MERCURY AND ARGUS. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY J. T. WILLMORE, A.RA. TURNER'S CELEBRATED LANDSCAPES SIXTEEN OF THE MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. REPRODUCED FROM THE LARGE ENGRA I 'INGS IN 'PERMANENT TINT Tt Y THE oAUTOTYPE PROCESS. LONDON : BELL AND DALDY, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1870. The Plates in this Work are reproduced in Autotype by Messrs. Crmdall amd Fleming, under license from the Autotype Printing and Publishing Company [Limited.) OHIffWIOK PBBM: -FKINTKii ht WHITTIHGHAM AN u W1LKINB, TOO KB COURT, OBAXCBBT LANK. LIST OF THE SUBJECTS. Engraver Page (|P|r|jflp ROSSING the Brook .... B. Brandard 24 S^^^ Dido Building Cahthage .... T. A. Prior 28 feiaiffiSz^i^ra. Shipwreck on the Coast of Northumberland J. Burnett . 32 Neuwied and Weissenthurn R. Brandard 36 Heideleerq ......... T. A. Prior 38 Dover, from the Sea J . T. Wilhnore, A.R.A. 40 Hastings, from the Sea R. Wallis 42 Lake of Zurich ........ T. A. Prior 4G The Golden Bough J. T. Witt/more^ A.R.A. 52 The Grand Canal, Venice ...... W. Miller . 56 The Approach to Venice R. WoMis . 68 Eheenbreitstein ........ J. Pye . 70 Mercury and Argus A.R.A. 76 A.R.A. 80 Modern Italy W. Miller . 82 The FiGnTiNG Temeraire 84 TURNER'S CHILDHOOD. AD never praised me for anything but saving a halfpenny," Turner used to say in after life, in apology for his parsimonious habits. He said it lightly, perhaps half jestingly ; but there is a wonderful sadness in the few words. They show at a glance the mean and straitened circumstances with which the child was sur- rounded, and that the father carried his economy to a parsimonious extreme, but they show something deeper and sadder than this, — that the child had as little praise as money, and that the father was as great a niggard of one as the other. This is the true note of sadness that rings in the words. Mr. Ruskin, in his advice to a biographer of Turner, told him to be sure that Turner " felt himself utterly alone in the world, from his power not being understood," and we believe this to be true in spite of all his fame and success. If, then, we imagine this want of true appreciation when a man, to have succeeded a youth- time spent in unremitting and solitary labour, and that again, a childhood spent without praise, we shall little wonder at Turner's melancholy, his self-depen- dence, his self-concentration, his dislike of and disqualifications for society, nor shall we wonder much at the absorbing nature of his love for his art, his jealousy of discovering her secrets to others, or even at his parsimony. It seems to us that his isolation was not imaginary, but real ; for not only did he from his childhood lack praise, and afterwards, though not praise, appre- ciation and sympathy, but he had no power of inspiring others with personal interest in himself. There are some people who, from their birth to their death, 2 Turner s Childhood. are never alone or without friends. There is something in their smile, even as children, which makes them " noticed." As they grow up, with no greater claims upon society than perhaps a fine pair of eyes and a ready smile, they attract persons to their side wherever they go ; a dozen strangers will speak to them for one who will speak to an ordinary person. Such men may most truly of all be called " Fortune's favourites." They not only charm, but appear to be charmed ; they may do what for others to do is to forfeit respect and affection, but they are forgiven at once ; they may with the utmost impunity offend one set of friends, there are always others ready for them. Frank Castlewood in Esmond is a typical specimen of this class, and one which all will remember. But there is the very opposite to this class. Men who, however deep may be their passions and affections, however great their talents and genius, are utterly without this effective power ; men who remain silent when fools talk, not because they despise the conversation, but because they cannot join in it; men whom you may see day after day for years without knowing what manner of men they are, whether rich or poor, wise or simple, cold or warm ; men whose being has none of the ordinary channels outward, and has no rapport with mankind. Such a man was Turner, and he is an extraordinary instance of how a great genius may grow and flourish without sympathetic commerce with his fellows, of a mind which in spite of the want of what is generally necessary to mental growth, crippled by that want, and always longing for the supply of it, yet had vital strength enough to dispense with it, and to develope in and by itself without it to a maturity of almost matchless perfection. But now, without further preface, we will proceed to consider the main facts of Turner's early life. The "Dad" who only praised him for saving halfpence, was a barber of Maiden Lane, the last vestige of whose habitation has been destroyed within the last few years. But Maiden Lane has not much changed its general aspect, since little Joseph ran up and down it, so that any one who likes to indulge his fancy in peopling old localities with dead celebrities can without Turner s Childhood. 3 much stretch of the imagination and with a small knowledge of the history of infantile costume still think that he sees the undeveloped artist playing in the gutter of that quiet lane. But we are afraid that even now we are beginning too soon, and that we ought at least to go back two or three generations before we can satisfy public curiosity as to the genesis of this great man. Unfortunately in his case research has at present yielded but barren results. The first really important fact con- nected with Turner is, that his father was poor and of low station. We will, however, state what is recorded respecting his ancestors, some of which, we fear, come under the head of what have been felicitously called " erroneous facts." His father's family lived at South Molton, in Devonshire, but his father came up to town and settled in Maiden Lane. Turner is reported to have said that he himself came up to London when very young, but there is no doubt that he was baptised in the parish church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, on the 14th of May following his birthday, which was on the 23rd of April, 1775; it is not absolutely certain therefore that he was not born in Devonshire, and if so he was certainly right in saying that he came up to London very young. He was christened Joseph Mallord William. This second name, peculiar as it is, seems to savour of ancestry, but we are not satisfied at any attempts which we have seen to account for it. Mr. Thornbury indeed states that his father married " a young woman whose name was Mallord (or Marshall) from whom the painter derived one of his christian names," but two pages before he has already told us " that his father was married (by license) to Mary Marshall." Unless she was a widow, or had two surnames, or Marshall and Mallord arc con- vertible terms, or Mallord was her christian name, it appears difficult to determine how Turner could have derived his second name from a mother of the name of Marshall. And Mr. Thornbury does not help us out of the difficulty. An attempt to obtain any accurate information respecting his mother, her name or names, her family and antecedents, has involved us in a sea of " facts apparently so " erroneous," that we at first designed to leave the matter alone 4 Turner s Childhood- and be content with the father ; but perhaps a statement of our difficulties will induce some better informed person to be kind enough to solve them.' She is said to have been a native of Islington, the first cousin to a grandmother of a Dr. Shaw, but her family lived at Shelford Manor House, near Nottingham, and she was " a Nottinghamshire young lady," whose family are supposed by Mr, Thornbury to have treated the son of the barber with indignity. He states that " the marriage of Miss Marshall with the barber was perhaps thought a disgrace to the family at Shelford Manor House. How the Devonshire barber found oppor- tunities to court the Nottinghamshire young lady, I do not know ; perhaps he had been called in to dress her hair while she was visiting down in Devonshire ; but it is no use guessing, for it is but letting down at night buckets from an ascended balloon, and drawing up nothing but darkness. " Certain it is that pride has a long memory, and seldom forgets an injury. The proud family let the barber pass away, and be absorbed among the millions of London, apparently without compunction or regret, for the creed of caste is still as strong among us as with the old Egyptians or the modern Hindoos, and these social lapses are seldom forgiven. " For the believers in two sorts of blood— blue and red, aristocratic and plebeian — the discovery of the fact that Turner's mother was of gentle birth will be of extreme importance. To those who see in all the world only two sorts of people— men and women— it will be, however, of less interest." * We confess that after this we are heartily disappointed and puzzled to find two or three pages further on that this fine young lady had an uncle who plied the humble trade of a butcher. Perhaps her mother was only house- keeper or cook at the Manor House. It is pleasant, however, hi the lack of more definite information as to their 1 A better informed person has, since tliis was Written, assured us tliat he -derived the name of Mallord from his mother's eldest brother, Joseph 'William Mallord Marshall. 2 The Life of J. M. W. Turner, B.A. by Walter Thornbury, vol. i. pp. 10, 11. Turner s Childhood. 5 families, to be able to give portraits of his father and mother, the first of which is drawn with a firm hand. First, his father. "As I knew him well," Mr. Trimmer' says, "I will try and describe him. He was about the height of his son, a head below the average standard, spare and muscular, with small blue eyes, parrot nose, pro- jecting chin, fresh complexion, an index of health, which he apparently enjoyed to the full, He was a chatty old fellow, and talked fast ; but from spealdng through his nose, his words had a peculiar transatlantic twang. He was more cheerful than his son, and had always a smile on his face." Of his mother. " There is an unfinished portrait of her by her son, one of his first attempts. I could perceive no mark of promise in this work, and the same remark might be extended to his first landscape attempts. It is not wanting in force or decision of touch, but the drawing is defective. There is a strong like- ness to Turner about the nose and eyes. Her eyes are blue, lighter than his, her nose aquiline, and she has a slight fall in the nether lip. Her hair is well frizzed— for which she might have been indebted to her husband's professional skill — and is surmounted by a cap with large flappers. She stands erect, and looks masculine, not to say fierce ; report proclaims her to have been a person of ungovernable temper, and to have led her husband a sad life. In stature, like her son, she was " below the average height." In the latter part of her life, she was insane and in confinement. Turner might have inherited from her his melancholy turn of mind." These facts at least we have sure. His father was a barber of economical habits, and his mother a violent woman, who ended her days in a lunatic asylum. This is not a very promising beginning for a great artist. But, economical as the barber was (and was probably obliged to be, though the trade must have been a busier one in those days of wigs and powder than it is now), he certainly seems to have had some reason for being proud, as he is said 1 Eldest sou of the Rector of Heston, near Brentford, one of Turner's friends . 6 Turner s Childhood. to have been, of giving his son a good education. For a barber's son, there is reason to believe he had a good education ; and, from the little we know, we think it may be gathered that his father early perceived the bias of his disposi- tion towards art, and did everything in his power to foster and encourage it. His father, indeed, seems rather to have sacrificed general to special training. Turner appears to have had only three or four years at the most of regular schooling, which though sufficient for a barber was but a spare allowance for a great genius. In 1785, or when he was ten years old, he was sent to his first school at Brentford ; but when he was eleven or twelve, as Mr. Thornbury thinks, he was sent to the Soho Academy, where he drew under Mr. Palice, a floral drawing- master ; when he was thirteen, he was sent to school at Margate, and he was admitted a student of the Royal Academy in 1789. But here, we must give up chronology altogether. There is scarcely a date which can be depended on with regard to Turner's education, general or artistic. There is a mythical period in the history of every nation except the United States, and there is a mythical period in the history of Turner, let us get over it as soon as we can, for there is little deep meaning in, and a very "small halo of romance around, the myths of Turner's childhood. 1 There is an old saying, that clever boys turn out stupid men ; but, whatever truth there may be in the maxim, it certainly does not hold good of artists, for there is scarcely one respecting whom anecdotes of precocity are not reported. They all scrawl pictures on the nursery floor, or take portraits like life in tender years. And Turner was no exception to the rule. At Brentford he is said to hare drawn on the leaves of his books when he should have been conning his lessons, and long before he went there he had shown signs which marked him out for an artist. It is curious, however, to note that the first story told 1 The best description of Turner's boyhood will be found in " Modern Painters," vol. v. p. 291, whore Mr. Euskin eloquently contrasts it with that of Giorgione. Turner s Childhood- 7 of his nascent genius is of an attempt made by him in a field very different from that in which he was afterwards to excel. It is stated that, when he accom- panied his father one day to the house of Mr. Tomkinson, a rich pianoforte maker, he was struck with the figure of a heraldic lion in a coat of arms embla- zoned somewhere in the room, and that when he returned home he made a recognisable drawing of the monster from memory. This Mr. Tomkinson 1 was a collector of pictures and a patron of young artists; it was he who bought Etty's "Coral Finders" from the walls of Somerset House, in 1824. AVe also hear of Turner's drawing Margate Church when nine years old, and chalking cocks and hens on the school walls. It is characteristic, however, and somewhat melancholy to find that, though many stories are told of his artistic power, there is none told of himself. What he did is reported, but not a word of what he said or felt, or learnt or loved, or even desired. There is no history of the child Turner, only of the young artist, whose whole being seems to have been early absorbed with one idea, namely, to copy and study nature and pictures, at any time and at every time. We would willingly give up the story of the cocks and hens, and even the great one of the salver, for one anec- dote which would tell us somewhat of what he thought and felt in those days — what sort of boy he was, in fact. Outside we know he was short, thick-set, with blue eyes, and a fine head of dark hair ; but his mind appears to have been a sealed book from first to last, which even he himself could not explain, except by drawing pictures. What a wonderful book it was we know from these its illustrations by his own hand, but the text is lost for ever. The only mental characteristic of this time, which we can assert with some confidence, was melancholy. This absence of definite information would suit well the purpose of an imaginative book-maker. The fewer the facts, the larger the field for con- 1 This gentleman's name is spelt Tomkinson by Mr. Thornbury, Tompkinson by Mr. Gilchrist, and Tomkison by Mr. Peter Cunningham, — we don't know which is correct. 8 Turner s Childhood- jecture : the shorter the text, the longer the sermon. But we have not space nor inclination to indulge in such cobweb-spinning, we will only start a problem. Turner used to say that a certain drawing of Vandevelde made him a painter, but he had begun to draw at every opportunity long before this. What made him and other artists begin? Taking the story of the heraldic lion for true, what strange power was at work to make the boy of five stare at it and study it, take it home with him in his mind and deliberately set to work to imitate it ? Did he like the lion ? did it seem to him pretty or desirable ? What attraction could exist between the unnatural form and him ? How did it, to use that vague expression, " strike his fancy," or did it strike his fancy at all ? What was it that made him do this thing ? Not admiration, not love, surely. Was it that he felt the stirring of a conscious power and desire to exercise it ; or, in other words, did he do it merely because he felt he could and should like to try ; or was it only the common childish instinct of imitation which had in him, like all others of his instincts and feelings, but one channel, viz., pictorial delineation? Had it been a bee or a bird, or a real lion, or anything natural or beautiful, the phenomenon were intelligible, but— an heraldic monster ! It is as we have said before, hopeless to attempt to give dates in this early period of his career. We must content ourselves with knowing that he was from his boyhood fond of going into the fields and on the Thames to sketch, and that he appears to have had facilities for copying drawings from the then best English landscape painters. Nature and Art he studied alternately, the Nature of which he was to be the greatest interpreter, the landscape Art of which he was to be the greatest developer that ever lived. As an artist, indeed, partly by means of his own strenuous industry, partly through fortune, he obtained a training which could scarcely at that time have been better or wider. He attended the drawing-school in St. Martin's Lane, he coloured prints for Raphael Smith, the celebrated mezzotint engraver, he was apprenticed to an architect, he washed in sides and hues for other architects' r Turners Childhood- 9 designs, and he learnt perspective of Thomas Malton, of Long Acre, an excellent master of this important subject. Mr. Malton, we are told, after one or two attempts, gave him up as hopeless, and this would afford another curious field for conjecture if the assertion were beyond a doubt, but we do not know how to reconcile it with Turner's statement, that his real master was Tom Malton, of Long Acre. At Dr. Monro's, and at Mr. Henderson's, both of Adelphi Terrace, he copied Dayes and Nicholson, Sandby and Hearne, Wilson and Cozens, and we dare say, Barrett and Zuccarelli, and many more unknown to fame. Dr. Monro also encouraged him and Girtin to make sketches from nature, which were afterwards finished at his house. The gulf between the youth who, with his friend Girtin, copied Dr. Monro's drawings, and worked out his own first original attempts for half-a-crown a night and his supper, and the prince of landscape painters who refused thousands for a favourite picture, is now what we have to bridge. CHAPTER II. TURNER'S YOUTH. "< &2Sttf2>£ S&H E small but judicious selection from the drawings left by Turner to the nation, now exhibited at South Kensington, and the pictures by him in the National Gallery, form a perfect history of Turner's art life, and therefore of modern landscape painting, and the very interesting collection of early English watercolours by Turner's forerunners and contemporaries, now at the South Kensington Museum, enable the student to compare Turner's early efforts with the mature productions of those artists whom he used to copy when a boy. Pale, lifeless, conventional works they appear for the most part, not likely to stir enthusiasm for art or inspire desire of imitation. It is only an educated eye that can now trace the dawn of light and beauty even in the delicate green drawings of Cozens, the harbinger of watercolour art in England. It seems strange that anyone could wish to be a landscape artist in those days, if these were the greatest triumphs that the very masters could achieve. The art -was in the grub or chrysalis stage ; and with no butterfly existence to hope for, who would wish to be a grub ? Luckily there was Nature, and Turner saw her, hoped and believed in her beauty and in his power of interpreting it, the only hope and belief he appears to have had. But these were intense enough to absorb the whole man. The sense of his own power must early have come upon him. A few years of hard work and he could not only do all that his masters did, but more. The drawings in Frame 1 at South Kensington, made when he was about fifteen, show Turner s Youth. 1 1 this. Mr. Ruskin, in his catalogue of Turner's sketches and drawings, calls attention to shadows on the trunks, to effects of tenderly gradated colour, and to ideas of composition in some of his earliest drawings which he could have learnt from no living artist. But consciously or unconsciously, Turner refrained from indulging himself in originality ; if he felt his powers, he did not exult in mani- festing them ; a critical eye like Mr. Ruskin's might detect his genius, but to the world he was only a careful follower of conventional precedents. He did not hurry his development ; without hurry, without rest, is his motto, as he went on working day by day, almost hour by hour, hoarding up his new discoveries in his mind, and storing note-book after note-book with short-hand dottings and scratches. He knew, or nature instructed him, that if his art would be a butterfly she must first be a grub, and that any attempt to break her crust prematurely, and strive to spread her ungrown wings, would end in disappointment and death. There is almost the steadiness of fate in the persistency of Turner's work. He masters one thing at a time. For years he works only in pencil, and grey tint, filling books with studies of leaves, birds, trees, boats, swans, donkeys, and more than all, architectural details. Employed to make topographical drawings for the engravers, he travels all over England, mostly on foot, " twenty to twenty-five miles a day, with his baggage tied up in a handkerchief and swinging on the end of his stick," observing and sketching everywhere, for every drawing which he does on commission taking a dozen or so pencil memoranda for himself, mere scratches to a stranger's eye, but to him records of effect never to be forgotten, germs of pictures to be finished many years hence, perhaps, and in any ease valuable material and accumulated knowledge. Thus at the age of twentj'-five he had probably collected more material than an ordinary artist could use in his life-time ; but his appetite for knowledge was insatiable, his industry indefatigable, and his love of accumulation almost, if not quite, morbid. It seems in those early years to have been of little consequence to him what he studied or drew, so long as he studied or drew something, — steam-engines and ducks, trees or boats,— anything for stock. Who shall tell what was passing in 12 Turner 's Youth. his mind as he added sketch to sketch, and memorandum to memorandum. No doubt he thought much of the future, and dreamed of the time when he should put forth his power and astonish the world ; but there is little dreaming in his work, it is all hard and real to the most practical degree. Business first and pleasure afterwards ; and no one ever plodded after the plough, or pored over mathematics with duller regularity than Turner plodded at his art work. What- ever fire there might have been in his heart, he allowed no spark to escape through his fingers ; whatever love for nature may have flushed his cheek, he did not permit it to interfere with the details of a steam-engine or the fretwork of an arch. Art might be rapture in the future, but it should be grim business first, then the colours of the rainbow, now black and white, and white and black. To an observer of him at that time, the art structure which he was building must have appeared as dull as a gaol. We do not think that even Turner knew for what a magnificent palace he was laving the foundations. He worked on with deathless industry at the rudiments of the art; it was only occasionally that lie allowed himself the luxury of a bit of colour, and if in any of his work he showed emotion or even inclination, it was in a little holiday-drawing of animals, but especially birds. There is something awful in the idea of this solitary youth, silently storing up pictorial wealth, hour by hour, and day by day, without a companion and without a friend, if we except poor Girtin, who was, perhaps, the nearest approach to a friend he ever had, but who was too open in his nature, and too prodigal in his tastes to altogether suit the close and prudent Turner. As boys, they met at Raphael Smith's, and coloured drawings together; at Dr. Monro's they met and copied the contents of his portfolios together ; they went out sketching together on the Thames and in the fields. Girtin was the only youth alive fit to be Turner's artistic companion. They two discovered nature afresh ; but Turner discovered two things to Girtin's one. Girtin's genius ripened early ; but Turner's genius was too great and deep to ripen so soon. Girtin's fruit was Turner's blossom. Turner was strong and Girtin weak. Girtin was sociable, Turner s Youth. 1 3 Turner solitary. Girtin married, and Turner clove only to Ms art; and soon Girtin died, and Turner lived on, alone, and still a student, but even, as such, a greater master than Girtin. There is indeed something awful in the necessary solitari- ness of so great a genius as Turner. The only worthy fellow-labourer with him in the vineyard was not able to withstand the heat of the day. From what we have said, it will be seen that we do not agree with those who thought, and perhaps think, Girtin the greater artist of the two, but it is evident that Turner thought so. "If Tim Girtin had lived, I should have starved," he said ; and again, when looking over some of his old friend's " yellow draw- ings," " I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that ; I would at any time have given one of my little fingers to have made such a one." Girtin's drawings are scarce, but there is luckily a good one of liivaulx Abbey at the South Kensington Museum, which anyone can see and compare with Turner's contemporary and future work on the same walls. Messrs. Redgrave, however, do not think that this drawing gives a full idea of the poetry with which he treated such subjects. Turner probably loved Girtin deeply, and mourned him long, but the two sentences we have given above are almost the only traces left of the feeling's with which Turner regarded him, and these characteristically refer to the artist Girtin, and not to the man. The different natures of the two men are well exemplified in the following extract from Mr. Thornburv's biography :' — " Girtin established a sketching class, which was open to patrons and amateurs, as well as to artists. For three years his little society of enthu- siasts met on winter evenings for mutual improvement. " No little coterie could be more respectable,'' says a frequent visitor. How often the talent of the barber's son must have been discussed at these pleasant evenings. " This society was the model, no doubt, for the celebrated one at whose Vol. I. p. 108. 14 Turners Youth. meetings the Chalons, Leslie, Landseer, long after, spent so many happy hours. They met alternately at each other's houses. The subject was taken from an English poet, and each man treated it in his own way. The member at whose house they met supplied stained paper, colours, and pencils, and all the sketches of the evening became his property. " They met at six o'clock (hours were earlier then) and had tea or coffee ; over their harmless cups they read the verses relating to the subject, and discussed its treatment and the effect it would naturally give rise to. After this, with heads down and bated breath, they worked hard till ten, when there was cold meat, bread and cheese, and such humble, solid fare ; and at twelve, as the day expired, they separated with hearty greetings. Beautiful works of art were often produced in this impromptu way, and the first ideas of great pictures were often suggested in dreamy hints that had sometimes a charm greater almost than that of the completed truth. Turner would never join this club ; he preferred working in solitude, and he could not at this time afford to sell a ten-pound sketch for a cup of tea and a slice of bread and cheese. Perhaps, too, he was at this time slow in execution, and found two hours insufficient to elaborate any thought worth painting." 1 We are far from thinking satisfactory the reasons here given for Turner's refusal to join the club; but the fact is enough. The society of Girtin and his brother artists, the pleasant chat round the tea-table, the pleasanter artistic rivalry, had no charms for Turner. He was not a " clubbable " man. We are more inclined to think that it was his natural self-concentration, the incom- municability of his temperament, his shyness, and incapacity for participating in ordinary social pleasures, that made him hold aloof from his friend's circle, than to set his absence down to reluctance to part with so much money's worth of sketches. He no doubt always showed a great disinclination to part ' The Society consisted of ten members : T. Girtin, the founder ; Sir Robert Ker Porter ; Sir Augustus Callcott; J. R. Underwood; G. Samuel! P. S. Murray; J. T. Colman ; La Francia (pupil of Girtin's) ; W. H. Wortliington; and J. C. Deuham. Turners Youth. 1 5 with his drawings, especially unfinished ones or sketches. But this was more from the love of his sketches than the love of money. He loved money, perhaps, though it is open to doubt whether he loved it for itself, but he certainly loved art more ; and, moreover, there was a seriousness even in his lightest work which was quite at variance with the playful exercise which amused Girtin and his friends. Girtin died in 1802, when Turner, though only twenty-seven, was elected a Royal Academician, and was, as Mr. Wornum says, a great landscape painter, both in water-colours and oils — great, that is, in comparison with his contemporaries, but little in comparison with himself even a few years later. He was only, according to Mr. Euskin, at the beginning of his first or student stage, but there was no English painter who was his equal, and he had been an asso- ciate of the Eoyal Academy three years, having taken the place of Flaxman in 1799. Great as was the distance between the Turner of 1802 and the Turner of the " Ulysses " and the " Tcmeraire," there was yet almost as vast an interval between the Turner of the " Jason " and the Turner whose boyish sketches, some ten years ago, were hanging round the shop of his father the barber, and ticketed at prices varying from one to three shillings. Many volumes might be filled with the history of his art work in these few years of his life, and materials for it may be found in the almost innu- merable sketches and artistic memoranda which he bequeathed to the nation. Here is a description of his earliest sketch book : — " Turner's earliest book, the cover now half cut off, seems to have been filled by him with sketches when he was about fifteen years old. There is a back view of the Hotwells, from Gloucestershire side; I think, pencil washed (sic). 1 There are notes of gates, towers, and trees (with little pen-touches), at Sir W. Lippin- eote's ; women and barrows, bell-turrets and yew-trees, cliffs, boats, and, lastly, hasty views of rocks, boats, and Welsh hills from the Old Passage. In the same 1 TAornbury's Life of Turner, Vol. I. p. 377. 1 6 Turners Youth. book I find a profile sketch of St. Vincent Rocks ; a craft stranded on an island in the Severn (' sea' written large on one place) ; pages of experimental purple blots ; a bend of the Avon ; the tower of Thornbury Church ; the Welsh coast, from Cook's Folly ; trees and hills, and ships. A study of Malmesbury Abbey, from the meadows, over roofs of houses — foliage bad — is a south-east view, and is dated 1791. The trees arc left a rank green with yellow tips; there is an orange walk, grey and rusty stains are seen through an arch ; there are, here and there sharp touches, but all is weak, plain, and timid, though exceedingly careful. There is, however, no touch of unnecessary work, and where there is detail, only a bit is finished to show how the rest is to be done." In 1793 he went upon his first sketching tour for a topographical work projected by Mr. Walker. The tour occupied six weeks, and was to " Margate, Canterbury, and elsewhere." This was the first of many such tours, in the course of which, before 1802, when he made his first trip to the Continent, he had ranged over Kent and Essex,. Wilts and Worcestershire, Cumberland, Yorkshire and Cheshire, Lincoln, Oxfordshire, and parts of Wales and Scotland, to say nothing of his journeys around London. Of the commissions which he executed during these wanderings we give the following account verbatim from Mr. Thornbury. " In 1794,' when Turner is nineteen, he is drawing Rochester and Chepstow for Walker's 'Copper-plate Magazine;' 2 his tours have been as yet chiefly in the home counties, and on the coast in Wales. In 1795 he makes drawings of Nottingham, Bridgenorth, Matlock, and Birmingham, for the same perio- dical ; the Tower of London and Cambridge for the 1 Pocket Magazine ;' and Worcester and Guildford for Messrs. Harrison; 3 in the next year, 1796 (aged twenty-one), for that and other magazines, from previous tours, he makes draw- ings of Chester, Leith, 4 Peterborough, Tunbridge, Bath, Staines, Bristol, Walling- ford, and Windsor. In 1797 (aged twenty-two), he sketches in Flint, Hereford- Vol. I. p. 252. 1 The Itinerant. 3 Pocket Magazine, probably. 4 A mistake for Neath. Turners Youth. 17 shire, and Lincolnshire ; and the first illustrations of his to a really topographical work appear ('Views in the County of Lincoln'). " In 1798 (aged twenty -three), appear in the ' Itinerant,' his Sheffield and Wakefield; and in 1799 (aged twenty-four), when illustration-work seems un- usually scarce with him, he begins the first of his nine years' drawings for the ' Oxford Almanac' In 1800 (aged twenty-five), work comes with a rush, and he furnishes numerous drawings of abbeys and gentlemen's mansions to Angus's ' Seats,' 1 and Whittaker's ' Parish of Whalley.' In 1801 Turner contributes his only drawing to the ' Beauties of England and Wales' ; and, in 1803, contributes to Byrne's 1 Britannia Depicta.' " It is useless to attempt anything like a complete history of what he did in those years, but the amount and variety of his study must have been tremendous. But he not only studied, for, even at the age of fifteen, he produced works which, however humble, were thought worthy of a place on the Academy walls. We publish at the end of this volume a complete list of his exhibited drawings and pictures, from which it will be seen that, beginning from 1790, or the year after he was admitted a student, to the year 1799 inclusive (his period of development before the formation of any original style, according to Mr. Buskin), he had exhibited fifty-nine works. These, with the exception of sixteen, were archi- tectural subjects, and mostly water-colours. It must not, either, be supposed that he had shown no signs of originality. The notion of drawing the Pantheon, the morning after the fire, was surely ori- ginal, though the work is said not to have been marked for anything more than grim accuracy. This drawing was exhibited in 1792, or, at the age of seventeen, and the next )-ear he produced " The Rising Squall — Hotwells, from St. Vincent's Rock, Bristol," which is said to have drawn attention. In the two following years come river scenes in Wales, and in 1796 "Fishermen at Sea." The year 1797 is signalized by his first oil picture, " Moonlight — a study at Millbank," a simple 1 Only one drawing to Angus's Seats. 1 8 Turners Youth. effective little work, remarkable for its sense of calm, and the plain directness of its execution. It is just worth remark also that this, his first exhibited oil paint- ing, has for its subject a scene not far from the cottage where, fifty-four years later, he was to breathe his last. This painting is in the National Gallery, together with two out of the three oil paintings which he exhibited in the next year, 1798, the " Winesdale," the " Coniston Fells," and the " Buttermere." Mr. Wornum speaks of the " Coniston Fells " as a picture " in which he (Turner) appears all at once as a great painter," and adds, respecting his work this year among the lakes and mountains : — " Turner's own atmospheric experiences in his early morning sketching expeditions, seem to have led him to thoroughly feel and appreciate the im- pressive descriptions of Thomson and of Milton, of such morning effects ; and in this year he commenced that long series of poetical illustrations which after- wards so frequently accompanied the titles of his pictures in the Royal Academy catalogues." These pictures no doubt did much towards gaining his election to the vacant associateship in the following year, when he exhibited his first battle piece (which was also his first imaginative work), and ten other pictures or drawings. He was now but twenty-four years of age. Twenty-four years of age, and already the greatest landscape painter of his day; great as an oil painter, but greater in watercolours. It is only necessary for one to look at that splendid drawing of Warkworth Castle, now at South Kensington Museum, and which was that exhibited in 1798, to prove not only what immense studies he had made in that art, but what an immense distance along the road to truth and beauty he had made that art travel with him. It is not too much to sa} r , that if he had died at the age of twenty-four, he would yet have done more for the advancement of watercolour landscape painting than any one who lived before or since. One curious thing may also, we think, be remarked respecting his oil paintings of this time. They do not seem to be so imitative of other artists as those greater ones which succeeded them. He seems to have gone direct to Turners Youth. 19 nature in his picture of the Coniston Fells, for instance, and to have taken the style of it from no man. It seems to us to be as original in its way as Gains- borough's pictures in theirs, or Constable's in theirs, and this is saying as much as could well be said. Indeed there are few things more remarkable in art than the originality of the styles of our great early landscape painters ; they all, except Wilson, who must not be left out of the list of great names, went direct to nature, and painted her in their own peculiar way, but Turner has this dis- tinction from all others, that ho not only painted nature in his own way, but in the way of all others, and what is more, excelled most of them in their own styles. But we must end this long chapter, for we have as yet reached only the dawn of what Mr. Euskin calls his first style. He is yet, to use our old com- parison, but a grub, and has not yet unfolded his wings to the sun. His pictures are yet comparatively colourless ; he has not even painted one bright or light picture. He has been working in the dark, but he is already a master of com- position, of architectural drawing, of aerial effects, of perspective, and above all, perhaps, of tonality. He has already raised himself above his rivals, but he is still fifteen years from his " Crossing the Brook," thirty from his " Ulysses," and forty from " The fighting Temeraire." But before closing the chapter, we would say one word of his personal life, which is so soon to be completely lost in his art. A cruel story is told of an early love of his, his only one. It is said that the attachment sprung up when at school, that it ripened afterwards into love; that when away on a long sketching tour his letters were intercepted by the girl's stepmother, and that when he returned he found her about to be married to another. How far to accept this story we do not know; but at all events, the disappointment must have come when he was a mere youth. What effect it may have had upon Turner it is impos- sible to say, and we shall never know. Such still waters as those of Turner's heart run very deep. But whether he met with bitter disappointment in early love, it is tolerably certain that he had no love, worthy of the name, for any 20 Turners Youth. woman during the remainder of his life, though mention is made of a later attachment. Love for his art engrossed the whole man. We must not omit to mention in this account of his youth, his great admira- tion for Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whose house he used to go to copy the knight's exquisite portraits. It would seem that his enthusiasm for the works of that great artist almost persuaded him to be a portrait painter. He never, however, attained more than respectable skill in this line, as is evident from his picture of himself in the National Gallery ; and though some portraits of his relations and friends are among his earliest works, he abandoned portrait painting for ever at the death of Sir Joshua. This admiration for the great portrait painter, his love for Girtin, and his early attachment to a girl, are almost the only pages of personal romance or sentiment in his young life, and they are ended now ; when we take leave of him, at twenty -five, in the dawn of manhood, a great artist, alone in the world with his art. CHAPTER III. TURNER'S OIL-PICTURES. ■ FIRST STYLE. 1800-20. N 1800 commenced what Mr. Rnskin calls the period of his first style — after his development from 1790 to 1800. " It may be also observed," says that critic, " that the period of development is distinguished by its hard and mechanical work : that of the first style by boldness of handling, generally gloomy tendency of mind, subdued colour, and perpetual reference to precedent in composition.'' In this period he is making use of all the artistic treasures which he has been hoarding up during the previous ten years. Having, as it were, gone to school in nature, and studied the works of English artists, he now graduates and finishes his technical education by the study of continental scenery and ancient masters. Up to 1820 he is still a student, in Mr. Ruskin's sense of continual reference to precedent in composition ; and, though he paints pictures which no one else could have painted, as the " Jason " and the " Shipwreck," and one occasionally which is eminently Turneresque, as the " Field of Waterloo," the large majority of paintings, especially the ambitious ones, are conceived in the vein of one or more earlier masters. In this period he seems to have tried his hand at every branch of the art, sometimes in frolic, as when he rivals Wilkio in painting the " Country Blacksmith Disputing upon the Price of Iron," &c. ; oftener in serious rivalry 22 Turners Oil-Pictures. of Claude, or rather in serious attempts to teach the public what Claude failed in, as in the " Cartilages," and other works ; once or twice in tentative efforts at figure painting, as in his " Holy Family," exhibited in 1802 and now in the National Gallery ; and the " Venus and Adonis " formerly in the possession of Mr. Munro. It may seem to some that Turner's time was wasted in studying others' paintings of nature instead of nature herself, seeing that he was so strong — so much stronger than others ; but no worker, however strong, can afford to dis- regard the labour of former men, though weaker than he. To say nothing of the negative knowledge to be gained from the faults of others, there is hardly any honest work that does not add some positive knowledge to the world, or that does not represent old knowledge in a more condensed and summed-up form ; so much work done that need not be done over again, so much knowledge that can be acquired by a shorter process than experience. This Turner knew, and so devoted twenty years of his life in mastering the labour of centuries. Had he spurned these ancient rungs he would not have climbed so surely or so swiftly to the top of the ladder of landscape art. From Vandevelde he learnt to paint the sea, but he did not copy Vandevelde. " He," says Mr. Ruskin, " went to the sea and painted it in the way of Vandevelde, and so learnt to paint it more truly than Vande- velde." All his early sea pieces owe something of their manner to this Dutch artist. One, we believe, of his earliest storm pieces forms the subject of our first plate. It is not the famous "Wreck" now in the National Gallery, or the " Wreck of the Minotaur," equally famous, in the possession of Lord Yarborough ; indeed, we have not been able to discover when the original was painted, whether it is a water-colour drawing or an oil-picture, or in whose possession it is, but we think that there is little doubt that it is a water-colour of an early period. It is evidently in a dark key ; the savage roll of the waves in whose power the ship is, and who have no pity, but dash her in careless fury against the rocks, reminds one of the terrible dark sea Turners Oil-Pictures. 23 of the "Wreck" in the National Gallery, but not of his later works. The ship is in the middle distance, her helpless hull showing dark against the spray of shattered foam that rises above her masts, and shrouds the cliffs in mist. Her fate were little doubtful if we saw but this ; but Turner not only shows us her fate but the exact manner of it. Look at that half-covered rock in the foreground, which the cruel wave seizes as it were with its teeth. We see that these low rocks run round the little bay, and we know surely that where the ship is, there arc rocks as hard and waves as cruel; and, more than this, that white spar that sticks up like the bone of some skeleton, shows that the waves of the foreground have also had their prey, but hunger still. What can be more insatiable than this sea, what more inhospitable than that coast ; but, to add to the pathos of the picture, Turner has introduced a town on the distant cliff, safe and smiling in the sun. How great an advance Turner made in a few years after 1800 would bo apparent from his sea pictures alone ; but each exhibition brought to light not only progress in one branch of the art, but in all ; each revealed powers not to be dreamed of before. In 1800 appeared Turner's " Fifth Plague of Egypt," the first of his pictures illustrative of either ancient or sacred history ; and, in 1801, " Dutch Boats in a Gale," his first picture of an agitated sea, and the " Army of the Medes de- stroyed in the Desert by a Whirlwind," foretold by Jeremiah xv., verses 32, 33. A picture or drawing of which we can find no description, but whose very title shows how early his mind delighted in strange imaginations, and in attempt- ing extraordinary atmospheric effects, and how it meditated on the history of man, his sorrows, his ambition, the fallacies of his hope, and the puninoss of his strength in conflict with the elements. But these pictures, though they showed that Turner was no ordinary land- scape artist, raised no hopes which could have foretold that the same artist was in the next year to exhibit such rare and mature imaginative power as was shown by his " Jason," his first classical picture, and, for complete expression of 24 Turners Oil- Pictures. mystic horror and of heroic courage, perhaps the finest of all pictures. This " Jason " is not a Greek, they say, at least in his armour, nor are Shakespeare's Greeks in the sense of being free from anachronisms; but what modern poet has caught the heroic spirit as Shakespeare has? what painter has painted the courage of the heroic age as Turner has in this figure, undaunted by the " scaly horror " of that fearful dragon-fold ? But we must refer the reader, who has not already read it, to what Mr. Ruskin has said 1 of the "Jason" in the Liber Studiorum (a "reminiscence" as he calls it of this picture), and pass on. This year (1802) was an important year for Turner, for in it he was elected Academician, went abroad for the first time, and travelled in France and Switzerland. Next year (1803) we have in no less than six pictures the first fruits of the great effect produced upon Turner by the sight of foreign lands ; the only other picture exhibited this year being his first attempt at pure figure painting, the " Holy Family." It was a sudden and short burst of enthusiasm, for, with the exception of the " Fall of the Rhine, at Schaffhausen," in 180G, and a " View of St. Michael, near Bonneville, Savoy," in 1812, he exhibited no foreign landscapes from this time till 1815. These were, nevertheless, great years both of labour and performance, for, in them he published ten parts of the Liber Studiorum, each of which contained five plates, and painted some of his best pictures, as his " Shipwreck," painted in 1805, but never exhibited; and his " Apollo and Python," now in the National Gallery. It is useless, however, to repeat the list which we have given at the end of this book of his exhibited works, and we have no space to dwell upon other pictures than those of which we give an illustration, and so we must pass on, leaving even the " Liber " for the present. In 1815 his first style culminated. In that year he exhibited two pictures, which are known wherever Turner's name is known — pictures which he himself thought so highly of and loved so dearly, that in the later years he refused 1 Modern Painters, Vol. II. p. 164. CROSSING THE BROOK. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY R. BRANDARD. Turner's Oil-Pictures. 25 fabulous prices for them, or what were fabulous in those days, so that he might keep them as long as he lived, and leave them at his death to the country. Those pictures were " Crossing the Brook " and " Dido building Carthage ; or, the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire." The " Crossing the Brook " may be considered to be the crowning— most perfect work of his first style of subdued tones, as " Dido building Carthage " may be regarded as the first prophecy of his second, in which darkness was to give place to light, vapour to the sun, patient labour to exultant mastery, the grey morning to the golden day. The " Crossing the Brook" is one of those pictures of Turner which every one admires ; it transcends no ordinary experience, it demands neither unusual knowledge nor imagination to comprehend it; it is purely beautiful with a beauty which appeals to the whole world. The view is taken from the banks of the Tamar, that divides Devonshire from Cornwall, though, says Mr. Wbrnum," " topographical accuracy is not to be looked for in this or any other of Turner's paintings." " The scene is from the neighbourhood of the Morwell Rocks and the Weir Head, some twenty miles from the sea, looking south towards Plymouth and Mount Edgcumbe, with Poulston Bridge above, Calstock in the middle distance, and beyond this is Calstock Church." " In the immediate foreground is a brook, and there are two girls with bundles, one of them seated by the waterside, the other wading the brook, followed by a dog carrying some small parcel in his mouth. On the right is a high and richly-wooded bank, with a dark arch at its base; on the left are two fine examples of Turner's favourite stone-pines ; in the middle is the winding Tamar and the woods of Cothele, bounded by Mount Edgecumbe in the distance. "The far distance is the estuary of the Tamar, with the Hamoaze, the renowned harbour of the British fleet, in which, about the time of this picture, The Turner Gallery, p. 30. 26 Turners Oil-Pictures. and for some few years after the peace (of Amiens), were moored in ordinary, sometimes nearly a hundred ships of war. The flag ship lies in this harbour, and it has moorings for one hundred sail of the line." Of this picture Mr. Thombury says' : " The picture of ' Crossing the Brook' was a great favourite with him (Turner), and when the engraver mentioned that he should require it two years in his possession for the purpose of engraving, he hesitated, mumbled something about the blank space in his gallery, and said that two )'ears was a long period at his time of life. " ' When the plate was nearly completed he called upon me,' says Mr. Brandard, the engraver, ' to go over the proof from the picture. In the course of conversation he observed, ' This picture was a commission, but the gentleman was not satisfied. I was to have had £500 for it.' Subsequently he refused £1600." Mr. Buskin says, in speaking of Turner's sparing use of colour in his early days, " The ' Crossing the Brook,' and such other elaborate and large compo- sitions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue, with a point or two of severe local colour in the figures." And such is undoubtedly the case, although the few colours used by the artist are employed with such mastery that it seems almost incredible to one whose attention has not been specially called to the fact. The picture is a complete expression of the most refined and elegant beauty of English scenery.' Turner has painted grander pictures but never a sweeter one than "Crossing the Brook;" he has touched far higher chords, but never pro- duced rhore perfect harmony ; he has represented greater loveliness, but never 1 Life of Turner, Vol. I. p. 298. 2 There are few counties in England where trees grow in such elegant forms as in Devonshire. We believe that Turner's love for the pear-shape in trees was first gained in this county. We have heard and seen it asserted that this shape is not to be found hi nature, but we have seen whole lines of elms (usually ungraceful trees in England) , in the south of Devonshire of this shape. Turners Oil-Pictures. 27 any more pure ; lie has painted more of truth, but never anything more truly. Full to overflowing as the composition is, there is no crowded spot; compli- cated as the drawing is, every line is distinct ; massive as the foliage is, there is light and air between each leaf. It is seldom that Turner ever gave up his soul so completely to the expression of peace without a thought of war, to joy without alloy, to beauty without canker, as in this picture. It is the most perfect flower of his youth, perhaps of his life. Here at least, if there is no strong hope, there is the serenity of calm content ; there is no bitter memory, no fearful forethought; there is only present peace. In a widely different spirit is conceived " The Building of Carthage." It is intended to typify the dawn of a great naval power. Carthage is repre- sented (contrary to historical fact) as on the banks of a river, which flows down the centre of the picture. The afternoon sun is shining fiercely, nearly in the centre of the picture, making the sky a blaze of light, and gilding the glowing city and the distant hills. On the right is a precipitous cliff, clothed with verdure and crowned with a temple. In the background is a bridge, in front of which galleys are being built ; in the foreground boys are sailing mimic ships ; behind these are Dido and her attendants, with plans outstretched before her. In the middle distance is a curious square building, " surmounted," says Mr. Wornum, " by something between a turtle and a crocodile — a typical crest — perhaps another symbol of sea dominion." Nothing is wanting to suggest the beginning of a reign of earthly pomp and maritime power. It is not, however, a picture of calm hope, but of feverish ambition. Man for a while supplants nature. One magnificent tree only is left. Except the cliff, too steep fir building on, and the distant hills, there is no place uncovered by magnificent structures begun and finished. Mr. Iiuskin points out' the intensity with which Turner's imagination dwelt always on the three great cities of Carthage, Home, and Venice — Carthage 1 Modem Painters, Vol. V. p. 340. 28 Turner's Oil-Pictures. in connection especially with the thoughts and study which led to the painting of the Hesperides Garden, 1 showing the death which attends the vain pursuit of wealth ; Rome, showing the death which attends the vain pursuit of power : Venice, the death which attends the vain pursuit of beauty. Turner dreamed gloriously, but his dreams were not unconscious ; he did not dream of the future but of the past, the splendid castles which he indeed "built in the air" were not the unsubstantial visions of a sanguine imagination but the glorious reflections of sad and hopeless memory. His brightest pictures were the foil of his darkest thoughts ; as he grew older, his pictures became lighter in colour, but sadder if possible in sentiment. This Carthage is glorious and bright even now when half its splendour has departed, and it yet fills one with delight at its beauty. But despite this, its effect on the mind is not cheering, its magnificence does not inspire a joyful sentiment. One cannot but feel that its pomp is vain, its splendour hollow. It is too hot for content, and the half finished piles are suggestive of ruin. It gives only half the thought of the painter. If it had been possible, he would have painted the building and the decline of Carthage on the same canvass; as it was not, he painted two. He could not have painted one picture without conceiving the other. Both are now in the National Gallery. Of this picture numerous stories are told. Chantrey once tried to buy it, but was startled by finding each time its price rose higher, — £500, £1000, £2000. " ' Why, what in the world, Turner, are you going to do with the picture ?' " ' Be buried in it, to be sure,' growled Turner." 2 Chantrey is said to have replied, that he would infallibly be dug up again for the sake of the picture, and to have recommended as a safer winding sheet, the manuscript of the "Fallacies of Hope," from which imaginary > poem Turner drew so many sphinx-like quotations for his pictures. In the National Gallery. 2 Life of Turner, Vol. I. p. 299. DO BUILDING CARTHAGE. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY T. A. PRIOR. Turners Oil-Pictures. 29 The picture was, according to Mr. Thombury,' originally painted for £100 for a gentleman, who declined to take it when the critics and the press began to attack it, and, long after Chantrey had bargained for it in vain, Turner refused a greater sum for it than even Chantrey had offered. " At a great meeting at Somerset House, where Sir Robert Peel, Lord Hardinge, &c, were present, it was unanimously agreed to buy two pictures of Turner, and to present them to the National Gallery, as monuments of art for eternal incitement and instruction to artists and all art-lovers. A memorial was drawn up and presented to Turner by his sincere old friend, Mr. Griffiths, who exulted in the pleasant task. The offer was £5000 for the two pictures, the ' Rise' and ' Fall of Carthage.' " Turner read the memorial, and his eyes brightened. He was deeply moved ; he shed tears ; for he was capable, as all who knew him well know, of intense feeling. He expressed the pride and delight he felt at such a noble offer from such men; but he added, sternly, directly he read the word 'Carthage' — ' No, no ; they shall not have it.' " On Mr. Griffiths turning to leave, he called after him and said : ' O ! Griffiths, make my compliments to the memorialists, and tell them ' Carthage may some day become the propert}' of the nation.'" 2 Turner left this picture and " The Sun Rising in a Mist" to the nation, on the condition that the) - should be hung next to Claude's " Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba," and " Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca." The Carthage is painted in distinct rivalry of Claude, to a great extent in imitation of him, but it is open to doubt what Turner's precise object was, in attaching this condition to the acceptance of the two pictures by the nation. If it was to convince the world that he was the greater painter, he has succeeded. But he could have succeeded without this. He could not have hoped or wished to utterly eclipse Claude, because nobody knew Claude's merit better than Turner, 1 Life of Turner, Vol. I. p. 395. ■ Idem, pp. 391, 395. 30 Turner s Oil- Pictures. and though the "Carthage" is like Claude, the "Sun rising in a Mist" is as unlike a work of the French master, as one picture can be unlike another in style. Perhaps he meant to say, " Here is one picture in ray style and one in Claude's; Claude could not have painted in my style at all, and I have beaten him in his own;" or, perhaps, as we think, he did not so much desire his own fame at the expense of Claude's as to show by the contrast the difference between them, and so teach the world a lesson of simple appreciation. If so, he could scarcely have chosen a better way of achieving his object. The four pictures present a short epitome of landscape art, and the student will learn almost as much from the pictures of one of the artists as from those of the other. Turner showed that he loved Claude by imitating him so much, but he hated the false estimation in which he was held. Turner wanted justice. He did not desire to be rated above his own value, or that Claude should be rated below his ; but he hated the popular ignorance of both, and tried to set the balance straight ; which end, with much help from Mr. lluskin, he has now accomplished. In 1816, Turner exhibited two pictures of the Temple of Jupiter Panhel- lenius, an instance of his love for contrasting modern decay with ancient glory. One was a "View" of the ruin taken from a sketch by H. Gaily Knight, (he occasionally made drawings and paintings of places he had never seen, from the sketches of others), and the other an imaginative picture of the same temple restored. In 1817 appeared his "Decline of Carthage," a picture which he is said to have preferred to the " Rise," but which is in such a sad state now, that it is impossible to judge of the justice of his opinion. In 1818, four pictures, including the " Field of Waterloo " and " Tivoli." In 1819, " The Meuse Orange Merchantman going to Pieces," a fine picture, now in the National Gallery. This year he also exhibited his " Richmond Hill," which and the " Rome from the Vatican," exhibited next year, are perhaps two as uninterest- ing pictures as ever were painted, far more so to our mind, than the wildest extravagances of his latest period. CHAPTER IV. TURNER'S TOURS AND WATER-COLOURS. F Turner commenced by drawing architecture pure and simple, he soon began to leave the plain path of the topographical artist to indulge in little excursions on his own account in the regions of light and mist and natural effect. It is eas} 7 to observe, even in his earliest drawings, that he was not satisfied with the simple task of plain- copying the lines of the buildings, and adding a few conventional trees and figures, as his predecessors had been. His artistic feeling was too strong within him to be content with simple transcription of lines and stones, his mind strayed from the prosaic details to poetical accidents, and could not be satisfied with a drawing which did not respond in some way to its artistic sense. So we find him earl}' attempting to surround his buildings with trees and grass, with light and cloud, or, in a word, with nature; and to choose the best artistic as well as the best architectural point of view. He and Girtin were the first Englishmen to feel, and endeavour to make others feel, the sympathy between nature and architecture, or rather perhaps the human sympathy which harmonises both, and without which both nature and architecture have no beauty which can interest man. If we except Gainsborough, no Englishman had yet arisen who had attempted to convey the effect of nature upon humanity, men had tried to draw with tolerable accuracy some things which they saw, but it was yet an almost unattempted task to express the feelings inspired by sight. More than this, with the above exception, and one or two more at most, 32 Turner s Tours and Water-Colours. Englishmen appear not even to have tried to draw what they saw, to have given up as hopeless any attempt even to copy nature, and to have been content to express her by certain conventional forms, which had come to be generally accepted as the artistic equivalents of natural objects. Art had become the mechanical reproduction of all the faults of former artists. Wilson, great artist though he was, drew boughs like pitchforks, so a pitchfork became the artistic formula for a bough. The miserable state in which landscape art was when Turner was young cannot be better shown than Mr. Ruskin shows it by quoting the directions given for the production of a landscape under article " Drawing," in the " Ency- clopaedia Britannica" (1797) : — ■ " ' If ho is to draw a landscape from nature, let him take his station on a rising ground, when he will have a large horizon, and mark his tablet into three divisions downwards from the top to the bottom, and divide in his own mind the landscape he is to take into three divisions also. Then let him turn his face directly opposite to the midst of the horizon, keeping his body fixed, and draw what is directly before his eyes upon the middle division of the tablet, then turn his head, but not his body' (what a comfortable as well as intelligent opera- tion sketching from nature must have been in those days), 'to the left hand, and delineate what he views here, joining it properly to what he had done before ; and, lastly, do the same by what is to be seen upon his right hand, laying down everything exactly, both with respect to distance and proportion. " ' The best artists of late, in drawing their landscapes, make them shoot away, one part lower than another. " ' Those who make their landscapes mount up higher and higher, as if they stood at the bottom of a hill to take the prospect, commit a great error ; the best way is to get upon a rising ground, make the nearest objects in the piece the highest, and those that are further off to shoot away lower and lower, till they come almost level with the line of horizon, lessening everything propor- tionably with its distance, and observing also to make the objects fainter and SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OE NORTHUMBERLAND. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY J. BURNETT. Turners Tours and l-Vater-Colours. 33 less distinct the further they are removed from the eye. He must make all his lights and shades fall one way, and let everything have its proper motion ; as trees shaken by the wind, the small boughs bending more, the larger ones less ; water agitated by the wind, and dashing against ships or boats, or falling from a precipice upon rocks and stones, and spirting up again into the air and sprinkling all about ; clouds also in the air, now gathered with the wind, now violently condensed into hail, rain, and the like, always remembering that, whatever motions are caused by the wind must be made to move all the same way, because the wind can blow but one way at once.' " Such was the state of the public mind and of public instruction at the time when Claude, Poussin, and Salvator were at the zenith of their reputation ; such were the precepts which, even to the close of the century, it was necessary for a young painter to comply with during the best part of the years he gave to study. Take up one of Turner's views of our Yorkshire dells, seen from about a bank's height of expanse above the sweep of its river, and, with it in your hand, side by side, read the old ' Encyclopaedia' paragraph.'' We have not one of these " Views of our Yorkshire dells" to present to our readers. The " Shipwreck" is probably the earliest of his works, of which we give a plate. This scene, as it happens, is on the coast of Yorkshire, and it shows (far too powerfully for our purpose) the enormous gulf which separates him, even at an early period of his career, from the students of the Encyclopedia. But short as was the time taken by Turner to mount so far above all con- temporary notions of and aims in art, his work in that period was long and unceasing. " Art is long and time is fleeting," is a modern translation of an old truth which Turner seems to have carried at his heart always, from the days when he wandered as a boy over England, to that on which he saw his last sunset at Chelsea. Not remarkable in his appearance, and passing from place to place silently, he was yet ever to be traced as " the man who had always a pencil in his hand." F 34 Turners Tours and Water-Colours. In 1790, when fifteen, Turner exhibited his first water-colour ; in 1797, when twenty -two, his first oil picture ; and during this short period of three years, he had walked and sketched in Kent, Essex, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Cam- bridgeshire, Worcestershire, Surrey, Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Somersetshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Flintshire, Herefordshire, Cardigan- shire, Monmouthshire, Denbighshire, Shropshire, Glamorganshire, Staffordshire, and other shires. He had exhibited thirty-two drawings at the Royal Academy, and twenty of his drawings had been engraved in magazines. Is it much to be wondered at, if at the end of this time he had eclipsed his contemporaries ? The sheer hard work is enough to account for it. He pressed into these three years the labour of many of their lives. The mass of sketches and drawings, complete and incomplete, left to the nation, and ranging over the whole period of Turner's life, would, no doubt, yield, on careful study, a minute history of Turner's progress as a water-colour artist, and very interesting would it be so to trace the gradually increasing knowledge of nature, the slow acquirement of power over materials, the thousand discoveries of new methods and tricks of effect, the growth of artistic feeling, the dawn of colour, and every other subtle gradation by which he rose from a student to be the greatest landscape painter of any time, from a topographic draughtsman to the prophet of nature ; but we have neither space nor power for the task. Mr. Ruskin has done much, but what a proof is it of the infinity of this man, that the long labour of another, perhaps as great as a critic as he was as an artist, should have left his subject unexhausted. We must hasten on from the student to the master, and must take up his water-colour drawing at the date of our last example of his oils. Imagine then Turner to have wandered half over England, to have then visited Yorkshire in 1797, and gained the first great impulse to his art by his wanderings over the wolds and by the lakes, to have gained the full honours of the Academy as a consequence, to have published nearly his whole series of the " Liber Studi- oruin," to have received his second great impulse by his visit to France and Turners Tours and Water-Colours. 35 Switzerland in 1802, to have painted his " Shipwreck," his "Jason," his " Crossing the Brook," his " Building of Carthage," to have achieved triumphs in every branch of landscape painting, to be forty-four years of age. Yet there is still more knowledge for him to acquire, more power to be gained, fresh victories to be won in new fields. In 1819, he for the first time visited the Rhine and Italy, and the effect of this tour upon his genius seems to have been to develop greatly his powers as a eokrarist and his love of light. Henceforth he scarcely paints a dark picture, and yellow is the prevailing colour in his drawings, as greys and browns had been in earlier days. " More light" is his constant cry until his death. Probably one of the fruits of his tour of 1819 was the drawing from the engraving of which our illustration of "The Rhine, Nieuwied and Weissenburn," is copied. It is a very beautiful example of his simpler style of composition. The arrangement, the duplication in the middle distance of the sail forms in the foreground, the bed of rushes balanced on the right by the boat and its reflection, remind one somewhat of the composition of the " Flint Castle" ot the Liber, though the light and shade is much more strongly contrasted in the latter, and the chiaroscuro is reversed, the water being used for shade in the Flint Castle, and for light in our illustration, the place of the light lower sky in the Flint Castle being taken by the dark hill sides in the Nieuwied. If the sketch for this drawing was taken on the spot it was probably finished at home, for surely that very English-looking sportsman who has just shot, or is about to shoot one of those ducks, was never sketched on the banks of the Rhine. Yet how finely these figures are introduced; how they break up the uninteresting foreground; how valuable they are for light and shade. Take away the white dog, or replace it with a black one, and the drawing is spoilt. The original drawing is, we believe, one of the grand series of sketches on the Rhine in the possession of Mr. Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, near Leeds. In this sketch it is evident that Turner strove for little else than to give 36 Turners Tours and Water-Colours. a faithful " view" of the ordinary aspect of the place represented ; the peaceful river with its rushes and its boats, the quiet villages, the tranquil mountains ; there is no striving after extraordinary effects ; as a diplomatist or warrior can be masterly in inaction, so Turner could be masterly in simplicity. If we compare this drawing with the " Dido building Carthage," it seems a wonder that the two should be drawn by the same hand ; but if it seems a wonder that the artist of those hard dull early sketches could develop into the painter of the " Carthage," it seems little less so that the same man should afterwards spend months in making quiet drawings like this of new places. To a man like Martin, such simple patient quiet labour might have been insufferable after the painting of " Belshazzar's Feast" and other gorgeous falsities, but to Turner nothing was tedious that was true. His mind might revel in working out the glorious visions of its fancy, but it loved also to drink in and dwell upon the wondrous works of nature. It liked well to command the powers of its imagination, but it loved to serve humbly at the feet of truth. When he was only known as a student he was a great artist, and when he was known as a great artist he was still a student. As a contrast to this unambitious but masterful sketch, we give one of the most elaborately finished drawings he ever drew, also taken from the Rhine, his drawing of Heidelberg. But before we consider it, it may be as well to saj' something of his method of water-colour drawing, or rather to let Mr. Ruskin say it for us : " The large early drawings of Turner were sponged without friction, or were finished piece by piece on white paper; as he advanced he laid the chief masses first in broad tints, never effacing anything, but working the details over these broad tints. While still wet, he brought out the soft lights with the point of a brush ; the brighter ones with the end of a stick, often, too, driving the wet colour in a darker line to the edge of the light, in order to represent the outlines of hills. " His touches were all clear, firm, and unalterable, one over the other. NEUWIED AND WEISSENTHURN. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY R. BRANDARD. I I Turners Tours and Water-Colours. 37 Friction he used only now and then, to represent the grit of stone or the fretted pile of moss ; the finer lights ho often left from the first, even the minutest light, working round and up to them, not taking them out, as weaker men would have done. " He would draw the dark outlines by putting more water to wet brushes, and driving the colour to the edge to dry there, firm and dark. He would draw the broken edge of clouds with a quiver of his brush, then round the vapour by laying on a little more colour into parts not wet, and lastly dash in warm touches of light when dry on the outside edges. " In his advanced stage, and in finished drawings, he no doubt damped, and soaked, and pumped on his paper, so as to be able to work with a wooden point. The superfluous colour he would remove, but he never stifled or muddled one tint with another ; nor would he use friction so as to destroy the edge and purity of a colour. His finer vignettes (as for his Milton) are on smooth cardboard, his coarser ones on sheets of thin drawing paper; and in some of his sketches he would colour on both sides, so that the paper could never have been soaked. There is no doubt, too, that besides his work on wet paper with wooden point, and his wonderful method of taking out high lights with bread, he had many secrets of manipulation, as, for instance, in imitating the dark broken edges of waves. In an Italian drawing that Mr. Alhiutt now possesses, there is an evident intentional graining given to a large block of stone in the right foreground by the pressure of a thumb in half-wet colour. You can still see the impression of the pores of the painter's skin. " The painting exhibited by Turner in 1805, ' The Battle of Fort Rock in Val d' Aosta,' combines all the painter's peculiarities. There are lights bluntly wiped out of the local colour of the sky, and sharply and decisively on the foreground trees ; others scraped out with a blunt instrument while the colour was wet, as in the moss on the wall and part of the fir-trees on the right-hand bank ; lights scratched out, as in one of the waterfalls ; others 38 Turner s Tours and Water-Colours. cut sharp and clean with a knife from the wet paper, as in the housings of the mules on the mountain road ; and then, for texture and air, there has been much general surface-washing." Surely all the resources of Turner's skill were demanded to produce the wonderfully elaborate and complex drawing of Heidelberg. It certainly must have tested most severely the patience and skill of Mr. Prior, from whose marvellous engraving our print is taken. Turner appears to have tried to concentrate into one drawing the whole spirit of Rhine scenery, and the whole of his power and knowledge as an artist, — the mountain, the bridge, the castle, the church, the river, the storm, the sunshine, the mist, the rain- bow, and even the costume and the habits of the people. Compare it with the simple sketch of Nieuwied, and it is like the most elaborate sonata heard after a ballad. The one is the melodious expression of one thought, the other the exquisite harmonies of a myriad. Divide the "Heidelberg" as you will, you still obtain a lovely series of pictures ; and yet there is no crowding in the drawing, and the unity of the composition is perfect. Multitudinous and various in the extreme, there is no confusion ; complex as the effects are, their causes are distinctly traceable : there is not a pin's point that does not do its duty. And here we have only black and white, instead of the infinite beauty of colour. How perfect the tonality of the colour must be, the engraving is sufficient proof. The scale of the chiaroscuro ranges from the almost total blackness of the shade in the foreground to the perfect whiteness of the horse in the river, and yet there is no violent contrast; the lights and darks are so broken up that the whole picture is luminous, the very storm-cloud is translucid, the deep shade of the foreground is illuminated with figures. The pure white bridge, which with its reflection crosses the river like a marble chain, is yet full of subtle gradations of whiteness ; the bridge is whiter than its reflection, the bridge itself is not so white as the lights in the foreground, while every arch by its reflection is as it were the frame of a little picture of land and river beyond, separately wonderful HEIDELBERG. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY T. A. PRIOR. Turner's Tours and Water-Co lours. 39 for light and shade, but all subordinate to the general effect. But if the tone of the picture is perfect the composition of it is little less so. Filled with a thousand objects of interest, no one is brought into undue prominence ; each keeps its place, and adds to the general effect without specially attracting notice. It is impossible to look at it except as a whole ; it needs an effort to detach one's attention from the entire composition to examine the details, and yet every detail is worthy of the closest attention, and the obscurest corners of this wonderful drawing are filled with the most elaborate work. To persons unac- customed to observe either nature or paintings minutely, Turner's drawings contain so many things that they have never seen before that it is no wonder that they appear unreal, but the more they are studied the more one sees how real they are, and after a little while instead of failing to find nature in Turner, one cannot look at nature without finding Turner. We once heard a person express his opinion that the bridge in this drawing was an " unintelligible jumble, of which no one could make head or tail," but after being persuaded to look at it intently for a few minutes, he expressed another opinion, and that was that " what struck him most in it was its elaborate distinctness." It may be a relief to the reader now for a little while to turn attention from the artist to the man. Here is an account of him in 1812, during one of his Devonshire tours, given by Mr. Cyrus Redding, which, though showing him a man of much mental and bodily power, gives one no notion of the com- bined vigour and grace of mind which was required to produce even some of his less remarkable works. So he was to live and die, — a rough, sailor- like man, whose outward and visible signs in no way expressed his inward invisible grace. Stored up within him, like a sweet kernel in a rough rind, were fancy, imagination, tenderness, tears, the sad philosophy of a solitary soul brooding without aid from any on the melancholy facts of human history, the grand poetic heart which made music of its sorrow for the pleasure of the world, the intense child-like love of nature which made storm and sunshine, 4° Turners Tours and IVater-Colours. mist and rainbows, his chosen friends and companions, nay, his brothers, — all this within, and without but a clay figure, scarcely recognizable from a bargeman's, through which none of that fine soul could ever find its way save at rare intervals, such as the death of a friend, when convulsed with the shock of grief as with an earthquake, the hard rind would bo riven and the sensitive soul would flash in tears upon the astonished sight. " The unprepossessing exterior, the reserve, the austerity of language, existed in Turner in combination with a powerful, intelligent, reflective mind, ever coiled up within itself ; he had a faculty of vision that seemed to penetrate the sources of natural effect, however various in aspect, and to store them in memory with wonderful felicity. His glance commanded in an instant all that was novel in scenery, and a few outlines on paper recorded it unintelligibly to others. He placed these pictorial memoranda upon millboard, not larger than a sheet of letter-paper, quite a confused mass ; how he worked out the details from such sketches seemed to me wonderful. His views around Plymouth, in the engravings from his pictures, were marvellously varied in effect, as well as faithful representations. His first sketches showed little of the after picture to the unpractised eye ; perhaps he bore much away in memory, and these were only a kind of shorthand, which he deciphered in his studio. " We once ran along the coast to Borough, or Bur Island, in Bibury Bay. There was to be the wind-up of a fishing account there. Our excuse was to eat hot lobsters, fresh from the water to the kettle. " The sea was boisterous, the morning unpropitious. Our boat was Dutch built, with outriggers, and undecked. It belonged to a fine old weather-beaten seaman, a Captain Nicols. " Turner, an artist; a half Italian, named Demaria; an officer of the army; Mr. Collier, a mutual friend ; and myself, with a sailor, composed the party. The sea had that dirty, puddled appearance which often precedes a hard gale. We kept towards Kame Head, to obtain an offing, and when running out from the land the sea rose higher, until off Stokes Point it became stormy. Turners Tours and Water-Colotirs. 41 " We mounted the ridges bravely. The sea in that part of the Channel rolls in grand furrows from the Atlantic, and we had to run about a dozen miles. The artist enjoyed the scene. He sat in the stern-sheets, intently watching the sea, and not at all affected b}' the motion. Two of our number were sick. The soldier, in a delicate coat of scarlet, white and gold, looked dismal enough, drenched with the spray, and so ill that at last he wanted to jump overboard. We were obliged to lay him on the rusty ballast in the bottom of the boat, and keep him down with a spar laid across him. Demaria was silent in his sufferings. In this way we made Bur Island. The difficulty was how to get through the surf, which looked unbroken. At last we got round under the lee of the island, and contrived to get on shore. All this time Turner was silent, watching the tumultuous scene. The little island, and the solitary hut it held, the bay in the bight of which it lay, and the dark, long Bolthead to seaward, against the rocky shore of which the waves broke with fury, made the artist become absorbed in contemplation, not uttering a syllable. While the shell-fish were preparing, Turner, with a pencil, clambered nearly to the summit of the island, and seemed writing rather than drawing. How he succeeded, owing to the violence of the wind, I do not know. " He probably observed something in the sea aspect which he had not before noted. We took our picnic dinner and lobsters, and soon became merry over our wine on that wild islet. Evening approached ; the wind had rather increased than diminished in violence. The landsmen did not approve of a passage back that must run far into the night, if not the morning. " Some one proposed we should walk to Kingsbridge and sleep. Captain Nicols declared he would return ; his boat would defy any sea. We ought not in good fellowship to have separated; when it was low water we could reach the mainland over the sands. We left the boat, and the captain with his man set sail back alone, and was obliged to run off the coast nearly to the Eddystone to make the Sound. Some of the men-of-war there were firing guns, to give notice that they were dragging their anchors. We slept at Kingsbridge. Turner and 4 2 Turners Tours and Water-Colours. myself went early the next morning to Dodbrook, to see the house in which Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar) was born, of which the artist took a sketch. We walked a good part of the way back. The next day we spent at Saltram. Though full of paintings by the great masters, and many landscapes of Zucca- relli, I could not extract a word about them from Turner. " Stubbs' ' Phaeton and Runaway Horses,' in the billiard-room he hardly noticed, except with the word ' fine.' The room in which I slept was hung with Angelica Kauffman's man-woman paintings. As we were retiring to bed, I directed his attention to them as he passed my room to his own ; I received a ' Good night in your seraglio' (harem). " On looking at some of Turner's subsequent works, I recently perceived several bits of the scenery we had visited, introduced into fancy pictures. Meeting him in London one morning, he told me that if I would look in at his gallery I should recognize a scene I well knew, the features of which he had brought from the west. I did so, and traced, except in a part of the front ground, a spot near Newbridge, on the Tamar, we had visited together. It is engraved, called, ' Crossing the Brook,' and is now in Marlborough House. " I was present at Devil's Point when he sketched the Sound, Mount Edgecombe, Trematon Castle, Calstock, and scenes on the Tamar. We once passed an entire night together in a country inn with a sanded floor, where no beds were to be had, not far from the Duke of Bedford's cottage on the Tamar. Most of our party went three miles to Tavistock. I volunteered to remain. " They were to rejoin us after breakfast the next day. Turner got some bread and cheese and porter for supper, which I did not relish, but by an after-thought procured some bacon and eggs ; and after sitting conversing till midnight with a fluency I never heard from Turner before or afterwards, he leaned over the table and fell asleep. I placed three chairs in a line, and stretching myself over them, got three or four hours' rest : quite enough to be fresh to start with my companion at daybreak to explore some sweet spots in the neighbourhood, and return to breakfast before our friends rejoined us. f Turner s Tours and Water-Colours. 43 " Turner said he had never seen so many natural beauties in such a limited spot of country as he saw there. He visited Mount Edgecumbe two or three times. " I have a pencil sketch of his, which is a view of Cawsand Bay from the heights, with the end of a seat, a bottle of wine, table, and the men-of- war at anchor below. I value it as a relic of a great man, though a mere scrawl. " I was one of a picnic party of ladies and gentlemen, which he gave in excellent taste, at Mount Edgecumbe. There we spent a good part of a fine summer's day. Cold meats, shell-fish, and good wines abounded. The donor of the feast, too, was agreeable, terse, blunt, almost epigrammatic at times, but always pleasant for one not given to waste his words, nor studious of refined bearing. We visited Cothele on the Tamar together, where the furniture is of the time of Henry VII. and VIII. " The woods are fine, and the views of some of the headlands round which the river winds are of exceeding beauty. In one place he was much struck, took a sketch, and when it was done, said, ' We shall see nothing finer than this if we stay till Sunday, because we can't.' " It was the last visit he paid to the scenery of the Tamar before he quitted the west. It was to the honour of several of the inhabitants of Plymouth that boats, horses, and tables were ready for his use during the time he remained. Everybody felt that in paying him attention they were honouring a most extraordinary genius, whose artistic merit had not been exaggerated. " I remember one evening on the Tamar, the sun had set, and the shadows become very deep. Demaria, looking at a seventy-four lying under Saltash, said, ' You were right, Mr. Turner ; the ports camiot be seen. The ship is one dark mass P " ' I told you so,' said Turner, ' now you see it all is one mass of shade !' " ' Yes, I see that is the truth, and yet the ports are there.' 44 Turners Tours and Water-Colours. " ' We can take only what we see, no matter what is there. There arc people in the ship : we don't see them through the planks.' " ' True,' replied Demaria. " There had been a discussion on the subject before between two professional men, in which Turner had rightly observed, that after sunset, under the hills, the portholes were undiscerniblc. We now had ocular proof of it." This is, on the whole, the best sketch we have anywhere seen of the artist as a man, other accounts of him are split up into anecdotes, but here we have a rough sketch of him, his habits and surroundings, the impression he made on others, the way he looked and behaved when free of restraint and in the prime of life. A good-natured rough sort of man, who cared nothing for hard weather or hard living, shrewd and self-concentrated, not given to speech, but sensible when he did speak, listening more than he spoke, and observing more than he heard, a man possibly of far greater attainments than one would give him credit for, but when we have said this we have said all or nearly all. We have now only to look at his works to see what a vast difference there was between the man that he was, and the man that he appeared. Such a man as Mr. Cyrus Redding so pleasantly describes might indeed be a good artist ; a man capable, for instance, of drawing Dover and Hastings as beautifully as he has done in the drawings from which our illustrations of those places are taken ; he was evidently just the man to do it, though we fancy that if we could present the original drawings instead of the black and white translations, there would be delicacies and subtleties perceptible, for which we should scarcely have given Mr. Bedding's companion credit. But turn from these to the " Heidelberg," and who could believe that a man of so rough and unrefined an exterior could have conceived it. Most men have depths to which the common world do not penetrate, but this man in that wonderful being of his had worlds undiscovered, peopled with thoughts uneonjectured and visions not hinted at. Each fresh work was a revelation. Turner s Tours and Water-Colours- 45 It is easy to try to get rid of the difficulties arising from the difference between a man and his works by describing his personality as double, making him to be half man, half artist — a sort of spiritual Centaur, scarcely to be thought of as a man, and this duality is apparent in Turner to a greater degree than perhaps in any other painter or poet, but such attempts merely state difficulties without solving them. The artist is, after all, part of the man, not an excrescent or alien part of him; he is not a hybrid, but a homogeneous whole, and though an artistic temperament may and must to a great degree modify a man's moral and intellectual conditions, it does not stifle or alter a man's individual character. In Turner's case, however, it actually appears, though falsely, to have done so ; for, with the exception of noble impulses, and one long settled plan of magnificent charity, his individual character seems as though dwarfed to the standard of a common labouring man. That his art in any way tended to do this, we do not in any sense believe ; instead of this, we believe that it was the only way in which the man himself showed in his proper magnificent light. Physical disabilities were his evil, and Art his good genius. If he had been gifted with an ordinary amount of verbal expression, and common power of communicating his thoughts to others ; if he had had the power of inspiring personal interest ; if he had had a less lopsided education, so that he could have moved like an ordinary intelligent being amongst his fellows, and have entered into their lives and enjoyed their confidence and sympathy like other men ; then indeed, if he had still refused this fellowship, and had shut himself up from the world, and sought to develop himself in nothing but painting, his art would have much to answer for ; but in that case his art would probably have suffered, and not have been the pure unselfish thing that it was, and he himself would have been a worse man. But we believe that if he was so cut off from the world, it was none of his fault ; he struggled for light, he loved his fellow-men, he longed to be one of them, but he could not, in any other than a merry-making, jovial, hail-fellow-well-met kind of way ; he had no bridge that would carry him over on a higher level to his fellow-men. He 46 Turner s Tours and Water-Colours. thought of politics, but his mouth was shut ; he pondered on time and fate and eternity, but his tongue was tied ; he conceived of love and sympathy, but he had no means for their communication. He was, however, fond of seeing people merry and convivial, and here there was a bridge — he could eat and he could drink, and so it became that social dinners and suppers were the only entertainments that ho could enjoy, the only opportunities of society which he loved to indulge in. But on the other hand was his art : did he see beauty he could paint it ; his love, to which all other channels were shut, found ample scope for all its emotions in the boundless variety of nature ; she sympathised with him, and he could express his love for her and hers for him as no one else could, and even his thoughts of man's sad history he could think out and realize in painted poetry. Milton was a blind poet, and Turner was a dumb painter, but there was this difference, Milton had seen the glories of the world in his youth ; but Turner had been dumb from his birth, and had never known what it was to express the emotions and thoughts of his heart in fitting speech, or the pleasure and profit of converse with other minds; both men were pitiable, but Turner far more so. They were both poets, philosophers, and artists, but Turner could only communicate with his fellow-men in a language which was imperfectly understood, which allowed of no response, nor admitted of any after elucidation. This dumb artist, then, was like a tree whose roots are in a cellar, and which has grown sideways through a chink ; one branch — his art alone — has light and heat, and with gratitude to the special favour it grows, till of itself it exceeds in size and beauty many a perfect tree ; but the other branches, where are they ? They grow perhaps in the sickly shade a little while and die, some scarce start at all, and the tree viewed altogether is unsightly and misproportioned. But is it the fault of the tree that its seed was so sown, or is it the fault of the one glorious branch that the rest are stunted ? is not that branch rather the only real manifestation of the tree, and is it not enough to redeem it ? There are therefore two things we think clear : first, that Turner, the man, LAKE OF ZURICH. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY T. A. PRIOR. Turners Tours mid Water-Colours. 47 is not to be divided from Turner, the artist, but that his art is the only full and fair expression of the man, the only means by which what he was was reveal- able to his fellowmen ; and second, that Turner, the man, was not sacrificed to, but redeemed by, his art. If therefore we wish to know what Turner was, we should not trust even to Mr. Redding, or be too much biased by other stories we shall have to relate, but should turn rather to his Liber Studiorum, to his " Ulysses," or even to the beautiful drawing of Zurich, which forms our next illustration. This drawing is specially remarkable as a typical instance of the way Turner used masses of figures to break up light. CHAPTER V. TURNER'S OIL-PAINTINGS. SECOND PERIOD, 1820-35. CCORDING to Mr. Buskin, Turner's pictures of this period are distinguished by delicate deliberation of handling, cheerful moods of mind, brilliant colour, defiance of precedent, and effort at ideal composition. In 1821 Turner was absent from the walls of the Academy, and his picture of 1322, "What you Will," was not important, but in 1823 he again surprised the world, by his wonderful picture of the " Bay of Baia3," a picture still so lovely, as it hangs on the walls of the National Gallery, that at a little distance it is almost difficult to believe that it is a mere wreck of what it was, but unfortunately a very little examination shows what ravages time, exposure, neglect and chemical change have wrought. Messrs. Redgrave write sadly of it. After describing the revolution in art caused by the application by Turner to oil of the effects he had learnt in his water-colour practice, Messrs. Redgrave contrast the picture of the " Shipwreck," with the " Bay of Baire." " In the former," they write, "the principle is dark, with a very limited proportion of light ; in the latter light, with a very limited proportion of dark. Again, in the former the work throughout is painted solidly, and with a vigorous and full brush, the sky is solid, the sea is solid and opaque in its execution, even in the darks much of it being laid on boldly with the knife. With the single exception of the red jacket Second Period-~-i$>20 to 1835. 49 of the man at the helm, the few patches of colour that break the solemn monotony of the storm are not glazed, but mixed as opaque tints. " Though the scheme of the picture has relation to the Dutch School, it is not Dutch, either in execution or finish, but simple, massive, and large. In " The Bay of Baiaj," on the contrary, the whole scheme of the picture is light ; instead of the keeping being the result of contrasts of different planes, it consists of infinite gradations of delicate tint ; the hills and distant bay are scumbled into a misty haze ; the foreground has been painted white, or in a very light hue, and broken up into delicate tints, finished with refined diaphanous glazings of colour. The wcedage, leafage, and flowers have been painted white, or approaching to it, and have their gorgeous hues given by glazing with colour unmixed with white. " The shadows and the principal darks of the foreground were liquid and dark, with the brown amber of rich asphaltum. Were ! yes, alas ! were, for the picture is now but a wreck of what it was. In 1S23, when it hung on the walls of the Royal Academy, we well recollect it as a vision of glorious beauty. Now time has worked its evil will upon it, aided by the neglect of its author, the system of painting he adopted, and the treacherous pigment used for the darks. The aerial blue of the far-off bay and the hills that marge its shores, are here and there dark with discoloured patches ; the middle distance has been tampered with, the hand of the restorer is visible. The bright lines on the foliage and flowers of the foreground have proved as evanescent as the things they represent, the crimson drapery of Apollo hangs like a rent and faded rag, and the darks, strengthened with asphalte, are cracked and blackened as if the breath of a fur- nace had passed over them. " Wonderful tints here and there speak to the eye, as rare music does to the ear, showing through the faded glazings with which they were once enriched, like the hues of life lingering on the face of death. It is but the wreck, the beautiful wreck, it is true, of a picture that is past." 1 1 Century of Painters, Vol. II. p. 112. H 5o Turners Oil-Pictures. We doubt whether any of Turner's pictures can properly be said to be cheerful. The quiet spontaneous subjective joy expressed by that word does not, we think, rightly apply to the mood in which one of his pictures with which we are acquainted was painted, perhaps excepting " Crossing the Brook." But, objectively, " The Bay of Baise," " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," " Caligula's Palace and Bridge," " The Golden Bough," and other glorious visions of this period are cheerful, if by that word we mean the reverse of gloomy. Sad sentiment still remains, but the pictures themselves are bright, glorious and unclouded, irradiated with sunshine and decked with all the hues of heaven and earth. Turner seems to have thought principally of beauty when painting them, the sensuous loveliness of nature. He had before exerted, and he will again exert, his powers in representing the force, the majesty, the terriblcness, and the melancholy of nature; but now for a time he seems to have given himself up to represent its pleasure, — cloudless skies, sun's rays unshorn by mist, and the utmost luxuriance of vegetation. All this certainly, but cheerfulness nowhere. Passion of heated climes, but no gentle love ; Boecacio's " Birdcage," but no talc of domestic life. Snakes trail among the leaves of the Eden of the "Bay of Baise," and in the very centre of his exquisite dream of the " Golden Bough " lies the Lake of Avernus. Even in other such seemingly happy scenes, as " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage " and " Caligula's Palace and Bridge," half the beauty is gained from ruins, and the sentiment is bitter reflection. Certainly, however, Turner seems to have had more pleasure in painting- after his visit to Italy in 1819. Sad thoughts, though underlying, arc not on the surface ; he revels in his mastery over his materials, he no longer follows patiently in the steps of other artists or even of nature ; he feels his full power and throws off all restraint of other minds. Daring before, his confidence in his own powers knows no bounds ; he paints by inspiration, scorning all models; and after many brilliant successes and some failures, his daring and his success culminate in that most magnificent of all his works, his " Ulysses deriding Polyphemus" (1829). Second Period — 1 8 20 & 1 83 5 . 51 It would be mere waste of time to describe a work which is so generally known and which can be seen by all at the National Gallery, but there is a story told of it and the artist which is too good to omit. " There can be, of course," says Mr. Thornbury, " no doubt that Turner selected his subject from the ninth book of the ' Odyssey,' yet, with his usual secretive sort of fun, he loved to mystify busybodies and dilettantes about it. " His friend, the Rev. Mr. Jndkins, who is neither a busybody nor a dilettante, but a friend of Constable's, and a very clever landscape artist, was one day dining with Turner at a large party. A lady sitting next to the clerical artist, with the curiosity traditionally supposed to be peculiar to her sex, was full of the glories of the ' Polyphemus,' the wonder of the last exhibition. It was one perpetual whisper, ' Wine ? No, thank you ; but oh, Mr. Judkins, do you — what do you think of Mr. Turner's great picture ? And — a very little, if you please, — don't you now think it is a sweet picture ? ' &e. &c. " Turner, glum and shy, opposite, is watching all this. He sees where the lady's eyes fall after she addresses her whispers to Mr. Jndkins. His little beads of eyes roll and twinkle with fun and slyness across the table ; he growls, ' I know what you two are talking about, Judkins — about my picture.' " Mr. Judkins suavely waves his glass, and acknowledges that it was. The lady smiled on the great man. " ' And I bet you don't know where I took the subject from ; come now — bet you don't.' " Judkins blandly replied, ' Oh ! from the old poet, of course, Turner ; from the ' Odyssey,' of course.' " ' No,' grunted Turner, bursting into a chuckle ; 1 Odyssey ! ' not a bit of it. I took it from Tom Dibdin. Don't you know the lines : " ' He ate his mutton, drank his wine, And then he jjohed his eye out?'" 52 Turners Oil-Pictures. " The lines may be in Dibdin. I never could find them ; but such is the mystifying fun Turner was so fond of." 1 Although the picture of the "Golden Bough" is not such a crowning example of genius as the " Ulysses," it would be difficult to find a picture more illustrative of Turner's second style. It is painted in a very light key, its colour is glorious, it is veiled in his own peculiar mystery, both of subject and execution ; it expresses, as Mr. Ruskin says, " the infinite redundance of natural landscape," as it never had been expressed before, " the treatment of the masses of mountains" being "wholly without precursorship in art;" 2 it is peculiarly representative of a state of mind in which the artist revelled in the exercise of sheer power and visions of the purely beautiful, and its composition and its figures arc eminently Turneresque. Turner may have had some deep meaning to express, but the meaning is as unfathomable as the Lake Avernus itself. The Golden Bough, we are told, when plucked from the Tree of Proserpine, enabled mortals to enter the dominions of Pluto with impunity, and there is a white figure on the left, with a bough in one hand and a sickle in the other, and there is a reclining female figure in the middle, either of which may be meant for Proserpine, or for the Cumrean Sibyl. We have examined authorities for the story of which this is an illustration, in vain, but we think that it matters little what the story is, and should have been as well content if the picture had had no name. It needs none ; it tells no story but that of beauty. The following description of this picture was written by Mr. Burnet, the careful and artist-like critic, of Turner, the engraver of Wilkie and biographer of Rembrandt, in whose death we lost almost the last link between the English art of the present day and that of Turner's youth : " This is one of those compositions that Turner took delight in painting — a great expanse of country, which his knowledge of aerial perspective, and ' Thornbury's Life of Turner, Vol. I. p. 317. 2 Modern Painters, Vol. IV. p. 298. THE GOLDEN BOUGH. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY J. T. WILLMORE, A. R. A. Second Period — 1 820 to 1 83 5 . 53 his refined taste for delicate colour enabled him to execute with all the breadth inherent in similar scenery of nature. The principal mass of light is composed of the gentlest tones, gradually advancing from the distance, defined only by the opposition of warm and cool tints of yellow and blue, spread out with the greatest preservation to the breadth of light, and strengthened towards the foreground by the reds and browns of the figures and shadows ; the dark green pine, with its warm-coloured stem, rising up against the sky, gives a firmness to the foreground, and the most retiring quality to the distant objects. "No painter has equalled Turner in giving such scenes with the luminous character of nature, or imitating her tenderest tones of atmospheric colour." ' It may be remarked, however, that this was not the first picture painted by Turner which had for its subject the mystery of the " Golden Bough," for in 1800, or thirty-four years before, he appears, according to Mr. Thornbury, to have painted " The Meeting the Cumsean Sibyl near her Cave at Lake Avernus, before he enters Hell to pluck the mystic Golden Bough, in order that, armed with that Talisman, he may consult his dead Father, Anchises." But it must not be supposed that because we have dwelt on certain bright, sunnv, rainbow-hued, ideal compositions as most typical of this period of his art, that he relinquished other styles and other subjects at this time. Indeed, there is nothing more puzzling than the great variety of the moods which affected his genius throughout his wholo life. Mr. Ruskin, by the aid of intense study, has been able to put down certain milestones in his career ; that is, he has been able to determine certain periods when fresh impulses have been given to Turner's art, fresh methods of painting started, and the prevailing tone has changed, but that is all. There is something all through his later stages to remind us of his earliest styles, something almost from the first foreshadowing his latest. Nearly at the commencement of his second style, viz., in 1822, his only exhibited picture that year, " What You Will," is said (we have not seen it) to be the first example 1 Turner and his Works, by Burnet and Cunningham, p. 107. 54 Turners Oil-Pictures. of his latest, while in 1835 his picture of " Line-fishing off Hastings," now in the South Kensington Museum (Sheepshanks Collection), though so far as the method is concerned unmistakeable as to date, is yet just such a coast scene as he always loved to draw, and undistinguishable in style, when engraved, from the " Dover" and " Hastings" of which we have given illustrations, and which were drawn about 1822. He never appears to have quite relinquished any of his stjdes or habits. He began to study, and never left off studying. He began as a topographical artist, and he sketched places from nature up to his death. He painted "Fishermen at Sea" in 1796, and "Whalers" in 1846. His "Army of the Medes destroyed in a Desert by a Whirlwind," exhibited as early as 1801, is the prototype of the latest and wildest freaks of his imagination. His two " Temples of Jupiter," of 1816, are bnt the germs of his " Ancient and Modern Italy " and " Ancient and Modem Rome," of 1838 and 1839, and even his attempts at figure painting, beginning with " The Holy Family," in 1803, only ended with his life. We might go on multiplying instances, but it is enough to prove how various was the web of his genius, and that he never dropped a thread. In 1833 a new thread was set, for in that year he exhibited his first picture of Venice. In Venice, Turner's genius seems to have found its last home. It had sprung into being amongst the Fells of Yorkshire ; it had wandered all over England ; it had crossed to France and Switzerland, Germany and Italy, never losing its love for one in painting the other; almost, as Mr. Ruskin implies, spoiling pictures of foreign scenes by affectionate recollections of home, and scenes of home by decking them with foreign glories ; but it had lived long nowhere, since its youth it was a wanderer. But in Venice it found a place where it conld rest and dream undisturbed — a city which suggested no home memories to traverse its thought ; it was distinct, unique, and yet so blended together his earliest love, architecture ; his latest, colour ; and those lifelong- darlings of his heart, the cloud, the mist, and the sea, that there was no sense of strangeness in its novelty, no solitariness in its solitude, no bereavement in its isolation. Second Period — 1820 /<? 1S35. 55 "Turner, from this time" (1833), says Mr. Thornbury, "painted many pictures of Venetian scenery, never seeming to tire of the enchantment of the sea Cybele." How should he tire of what was to his art an earthly paradise — a dream-land of all that was most ethereal in nature, where there was more light and colour and mist and water than any other spot on the face of the globe '! Much has been said of Turner's habit of whitening the buildings of Venice, and his want of rightly appreciating its architecture, and no doubt Turner took liberties with Venice which no other man could dare do, or be justified in doing ; but, as Leslie truly says, " Others may have painted with more truth many of its lesser facts, but lie alone has given the great facts that are the prevailing associations with Venice." For instance, there is a fine picture of " Venice," by Bonington, in the wonderful collection of pictures made by the late Mr. Munro, of Novars and Hamilton Place, and now in the possession of his brother-in-law, Colonel Butler- Johnstone. This picture is, besides being a fine work of art, a picture that represents the most obvious facts of Venice with far greater accuracy than most of Turner's, but still it is a view of Venice and nothing more ; it faithfully gives the well-known buildings, the forms and colours of the boats, it has a Venetian sky, and the water is the water of a Venetian canal; it expresses all this, but it does not express the one great fact which Turner never failed to express— viz., that Venice is the City of the Sea. It was to express this fact, we think, that Turner whitened his buildings till they look as though they had risen like Venus from the foam of the waves. For this reason, also, he seems to have preferred to paint Venice from a distance, as in that glorious " Approach to Venice," of which we give an illustration elsewhere, in his " Going to the Ball," his " Returning from the Ball," his " Sun of Venice going out to Sea," and many other pictures, of which it may be said, that they are all light, and air, and water; where the distant city looks like a mirage of mist-like towers, where the boats skim over the water like clouds, and their sails are woven of the rainbow. 5 6 Turner s Oil-Pictures. The "Grand Canal, Venice," of which a representation is given, was painted in the year 1834. From the engraving, it appears to have heen bought by the Mr. Munro before mentioned, who was a great collector of Turner's pictures and drawings, and one of his kindest friends and patrons. Mr. Munro, however, must soon have parted with this picture, for in 1860 it was purchased by Mr. Gambart, at the sale of Mr. Burnett's pictures, for £2,520. In 1862 it was in the possession of Mr. John Hugh, of Manchester. This is a scene on the Grand Canal, and one of his earliest Venetian pictures. It is therefore more realistic than his later ones ; but still here the " wateriness," so to speak, of the place is most distinctly emphasized. Water washing both sides of the picture occupies the whole of the foreground, and retreats, together with an infinite perspective of shipping, into the extreme distance. Buildings on each side take up but a little part in the picture ; the sky above and the water below monopolize nearly four-fifths of the space, while the central point of interest is the shipping — shipping, except one or two gondolas, not for the navigation of canals, but of the sea. THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY W. MILLER. CHAPTER VI. TURNER'S "LIBER STUDIORUM" AND THE ENGRAVINGS FROM HIS WORKS. INCE the year 1794, when the first engraving after Turner appeared in the " Itinerant,'' up to the present clay, the British public have had almost uninterrupted opportunities of studying Turner's art by means of engravings. The list of his engraved works, so carefully compiled by Mr. Stokes, but which for all his labour is yet not quite perfect, contains the enormous number of seven hundred and forty-five plates, published and unpublished, excluding the " Liber Studiorum." A complete set of the " Liber" ought to contain seventy-one published plates; and there are twenty unpublished. Altogether we may estimate at over seven hundred the number of plates engraved in his lifetime from his works. On the whole, we think there can be no doubt that in his choicest oil paint- ings Turner's reached its highest point ; his water-colour drawings contain, on the other hand, his most faultless work ; but it is by engravings from his drawings and pictures that he is most widely known. Only very rich men can afford to keep his pictures, only rich men can possess a good drawing, but it is only very poor men who cannot afford to possess, and cannot easily procure, some good engravings from his pictures. In these, of course, much is missed, all colour and much of force and tone, but yet there is scarcely even an inferior engraving from Turner which does not bear the stamp of the artist, something I 5 8 Turner s Liber Studiorum and the which does not make it more valuable as an art-study than any engraving from any other landscape artist. Turner's works were not " profitable " to the engraver in one sense. They taxed his power to the utmost; there was no easy work in them, no patches which could be expressed by conventional lines, no possible lightening of the toil by machine-like expedients. Each stroke of the graver required sepa- rate thought, and had to express something expressible only by a particular and unpractised line, each pin's point had to be made a separate study of. But " profitable " surely in nearly every sense in which profit is really worthy. Turner may be said to have educated a separate school of copper-plate en- gravers, whose works are remarkable, among landscape engravers, not less for laboriousness than for brilliance of effect, not less for absence of conventionalism than for minute finish, not less for their complete novelty than for their perma- nent value. Miller, Pye, Brandard, Lupton, Goodall, Willmore, Prior, not to mention any others, have all produced engravings after Turner, to which it would be difficult to find rivals in any age or country. Not "profitable" for the artist either in one sense hinted at before, viz., that more of the artist's own effect was lost by the transmission into black and white than in the case of any other artist. In the matter of mere colour, which is a loss to all artists, he lost more than others, for his pictures were woven of colour. Moreover, the balance of contrasting effects necessary to a picture, and usually kept by the mere opposition of light and dark, was in Turner's pictures, especially his later ones, kept mainly by the opposition of hot and cold colour. Such effects are quite untranslatable into black and white. But profitable to the artist yet in many respects, for often half the effect of one of his pictures was more admired, being more easily understood by the public, than the whole. The actual loss of effect was thus, in many cases, an actual gain in appreciation, for as the only way to teach the meaning of a poet to an uneducated intellect is to make a homely paraphrase of his glorious language, so a rendering in black and white, which robs one of Turner's poetical pictures of more than half its beauty, is often Engravings from his Works. 59 the only way of making any portion of that beauty apparent to an ignorant eye. Strong meat is not good for babes, and little profit will a man without either a naturally artistic temperament or a cultivated artistic taste, derive from prolonged contemplation of some of even the best of Turner's pictures. The beauty of the composition, the exquisiteness of the drawing, the magic of the aerial perspective, will be lost upon him ; the obvious inaccuracy of the figures, the blaze of unaccustomed hues, will be all that he will carry away, but if shown an engraving of the same picture, he will feel, if he does not understand, the very beauties which he missed of seeing in the picture. We believe it is not yet an entirely exploded idea that Turner " owed " a great deal to his engravers, that by some wonderful magic they made something out of what was an unintelligible jumble of colour; that, in fact, there was much more in the engravings than there was in the pictures, and that Turner got credit for genius which properly belonged to his copyists or translators. Now, if there is one thing true about Turner, it is that his pictures contained more than could ever be expressed by, or compressed into, an engraving; that his work was too fine and subtle in a mere mechanical sense for any possible imitation, and that the most exquisite of all engravings from him was, as it were, but a dilution of, or a selection from, the original picture, containing no beauty not found in the picture. It may be said that, as nature was more full than Turner, so Turner was fuller than his engravers. Turner could not paint the whole of nature, but he painted much more than was visible to the common eye ; the engravers could not represent the whole of Turner, but by a second process, as it were, of reduction, they interpreted him, and nature too through him, to all. It is impossible to estimate the silent work which, for the last three-quarters of a century, the engravings from Turner's works have been doing in educating the mind of England to a proper appreciation of landscape beauty. We have heard much said lately as to the newness of this national love for beautiful scenery, and there was certainly little or none of it a century ago. It was perceptible neither in our poets nor our painters. A sort of sham love of nature, 6o Turner s Liber Studiorum and the under the title of the picturesque, was, indeed, to be found both in art and literature. In Turner's youth this sham picturesque was at the height of its reign ; but it was soon to fall, for both authors and artists had, in searching after it, come in contact with nature herself, and had infused some true feeling into their works. Wilson among painters, and Mrs. Radcliffe among writers, are representatives of this transitional state ; the ideal of their landscapes is conventional and unreal, but their broad effects are studied from nature. Mrs. Radcliffe drove about England in a post-chaise, and, when she halted, wrote magnificent descriptions of Italian scenery. Wilson painted ruins from a Stilton cheese, but he threw over it the rays of the real sun. The reign of nature had begun, though the works of both artist and author were spoilt by falseness of intention. The three men who were finally to upset the sham picturesque, and to be the first prophets in modern times of the true glories of nature, Scott, Words- worth, and Turner, were born within six years of one another. When we consider and wonder at the marvellous way in which the true love of nature has spread itself among all classes, we must not leave out of our calculations the effect which must have been produced by Turner with his thousands of engravings. Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and many others, have supplemented the labours of the other poets, but no one at all comparable in the number of his engraved works, or the strength of his genius, has supplemented Turner's labour. Thanks to Mr. Rnskin, Turner is now appreciated at his true worth as an artist ; but, in considering his many claims on our admiration, one of the greatest, viz., the effect of the engravings from his works in educating the present generation to love and appreciate the beauty of nature, is almost lost sight of. We think of the beauty of his works as though it were a recent revelation ; we view him as the greatest landscape painter that ever lived, but one not to be understood of the vulgar, little thinking that, for the last half century and more he has by means of these engravings been a living power among the people, vulgar and refined. Engravings from his Works. 61 Down to 1807, when the first part of the " Liber Studiornm " was published, he being then thirty-two years of age, fifty-seven plates from his drawings had been published, but these were all architectural or topographical, to illustrate magazines, books, and the " Oxford Almanack." Turner supplied the drawing for the top of this almanack for the nine years following, 1799, 1801, 1802, 1804, 1805, 180G, 1R07, 1808, 1811. A characteristic story is told of him with regard to one of his Oxford drawings, which we may as well introduce here, though the date of it is not precisely known. " Wyatt, the framemaker, of Oxford," say Messrs. Redgrave, " had employed this painter to make some drawings of Oxford, which obliged him to sit in the public street. The price to be paid for the work was a liberal one ; but, as annoyances and hindrances took place from the curiosity of spectators, before Turner began the drawing of Christehurch, he made Wyatt obtain for him the loan of an old post-chaise, which was so placed in the main street that Turner could work from the window ; and when the drawing was paid for, the painter insisted on receiving three shillings and sixpence which he had disbursed for the use of the old vehicle." To the last he was very particular in exacting any sums which he had disbursed for travelling expenses or for carriage, in addition to the price of his pictures, however disproportionate the additional sum might be to the rest of the amount due, and many stories are told of this nature, some adducing them as instances of his meanness, and others of the rigid sense of justice which regulated all his business transactions. In 1807, the year of his " Country Blacksmith " — a picture which was painted in imitation of Wilkie, and has had more written about it than it deserves, in consequence of an unfounded attack with regard to it made upon the artist by the elder Cunningham, renewed by the younger, and disproved conclusively by Messrs. Redgrave 1 — and of his " Sun rising through Vapour," appeared the first number of the " Liber Studiorum." 1 As this controversy is ended, we think it quite needless to do more than refer to it thus generally. The whole history of it is to be found in Messrs. Redgrave's " Century of Painters." 62 Turner's Liber Studiorum and the The title of this wonderful work would be of itself sufficient to show that it was designed in rivalry of Claude's " Liber Veritatis," but no fair comparison can be instituted between the two series, for, as Mr. Wornum says, the views of the " Liber Studiorum " " are not mere memoranda and sketches of pictures, as Claude's arc" (Claude's "Liber" was a mere sketchy record kept by him of the pictures he painted, so that spurious ones might be known, and genuine ones identified by reference to it), "but very careful elaborations of light and shade effects, executed in mezzotint on copper, and printed with brown ink." The drawings for the " Liber Studiorum" were commenced when Turner was staying with his friend Mr. Wells. One of the pleasantest pictures we have of Turner is that drawn by the tender hand of Mrs. Wheeler, the daughter of Mr. Wells, which was contributed by her to Mr. Thornbury when engaged upon his life of Turner. That lady writes, 1 " In early life, my father's house was his second home, a haven of rest from many domestic trials too sacred to touch upon. Turner loved my father with a son's affection ; to me he was as an elder brother. " Turner's celebrated publication, the ' Liber Studiorum,' entirely owes its existence to my father's persuasion, and the drawings for the first number were made in our cottage at Knockholt. He had for a long time urged upon Turner the expediency of making a selection from his own works for publication, telling him that it would surely be done after his death, and perhaps in a way that might not do him that justice which he could ensure for himself. After long and continued persuasion, Turner at length gave way ; and one day, when he was staying with us in Kent (he always spent a part of the autumn at our cottage), he said, ' Well, Gaffer, I see there will be no peace till I comply; so give me a piece of paper. There, now rule the size for me, and tell me what I am to do.' "My father said, 'Well, divide your subject into classes — say Pastoral, Tbornbury's Life of Turner, Vol. II. p. 55. Engravings from his Works. 63 Marine, Elegant Pastoral, and so forth,' which was accordingly done. The first drawings were then and there made, and arranged for publication. This was in the autumn of 1806. I sat by his side while these drawings were making; and many are the times when I have gone out sketching with him." This is a pleasant beginning. We regret that all the history of the " Liber" is not equally so, but from one cause and another, the progress of the work gave little pleasure or profit to those who were engaged on it ; and though nothing is a greater proof of his industry and genius than this, and though he spent upon it great time and care, it was a source of trouble and mortification, almost from beginning to the end. The method of publication— he published it himself— was bungling ; he perpetually quarrelled with his engravers ; it did not sell well, and finally, worst of all, the only traces of dishonesty in Turner's career were shown with regard to these unfortunate plates. The " Liber" was published in numbers, each containing five engravings, and Mr. Thornbury states, that for the earlier numbers he employed Mr. Lewis, and paid him so badly that the result was a quarrel which lasted fifteen years. However, the only plate of the " Liber" engraved by Mr. Lewis (according to Mr. Stokes) was the " Goats on a Bridge," in the ninth number, published in April 1812. The first four numbers appear to have been engraved by Mir, Charles Turner, who was paid eight guineas a plate, but this pay was not sufficient to prevent quarrels. He struck after the first twenty plates or so for higher terms, ten guineas a plate, but he had agreed to do fifty at the lower rate, and Turner, according to Mr. Thornbury, could not understand this desire to break the contract, and (an atmospheric effect which Turner himself alone could have painted) "flew into an inarticulate, whirlwind of rar/c, the result of which was that the painter and engraver never spoke for nineteen years." This was indeed a terrible result, but what less could one expect from an " inarticu- late whirlwind?" we only wonder they were not dumb for life. Turner then employed many other engravers, Say, Dawe, Dunkarton, Hodgetts, Easling, Annis, Clint, Lupton, and Reynolds, making, with himself, 64 Turner s Liber Sttidiorum and the Charles Turner, and Lewis, twelve engravers in all. Of the 71 published plates, Charles Turner engraved 23; Turner himself and Say, each 11; Lupton, Dun- karton, and Dawe, each 4 ; Hodgctts and Easling, 3 ; Reynolds and Clint, 2 ; Lewis and Annis, 1 ; and of the remaining two, one was the joint production of Annis and Easling, and the other (the frontispiece) of Turner and Easling. Turner's skill as an engraver was great, and his knowledge of engravers' effects unrivalled, his long practice in sketching in black and white, or with neutral tints, having made him a perfect master of chiaroscuro and tonality. The engravings of the " Liber " executed by his own hand are the best of the series, and lie so altered and directed the engraving of the others that the engravers may be said to have been little more than his own tools. The etched lines in all except two are done by him ; and here, for the better understanding of the peculiar combination of etching and mezzotint adopted by Turner, to imitate Claude's " Liber Veritatis " — that is, drawing's in pen and ink, with sepia washes, — we will quote one of the greatest modern authorities in etching and engraving, Sir. Hamerton : — 1 " Turner was a first-rate etcher au trait, but he did not trust himself to carry out chiaroscuro in etching, and habitually resorted to mezzotint for his light and shade. His etchings were always done from the beginning with reference to the whole arrangement of the chiaroscuro, and he never laid a line without entire understanding of its utility and effect." . . . . " When etching and mezzotint are used in combination on the same plate, the etching is done first, and in simple lines, which are bitten in more deeply than they would be if the plate were intended to remain a pure etching ; then the plate is roughened all over with a tool on purpose, and which produces bar — that is, a raising of little points of copper. These little points, which are raised by millions, all catch the ink in printing, and would yield an intense black if they were not removed. They are accordingly partially removed with the scraper when lighter Etching and Etchers, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Macmillan, 18GS. P. 80, &c. Engravings from his Works. 65 darks arc required, and the lighter the passage the more the bur is cleared awa}', till finally, in high lights, it is removed altogether, and the plates in these places are burnished The etcher for mezzotint is satisfied with selecting and laying down the most necessary and expressive lines, the great guiding lines, and does not trouble himself about shading, except so far as to leave the plate in a condition to be shaded properly in mezzotint The power of Turner as an etcher was his power of selecting main lines, and drawing them firmly and vigorously. In this respect no landscape etcher ever surpassed him As a mezzotint engraver Turner ranks exceedingly high, but his merits in that art are rather beyond our present purpose. One thing, however, cannot be outside of our province, the possibility which etching possesses of happy combi- nation with mezzotint, and of which Turner so gladly and successfully availed himself. It is certainly a fortunate quality in an art to be complementary of another art, so that the two produce results of remarkable value at a minimum cost of labour. The great freedom and force of the etched line, its immense power of firm and rapid indication, are exactly the qualities in which mezzotint is most deficient; and though etching can by shading, especially if helped by drypoint work, arrive at chiaroscuro not less rich and perfect than that of a mezzotint engraver, it achieves this at an expense of toil and effort which it is not an exaggeration to estimate at three times the labour which he gives for the same result. It is very curious that, in spite of the value now attached to the pnnts in the ' Liber Studiorum,' this marriage of two arts so naturally comple- mentary has not been more frequently repeated. The combination of etching with mezzotint may, however, as art culture advances, become sufficiently popular to be employed in landscape illustration on a more extensive scale ; and if this should ever be, the etcher of the future will have the advantage of models in the etchings of Turner of which it is not too much to say that, on all technical points, in the application of artistic judgment to method, they are so sound and safe as to be beyond criticism." As this volume contains no specimen of the " Liber Studiorum," it is perhaps K 66 Turner s Liber Studiorum and the out of place to write more, or to write as much respecting it, and we must refer our readers to Messrs. Ruskin and Hamcrton for further remarks respecting these wonderful efforts of Turner's genius, which even as they are, without the other plates which were to finish the series, furnish an almost complete epitome of landscape art. As studies of composition and chiaroscuro, and as examples of power of representing by a few lines or strokes an " intense sense of the nature of things," such as the solidity of rocks, the toughness of timber, the lightness of leaves, the buoyancy and strength of boats, they are altogether unequalled. And yet it did not " pay," and would not pay now, if a new Turner were to arise to finish the series. The high prices which the plates fetch now being due. as Mr. Hamcrton rightly remarks, "not to any appreciation of their (the plates') quality as art, but to the fame which Turner acquired in other ways, and chiefly by popular engravings from his water-colour drawings. When Turner finished the publication he sold complete sets for fourteen guineas ; now a good collection is worth from £200 to £500, and Mr. Thornbury says that a complete set, that is, we suppose, one containing the twenty unpublished plates, is worth £3000 or more, and that a single unpublished plate has sold for £20. Mr. Charles Turner, the engraver, actually used proofs to light fires, so little value had they in former days. We should like to pass over, if we could, the saddest part of the " Liber" history, and on the whole perhaps the saddest part of Turner's, but for truth's sake it is necessary to say that Turner used his great knowledge and skill to conceal the imperfections caused by the wear of his plates. When one was worn he would introduce a tree, alter a light effect into a dark one, and play other skilful but not honest tricks to keep the plate workable, and not only did he do this, but he took out the thickened letters of plates in a bad state, and engraved open letters higher up, thus passing oft' bad impressions for proofs. The complete sets which he sold are therefore composed of plates in a variety of different states, some being worn out and bad, and others fresh and beautiful. " In a set purchased by Mr. John Pye, the engraver," writes Mr. Wornum, " the Engravings from his Works. 67 earlier plates were invariably bad ; the middle ones tolerably good, but towards the end several were proof impressions, and in an excellent state." As it was to the engravings from his works that Turner owed his fame, so it was to these engravings that he owed the greater part of his wealth. He could scarcely ever have been termed an unsuccessful man, if we speak in a pecuniary sense. His " Liber," though not successful altogether, must yet have paid on the whole, and the sums which he got for lending drawings to be engraved, and for the drawings themselves, must have poured like a constant stream of money into his pockets. Turner, however, although he made his fortune by means of them, appears to have looked upon engravers and publishers as his natural enemies. We have seen that when he was his own publisher, he quarrelled with an engraver for demanding more for engraving part of the series than the price originally agreed upon, but when he had to supply a large series of drawings to be engraved, and had agreed to do them at so much a-piece, we find him doing just what his engraver did, viz. : making a fierce stand with his publisher for higher prices before he has finished, and threatening to commence a rival work if he does not obtain " his terms." This was in the case of the " Southern Coast," for which he executed forty drawings. Another constant source of quarrels was the large number of proof im- pressions from each plate which Turner demanded. In the case of the " Southern Coast" he insisted on having twenty-five sets on India paper. Why he demanded so many, except in the mere spirit of acquisitiveness and love of making a good bargain, it is hard to say, for he never used them or touched them, but stored them up in Queen Anne Street, where they were found at his death, a ton load, it is said, much spoilt by damp. 1 Altogether Turner's character does not show in a favourable light in con- nection with print publishers ; it is evident that he thought of them as Egyptians ' It is singular that, after having been thus hoarded in a useless heap by Turner, they should now, in accordance with the decision in the great Turner Will case, have come into the possession of a gentleman who treats them in a similar way, paying, however, we trust, more regard to their preservation . 68 Turners Liber Studiorum and the whom it was only right to spoil ; they were to him like a red rag to a mad bull, and we dare say that they did much to deserve his wrath. They probably thought themselves justified in paying him as little as they could, and he in the manner of geniuses thought he ought to be paid according to his own estimate of the value of the work, regardless of the success or failure of the undertaking. It is an endless fight this between brains and capital, and the brains never gain much respect from the conflict. As for Turner, he shows to such singular dis- advantage in every story connected with engravings that we are thankful to think that Mr. Ruskin, who knows so much more than any one else about it is able after all to write from his heart that " Turner never broke a promise or failed in an undertaken trust." We believe this to be literally true, but nevertheless, after the stories connected with the " Liber," there seems a slight smack of special pleading about it. When writing of the "Liber " just now we mentioned the great mastery possessed by Turner over engravers' effects, and it was shown no less in the engravings from his other works. Probably no painter ever took so much pains with, or exercised so much authority over his engravers as Turner did. He would cover the margin of the proofs with pencil memoranda and instructions to the engravers, and would sometimes alter the composition so much that it would scarcely be taken for an engraving from the picture. He would heighten mountains and diminish clouds, put in figures and trees, and in fact treat it much as an author would treat the proof of a book, not careful to preserve the language of the original manuscript, but only to make the work as good as possible. We believe that the engraving of the "Approach to Venice," 1 of which wo give a carbon photograph, was much altered from the picture, which Mr. Ruskin calls " one of the most beautiful bits of colour ever done by any man, by any means, at any time." We may speak of the engraving in similar terms, for it seems to us to be one of the finest pieces of landscape engraving in the world. We 1 Exhibited at tho Royal Academy, 1844. THE APPROACH TO VENICE. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY R. WALLIS. Engravings from his Works. 69 know of nothing to equal the infinite suggestiveness of the distant city, the marvellous mystery of the whole effect, the perfection and complexity of the chiaroscuro ; and yet with all its mystery and complexity nothing can exceed the precision with which the smallest detail is brought out. Every square inch of it will repay the most careful study, and every minute of such study will reveal some new exquisite wonder, some reflection unobserved, some ripple unnoticed. Here we have as much of the infinity of nature as it is possible to express in so many square inches of black and white. It is one of those few landscape en- gravings which it is possible to gaze at with rapturous admiration and delight. Great in its dexterity as the engraving of the " Heidelberg" is, this far surpasses it in general effect, and it has a soft delicious beauty which is all its own. Its delicacy is scarcely of this world, it is eerie. It seems like the approach to the " City of the Blest" rather than to a city of mortals; the gondolas glide with the gentleness of ghosts, and the city has an impalpability as of a disembodied spirit. Mr. Ruskin further says of this picture, " Without one single accurate detail the picture is the likest thing to what it is meant for — the looking out of the Giudecca landwards, at sunset — of all that I have ever seen. The buildings have in reality that proportion and character of mass, as one glides up the centre of the tide stream ; they float exactly in the strange mirageful, wistful way in the sea-mist, rosy ghosts of houses without foundations ; the blue line of poplars and copse about the Fusina marshes shows itself just in that way on the horizon; the flowing gold of the water, a quiet gold of the air, face and reflect each other just so. The boats rest so, with their black prows poised in the midst of the amber flame, or glide by so; the boatman stretched far aslope upon his deep-laid oar. Take it all in all, I think this the best Venetian picture of Turner's which is left us." Wallis, the engraver, one of the very best of Turner's engravers, is probably well known to most of our readers by his exquisite vignette of " Tornaro's brow" in Rogers' " Poems," if not by many others of his beautiful plates. We are reminded that we have said no word respecting Turner's illustrated 70 Turner's Liber Stiidionim, etc- books, S'i numerous and beautiful, but we have no space for the purpose, and must again refer our readers to Mr. Ruskin. Turner's illustrations to Rogers' " Italy and Poems," and to the " Rivers of France," appear to us to be the most beautiful of any, those to " Milton" and the " Epicurean " the least so, indeed, but for a certain weird power of imagination these latter would be nearly worthless ; but they were completely out of Turner's line, and he only did them to order. Nevertheless the conception of some of the " Milton" drawings is fine enough. The other illustration which we give in connection with this chapter on engravings is Mr. John Pye's " Ehrenbreitstein." This picture is said to have been painted for the express purpose of being engraved by Mr. John Pye, who devoted ten years of his life to it. Turner consented to its being engraved on condition of receiving twelve pounds for the copyright, a very moderate sum, it would seem. It was then bought by Mr. Bicknell for £401, and sold in 1863, or nineteen years afterwards, for £1,890. This picture is, we are told, a typical instance of Turner's principle of mis- representing facts for the purpose of representing a larger truth. The view is far from being topographically accurate ; the rock is heightened, the foreground is a pure fiction, and the tomb of Marceau is not in its proper place, but the result is a truer impression of the place than could be gained by the most accurate study from a particular point of view. We shall reserve our remarks on this question for the next chapter. The town on the right is Coblentz. EHRENBREITSTEIN. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY J. PYE. CHAPTER VII. TURNER'S OIL- PICTURES. THIRD STYLE, 1835-45, AND LAST WOHKS. R. RUSKIN thinks the works of Turner during this period often years, from 1835 to 1845, distinguished by " swiftness of handling, tenderness and pensiveness of mind, exquisite harmony of colour, and perpetual reference to nature only, issuing in the rejection alike of precedents and idealism." It was in the first year of this period that Turner exhibited the picture of which we have last spoken in the preceding chapter, and whicli forms the subject of our last plate. It was described in the Academy catalogue " The Broad Stone of Honour (Ehrenbreitstein), and Tomb of Marceau ; from Byron s ' Childe Harold,' " and to this description was appended the following quotation : " By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground, There is a small and simple pyramid Crowning the summit of the verdant mounds. Beneath its baso aro heroes 1 ashes hid, Our enemy's ; but let not that forbid Honour to Marceau Ho was freedom's champion ! Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered wall, Yet shows of what she was." 1 1 The following note of Byron's respecting this place may be interesting to some : " Ehren- 72 Ttirners Oil-Pictures. Whatever doubt men may entertain as to whether Turner was justified, in this and other pictures, in what may be inaccurately called misrepresenting facts in order to improve the composition, there can be but one opinion as to the result, viz. that he did improve the composition and make his pictures beautiful. To those who give Turner no other motive for this misrepresentation, we would urge simply that a picture should be beautiful, and that beauty is a higher aim for an artist than topographical accuracy. With those who do not recognise any higher truth in landscape art than topographical accuracy, and who think that any deviation from it implies a want of veracity, it is useless to argue — for them a photograph representing a squinting countenance to the life would be a finer work of art than a portrait which expressed the man's whole character, and left out the squint. But for those who do recognise a deeper truth in all things than is apparent on the surface, we would urge that the character of a place or a landscape is only to be revealed by much the same process as that employed by a first-rate portrait painter. As a squint or an accidental gash across the lip will sometimes entirely prevent a countenance in its ordinary aspect from showing any thing of the real truth that is the man, so will an ugly block of buildings or a dead tree be sufficient to mar the whole true spirit of a place or scene. We are now only writing of what may be called the portraits of places, but when there are other ideas to be represented, when a picture like this of Ehrenbreitstcin is intended to represent not only the natural character of a place, but its history and associa- tions, it is simply impossible to express the truth in the artist's mind without breitstein, i. e. 1 The Broad Stone of Honour,' one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, was dis- mantled and blown up by the French at the truce of Leobcn. It had been, and could only be, reduced by famine and treachery. It yielded to the former, aided by surprise. After having seen the fortresses of Gibraltar and Malta, it did not much striko by comparison ; but the situation is commanding. General Marceau besieged it in vain for somo time ; and I slept in a room where I was shown a window at which he is said to have been standing, observing the progress of the siege by moonlight, when a ball struck immediately below it." Third Style — 1835 to 1845. 73 deviation from the actual facts. To object to this would be to object altogether to the employment of imagination in landscape art, and to reduce it to an almost mechanical reproduction of obvious facts. Now Turner had imagination to a far greater extent than any other landscape painter that ever lived, and it is this which, more even than his unapproached skill, raises him so high above, not only most artists, but most men. It is apparent in some degree in his merest sketches, but it is only found in its highest manifestation in his oil- pictures. For Turner to have spent all his time in taking the most accurate "views" of places from- particular spots would not only have been destructive of high beauty in his works, but would have been a shameful neglect of the rarest and noblest qualities of his mind. It is a very rare thing for a landscape artist to have imagination of a high kind, and the reason of it is not, we think, far to seek. Landscape art is the art least favourable for the display of imagination, and though in Turner's hands it yielded astonishing effects, they were produced only by enormous labour and the entire concentration of a very powerful mind that was debarred any other outlet. Had Turner had the faculty of expressing his thoughts by words, it is doubtful whether he would have expressed so many by his brush ; he would probably have written better verses and have painted worse pictures. Turner is the only instance of a man with a mind of the first class who has devoted its whole power to landscape art. Other landscape painters have painted poetical pictures, but he alone has painted poems. It is greatly on account of this rarity of the phenomenon of imagination in landscape art that Turner is so misjudged and misunderstood. In poetry and figure painting and sculpture everybody is accustomed to see particular facts treated as subordinate to the general impression to be conveyed. With a strange misapprehension of the real truth of things such sacrifices of ex- ternals are called " licenses ;" but no license is allowed to the landscape painter, except of a trivial kind; he may indeed make his trees of an im- possible colour to harmonize with an impossible sky, and the treatment will 74 Turners Oil- Pichires. be condoned as artistic ; but if he dares to suppress accidental facts in order to express an eternal truth, he is condemned at once. A landscape artist may be allowed to be sentimental, but it is too bad for him to be a poet. We insert here part of what Mr. Thornbury calls an " ingenious defence," by Mr. Ruskin, of Turner's habit, or rather necessity, of deviating from local facts, in order to express a larger local truth than could be represented by the exact delineation of a particular scene — how, to use a homely image, he boils down a day's impressions into a small drawing of a part of a valley. " There is nothing in this scene, taken in itself, particularly interesting or impressive. The mountains are not elevated or particularly fine in form, and the heaps of stones which encumber the Ticino present nothing notable to the ordinary eye ; but, in reality, the place is approached through one of the narrowest and most sublime ravines in the Alps, and after the traveller, during . the early part of the day, has been familiarized with the aspect of the highest peaks of the Mount St. Gothard. Hence it speaks quite another language to him from that in which it would address itself to an unprepared spectator; the confused stones, which by themselves would be almost without any claim upon his thoughts, become exponents of the fury of the river by which he journeyed all day long ; and the defile beyond, not in itself narrow or terrible, is regarded, nevertheless, with awe, because it is imagined to resemble the gorge that has just been traversed above ; and, although no very elevated mountains immediately overhang it, the scene is felt to belong to, and arise in its essential characters out of, the strength of those mightier mountains in the unseen north. " Any topographical delineation of the facts, therefore, must be wholly incapable of arousing in the mind of the beholder those sensations which would be caused by the facts themselves, seen in their natural relations to others ; and the aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts, and to reach a representation which, though it may be Third Style — 1835 t° I <H5- 75 totally useless to engineers or geographers, and, when tried by rule and measure, totally unlike the place, shall yet be capable of producing on the far-away beholder's mind precisely the impression which the reality would have produced, and putting his heart into the same state in which it would have been had he verily descended into the valley of Airlo." And this is how Turner altered the facts of the valley in order that his sketch might express the essential truth of the local scenery: "There are a few trees rooted in the rock on this side of the gallery, showing by comparison that it is not above four or five hundred feet high. These trees Turner cuts away, and gives the rock a height of about a thousand feet, so as to imply more power and danger in the avalanche coming down the couloir. " Next he raises, in a still greater degree, all the mountains beyond, putting three or four ranges instead of one, but uniting them into a single mossy bank at their base, which he makes overhang the valley, and thus reduces it nearly to such a chasm as that which he had just passed through above, so as to unite the expression of this ravine with that of the stony valley. The few trees in the hollow of the glen he feels to be contrary in spirit to the stones, and fells them as he did the others ; so also he feels the bridge in the foreground by its slenderness to contradict the aspect of violence in the torrent. He thinks the torrent and avalanches should have it all their own wa) r hereabouts, so he strikes down the nearer bridge, and restores the one further off, where the force of the stream may be supposed less. Next, the bit of road on the right, above the bank, is not built on a wall, nor on arches high enough to give the idea of an Alpine road in general; so he makes the arches taller, and the bank steeper, introducing, as we shall see presently, a reminiscence from the upper part of the pass. " I say he thinks this, and introduces that ; but, strictly speaking, he does not think at all. If he thought, he would instantly go wrong ; it is only the clumsy and uninventive artist who thinks. All these changes come 76 Turners Oil- Pictures. into his head involuntarily an entirely imperative dream, crying, ' Thus it must be.' " This doing right without knowing it is the peculiar prerogative of genius ; but we think Mr. Ruskin wrong in saying that it is only clumsy, uninventive artists who think. There are conscious geniuses as well as unconscious. Sophocles made much the same remark about iEschylus as Buskin of Turner ; but Sophocles, though he thought, was not a clumsy or an uninventive artist. Wordsworth, a great favourite of Mr. Ruskin, surely was neither clumsy nor uninventive, and was he always right without thinking ? whereas, it has been said of Byron, that " he did not think, thoughts came to him." To a great extent however, we agree with Mr. Ruskin, There arc certain motions of the imagination which are perfectly imperceptible, and the highest and only inimi- table work of a genius is performed by a process which, to what we ordinarily mean by thought, is as a flash of lightning to the Indian's process of making a light with two pieces of stick. That Mr. Ruskin is right in the main there can be no doubt, but he is far too hard on the thinkers. But to continue. In 1836, or the year after the " Ehrenbreitstcin," appeared the " Mercury and Argus," of which we also give a plate. This picture is a very favourite one of Mr. Ruskin, who refers to it very frequently to illustrate the rare qualities of Turner's work. It is thus described by Mr. Wornum : — " This is a brilliant sunny landscape with a view of the sea or some lake in the background, and somewhat similar in composition to the ' Loretto Necklace ; ' a pile of buildings on elevated ground to the right, and a solitary tree, very prominent in the middle foreground, being the principal features of both pictures. In the immediate foreground, to the right, is a rivulet, with cows browsing on its banks and drinking in its waters ; the two figures seated together in conversation are Mercury and Argus; the transformed Io, the object of Argus's solicitude is seen tied to a tree, browsing before him. " When Io was transformed by Jupiter into a white cow, Juno asked for her as a present, and, having obtained her, set the all-seeing Argus, the hundred- Third Style — 1835 to 1845. 77 eyed, to watch over her in the grove of Mycenas. Jupiter, pitying the condi- tion of Io, sent Mercury to liberate her, but Argus proved so watchful, that Mercury found that the only way to release Io was to kill Argus. Io wandered away, and finally, in Egypt, received back from Jupiter her original shape, and became the mother of Epaphus. Juno, to commemorate the hopeless fate of Argus, transferred his one hundred eyes to the tail of her peacock." Of the truth of Turner's tone we have already written so much that we cannot afford space for Mr. Kuskin's remarks on the tone of this picture,' nor can we, for the same reason, indulge our readers with what he has written respecting it in his chapter on "Truth of Space;" 2 but as we cannot for our- selves speak as to its colour, we extract the following passage : — 3 " In the 1 Mercury and Argus,' the pale and vaporous blue of the heated sky is broken with grey and pearly white, the gold colour of the light warming it more or less as it approaches or retires from the sun ; but, throughout, there is not a grain of pure blue ; all is subdued and warmed at the same time by the mingling grey and gold, up to the very zenith, where, breaking through the flaky mist, the transparent and deep azure of the sky is expressed with a single crumbling touch ; the key-note of the whole is given, and every part of it passes at once far into glowing and aerial space." Of the truth of this description the reader who has not seen the picture cannot of course judge for himself, and therefore cannot obtain the access of enjoyment which would otherwise result from reading it, but the beautiful ■drawing and moulding of the foreground is perceptible in our illustration, which in this respect is scarcely inferior to the" picture, and he will therefore thoroughly appreciate the following quotation : — 4 " It will be found in this picture (and I am now describing nature's work and Turner's with the same words) that the whole distance is given by retire- ment of solid surface ; and that if ever an edge is expressed, it is only felt for 1 Modern Painters, Vol. I. p. 142. 2 Idem, p. 195. 3 Idem, p. 163. 4 Idem, p. 313. 78 Turners Oil '- Pictures. an instant, and then lost again, so that the eye cannot stop at it and prepare for a long jump to another like it, but is guided over it, and round it into the hollow beyond; and thus the whole receding mass of ground, going back for more than a quarter of a mile, is made completely one, no part of it is separated from the rest for an instant, it is all united, and its modulations are members, not divisions of its mass. But those modulations are countless ; heaving here, sinking there; now swelling, now mouldering; now blending, now breaking; giving, in fact, to the foreground of this universal master precisely the same qualities which we have before seen in his hills, as Claude gave to his foreground precisely the same qualities which we had before found in his hills— infinite unity in the one case, finite division in the other." Finally, we cannot resist the temptation of quoting what Mr. Ruskin has said of the effect of the (humanly speaking) infinite knowledge displayed in this and other of the fullest works of Turner : — 1 " It is not until we have made ourselves acquainted with these simple facts of form as they are illustrated by the slighter works of Turner, that we can become at all competent to enjoy the combination of all, in such works as the ' Mercury and Argus,' or ' Bay of Baias,' in which the mind is at first bewildered by the abundant outpouring of the master's knowledge. Often as I have paused before these noble works, I never felt on returning to them as if I had ever seen them before ; for their abundance is so deep and various, that the mind, according to its own temper at the time of seeing, perceives some new series of truths rendered in them, just as it would on revisiting a natural scene : and detects new relations and associations of these truths which set the whole picture in a different light at every return to it. And this effect is especially caused by the management of the foreground : for the more marked objects of the picture may be taken one by one, and thus examined and known ; but the foregrounds of Turner are so united in all their parts that the eye cannot take them by 1 Modern Painters, Vol. I. p. 318-9. Third Style — 1835 to 1845. 79 divisions, but is guided from stone to stone and bank to bank, discovering truths totally different in aspect according to the direction in which it approaches them, and approaching them in a different direction, and viewing them as part of a new system every time that it begins its course at a new point. One lesson, however, we arc invariably taught by all, however approached or viewed, that the work of the Great Spirit of Nature is as deep and unapproachable in the lowest as in the noblest objects ; that the Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundation of the earth ; and that to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same infinity, the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection, manifest in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of the dust as in the kindling of the day-star." In the next year's Exhibition Turner exhibited four pictures, two of which, the "Apollo and Daphne" and the "Hero and Leander," are now in the national collection ; and the next year, 1838, appeared three masterpieces of colour and composition, " Phryne going to the Bath as Venus," now in the National Collec- tion, and the two Italies, Modern and Ancient, purchased by Mr. Munro, and now in the possession of Colonel Butler-Johnstone. The " Phryne" is remarkable for its gorgeous colour, the magnificence of the composition, and the excessive carelessness with which the figures are drawn. In- deed, they can be scarcely said to be drawn at all, and their shadows are a brilliant scarlet. Perhaps Turner's eccentric carelessness in his later pictures as to what portion of the face he placed the eyes, and how long or of what shape he made the legs of his figures, is the greatest stumbling-block to a popular appreciation of some of his finest pictures, one of which this " Phryne " undoubtedly is. The popular mind does not know much about the ramification of trees, and is not greatly exercised in the perspective of clouds ; but it does know that eyes are generally on a level in the human face, and that legs are not more than twice as long as the rest of the body. Scarlet shadows may be defended, but 80 Turners Oil- Pictures. to defend such wilful ill drawing is a task to which even Mr. Ruskin is not equal. But what is true, and what the popular mind cannot understand, is, that a landscape may yet be worthy of the highest admiration, despite the worst figure-drawing that even Turner could be guilty of. Take a converse case, and little or no outcry would be raised. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, drew foliage and trees as badly as Turner drew figures ; but the popular mind can understand that trees arc, in a portrait, subsidiary to the face, and that the intention of a portrait is no whit marred by vile foliage so long as it is subordinate and appropriate in colour. To imagine, however, that it is possible for any picture to be painted in which the figures introduced are not the most important items, is a task beyond the popular human mind. But so it is. Turner, in such pictures as the " Phiyne," thought entirely in landscape ; — in trees and architecture and sunlight, and only used figures to express the other- wise inexpressible, being careful above all things not to spoil the effect of the landscape, but to incorporate the figures with it ; in fact, he introduced them in much the same spirit as Sir Joshua would introduce a landscape to show that its owner was a landed proprietor. And for his purpose no landscape painter that ever lived could use figures with such effect. In the " Phryne " itself, Turner, with a few touches, in total disregard of anatomy, has produced a troop of dancing girls with waving drapery, which, for expression of frivolity, luxury, and abandonment, could scarcely be surpassed. But it is seldom that even critics take the trouble to seek out the artist's aim, or to judge him by that ; and for the popular mind, an eye in the middle of a cheek is quite enough to damn the most lovely landscape that ever was painted. Strangely enough, the three pictures of this year are still in excellent preservation, the Modern and Ancient Italies particularly. By the kindness of their present possessor, we had an opportunity of examining them, and they appear as fresh as when they left the easel — a result greatly due, no doubt, to the care that has been taken to keep them from air and dirt. In these pictures the figures are clearly subsidiary, both in aim and execution, to the I Third Style— 1 83 5 & 1 845. 81 composition, and have little or no importance except to serve for points of light and shade, and to give an interest (artistically speaking) to the scene. We have, however, seen no pictures by Turner which are more splendid in execution than these. The historical contrast is not a very true or a very deep one, but there is a true contrast of composition and colour. Looking at them we felt as we have only felt before when looking at the "Temeraire" — what Turner's pictures, in his finest period in point of colour, must have been when fresh. It is impossible to form any notion from our illustrations, good as they are, of their brilliance, their transparency, or, still less, the lightness of the key in which they are painted. " It will hardly be credited," says Mr. Euskin, " that the piece of foreground on the left of Turner's 1 Modern Italy,' represented in the Art Union engraving as nearly coal-black, is, in the original, of a pale, warm grey, hardly darker than the sky." For splendour of colour and brilliance of light these two magnificent pictures may rank with the finest of Turner's compositions. We, however, much prefer the " Modern Italy," the splendid distance of which Turner never excelled. The temple above the arch on the right is the Temple of Vesta, at Tivoli. The country in the distance is the Campagna ; in the foreground, on the left, a monk is receiving the confession of a woman ; and on the left some Pifferari, — mountain shepherds, who play upon the bagpipes, and come to Rome at Christmas to pay homage to the Virgin, — are seen, and a religious procession. Amongst the conglomeration of buildings in the " Ancient Italy " may be recognized the Pons Sublicius, the Temple of Vesta, and the Mausoleum of Augustus, now the Castle of St. Angelo. Of this picture Mr. Wornum says, " In this composition, ho [Turner] has placed the point of sight under the sun, so that the lines of the buildings and their shadows terminate at one place, thereby giving the greatest simplicity and effect to the perspective." Very simple, truly — simple as only a great artist could dare to be. Next year appeared one of the greatest of all his pictures ; the last picture, says Mr. Euskin, which Turner ever executed with his perfect power — that is, M 82 Turner s Oil-Pictures. he explains, that he could have done over again then all that he had done before, but that " when he painted the ' Sun of Venice,' though he was able to do different, and in some respects more beautiful things," he could not have done works requiring his ancient firmness of hand, undimmed sight, and perfect faculties. The "Temeraire" is perhaps the best known of all Turner's works, and therefore least needs description ; moreover it is, like the " Crossing the Brook," a picture which appeals to all. In these two paintings — one the most perfect work of his earliest, as the other of his latest style — he touched, as he rarely did, the common heart of mankind. If we could select two of Turner's works to be saved from the ravages of time, we should choose these ; if we had any fear for his future reputation, we should still think it safe as long as these were preserved. Luckily, they are likely to last. The early one was, indeed, painted before he played tricks with colours, but it must have been by a mere chance that the " Temdraire " was painted safely and firmly ; it is still uncracked and fresh. Apart from particular associations, there is an eternal pathos in an old ship being tugged to its last berth in calm water at sunset. It is not necessary to tell the story of how the good ship was captured from the French at the battle of the Nile, and broke the line of the combined fleets at that of Trafalgar, sailing next to Nelson's ship, the " Victory ; " — how Collingwood, the commander, tried to pass the " Victory," but was hailed by Nelson himself to keep back, and how " two hours later she lay with a French seventy-four-gun ship on each side of her, both her prizes, one lashed to her mainmast and one to her anchor." It is not necessary to tell that her battered hulk is a type of the old sailing oak man-of-war so soon to be replaced by iron sides and steam propellers, and that the picture is a poem realizing the thought of the " old order" which " changeth, giving place to new." It is a poem without all this, though all this adds an additional interest and pathos to it in our eyes. But if it lasts, as we hope it will, till it is as old as the oldest pictures are now — till steam gives way to Third Style — 1835 t° 1 845- 83 something swifter, and iron to something stronger, or even till we fight with " airy navies," or till war shall be no more, and " The kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law," it will still tell its tale, and still move hearts with solemn pity, and eyes with joy, at its simple pathos and its might of colour. This was almost the last " English " picture which Turner painted. They had been scarce for many years. Venice, as we have said before, was the last home of his genius. He exhibited no less than fifteen Venetian pictures in the next seven years, one of which, " The Approach to Venice," we have already mentioned. His hand failed, but it did wonders yet. We have not space to mention half the beautiful pictures which he painted after the " Temeraire," but we must say a word about one or two. The most notable picture of 1840 was the " Slave Ship" purchased by Mr. Buskin, and till lately in his possession. (It was sold at Christie's this year (1869) for £2,042.) This fortunately has stood well, and has been care- fully preserved. The sea is magnificent, but most terrible, as it should be. Mr. Ruskin thinks it the noblest sea over painted by him or any man. The near waves are full of corpses of black men, and the whole picture is lit up with a lurid sunset. Though much abused at the time, it is undoubtedly one of the finest of Turner's imaginative pictures. But we must leave our readers to seek in the writings of its late owner a further account of the wonders of this picture. There are three of Turner's latest pictures which give to us as great as, and a rarer pleasure than, almost any other of his works — pictures which are often passed by with a pitying smile or a sneer. The first of these, in point of time, is the " Burial of Wilkie," described in the Academy catalogue of 1842 as " Beace — Burial at Sea : — " ' The midnight torch gleamed o'er tho steamer's side, And Merit's corse was yielded to the tide.' — MS. Fallacies of Hope." 84 Turner's Oil-Pictures. Not even the " Temeraire" itself to our mind excels tins pictvtre in genuine pathos. If Turner ever entertained a spirit of ungenerous rivalry towards Wilkie, and we do not think that he ever did, this painting makes ample amends. If Turner could not express his sorrow in words — and surely the lame verses appended to this picture are sufficient proof of this — he could do so as no other man ever could with a brush and colours. It is a picture to stand before with uncovered head, so deep, so reverent is the grief in every touch. The next of the three is that marvellous painting of " Rain, Steam and Speed," a picture which we think is the greatest for the quality of mystery ever painted by Turner; and the nearest approach to the expression of pure ideas by the medium of landscape art that was ever accomplished. It is not, we believe, unimpaired by time, but it will still repay long study. Without this it is useless to approach it. At first sight its mystery completely puzzles the sight as the actual scene of which it is a representation would do, but like that actual scene, if we stand before it till our eyes get acclimatized to the atmosphere of mist and rain, slowly and by imperceptible degrees the prospect clears and clears, till there is not the smallest speck in the picture from the hare which rises before the train to the bathers on the farther shore, which does not become distinctly intelligible. This is, indeed, one of the " more beautiful" things which it was reserved for his failing strength to accomplish. The third and last of these later pictures to which we would direct atten- tion is the last picture exhibited by him at the British Institution, almost the last splendid flare in the socket of this grand genius — the " Queen Mab's Cave," which, as well as the " Burial of Wilkie" and the " Bain, Steam and Speed," is in the National Gallery. Now his hand and sight had failed almost entirely, but " in their ashes lived their wonted fires." For subtle power of colour we know nothing by any artist's hand which can equal this wild incoherent work. No description of it will avail, its beauty and wonders are among those things which can only be felt. The moment we begin to think about it, or to attempt to account for any THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY J. T. WILLMORE, A.R.A. Third Style — 1835 & 1845. 85 part of it, we are lost, but it is not a less glorious work for that. Its colour is ineffable, its fancy and grace inimitable, and the combination of infinite know- ledge and failure of expression, of unequalled power gone to ruin, of exquisite delicacy and feeble handling, make it one of the most piteous works that was ever done. The decay of this great mind and skilful hand was attended by much of the glory of nature's dissolution ; in his last pictures we see, as we see in nature itself, the strange pathetic incongruity of death and beauty, the morbid, lovely lines of autumn, the fitful glories of the sunset. CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION. TURNER'S LIFE. E left Turner at the end of the second chapter just entering into manhood. Since then we have hcen considering the artist and his works almost exclusively. It is now time to say in conclusion a few words about the man. It is the same with most artists and men of mind, viz., that their lives are comparatively barren of incident and full of work ; but in Turner's case this is true to an even unusual extent. He was an artist, and to outward appearance little more. In a recent article upon Byron in the " Examiner," it is stated that men of genius give so much of their being to their works that they leave only the rags and tatters of it for themselves ; and this is true of Turner, who can scarcely be said to have had an existence independent of his art ; all his powers were employed in its service, all his noblest aspirations found in it their only expression ; such few friends as he had were intimately connected with it, fellow artists and patrons. He had no wife, and, except his father, no relations with whom he kept up any intimacy. His father, the thrifty barber, lived with his son till his death in 1830 ; and after his retirement from his trade, became the artist's devoted servant, opening his gallery and grinding his colours. He was as eccentric as his son. Having to come up of a morning from Twickenham to Queen Anne Street, to open Turner's gallery, he, with his ingrained thriftiness (which, be it observed, was shown as much in his son's cause as it had ever been in his own), was much Turners Life- 87 troubled in his mind as to the cost of the journey, and the jovial little man grew sad and melancholy ; but one day his ancient spirits returned, and his grey eyes twinkled with their accustomed joyfulncss. He had solved the great problem ; he had found a market gardener, who was willing to give him a lift to town on the top of his vegetables for the small recompense of a daily dram ! Turner and his " dad " lived together till the old man's death, the natural relation between them being as it were reversed, the father being the servant, and the son the master ; but there is no reason to believe that there was any want of proper feeling in Turner towards his parent ; they were both eccentric and economical, and this arrangement was one which employed them both in spheres suitable to their talents and dispositions, with the least possible expenditure of capital. If the father was the son's servant, he at least was a willing one, and there is no word of any misunderstanding between them. In 1830 the old man died, and was buried in St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. The following epitaph was written by his son : — In the Vault Beneath and near this Place Aee deposited the Remains of WILLIAM TURNER, Many yeaes 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. Turner's disposition was not, as we have before pointed out, one which easily made friendships, or delighted in the ordinary pleasures of societv, but he nevertheless had some good friends, all the truer and stauneher for their 88 Turner s Life. rarity. These were principally, however, artists and patrons (we wish there were some other word). Amongst his most intimate friends may be mentioned the ■Rev. Mr. Trimmer, Sir Francis Chantrey, George Jones, K.A., Mr. Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, near Leeds, Mr. Munro, of Novars, Mr. Puskin, Mr. Stokes, and the Earl of Egremont. Of the last-named eccentric nobleman, at whose seat of Pet- worth, in Sussex, the artist spent much time, there are many amusing anecdotes in connection with Turner. In the society of such men, where Turner was at ease, he is represented as a blithe and gay companion, brimful of spirits. With children he was uniformly tender and kind. To young artists at the Academy he was ever ready with valuable hints, though expressed in such a terse queer way that they were often useless. He was upright and just, he never spoke ill of any one, not even of a brother artist. Many stories are told of his small meannesses, but they are rebutted by tales of great generosity and gratitude. There are anecdotes of his love of eclipsing the works of other artists on the walls of the Academy by sudden crafty expedients of colour, but there are others of his covering his glorious effects with lampblack for the very opposite purpose, and even of assisting bitter enemies with valuable suggestions. Let us take two good opposite stories; the first is told by Mr. Leslie, but we reprint them both from Mr. Thornbury's book. "In 1822, when Constable exhibited his 'Opening of Waterloo Bridge,' it was placed in the School of Painting, one of the small rooms at Somerset House. A sea-piece by Turner was next to it ; a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's picture seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while he was heightening with vermillion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him, looking from the 'Waterloo' to his own picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, he went away without a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the ver- Turners Life. 89 million and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just as Turner left it. " ' He has been here,' said Constable, ' and fired off a gun.' On the op- posite wall was a picture by Jones, of 1 Shadrach, Meshaeh, and Abednego in the Furnace — " ' A coal,' said Cooper, ' has bounced across the room from Jones's picture, and set fire to Turner's sea.' The great man did not come again into the room for a day and a half; and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy." Turner and Constable were not good friends, but Turner could be generous to Constable. Look first on that story and then on this : — " Once Constable was pacing impatiently before a picture, the effect of which somehow or other did not please him. It was true to rules, but still there was something wanting (perhaps a mere red cap, a blue apron, or a tree stem), yet what it was he could not for the life of him tell. There was a line too much or too little in the composition, that was certain; a speck of colour redundant or deficient, that was evident. At that moment Turner entered. " ' I say, Turner,' cried Constable, ' there is something wrong in this picture, and I cannot for the life of me tell what it is. You give it a look.' " Turner looked at the picture steadily for a few moments, then seized a brush, and struck in a ripple of water in the foreground. " That was the secret — the picture was now perfect, the spell was com- pleted. The fresh, untired eye of the great magician had seen the want at a glance." We could fill many more pages with anecdotes about this great artist, but they are so contradictory that they do little to increase our knowledge of his character. The man was great within, and these occasional flashes of a whim or a humour are of little value except for amusement. Mr. Ruskin names the fol- N 90 Turner s Life. lowing as the main characteristics of Turner : — Uprightness, generosity, tender- ness of heart (extreme), sensuality, obstinacy (extreme), irritability, infidelity. Not a very brilliant list of qualities these, though redeemed by the three great virtues of uprightness, tenderness, and generosity, but it is noteworthy that his defects were just such as would bo born and nourished by his ill- nurtured, unfriended youth, and his extremely sensitive and secretive dis- position. A passionate being, with no outlet in the ordinary channels of social inter- course and domestic affection, and with no opportunity of cultivating high and pure principles by intercourse with noble men and women, is almost sure to sink into sensuality ; and that Turner did so there is no doubt, and to sensuality of a gross kind. We would not undertake his defence in this respect, we would only offer what we think is its explanation, and without defence or judgment pass on. Whatever causes may have led to the formation of this strange character, the result is a bundle of paradoxes. He was mean in little things, and gene- rous in great ones ; given to self-indulgence in low pleasures, and capable of the greatest sacrifices for noble ends ; an intellectual giant, without the commonest power of verbal expression ; averse from society, and yet fond of convivial meetings; of a most melancholy disposition, and yet full of mirth and humour; obstinate as a Turk with men, and yet tender as a woman with children ; suspicious of mankind, and yet capable of the deepest affection for indi- viduals. One of the most puzzling paradoxes respecting Turner was the great fame which he enjoyed during his life, which has justly been called one of uninter- rupted and unexampled success, and the equally certain fact that he was never estimated at his true worth, and in his later years became a common butt for all rising wits to shoot their arrows at. The fact is that a great genius, though he will often be popular, will be so not on account of what are really the superlative merits of his works, as for some Turners Life. 91 lower attractive qualities which they happen to contain. Turner's fame was made not by his drawings, but by the engravings from them ; he became popular not because he was recognized as the greatest landscape painter that ever lived, but because he had a facility which no other man had for making drawings that engraved well, and the public had a passion at that time for engravings of scenery, whether good, bad or indifferent. The reputation thus gained would have been more than sufficient for most men, and the sums of money thus pro- duced would have made them bear the neglect of their more ambitious works with comparative indifference, but no money could compensate the solitary genius of Turner for the want of appreciation of his noblest qualities. He had the genius almost of a Shakespeare, but his fame was not of much more value than that of a Tupper. This was the true gall of his life, — what use to hoard mounds of money, and to have his sketches bought up greedily when his " Temeraire" left the exhibition unsold, and his " Snowstorm" was derided as " soap-suds." Of all men none demands so much, and obtains so little, true sympathy as a great genius. No wonder he was obstinate and irritable — ob- stinate, because so unable to make others see that he was right; irritable, because the slave of publishers and the butt of fools. Turner spent the last years of his life at an obscure cottage at Chelsea, where he lived with a woman of the name of Booth. In the vicinity he was well known by the nicknames of " Puggy Booth" and " Admiral Booth," but he carefully kept his retreat a secret from his friends. In this little cottage at Chelsea, one bright winter's morning, with the sun shining upon his face as he lay in his bed, this great artist died. The day of his death was December 19, 1851. His gallery at Queen Anne Street was in a most deplorable condition, full of dust and dirt , neither wind nor waterproof ; the pictures hanging on the walls were half spoilt with damp and neglect, many of them had to be extensively repaired before they could be exhibited. The noblest dream of Turner's life was to found a charity for " male 9 2 Turners Life. decayed artists," and it was doubtless his intention to leave the bulk of his property to be devoted to this purpose, but his will was so confused and badly worded that it frustrated this its main object, and after a four years' chancery suit, a compromise between all the parties to it had to be arranged, to the following effect : — 1. The real property to go to the heir-at-law. 2. The pictures, &c. to the National Gallery. 3. £1000 for the erection of a monument in St. Paul's Cathedral. 4. £20,000 to the Royal Academy, free of legacy duty. 5. Remainder to be divided amongst next of kin. 6. The engravings to the next of kin and heir-at-law. Thus Turner's main aim was defeated, but we have yet much to be thankful for, in that the efforts of the next of kin to set aside the will altogether (on the ground that the mind of the testator was unsound) happily failed. If we have not " Turner's Gift," the name he designed for his institution, we have at least the Turner Gallery of Pictures and the Turner Drawings, bequests that will preserve his name in deathless honour and provide pure delight and noble in- struction to many generations. In conclusion, it may be interesting to our readers to record a few prices recently given for some of Turner's paintings and drawings, facts which speak for themselves as to the present high appreciation of Turner's works. The following comparative statement of the prices at which Mr. Bicknell's oil-pictures sold, and the prices for which they were bought, we extract from Messrs. Redgrave's work : * — SALE OF ME. BICKNELL'S (OF DULWICH) PICTURES IN 1863. Purchased for Sold for £ s. d. 8. d. Ivy Bridge, Devon Calder Bridge, Cumberland 283 10 0 924 0 0 288 15 0 525 0 0 * Century of Painters. Turner s Life. 93 The Wreckers ..... Antwerp : Van Goyen Looking for a Subject Helvoetsluys . Port Ruysdael Ehronbreitstein on the Rhine Venice, the Giudecca Venice, the Campo Santo . Palestrina Purchased for £ », a. 288 15 0 315 0 0 283 10 0 315 401 262 262 1050 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 £ 1984 2635 1680 1995 1890 1732 1732 1995 s. d. 10 0 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10 0 10 0 0 0 £3749 10 0 £17094 0 0 Thus in a few years these pictures increased more than five times in value. At the sale of part of Mr. Buskin's collection this year (1869) forty water-colour sketches (not finished drawings) sold for £2112, being an average of nearly £40 a-piece, and his oil-picture the " Slave Ship" sold for £2042. On the same day were sold Mr. Dillon's collection of Turner's water-colour drawings. Two sepia drawings, one for the " Liber Studiorum," and the other a companion drawing, sold for 204 guineas and 175 guineas respectively, Tho Eddystone Lighthouse Vesuvius in Repose (small) Vesuvius in Eruption (small) • Lake of Nemi ..... Falls of Terni (about tho sizo of a hand) Pendeunis Castle (early) Lulworth Castle View of Poole Rivaulx Abbey Mont Blanc from Aosta Folly Hill Landscape, with figures and cattle 370 285 230 370 565 50 250 335 980 810 890 1200 Turner was buried in the catacombs of St. Paul's. This wish of his at least was gratified. The ceremony was attended by nearly all distinguished painters 94 Turners Life. and his few personal friends. Nothing at least was left undone which could do honour to his remains, and if his spirit is able to follow and to feel emotion at the work which his labours on earth have accomplished, and are accomplishing, it will see with pleasure that few wishes of his life now remain unfulfilled, and for those that were blasted, there is a surplusage of success in other matters to make fair compensation. We only wish that we had been able to afford more glimpses of the great man's heart, which was, we believe, quite worthy of his genius ; and we trust that we shall not seem to wish to condone his bad quali- ties on account of that genius when we say that the worst things which are reported of him seem to us to be small and inconsiderable specks upon the sun of his glorious life. And it was a glorious life despite the meanness of its outward accidents, for where else can we find more industry and perseverance, more love for things human and divine, a more strict integrity of soul, or a more entire devotion of power to the good of mankind ! It is true that he amassed much worldly lucre, but he did it honestly, and designed it for a noble purpose ; and in like maimer as his few sins sink in our eyes to insignificance when viewed in comparison with the self-abnegation, heroic courage, and deathless industry, which distinguished his career, so does the large fortune which he hoarded sink into mere nothingness in comparison with the pictorial wealth, which he not only amassed, but created. His money has gone away from those for whom it was intended, and decayed artists cannot receive those temporal blessings which Turner intended for them, but his pictures, his drawings remain. These are the true results of his life, his true " fortune ; " and of this magnificent bequest we, the whole world, are the heirs. Let us then be grateful to him as we should be to one of the great benefactors of mankind. It is indeed, however, pleasant to think that his personal character was loved by those who knew him, and that in the presence of the pomp with which his ashes were yielded to the dust, tears were shed for him, not as an artist, but as a man. We cannot conclude this imperfect memoir better than by the touching Turners Life. 95 words of those by whom he was known and loved, and to whom it had been given to see and feel the tenderness that was concealed beneath the rough husk of the outer man. Mr. Trimmer, speaking of him as he saw him shortly after his death, writes : — " Dear old Turner, there he lay, his eyes sunk, his lips fallen in. He re- minded me strongly of his old father, whom long years before I had seen trudging to Brentford Market from Sandycomb Lodge, to lay in his weekly supplies. Alas for humanity ! This was the man whom in my childhood I had attended with my father, and been driven by on the banks of the Thames ; whom I had seen sketching with such glee on the river's banks, as I gathered wild flowers, in my earliest years ; who had stuffed my pockets with sweetmeats, had loaded me with fish, and made me feel as happy as a prince. " There was written on his calm face the marks of age and wreck, dissolution and reblending with the dust ; this was the man whose worst productions contained more poetry and genius than the most laboured efforts of his brother artists ; who was the envy of his rivals, and the admiration of all whose admira- tion is worth the having ; nor was it without emotion that I gazed upon so sad a sight." Mrs. Wheeler (whose reminiscences we have before quoted in connection with the " Liber Studiorum ") writes : — " He was a firm affectionate friend to the end of his life ; his feelings were seldom seen on the surface, but they were deep and enduring. No one would have imagined, under that rather rough and cold exterior, how very strong were the affections which lay hidden beneath. I have more than once seen him weep bitterly, particularly at the death of my own dear father, which took him by surprise, for he was blind to the coming event, which he dreaded. He came immediately to my house in an agony of grief. Sobbing like a child, he said, '0, Clara, Clara! these are iron tears ! I have lost the best friend I ever had in my life.' Oh, what a different man would Turner have been if all the good and 96 Turners Life. kindly feelings of his great mind had been called into action ; but they L dormant, and were known to so very few. He was by nature suspicious, and tender hand had wiped away early prejudices, the inevitable consequences o defective education." LIST OF WORKS BY J. M. W. TURNER EXHIBITED AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY AND THE BRITISH INSTITUTION. ROYAL ACADEMY. 1790. 1. View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth. 1791. 2. King John's Palace, Eltham. 3. Swakeley, near Uxbridge, the Seat of the Rev. Mr. Clarke. 1792. 4. Malmsbury Abbey. 5. The Pantheon — The Morning after the Fire. 1793. G. View on the River Avon, near St. Vincent's Rock, Bristol. 7. Gate of St. Augustine's Monastery, Canterbury. 8. The Rising Squall — Hot Wells, from St. Vincent's Rock. Bristol. 1794. 9. Second Fall of the River Monach, Devil's Bridge, Cardiganshire. 10. Porch of Great Malvern Abbey, Worcestershire. 11. Christ Church Gate, Canterbury. 12. Inside of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire. 13. St. Anselm's Chapel, with part of Thomas-a-Becket's Crown, Canterbury Cathedral. 1795. 14. St. Hugh's the Burgundian's Porch, at Lincoln Cathedral. 15. Marford Mill, Wrexham, Denbighshire. 16. West Entrance of Peterborough Cathedral. 17. Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire. 18. Welsh Bridge, Shrewsbury. 19. View near the Devil's Bridge, with the River Ryddol, Cardiganshire. 20. A View in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. 21. Cathedral Church at Lincoln. o 98 Turner s Exhibited Works. Year of * Exhibition. No. 1796. 22. Fishermen at Sea. 23. Close Gate, Salisbury. 24. St. Erasmus in Bishop Islip's Chapel. 25. Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. 26. Llandilo Bridge and Dynevor Castle. 27. Interior of a Cottage — a Study at Ely. 28. Chale Farm, Isle of Wight. 29. Llandaff Cathedral, South Wales. 30. Remains of Waltham Abbey, Essex. 31. Transept and Choir of Ely Minster. 32. West Front of Bath Abbey. 1797. 33. Moonlight— a Study at Millbank. 34. Fishermen coming ashore at Sunset, previous to a Gale. 35. Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire. 36. Choir of Salisbury Cathedral. 37. Ely Cathedral, South Transept. 38. North Porch of Salisbury Cathedral. 1798. 39. Winesdale, Yorkshire — an Autumnal Morning. 40. Morning, amongst the Coniston Fells, Cumberland. 41. Dunstanburgh Castle, N.E. coast of Northumberland — Sunrise, after a Squally Night. 42. Refectory of Kirkstall Abbey, Yorkshire. 43. Norham Castle, on the Tweed — Summer's Morn. 44. Holy Island Cathedral, Northumberland. 45. Ambleside Mill, Westmoreland. 46. The Dormitory and Transept of Fountains Abbey— Evening. 47. Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromack Water, Cumberland — A Shower. 48. A Study in September of the Fern House, Mr. Lock's Park, Mickleham, Surrey. 1799. 49. Fishermen Becalmed, previous to a Storm— Twilight. 50. Harlech Castle, from Trwgwyn Ferry — Summer's Evening, Twilight. 51. Battle of the Nile, at ten o'clock, when "L'Orient" blew up from the station of the gun-boats, between the battery and Castle of Aboukir. 52. Kilgarran Castle, on the Twyvey — Hazy Sunrise, previous to a Sultry Day. 53. Sunny Morning — The Cattle, by S. Gilpin, RA. 54. Abergavenny Bridge, Monmouthshire — Clearing Up, after a Showery Day. Turners Exhibited Works. 99 Year of Exhibition No. 55. Inside of the Chapter House of Salisbury Cathedral. 56. West Front of Salisbury Cathedral. 57. Carnarvon Castle. 58. Morning — From Dr. Langhorne's " Visions of Fancy." 59. Warkworth Castle, Northumberland — Thunder-storm approaching at Sunset. 60. Dolbadern Castle, North Wales. 1800. 61. The Fifth Plague of Egypt. 62. View of the Gothic Abbey (Afternoon) now building at Fonthill, the seat of William Beckford, Esq. 63. South-west view of the same — Morning. 64. Carnarvon Castle. 65. South view of the Gothic Abbey building at Fonthill — Evening. 66. East view of the same — Noon. 67. North-east view of the same — Sunset. 1801. 68. Dutch Boats in a Gale — Fishermen endeavouring to put their Fish on board. 69. The Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desert by a Whirlwind. Foretold by Jeremiah, chap. xxv. vv. 32, 33. 70. London — Autumnal Morning. 71. Pembroke Castle, South Wales — Thunder-storm approaching. 72. St. Donat's Castle, South Wales — Summer Evening. 73. Chapter House, Salisbury. 1802. 74. Fishermen upon a Lee Shore in Squally Weather. 75. The Tenth Plague of Egypt. 76. Ships bearing up for Anchorage. 77. The Fall of the Clyde, Lanarkshire — Noon. Vide Akenside's " Hymn to the Naiads." 78. Kilchern Castle, with the Cruchan-Ben Mountains, Scotland — Noon. 79. Edinburgh New Town, Castle, &c. from the Water of Leith. 80. Jason. 81. Ben Lomond Mountains, Scotland — The Traveller. . Vide Ossian's " War of Caros." 1803. 82. Bonneville, Savoy, with Mont Blanc. 83. The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon. 84. Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing for Sea — an English Packet arriving. 85. Holy Family. ioo Turners Exhibited Works- Year of Exhibition. 17a 86. Chateau de St. Michael, Bonneville, Savoy. 87. St Hughes denouncing Vengeance on the Shepherd of Cormayeur, in the Valley of Aoust. 88. Glacier and Source of the Arveron, going up to the Mer de Glace. 1804. 89. Boats carrying out Anchors and Cables to Dutch Men-of-war in 1665. 90. Narcissus and Echo. 91. Edinburgh, from Calton Hill. 1806. 92. Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen. 93. Pembroke Castle — clearing up of a Thunder-storm. 1807. 94. A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron, and the Price charged to the Butcher for Shoeing his Pony. 95. Sun rising through Vapour ; Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish. 1808. 96. The Unpaid Bill, or the Dentist reproving his Son's Prodigality. 1809. 97. Spithead — Boat's Crew recovering an Anchor. 98. Tabley, the Seat of Sir J. F. Leicester, Bart. — Windy Day. 99. Tabley, Cheshire — Calm Morning. 100. The Garretteer's Petition. " Aid me, ye powers ! oh, bid my thoughts to roll In quick succession — animate my soul ! Descend, my Muse, and every thought refine, And finish well my long, my long-sought line." 1810. 101. Lowther Castle, Westmoreland — the seat of the Earl of Lonsdale. X.W. view from TJllswater Lake — Evening. 102. Lowther Castle, North Front, with the River Lowther — Mid-day. 103. Petworth, Sussex; the seat of the Earl of Egrcmont— Dewy Morning. 1811. 104. Mercury and Ilerse\ 105. Apollo and Python. 106. Somcr Hill, near Tonbridge, the seat of W. F. Woodgate, Esq. 107. Whalley Bridge and Abbey, Lancashire— Dyers washing and drying cloth. 108. Windsor Park — with Horses, by the late S. Gilpin, R.A. 109. November — Flounder Fishing. 110. Chryses —Pope's "Homer's Iliad," Book I. 111. May — Chickens. 112. Scarborough, Town and Castle— Morning ; Boys collecting Crabs. 1812. 113. A View of the Castle of St. Michael, Bonneville, Savoy. 114. View of the High Street, Oxford. Turner s Exhibited Works. 101 1813. 1814. 1815. 115. View of Oxford, from the Abingdon Road. 116. Snow-storm — Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps. " Fallacies of Hope." 117. Frosty Morning. " The rigid hoar-frost melts before his beam." — Thomson. 118. The Deluge. " Meanwhile the south wind rose, and with black wings Wide hovering, all the clouds together drove From under heaven, the thicken'd sky Like a dark ceiling stood ; down rush'd the rain Impetuous, and continued till the earth No more was seen." — Milton's Paradise Lost. Dido and jEneas. Bligh Sand, near Sheerness — Fishing- boats trawling. Crossing the Brook. Dido building Carthage, or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire. The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d'Aouste, Piedmont, 1796. "-Fallacies of Hope." The Eruption of the Souifrier Mountains, in the Island of St. Vincent, at Midnight, on the 30th of April, 1812, from a sketch taken at the time by Hugh P. Keane, Esq. The Passage of Mount St. Gothard, taken from the centre of the Teufel's Briick (Devil's Bridge), Switzerland. The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, in the Valley of Hasle, Switzerland. Lake of Lucerne, looking toward's Tell's Chapel, Switzerland. The Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius restored. View of the Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, in the Island of ^Egina, with the Greek National Dance of the Romaika; the Acropolis of Athens in the Distance. Painted from a sketch taken by H. Gaily Knight, Esq. in 1810. 1817. 130. The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. Rome being determined on the overthrow of her hated rival, demanded from her such terms as might either force her into war or ruin her by compliance; the enervated Carthaginians in their anxiety for peace consented to give up even their arms and their children. " At Hope's delusive smile The chieftain's safety and the mother's pride Were to th' insidious conqueror's grasp resign'd, While o'er the western wave the ensanguin'd sun 1816. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 102 Turners Exhibited Works. Vear of Exhibition. No. In gathering haze a stormy signal spread, And set portentous." 1 SIS. 131. Raby Castle, the Seat of the Earl of Darlington. 132. Dort, or Dordrecht — the Dort Packet-boat from Rotterdam becalmed. 133. The Field of Waterloo. " Last noon beheld them full of lusty life," &o. 134. Landscape — Composition of Tivoli. 1819. 135. Entrance of the Meuse. Orange Merchant on the Bar going to pieces ; Brill Church bearing S.E. by S., Marensluys E. by S. 136. England. Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday. " WMch way, Amanda, shall we bend our course?" &o. 1820. 137. Rome from the Vatican. Raffaelle accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia. 1822. 138. What yon Willi 1S23. 139. The Bay of Baia?, with Apollo and the Sibyl. " Waft me to sunny BaiaVs shore." 1825. 140. Harbour of Dieppe (changement de domicile). 1826. 141. Cologne. The Arrival of a Packet-boat— Evening. 142. Forum Romanum, in Mr. Soane's Museum. 143. The Seat of William Mofifat, Esq., at Mortlake — Early Summer's Morning. 1827. 144. " Now for the Painter (rope)." — Passengers going on board. 145 Port Ruysdael. 146. Rembrandt's Daughter. 147. Mortlake Terrace, the Seat of William Moffat, Esq. — Summer's Evening. 148. Scene in Derbyshire. " When first the sun, with beacon red." 1828. 149. Dido directing the Equipment of the Fleet; or the Morning of the Car- thaginian Empire. 150. East Cowes Castle, the Seat of J. Nash, Esq.— The Regatta, beating to windward. 151. East Cowes Castle, the Seat of J. Nash, Esq.— The Regatta, starting for their moorings. 152. Boccacio relating the Tale of the Birdcage. 1829. 153. The Banks of the Loire. 154. Ulysses deriding Polyphemus. 155. The Loretto Necklace. 156. Messieurs les Voyageurs, on their Return from Italy (par la diligence), in a Snow-drift upon Mount Tarra, 22nd January, 1829. * Turners Exhibited Works. 103 Year of Exhibition. No. 1830. 157. Pilate Washing his Hands, St. Matthew, chap. 27, v. 24. 158. View of Orvieto; painted in Rome. 159. Palestrina — Composition. " Or from yon mural rock, high crowned Prseneste, Where, misdeeming of his strength, the Carthaginian stood, And marked, with eagle eye, Rome as his victim." — AC. Fallacies of Hope. 160. Jessica. — " Shylock. Jessica, shut the window, I say." 161. Calais Sands — Low water, Poissards collecting Bait. 162. Fish Market on the Sands— The Sun rising through a Vapour. 163. Funeral of Sir Thomas Lawrence — A Sketch from Memory. 1831. 164. Lifeboat and Manby Apparatus going off to a Stranded Vessel making signal (blue lights) of distress. 165. Caligula's Palace and Bridge. " Fallacies of Hope." 166. Vision of Medea. " Fallacies of Hope." 167. Lucy, Countess of Carlisle, and Dorothy Percy's visit to their Father, Lord Percy, when under attainder upon the supposition of his being concerned in the Gunpowder Plot. 168. Admiral Van Tromp's Barge at the entrance of the Texel, 1645 169. Watteau — Study by Fresnoy's rules. " White, when it shines with unstained lustre clear, May bear an object back, or bring it near." Fresnoy's Art of Painting, p. 496. 170. " In this arduous service (of reconnaisance) on the French coast, 1805, one of our cruisers took the ground, and had to sustain the attack of the flying artillery along the shore, the batteries and the Fort of Vimieux, which fired heated shot until she could warp off at the rising tide, which set in with all the appearance of a stormy night." — Naval Anecdotes. 1832. 171. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage— Italy, " And now, fair Italy," &c. — Canto iv. 172. The Prince of Orange, William III., embarked from Holland and landed at Torbay, Nov. 4th 1688, after a Stormy Passage. " The yacht in which his Majesty sailed was, after many changes and services, finally wrecked on Hamburgh sands, while employed in the Hull trade." — History of England. 173. Van Tromp's Shallop at the Entrance of the Scheldt. 174. Helvoetsluys— The City of Utrecht (64) going to Sea. 175. " Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the mouth of the burning fiery furnace, 104 Turners Exhibited Works. Vear of Exhibition. No. and spake, and said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, ye servants of the most high God, come forth and come hither. Then Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came forth of the midst of the fire." —Daniel, chap. iii. v. 26. 176. Staffa — Fingal's Cave. " Nor of a theme less solemn tells That mighty surge that ebbs and swells, And still between each awful pause, From the high vault an answer draws." — Lord of the Ides, canto iv. 1833. 177. Rotterdam Ferry Boat. 178. Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace, and Custom House, Venice — Canaletti painting. 179. Van Goyeu looking out for a Subject. 180. Van Tromp returning after the Battle of the Dogger Bank. 181. Ducal Palace, Venice. 182. Mouth of the Seine, Quille-bceuf.— " This estuary is so dangerous from its quicksands, that any vessel taking the ground is liable to he stranded, and overwhelmed by the rising tide, which rushes in in one wave." 1834. 183. The Fountain of Indolence. 184. The Golden Bough. " Fallacies of Hope." 185. Venice. 186. Wreckers— Coast of Northumberland, with a Steamboat assisting a Ship off Shore. 187. St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall. 1X35. 188. Keelmen heaving in Coals by Night. 189. The Broad Stone of Honour (Ehrenbreitstein) and Tomb of Marceau, from Byron's " Childe Harold " " By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground," etc. 190. Venice — from the porch of Madonna della Salute. 191. Line Fishing off Hastings. 192. The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, Oct. 16, 1834. 1836. 193. Juliet and her Nurse. 194. Rome from Mount Aventine. 195. Mercury and Argus. 1837. 196. Scene — a Street in Venice. " Antonio. Hear me yet, good Shylock. Shylock. I'll have my bond." — Merchant of Venice, act iii. sc. 3. 197. Story of Apollo and Daphne. — " Ovid's Metamorphoses." Turners Exhibited Works. 105 Kzbibitlou. No 198. The Parting of Hero and Leander — From the Greek of MusEeus. " The morning came too soon, with crimson'd blush, Chiding the tardy night, and Cynthia's warning beam ; But Love yet lingers on the terraced steep, Upheld young Hymen's torch and failing lamp, The token of departure, never to return. Wild dashed the Hellespont its 'stracted surge, And on the raised spray appeared Leander's fall." 199. Snow-storm — Avalanche and Inundation; a Scene in the upper Part of Val d'Aouste, Piedmont. 200. Phryne going to the public Bath as Venus— Demosthenes taunted by jEschines. 201. Modern Italy— The Pifferari. 202. Ancient Italy — Ovid banished from Rome. 1839. 203. The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838. " The flag which braved the battle and the breeze No longer owns her." 204. Ancient Rome— Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Caesars restored. " The clear stream — Ay, the yellow Tiber, glimmers to her beam, Even while the sun is setting." 205. Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino. " The moon is up, and yet it is not night ; The sun as yet disputes the day with her."— Lord Byron. 206. Pluto carrying off Proserpine. — Ovid's Metamorphoses. 207. Cicero at his Villa. 1 840. 208. Bacchus and Ariadne. 209. Venice— The Bridge of Sighs. " I stood upon a bridge, a palace and A prison on each hand." — Byron. 210. Venice, from the Canale della Giudecca, Chiesa di S. Maria della Salute, &c. 211. Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying— Typhoon coming on. " Fallacies of Hope." 212. The New Moon; or, " I've lost my Boat, you shan't have your Hoop." 213. Rockets and Blue-lights (close at hand) to warn Steamboats off Shoal- water. 214. Neapolitan Fisher-girls surprised Bathing by Moonlight. P io6 Turner s Exhibited Works. Exhi"tioD. No. 215. Ducal Palace, Dogana, with part of San Giorgio, Venice. 1841. 216. Giudecca, la Donna della Salute and San Giorgio. 217. Rosenau, Seat of H.R.H. Prince Albert of Coburg, near Coburg, Germany. 218. Depositing of John Bellini's three pictures in la Chiesa Redentore, Venice. 219. Dawn of Christianity (Flight into Egypt). "That star has risen." — Rev. T. Gisborne's "Walk in a Forest." 220. Glaucus and Scylla. " Ovid's Metamorphoses." 1842. 221. The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa. 222. Oampo Santo. Venice. 223. Snow-storm — Steamboat off a Harbour's mouth, making Signals in shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich. 224. Peace. Burial at Sea. " Fallacies of Hope." 225. War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet. " Fallacies of Hope." 1843. 226. The Opening of the Walhalla, 1842— " L'Honneui' au Roi di Baviere." "Fal- lacies of Hope." 227 . The Sun of Venice going to Sea. 228. Dogana and Madonna della Salute, Venice. 229. Shade and Darkness — the Evening of the Deluge. "Fallacies of Hope." 230. Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) — The Morning after the Deluge. Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. 231. St. Benedetto, looking towards Fusina. 1844. 232. Ostend. 233. Fishing-boats bringing a Disabled Ship into Port Ruysdael. 234. Rain, Steam and Speed. The Great Western Raihvay. 235. Van Tromp going about to please his Masters — Ships at Sea, getting a good wetting. Vide "Lives of Dutch Painters." 236. Venice — Maria della Salute. 237. Approach to Venice. " The path lies o'er the sea, invisible; And from the land we went, As to a floating city, steering in, And gliding up her streets as in a dream, So smoothly, silently." — Rogers' Italy. " The moon is up, and yet it is not night ; The sun as yet disputes the day with her." — Byron. Turners Exhibited Works. 107 Year of Exhibition. No. 238. Venice Quay — Ducal Palace. 1845. 239. Whalers. Vide Beale's " Voyage," p. 163. 240. Whalers. Vide Beale's " Voyage" p. 175. 241. Venice — Evening. Going to the Ball. " Fallacies of Hope." 242. Morning— Returning from the Ball. St. Martino. " Fallacies of Hope." 243. Venice — Noon. " Fallacies of Hope " 244. Venice— Sunset. A Fisher. " Fallacies of Hope." 184G. 245. Returning from the Ball. St. Martha. 246. Going to the Ball. St. Martino. 247. "Hurrah! for the Whaler, Erebus ! another fish ! " Beale's " Voyage." 248. Undine giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples. 249. The Angel standing in the Sun. — Revelation, xix. 17, 18. 250. Whalers (boiling blubber), entangled in Flaw Ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves. 1847. 251. The Hero of a Hundred Fights. An idea suggested by the German invoca- tion upon casting the bell, in England called " Tapping the Furnace." "Fallacies of Hope." 1849. 252. The Wreck Buoy. 253. Venus and Adonis. 1850. 254. Mercury sent to Admonish Jimeas. " Fallacies of Hope." 255. iEneas relating his History to Dido. "Fallacies of Hope." 25G. The Visit to the Tomb. " Fallacies of Hope." 257. The Departure of the Fleet. " Fallacies of Hope." BRITISH INSTITUTION. 1806. 1. Narcissus and Echo. " Ovid's Metamorphoses." 2. The Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hespcrides. 1808. 3. The Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory. (Height, 7 ft. 4 in. ; width, 9 ft. 3 in.) 4. Jason. (Height, 3ft. 8 in.; width, 4ft. 8 in.) "Ovid's Metamorphoses." 1809. 5. Sun rising through Vapour, with Fishermen landing and cleaning their Fish. (Height, 6 ft.; width, 7ft. 6 in.) 10S Turners Exhibited Works. Vetr of Exhibition. No. , 1814. 6. Apuleia in search of Apuleius. (Height, 6ft. 10 in ; width, 9ft. 3 in.) "Ovid's Metamorphoses." 1817. 7. View of the Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius in the Island of iEgina, with the Greek National Dance of the Romaika; the Acropolis of Athens in the Dis- tance. Painted from a sketch taken by H. Gaily Knight, Esq., in 1810. (Height, 5ft. 2 in. j width, 7ft. 2 in.) 1835. 8. The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834. 1836. 9. Wreckers on the North Shore. 10. Fire of the House of Lords. 1837. 1 1. Regulus. (Height, 4 ft. 6 in. ; width, 5 ft. 6 in.) 1838. 12. Fishing-boats, with Hucksters bargaining for Fish. 183'.). 13. Fountain of Fallacy. (Height, 4 ft. 8 in. ; width, 6 ft. 8 in.) "Fallacies of Hope." 1840. 14. Mercury and Argus. (Height, 6ft. 3 in.; width, 5ft.) 1841. 15. Snow-storm, Avalanche, and Inundation in the Alps. (Height, 4 ft. 3 in. ; wide, 5 ft. 3 in.) 16. Blue Lights (close at hand), to warn Steamboats off Shoal-water. (Height, 4 ft. 3 in.; width, 5 ft. 3 in. ) 1846. 17. Queen Mab's Cave. "Frisk it, frisk it, by the moonlight beam." — Midsummer Nights Dream. "' Thy orgies, Mab, are manifold." — MS. Fallacies of Hope.