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

S^^^ Dido Building Cahthage ....

T. A. Prior

feiaiffiSz^i^ra. Shipwreck on the Coast of Northumberland

J. Burnett .

Neuwied and Weissenthurn

R. Brandard

Heideleerq .........

T. A. Prior

Dover, from the Sea

J . T. Wilhnore,

A.R.A.

Hastings, from the Sea

R. Wallis

Lake of Zurich ........

T. A. Prior

The Golden Bough

J. T. Witt/more^

A.R.A.

The Grand Canal, Venice ......

W. Miller .

The Approach to Venice

R. WoMis .

Eheenbreitstein ........

J. Pye .

Mercury and Argus

A.R.A.

Modern Italy

W. Miller .

The FiGnTiNG Temeraire

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 .

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'

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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,

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."

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

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

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,

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-

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

Ivy Bridge, Devon

Calder Bridge, Cumberland

283 10 0

924

0 0

288 15 0

525

0 0

* Century of Painters.

Turner s Life.

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

£
1984

2635
1680
1995
1890
1732
1732
1995

s. d.

10 0

0 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.

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.

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.