be specially
associated: 'The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl.'"
The "Rivers of England" was published in 1826, with sixteen engravings
after Turner's designs. Monkhouse says: "For perfect balance of power,
for the mirroring of nature as it appears to ninety-nine out of every
hundred, for fidelity of color to both sky and earth, and form
(especially of trees), for carefulness and accuracy of drawing, for work
that neither startles you by its eccentricity nor puzzles you as to its
meaning, which satisfies without cloying, and leaves no doubt as to the
truth of its illusion, there is none to compare with these drawings of
his of England after his first visit to Italy."
During this year, 1826, among other pictures, Turner exhibited his
"Cologne--the Arrival of a Packet-boat--Evening." "There were," says
Hamerton, "such unity and serenity in the work, and such a glow of light
and color, that it seemed like a window opened upon the land of the
ideal, where the harmonies of things are more perfect than they have
ever been in the common world." The picture was hung between two of Sir
Thomas Lawrence's portraits, the golden color of the "Cologne" dulling
their effect. Turner at once covered his picture with lampblack, thereby
spoiling it for the public view. When reproached by the critics, he
said: "Poor Lawrence was so unhappy. It will all wash off after the
Exhibition." "Was there ever," says Hamerton, "a more exquisitely
beautiful instance of self-sacrifice?" The "Cologne" was sold, in 1854,
to Mr. John Naylor, for two thousand guineas.
Turner made designs for twenty illustrations in Rogers's poem of
"Italy," for which, it is asserted, he would accept but five guineas
each, as the execution of the work pleased him so well; thirteen
illustrations for "The Provincial Antiquities of Scotland," for which
Sir Walter Scott wrote the letter-press; and twenty-six pictures for
Finden's "Illustrations of the Bible." Turner generally received from
twenty to one hundred guineas for each drawing used, which was returned
to him that he might sell it, if he so desired.
In 1827 the first part of his largest series of prints was published:
"England and Wales." The work was discontinued twelve years later,
because it was not a pecuniary success.
Bohn offered twenty-eight hundred pounds for the copper plates and
stock, but Turner himself bid them in, at the auction, for three
thousand pounds, saying to Bohn: "So, sir, you were going to buy my
'England and Wales' to sell cheap, I suppose--make umbrella prints of
them, eh? But I have taken care of that."
He disliked steel engravings, or any plan to cheapen or popularize art.
He once told Sir Thomas Lawrence that he "didn't choose to be a basket
engraver." Being asked what he meant, he replied: "When I got off the
coach t'other day at Hastings, a woman came up with a basketful of your
'Mrs. Peel,' and wanted to sell me one for a sixpence."
The painter's hard-working life, with little comfort save what fame
brings to a man who eagerly seeks it, received its greatest shock in the
death of the aged father, in 1830. Turner said, "The loss was like that
of an only child." His friends the Trimmers said, "He never appeared the
same man after his father's death."
The plain barber had lived with his son for thirty years, and had seen
him gain wealth and renown. He could do little save to encourage with
his affection and be proud and grateful for the painter's success. And
this was enough. He was buried in St. Paul's, Covent Garden, the artist
writing this inscription for his monument:--
IN THE VAULT
BENEATH AND NEAR THIS PLACE
ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF
WILLIAM TURNER,
MANY YEARS AN INHABITANT OF THIS PARISH,
WHO DIED
SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1830.
TO HIS MEMORY AND OF HIS WIFE,
MARY ANN,
THEIR SON J. M. W. TURNER, R. A.,
HAS PLACED THIS TABLET,
AUGUST, 1832.
In 1832, Turner exhibited his memorable "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage;
Italy," in which he seemed to combine the mountains, the trees, the
cities, and the skies he had loved in that beautiful country. From 1833
to 1835 he produced his exquisite series, "The Rivers of France." Ruskin
says: "Of all foreign countries, Turner has most entirely entered into
the spirit of France; partly because here he found more fellowship of
scene with his own England; partly because an amount of thought which
will miss of Italy or Switzerland will fathom France; partly because
there is in the French foliage and forms of ground much that is
especially congenial with his own peculiar choice of form.... He still
remains the only, but in himself the sufficient, painter of French
landscape."
In 1833 Turner exhibited the first of his eleven remarkable Venetian
pictures, one of the finest being, "The Sun of Venice going to Sea."
"The characteristics which they have in common," says Hamerton, "are
splendor of color and carelessness of form; the color being, in most
instances, really founded upon the true Venetian color, but worked up to
the utmost brilliance which the palette would allow, the forms simply
sketched, exactly on the principles of the artist's own free sketching
in water colors.... It is believed, and with probability, that he
blocked out the picture almost entirely in pure white, with only some
very pale tinting, just to mark the position of the objects, and that
this white preparation was thick and loaded from the beginning. On this
he afterwards painted thinly in oil or water-color, or both, so that the
brilliance of the white shone through the color, and gave it that very
luminous quality which it possesses. This is simply a return to the
early Flemish practice of painting thinly on a light ground, with the
difference, however, that Turner made a fresh ground of his own between
the canvas and his bright colors, and that the modelling of the impasto
with the brush was done in this thick white. The result was to unite the
brilliance of water-color to the varied and rich surface of massive
oil-painting."
These pictures called forth much adverse criticism, but they soon had a
Herculean defender in the "Oxford Undergraduate" of 1836, the Ruskin of
"Modern Painters." In 1839, Turner exhibited "The fighting _Temeraire_
tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838." Thornbury tells how the
subject was suggested to Turner.
"In 1838, Turner was with Stanfield and a party of brother artists on
one of those holiday excursions, in which he so delighted, probably to
end with whitebait and champagne at Greenwich. It was at these times
that Turner talked and joked his best, snatching, now and then, a moment
to print on his quick brain some tone of sky, some gleam of water, some
sprinkling light of oar, some glancing sunshine cross-barring a sail.
Suddenly there moved down upon the artist's boat the grand old vessel
that had been taken prisoner at the Nile and that led the van at
Trafalgar. She loomed pale and ghostly, and was being towed to her last
moorings at Deptford by a little fiery, puny steam-tug.
"'There's a fine subject, Turner,' said Stanfield," and the suggestion
was gladly acted upon.
Hamerton says: "The picture is, both in sentiment and execution, one of
the finest of the later works. The sky and water are both magnificent,
and the shipping, though not treated with severe positive truth, is made
to harmonize well with the rest, and not stuck _upon_ the canvas, as
often happens in the works of bad marine painters. The sun sets in red,
and the red, by the artist's craft, is made at the same time both
decided in hue and luminous, always a great technical difficulty. Golden
sunsets are easy in comparison, as every painter knows. This picture has
more than once been associated by critics with the magnificent 'Ulysses
deriding Polyphemus,' which was painted ten years earlier. Both are
splendid in sky and water, and both are florid in color. Mr. Ruskin's
opinion is that the period of Turner's central power, 'entirely
developed and entirely unabated, begins with the Ulysses, and closes
with the _Temeraire_.'
"This decade had been a time of immense industry for Turner. In that
space he had made more than four hundred drawings for the engraver, had
exhibited more than fifty pictures in the Royal Academy, and had
executed, besides, some thousands of sketches, and probably many
private commissions which cannot easily be ascertained."
One reason of his aversion to society was his desire to save time for
this great amount of work. The _Temeraire_, though sought by several
persons, the artist refused to sell at any price, and bequeathed it to
the nation.
From 1840 to 1845, Turner painted a few pictures of great power. The
"Slave Ship, slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying, typhoon
coming on," was exhibited in 1840. It became the property of Mr. Ruskin,
who sold it, and it is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It
represents a sunset on the Atlantic after a storm. It is gorgeous in
color, and is regarded by many as the grandest sea which Turner ever
painted. The "Snowstorm," in 1842, was harshly criticised, and called
"soapsuds and whitewash." The picture represents a steamer off a harbor
in a storm, making signals.
Ruskin says: "Turner was passing the evening at my father's house, on
the day this criticism came out; and after dinner, sitting in his
armchair, I heard him muttering low to himself at intervals, 'Soapsuds
and whitewash!' again, and again, and again. At last I went to him,
asking 'why he minded what they said.' Then he burst out: 'Soapsuds and
whitewash! what would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's
like? I wish they'd been in it!'"
Turner had been in the storm, and knew that he had painted truthfully.
One night, when the Ariel left Harwich, he "got the sailors to lash him
to the mast, to observe the storm," and remained there four hours, not
expecting to survive it.
"Peace--Burial at Sea," now in the National Gallery, was exhibited also
in 1842. It was painted to commemorate the funeral of Sir David Wilkie,
the Scottish artist, which had taken place in June, 1841, off Gibraltar,
some distance from shore. Whilst the picture was on the easel, Stanfield
entered Turner's studio and said, "You're painting the sails very
black," to which the artist made answer, "If I could find anything
blacker than black, I'd use it."
The deaths of Chantrey, in 1841, and of Callcott, in 1844, deeply
affected Turner. "In the death-chamber of the former," says George
Jones, "he wrung my hands, tears streaming from his eyes, and then
rushed from the house without uttering a word." When William Frederick
Wells, the artist, died a few years previously, Turner went to the
house, sobbing like a child, and saying to the daughter, "O Clara,
Clara! these are iron tears. I have lost the best friend I ever had in
my life."
In 1843, he took his last journey to the Continent, making many sketches
about Lake Lucerne, which was very dear to him. From 1847 to 1849, he
paid several visits to the photographic artist Mayall, calling himself a
master in chancery, as he did not wish to be recognized. He was deeply
interested in the progress of photography. When Mayall was in pecuniary
trouble in consequence of a lawsuit about patent rights, Turner,
unasked, brought him fifteen hundred dollars, telling him to repay it
sometime if he could. He gladly accepted the loan and paid it. After
nearly two years, Turner found that his personality had become known,
and could never be induced to visit the place again.
In 1850, he sent his last pictures to the Academy: "AEneas relating his
Story to Dido," "Mercury sent to admonish AEneas," "The Departure of the
Trojan Fleet," and "The Visit to the Tomb."
He was now seventy-five years old. In 1851, he exhibited no pictures,
and ceased to attend the Academy meetings, which had always given him so
much pleasure. David Roberts, the artist, wrote him, and begged to be
allowed to see him. Two weeks later, Turner called at the studio. "I
tried to cheer him up," says Roberts, "but he laid his hand upon his
heart and replied, 'No, no; there is something here which is all wrong.'
As he stood by the table in my painting-room, I could not help looking
attentively at him, peering in his face, for the small eye (blue) was
brilliant as that of a child, and unlike the glazed and 'lack-lustre
eye' of age. This was my last look."
For several months, the aged artist was absent from his home in
Queen-Anne Street. Finally, Hannah Danby, who had been his housekeeper
for fifty years, and was said to have been his mistress, found a letter
in the pocket of an old coat, which led her to believe he was in
Chelsea. She and a relative sought him, and found him, December 18,
1851, very ill, in a small plain cottage on the banks of the Thames,
owned by Sophia Caroline Booth. He was called "Admiral Booth" by her
neighbors, who thought him an admiral in reduced circumstances. He died
the day after his friends found him. An hour before his death, he was
wheeled to the window to look out upon the Thames, and bathe in the
sunshine which he so dearly loved.
"So died," says Monkhouse, "the great solitary genius, Turner, the first
of all men to endeavor 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.... Sunlight was his discovery; he had found its presence in
shadow; he had studied its complicated reflections before he commenced
to work in color. 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
splendor. Then it came out and flooded his drawings and his canvases
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."
Turner was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, between the tombs of Sir
Joshua Reynolds and James Barry, the service being read by Dean Milman.
By his will, he left all his pictures and drawings to the nation, to be
preserved in a "Turner Gallery," specifying that "The Sun Rising in
Mist" and "Dido building Carthage" should be hung between the two
pictures painted by Claude, the "Seaport" and "Mill." During his life he
is said to have refused two offers of five hundred thousand dollars for
the pictures in his Queen-Anne Street house. He left one hundred
thousand dollars to the Royal Academy, five thousand dollars for a
monument to himself in St. Paul's, a few small bequests for relatives,
money for a medal to be given for the best landscape exhibited at the
Academy every two or three years, and the remainder of a large fortune
for the maintenance of "poor and decayed male artists being born in
England and of English parents only, and lawful issue;" the latter gift
to be known as "Turner's Gift."
The will was contested by relatives, and, after four years of
litigation, the testator's intention to provide for aged artists was
disregarded, and the property given to the "nearest of kin." Such
instances are teaching our great men to carry out their benevolent
wishes in _their lifetime_. Though Turner had great faults,--it is
stated that he drank to excess in later years,--he had great virtues.
Though parsimonious with himself, he was generous to others. Ruskin
tells these incidents:
"There was a painter of the name of Bird, and when Bird first sent a
picture to the Academy for exhibition, Turner was on the hanging
committee. Bird's picture had great merit; but no place for it could be
found. Turner pleaded hard for it. No, the thing was impossible. Turner
sat down and looked at Bird's picture a long time; then insisted that a
place must be found for it. He was still met by the assertion of
impracticability. He said no more, but took down one of his own
pictures, sent it to the Academy, and hung Bird's in its place.... At
the death of a poor drawing-master, Mr. Wells, whom Turner had long
known, he was deeply affected, and lent money to the widow until a large
sum had accumulated. She was both honest and grateful, and, after a long
period, was happy enough to be able to return to her benefactor the
whole sum she had received from him. She waited on him with it; but
Turner kept his hands in his pocket. 'Keep it,' he said, 'and send your
children to school and to church.' He said this in bitterness; he had
himself been sent to neither."
Once, after sending an importunate beggar from his house, he relented,
ran after her, and gave her a five-pound note.
Says Thornbury: "An early patron of Turner, when he was a mere
industrious barber's son, working at three-shilling drawings in his
murky bedroom, had seen some of them in a window in the Haymarket, and
had bought them. From that time he had gone on buying and being kind to
the rising artist, and Turner could not forget it. Years after, he heard
that his old benefactor had become involved, and that his steward had
received directions to cut down some valued trees. Instantly Turner's
generous impulses were roused; his usual parsimony (all directed to one
great object) was cast behind him. He at once wrote to the steward,
concealing his name, and sent him the full amount; many, many
thousands--as much as twenty thousand pounds, I believe.
"The gentleman never knew who was his benefactor; but, in time, his
affairs rallied, and he was enabled to pay the whole sum back. Years
again rolled on, and now the son of Turner's benefactor became involved.
Again the birds of the air brought the news to the guardian angel of the
family; again he sent the necessary thousands anonymously; again the son
stopped the leak, righted himself, and returned the whole sum with
thanks."
Ruskin says: "He had a heart as intensely kind and as nobly true as God
ever gave to one of his creatures.... Having known Turner for ten years,
and that during the period of his life when the highest qualities of his
mind were in many respects diminished, and when he was suffering most
from the evil speaking of the world, I never heard him say one
depreciating word of living man or man's work. I never saw him look an
unkind or blameful look. I never saw him let pass, without some
sorrowful remonstrance or endeavor at mitigation, a blameful word spoken
by another. Of no man but Turner whom I have ever known could I say
this; and of this kindness and truth came, I repeat, all his highest
power; and all his failure and error, deep and strange, came of his
_faithlessness_." Probably Mr. Ruskin means lack of religious faith, as
Mr. Thornbury says Turner feared that he would be annihilated.
Turner was a most pains-taking worker. "Every quarter of an inch of
Turner's drawings," says Ruskin, "will bear magnifying; and much of the
finer work in them can hardly be traced, except by the keenest sight,
until it is magnified. In his painting of 'Ivy Bridge,' the veins are
drawn on the wing of a butterfly not three lines in diameter; and I have
one of his smaller drawings of 'Scarborough' in my own possession, in
which the muscle shells on the beach are rounded, and some shown as
shut, some as open, though none are as large as the letters of this
type: and yet this is the man who was thought to belong to the 'dashing'
school, literally because most people had not patience or delicacy of
sight enough to trace his endless details."
He loved poetry, and sometimes attempted to write it. He was seldom true
to nature in his work. Hamerton says: "With an immense and unwearied
industry, Turner accumulated thousands and thousands of memoranda to
increase his knowledge of what interested him, especially in the
mountains, rivers, and cities of the Continent, and the coasts of his
native island. Amidst all this wealth of gathered treasure, his
imagination reigned and revelled with a poet's freedom. With a knowledge
of landscape vaster than any mortal ever possessed before him, his whole
existence was a succession of dreams. Even the hardest realities of the
external world itself, granite and glacier, could not awaken him; but he
would sit down before them and sketch another dream, there, in the very
presence of the reality itself. Notwithstanding all the knowledge and
all the observation which they prove, the interest of Turner's twenty
thousand sketches is neither topographic nor scientific, but entirely
psychological. It is the soul of Turner that fascinates the student, and
not the material earth."
With little education from the schools, without distinguished ancestry,
in the midst of many disappointments and much censure, Turner came to
great renown. He had talent, but he had also untiring industry and
unlimited perseverance.