idden ircasures at (he PiONAL Gallery Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/hiddentreasuresaOOturn VARNISHING DAY, ROYAL ACADEMY. Portrait of Turner, by William Parrott (1846). HIDDEN TREASURES AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY. A SELECTION OF STUDIES AND DRAWINGS BY J. M. W. TURNER, R. A. NOW PUBLISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME. With some account of them : By E. T. Cook With a Sketch of Turner's Life, and reproductions of a number of his finished works. LONDON: " FALL MALL" PRESS, I IOLBORN. 1905. PREFACE. This Art Extra of the Pall few scratches upon a sheet or two of it, which were so much shorthand indication of all he wished to remember. When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed the pencil- ling rapidly, and added as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture." The beauty of these foreign sketches is known to every one who has been in the water- colour rooms at the National Gallery, where a large number of them is exhibited. But an almost equal number remains hidden away in the tin boxes ; and the examples here reproduced — in which the reader must have charity of imagination enough to supply the brilliant notes of colour — will show how little force there is in the contention that the boxes contain "sketches of little educational value," and nothing better than food for the waste- paper basket. A fact which seems to me conclusive on the point may be mentioned. When Ruskin first craved permission from the Trustees, in 1857, to arrange some of the drawings for exhibition, he selected one hundred sketches, by way of putting before the Trustees a sample of the treasures committed to their keeping, and of explaining the method of mounting and exhibition which he recom- mended. He wrote also a catalogue for private circulation describing these first selected pieces. Of this series several pieces have from that day to this remained hidden in the tin boxes. Three of them are here given. One sketch is of Treport, another of the Church of Eu ; and the third, of the Castle of Heidelberg. An extract from the rare catalogue by Ruskin to which I have referred will show the kind of interest — topo- graphical, biographical, and technical — which 3 may be brought out by a careful and system- atic arrangement of the drawing's. Kuskin arranged the Hundred Sketches which he first selected and framed, "so as to form a con- nected series, illustrative of a supposed tour up the Rhine, and through Switzerland, to Venice, and back." The catalogue begins thus : — " L Treport. " We land on the pier of 'Treport, and are de- lighted by the pretty irregularity of the old church, with its gabled chapels, which we draw on the ->pot, with one bold zigzag touch for their roofs, and a wriggle for every window. Yet it will not be easy for anyone coming after us to give a better idea of the standing of the grey walls on their seaworn mound, and of the high chalk cliff beyond them. This cliff is a masterpiece of draw- ing ; it is not possible with the given number of touches to indicate more faithfully the form of a chalk precipice, or the way it breaks into the turf at its brow. The whole sketch is heavy, but very beautiful." [This sketch may be seen in the National Gallery, where it is No 276 in tin- framed water-colour series. | " 2. Treport. " We set out for a walk about the town, retain- ing, however, our first interest in the chapel and cliff ; and being disturbed by the military (a couple of Lancers), we put them in revenge- fully in red outlines." |This sketch remains in one of the tin boxes, and is here reproduced. See p. 53.| " 3. Treport. " We wander still further from the (own, ami see old pieces anil fortifications under amazing effects. The military are still interested in our motions. The officer having held his sword in an unsatisfactory manner towards his legs, is obliged In change its position, and appears now to he carrying two. "Very hasty; but grand in arrangement of colour and interesting in execution. Note the vermilion in the piece in the foreground, laid in Very wet, and the white lines scraped out with I he wooden end of the brush towards the left, carrying the vermilion out on that side. The ob- ject in the middle distance is a fortification with two gates of entrance, and a flagstaff, and the sweeping pencil lines to the right of the flagstaff mean, I believe, that the smoke of a gun W8S tO be there if ever the picture were finished. " |This sketch is No. 19 in the series placed on loan in the Kuskin Drawing School at Oxford. | " 4. Ku. "Getting tired of the beach, we walk up the country, and obtain a general view of the town of Eu. The part of the blue touch in the dis- tance, on the left, with a spike to it, means our old friend, the hill and church of Treport ; the darker and level blue means the sea under a Fresh breeze. The whole looks quite instantaneously done; but it is not; the dark crumbling touch was laid first, then water was put to it, and it was graduated into the church ; lastly, a wet hori- zontal touch of blue has been added below, to give it more breadth. " The general charac ter of the French cathedral churches, rising out of the towns like a broken but successive group of steep basalt rock, with small pinnacles above, is quite wonderfully seized in this sketch. The live pink, square-topped cones under the blue sea are the roofs of Louis Philippe's palace [which may be seen in No. C65 at the National Gallery]. Having got rid of the military, we are now annoyed by cows, and horns of diligences pulling up hill ; which, nevertheless, we mean to make something of some day." [This sketch remains in one of the tin boxes, and is here reproduced : see p. 50 1 . * Then, later on in the catalogue, Kuskin accompanies Turner on a sketching-tour to Heidelberg, noticing (among other points), in the sketch here reproduced (p. 23), as " highly interesting, the way Turner liked to lead his curves to the main points of his prin- cipal objects. The two large curves in the sky are outlines of hills, and are merely put there to indicate that in the finished drawing these curves should lead, one to the main tower of the castle, one to the first gable, while the second gable should he the only piece ol the castle relieved against the sky." 1 may leave it to the reader of these remarks, with the reproductions before him, to decide whether sketches, which Kuskin found thus instructive, are indeed mere pieces of " waste-paper, " and whether the nation properly discharges its debt to Turner by consigning them to oblivion. Another important group of Turner's sketches in the National (lallery belongs to his first Continental journey, when he spent some time in Savoy, collecting materials which he afterwards used in the Chamounix subjects in " Liber Studiorum." Several of these sketches are framed and placed in cabinets, but many more remain in the tin * The whole of Ruskin's catalogue, now reprinted in the Library Kdition of his Works (Vol. XIII., pp. 185 — 226), will be found of peculiar interest to students of Turner. 9 boxes ; see the example here given p. 56). A further group consists of sketches made at Rome ; of interest not only for their own sake, but as preserving records of the city as it stood in the days before the antiquarian movement of the last century had dis- encumbered so many of the remains of ancient Rome from the accumulations or adaptations of succeeding centuries. I cannot agree to dismiss as " waste-paper " the sketch here reproduced (p. 52), showing the Coliseum in the background, and, in the foreground, the Arch of Titus, as it was before it was restored to its old form in 1822. One may see the general appearance of the Forum in those days, with this arch in connection with the fortress of the Frangipani, in the drawing which Turner made from Hakewell's sketch in Hakewell's " Italy." The beauty of even the slightest of Turner's sketches of Venice is known to everybody. There are many on exhibition at the National Gallery, and many more at Oxford. But a large number — though prepared by Ruskin for exhibition — are still among the buried treasures ; and several of them are here given. Only a dim idea of their beauty can, however, be gained by the reproductions ; while the photographer had to pass by, as wholly untranslateable into black and white, numerous specimens of brilliant notes of Vene- tian colour which the tin boxes still contain. A large number of the pieces in the tin boxes belongs to a well-known group, being specimens of the countless studies and sketches — sometimes in pen-and-ink, some- times in colour on grey paper — which Turner made for his "Rivers of France." It is quite true that a great many of them are already accessible to the public (again at Oxford, as well as at the National Gallery) ; but that is no reason why the others should remain unknown, and I am afraid not too well cared for, in the tin boxes. Turner's studies of interiors, mostly done at Farnley and Petworth — are also well known ; many of them are among the de- spised contents of the boxes, and specimens are included among our reproductions. The flower-piece is especially interesting (see p. 60). Among the Turners buried in the tin boxes are several sketches and drawings which seem to have been studies, or first sugges- tions and materials, for finished pictures. Specimens of this sort will be found on pp. 56 and 66. One of these must have been a study for an Italian composition, such as the " Bay of Baiae," or " The Golden Bough " ; the other, for such a picture as the "Steamboat Going by the Lead." Studies of this kind should, surely, be catalogued, mounted, and made accessible, if not to the general public, at least to students and col- lectors. The object of this paper is to call atten- tion to the wealth of " buried Turners " that still, after fifty years, awaits proper utilisa- tion and recognition. It is not for any out- sider to draw up a Reform Bill in detail. The Trustees, I cannot doubt, know the facts well ; I suppose they think it useless to do anything, in view of the scanty space at their disposal. I will conclude, however, with a few rough suggestions of what might be done if the nation ever cared to insist on some better use being made of this portion of the Turner bequest. In the first place, the present tin boxes should be abolished. The contents are in a dirty state — broken pieces of old sealing-wax, tattered fragments of string, dusty brown paper, are not the best milieu for delicate Turner drawings. Also the mildew which is forming on some of them should be removed. Ruskin performed this desirable operation, with the assistance of Mr. George Allen, in 1862. " I've got the mildew off," he wrote at that time, " as well as I could, and henceforth I've done with the whole business ; and have told them they must take it off themselves next time, or leave it on — if they like." When I was very kindly given permission to look through the boxes last year the mildew was on. All the more valuable sketches and drawings should be framed (many of them were mounted by Ruskin for the purpose fifty years ago) and then enclosed in cabinets with sliding grooves, such as he designed. The subsequent disposition of the sketches must largely depend on the policy of the Trustees and of the Treasury with regard to the ex- tension of the Gallery. In any case large numbers of pencil drawings should be dis- 10 tributcd (as already suggested) among art schools, for use as drawing-copies and lessons in composition. (The master of the School at Oxford tells me that he finds those in his custody to be of great value in this respect.) The six collections already in cir- culation might he Supplemented. The re- mainder of the sketches and the drawings would remain at the National (iallery, arranged decently and in order, and made accessible to students. Prom time to time there might be temporary exhibitions, such- as the authorities of the British Museum arrange out of their drawings and engravings. Many things might be exhibited permanently in show -cases. For instance, the National (iallery shows already the drawings which Turner made for the engraved vignettes in Rogers's " Italy" and " Poems." In one of the tin boxes is Turner's own copy of the " Poems," in which he made on the margins little notes of his intended illustrations : surely it would be of interest to show this in a case. A group of our reproductions, to which I have not hitherto referred, consists of Tur- ner's sketches for vignettes engraved, or in- tended for the volume containing Moon's "The Epicurean" and " Alciphron." I cannot conceive why none of these is con- sidered worthy of any better place than a brown-paper parcel in a tin box. One of the vignettes here reproduced (p. 72) shows " Al- ciphron and the Spectre " (see pp. 10-11 of " The Epicurean " and pp. 6-7 of " Alci- phron "). The subject of the engraved fron- tispiece was ultimately used instead. Another of the sketches (p. 72) illustrates the "Descent into the Chasm " (see " The Kpicurcan," pp. 49-50) ; while the third is an intended vignette to illustrate Alciphron 's swoon in Kgvpt (see "The Epicurean," p. 45). These vignettes should be shown, together with a copy of tin- book ; or else they should be transferred to the Print Room of the British Museum. Specimen pages of Turner's note-books, his own poems, his thumb-nail sketches in the Vatican, and so forth, mighl also thus be shown in cases such as are used for the simi- lar display of autographs and illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum. The tin boxes are peculiarly rich in autobiographical matter, as I have indicated in my account >l them elsewhere.* It is especially interesting to see how constantly Turner was trying to ex- press himself in another art than that which had become nature to him. His note-books are full of verses, and Turner would often make as many beginnings, or studies, or ver- sions of a poem as of a picture or of a draw- ing. A page of one of these note-books is here given in reduced facsimile (p. 76). It is, I submit, a great pity that some of his manu- scripts are not exhibited. These are merely a few suggestions of the kind of thing which might be done. The tin boxes form a storehouse out of which an in- genious and zealous Director would constantly bring forth treasures new and old. " But there is no room," it may be said. That is very true ; and the main drift of this paper is to show that the nation itself is re- sponsible for the neglect of its buried Turners. If it be finally decided that DO more room is by the nation worth providing, then I SUggCSl that a Turner House or a Turner Museum should elsewhere be established by private zeal, and that the Trustees of the National (iallery should be authorised to transfer there- to any pictures, drawings, sketches, or memo- rials of the artist for which the nation is un- willing to find proper accommodation. E. T. C. I'The identification "f the scenes uf Turner's sketches is matter of much uncertainty and diffi- culty. Mam of those already exhibited at the National (iallery have never been identified at all. or bear titles for which the authorities claim no finality. Similarly with the sketches which are here reproduced, and which have never been ex- hibited, the editor in many cases gives titles which are conjectural only, and in others is un- able to give any precise titles. In view of future issues of this volume, be will be much obliged by any corrections, hints, or suggestions with which readers may favour him. Tiik Editor.] * Library Edition of"Ruakin'i Works." Vol. Mil , pp. xli. — xliii. 11 STUDIES & DRAWINGS NOW PUBLISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME. AN ITALIAN ski: K II. The examples which fallow have been sprcial/v photographed b\ permission of Sir E. J. Povntcr, Bart., P.R.A., awl the Trustees of the Xatioiial Gallerv. 14 15 ON THE RHINE (?). LIBRARY AT FARNLEY HALL. 16 21 22 23 A CASTLE ON THE RHINE (?). 24 26 B7 u J H O K U w — < X 28 29 50 I'HE SICK CAT : A COTTAGE INTERIOR 31 33 B 34 36 36 38 40 •11 42 43 44 45 46 / _ 48 4:> r 50 52 53 55 ON THE ROAD TO CHAMOUNI. 56 59 STUDIES OF VENICE.— IV 61 63 65 66 / 67 63 BRISTOL CATHEDRAL (BEFORE THE NEW NAVE WAS BUILT). (An Example of Turner's Earliest Work.) TURNER: THE MAN AND THE PAINTER. A Character Sketch, with many Storks and Anecdotes. utterly alone in the world from its not being' understood." Turner was sixty years of age when Ruskin met him first, and his character, never a lenient one, was set too hard to receive the impressions of new friendships. His was not the gift if intimacy. But the man .vho analysed his art could hardly fail, even at a distance, to detect the main points of his character, and the more we know of it, the more truth appears in Ruskin's outline. Turner's lack of the social sense was due, like many of his other traits, to the hard con- ditions of his birth and upbringing, and truly they were as uninspiring for the creation of 1 great artist as the livery stables and the galli- pots were in the case of Keats. II. Turner was born on April 23, 1775 — the same day as Shakspeare, the same year as Charles Lamb — and his father was a HEN Ruskin was asked half a century ago if a biography of Turner then being projected would in- terfere with any plans of his own, he answered no, and generously offered to him lay. " Don't try- side, " was Ruskin's advice to Thornbury, the biographer he helped. " Fix at the beginning the follow- ing main characteristics of Turner in your mind, as the keys to the secret of all he said and did — uprightness, generosity, extreme tenderness of heart, sensuality, extreme obsti- nacy, irratibility, infidelity. And be sure that he knew his own power, and felt himself help as far as in to mask the dark 70 Co vent Garden barber. It was an un- promising beginning', but we remember that this same prosaic sign of the barber's pole ruled over the boyhood of Jeremy Taylor. The house was at the wes1 end of Maiden-lane — No. 26, to be exact — Dut the last vestige of it disappeared nearly half a century ago. He was christened William after his father, Mallord after his mother's eldest brother, and Joseph after goodness knows whom ; and as Joseph Mallord (it was mis- spelt, by the way) William Turner, his name is still to be seen on the register of the parish church of St. Paul's. His father came from Devonshire, so the lad had the same ancestral shire in common with Reynolds, who was to be his master. Of his mother, a London woman, little is recorded, save an un- governable temper and an hereditary touch of madness. There were connections of hers it Brentford, and for one of these, the foreman of a distillery, young Turner made- some of his earliest sketches. At Brentford also he went to school, there distinguishing himself by scrawling sketches of flourishing poultry a'l over the copy-books and schoolroom walls. He used to colour engravings for fourpence, and some of them his father exhibited in the shop at a shilling apiece. Happily they caught the eye of his artist patrons, among them Thomas Stothard, and on their recommenda- tion the father gave the lad leave to follow his obvious bent. But the sale of the lad's sketches was characteristic. Thrift ran hard in the family blood, and the man of whom his son said, " Dad never praised me for anything but saving a halfpenny," lived in aftei years to play the part of rough-and-rcadv liousekeepei in the bachelor menage that served the artist to the end of his days. He entered under several masters in turn Mr. Palice, of the Soho Academy ; Thomas Malton, a master in perspective; Daves, expert in costume ; John Raphael Smith, the engraver ; and William l'orden, an architect who offered to article him without a lee. lb- was a dullish pupil, but he said that he learned more from Dayes than anyone else, the fact of the matter being that in Dayes's studio he fell in with Thomas (iirtin, the rival who was destined to influence him more than any tutor could, and by an untimely death leave him master of an undisputed held. Many years afterwards he said himself, " Had Tom (iirtin lived, I should have starved " ; but this was characteristically overstated. Turner's father came into a legacy, and paid it away again as a premium to yet another art-master, Thomas Hard wick, and Hardwick, perceiving the lad's forte, advised him to stick to land- scape. He continued to study under Robert Ker Porter and Henry Barker, and finally in the studio of Sir Joshua. By copying some of the tatter's portraits, he picked up sufficient skill in the art to paint his own ; and by the time he w as fifteen he had landed his »irst drawing in the Royal Academy. It was a view of Lambeth Palace, and the first of any note in a long series of sketches, largely topo- graphical and architectural, in the neighbour- hood of London. HI. One of the portraits of himself was painted as a love-token, and figured in the only romance of his life. During the restless wandcrjahrc that succeeded his tour of the studios he fell in love with a maid of Mar- gate, and the passion was returned. She may have been the daughter of the artist, William Frederick Wells, and the affair pro- ceeded happilyenough until something or some- one interfered with their correspondence, and young Turner returned from one <.f his chapters of wandering to find her affianced to another. She had transferred her hand, be- lieving him to be indifferent, and no pleading of his could move her. Thornbury says that the marriage proved unhappy, but the hitter's sentimental bias weakens our belief. Turner set off again with his palette and sketch- book, an embittered man. The incli- nation for marriage seems never to have oc- curred to him again, except twenty years later in the case of the sister of his friend, Henry Trimmer, the vicar of Heston. Trimmer was an art amateur of some accom- plishment, and used to entertain the artist (hiring his fishing expeditions. The amiable cleric tried to teach him the rudiments of Greek and Latin, but without BUOCeSS. Turner was taken to an unusual degree with the vicar's family, and famous as he had then come to be, might have had the vicar's sister for the asking. Either he was too shy, or the old wound rankled, and he went back to his fishing, the cheerless home with his lather at Hammersmith, and his ceaseless round of work. Vet he was anything but morose in his early touring days, when a guinea lasted him the best part of a week, and a bundle at the end of a stick comprised his belongings, One lifelong friend says of him that in those days he was the merriest and lightest-hearted creature she ever knew. He set up a make- shift studio in Hand Court, near his father's shop, but his happier days were spent in these roving excursions. He financed himself by executing plates for the magazines and mis- cellanies of that day, and with the proceeds he scoured the country, copying cathedrals and abbeys, with all the old bridges and mills and fishing villages in between, or else Stay- 71 ing by the way to bestow a five-shilling - lesson on some casual pupil. Girtin accompanied him, certainly on some of the excursions around London, and for some of these they found an excuse and an objective in the en- couragement of Thomas Monro. The worthy doctor's history is identified with the Old Water-colour Society, and he was acute enough Jf$ - to see the genius that underlay the hopes of these two youngsters. " Many a time,'' Turner told David Roberts once, " Girtin and I have walked to Bushey and back to make drawings for good Dr. Monro at half-a-crown apiece and a supper." It was a far from "tt WOP J mercenary arrangement in the older man, see- ft j|- J5*%jjf ing the slender probability of his ever living /s. to recoup himself, and the wretched prices '^urn* "ALCIPHRON'S SWOON IN EGYPT." Intended vignette for Moore's " The Epicurean and Alciphron." that ruled the water-colour market in those primitive days. The suppers were given at the doctor's house in Adelphi-terrace (next door to the one where Garrick had died a few years before), and there the young men met a group of artists. They also found a collection of master- pieces to copy, and it was here that Turner's fast-developing genius measured itself with the work of Paul Sandby and Cozens ; Morland and Gainsborough and Richard Wilson ; Canaletto, Rembrandt, Claude, and Salvator Rosa. It was the period of his " grey " drawings, and his fairylike silvery interiors. Finding that Girtin was beating him by studies of Jedburgh Abbey, Turner set off for Yorkshire and the "ALCIPHRON AND THE SPECTRE." Intended vignette for Moore's "The Epicurean and Alciphron." north, and returned to show in the Academy Exhibition of 1798 the drawing, " Summer Morn: Norham Castle on the Tweed," to which he attributed his success in life. This was the tour, besides, that produced the "THE DESCENT INTO THE CHASM." Intended Vignette for Moore's " Epicurean." 72 Coniston drawing in the National Gallery, and the " Dunstanborough Castle." It intro- duced him, too, to several valuable friends, and lightened the strain of his keen competition with Girtin. Theirs was the story of Reynolds and Romney over again, and the man of slower, broader development was bound to win in the end. Keen emulation, however, could hardly help estranging them, and three years later Girtin was dead. Turner attended the funeral, and made a vow to put a stone up to his memory. Others did it for him, and he perpetuated his rival's fame by con- ferring on their common art a new lustre and a new perfection. He said of a yellow drawing of Girtin's that he would have given one of his little lingers to have done it ; but the time w as at hand when his fellow -student was to be utterly eclipsed. Turner made another tour, this time in Wales, exhibited his first naval subject, " The Battle of the Nile," and was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. IV. He must have been a strange man, even in those days, before age, excess, and avarice had begun to spoil him. He was twenty-four years old when the Associatcship came to him, and he was already the first water-colour artist of his age. Three portraits that remain of him about this time (a couple by his name- sake, the engraver, and one by Nathaniel Dance) show him to have been anything but ill-looking, but he was low and crook- shanked in his build, and in his features there was enough of a Jewish cast to cause him annoyance when he heard it discussed. He was intensely, morbidly sensitive, the more so because he was conscious of a breeding ill- suited tt> his powers. He was most at home when wrangling with the engravers and the publishers, and he was now entering on a long campaign of exactions and quarrels which lasted until his death. Ruskin says that he never broke a promise, or failed in a trust he had undertaken. Yet he squabbled with Charles Turner, his engraver, on paltry excuses, half-accused him of allowing his prints to be stolen, and so resented an appeal for better terms that the misunderstanding lasted nineteen years. I've and Roget, in their entertaining " Notes and Memoranda," print a letter showing how the artist sprang a demand lor fourteen shillings upon Colnaghi's, a firm that had paid him many thousands of pounds : he had suddenly made up his mind to allow no discount to "the trade," and it closed the account between them. Several times he asked engravers for a dozen proofs for him- self, and when it came to a question of pay- ment denied having ordered them. The history of these transactions would make a book of itself, and not the least inte- resting passage (one that the late Mr. Blades would have turned to eloquence) goes to relate how one or two engravers, failing to realise the value even of faulty impressions, threw them to domestics to light the fire w ith. Vet there is hardly a character-sketch of the many that have Turner for their theme that do not contain anecdotes redounding to his credit. Lupton, the engraver, records that when he was a young man in the employ of George Clint, he frequently waited on the great man with proofs of his " Liber •Studiorum. " One day he ventured to ask for a chance to show his mettle. Turner asked, " How do I know what you can dor"' The aspirant answered that the only way was to try him with a subject, and then if the plate that resulted was unworthy, to destroy it. Turner smiled, and said, " Well, tell me what 1 am to pay you." Lupton fixed the price at five guineas, a guinea lower than his master asked, and Turner handed him a slight but beautiful drawing in bistre of Solway Moss. The result was approved, inJ took its place with the best. Rut these are lucid intervals in the long and stormy deal- ings he had with his printers, and we may well say that there was even more usury in his soul than in his face. Ruskin, meeting him in the forties, went almost as an idolater, but even then was not very favourably im- pressed. " I found in him," he writes in his journal the night after the meeting, " a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter- of-fact, Lnglish-mindcd — gentleman ; good- natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of the mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look." The lengthened and reluctant hyphen before the word " gentle- man," was perhaps the most expressive touch in the picture, and Turner clearly never took the pains to qualify for refined society. His home life, such as it was, went on behind a kind of veil, and for a great many years none of his closest friends and admirers were permitted to draw it aside, fie lived for some few years at 64, I larlcv -street, but in 1812 he built himself other houses aft .-r his own designs, one in Cjuccn Anne-street (now No. 23), and another at West End, the Upper Mall, Hammersmith. This last he called Sandycombe Lodge, or (more signifi- cantly still) Solus, and, finding he used it less and less, he parted with it in 1826. He records 73 ♦ in a letter not ' without traces of affection, that his father was always catching cold through working in the garden, and adds : " I began to think of being truly alone in the world, but 1 believe the bitterness is past . . . I am thin as a hurdle, and not better for wear." When his father's death actually came (in 1829) it stirred him deeply, and it only knows how soon!" The next sentence in the same letter was a scathing remark on patrons who sent empty carriages to swell a funeral, and this was inspired by the same hatred of humbug that Ruskin had perceived in him. Lawrence, by the way, was once the occasion for an act of generosity worth record- ing. In 1826 Turner's " Cologne " was placed SKETCH OF RUINS : AFTER A FIRE. was evident that the old man was vastly more to him than a personal attendant, who stretched his canvases and saved him expense in a hundred different ways. In the same year he acted as pall-bearer to his friend Dawe, and in the next he helped in the last offices to another friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Death had come home to him, and he wrote : " Who will do the like for me, or when, God between a couple of Sir Thomas's portraits, and outshone them with its welter of high colour. Straightway Turner covered it with a coat of lamp-black, saying, " It will all wash off, and Lawrence was so unhappy." The incident was as characteristic, perhaps, as any- thing else, but such incidents were rare. It shows how art might have ennobled him, if he had not worshipped other gods as well ; and 74 the wonder is that his art was so little affected by his secret debauches. As it was, this strange compound of sudden generosities, hard-fisted dealing, barbarous temper, and eccentric life, was turning off year by year a series of landscapes lit to persuade one that the (iolden Age had come again. V. Nothing can give us any sense of the range and mastery of Turner's three main periods of activity except a catalogue with dates and detail, and this is beyond our scope. His method of classification established his land- scapes in the three important divisions of Pastoral, Historical, and Topographical ; but he put an " E " by way of sub-div ision before the " I* " of Pastoral, and this has been con- strued as " Epic," without defining the boundary in 'Turner's mind between the his- torical and the pastoral schools. Thornbury says that the first attempt in oils was a sun- set on the Thames, made in 1795 from a crayon study for his friend Hell, to com- memorate a narrow escape of theirs while sketching in a punt off Hatter- sea. His first oil of any consequence was a view of fishing-boats in a gale of wind off the Needles, and was sold for ten pounds to General Stewart. His diploma work for the Academy was the " Dolhadern Castle," and 1800 saw him started on what Ruskin called his first style. It was still tin- age of Old Testament subjects and pseudo- classical studies like " Jason," and he might have remained a sort of Handel of the brush, all pomp and mannerism, if he had not gone it this time (1802) for a first foreign tour. He worked his way across the Alps, making bril- liant sketches (black pencil on tinted paper) of the scenery round Chamouni, the Grande Chartreuse, Crenoble, and tin- valley of the Rhone. Four years later he painted the daring " Tails of the Rhine at Schafl hauscn, " which hangs in the public gallery at Birmingham, and has a page of Ruskin to itself. The Dutch sea-painters turned him back to his fishing-boats ; and Claude and Wilson to themes like " Mercury and Herse," sold a few years ago for seven thousand guineas. In 1807 he Hashed out, like a herald ray of the northern lights, with a picture in his riper manner, the glorious " Sun Rising through Vapour," which Hamerton turns to such glow- ing prose. It was Claude, too, who suggested the " Liber Studiorum," and Turner made this black-and-white work, as ( iainsborough did with his society portraits, the bondslave of his true mistress, landscape in oils. In 1808 the Academy made him its lecturer on perspective, and where he failed in delivery he made up with lavish illustra- tion, a proceeding calculated, perhaps, to deter his students rather than to point the way. Once and once only he visited his father's county ol Devon, but it inspired him with the lovely "Crossing the Brook." A storm at Farnlev suggested the " Hannibal trussing the Alps" (1812), and he printed at the foot of it a dozen lines of his own com- position ; and these, though uncouth, like the rest of his attempts in this direction, had a certain rugged smack of the I'vrrhus lines in "Hamlet." At last, in the Waterloo year, he exhibited " Dido Building Carthage," per- haps his greatest favourite. He said once that he would be buried in it, but that musl have been in either a fit of moody grandeur, or else a fit of petulance at the onslaught the critics had made on it. The patron who com- missioned it for £100 declined to take it, and Turner refused thousands for it repeatedly, in order to bequeath it as part of his gift to the nation. These attacks of the critics on his eagle flights of fancy, and the parodies in " Punch on his verses always nettled him, and he consoled himself but poorly with bitter retorts that they were ungrateful and con- temptible. " A man may be weak in his age," he said to Ruskin towards the end, " but you should not tell him so." Foreign sketching tours, and several ex- quisite series of prints, like the " F.ngland and Wales," " Rivers of Trance," and " Italy," represent a large proportion of work in the years that remained, but masterpiece succeeded masterpiece in bewildering succes- sion, lb visited Venice first in or about the year 1832, and we all know with what gleams and visions he invested the Bride of the Adriatic. In the August of 1838 he and Clarkson Stanlicld were gleaning material in the lower reaches of tin- Thames, and saw the old Temerairc being towed upstream to her destruction. Clark- son urged it on Turner as a subject, and the result was one of the most popular among his pictures. " Blackwood," in a tremendous onslaught, expressly excepted this work, and the public ear was tilled with outcries against his wanton tricks with paint. The loan collection of his works at (iuildhall three or four vears ago, contained an example of this. He had painted a glowing sunset across the river from the Barnes road, and in a moment of mischief or inspiration (it is hard to say which) he conceived the idea of a dog against the light. Instead of painting it : n fairly, lie cut it out of black paper en silhouette, and stuck it on the parapet, where it remains to this day, a cheap disfigurement. Stantield complained of the blackness of the ship's sails in the picture of Wilkie's burial by night, and 76 0 f fit*, faM&n ■ k^tC Ph. ilt4r~~i **** **-> /win A^«'/*iI | m"^ furor > HjtC Strf, tit. /UlOifiJl(/?(A£(,L (iCu ^**v '■f/itkisu, (tcl^Lj 6"r**/{^ Turner brusquely retorted, "If I could find anything blacker than black I'd use it." But to shield him against the arrows of criticism, imagined or real, Providence sent him John Ruskin ; and instead of turning' him from the door, as he had done Carlyle, he received him amiably, literature. The sequel is great and familiar TURNER AS POET '. A PAGE FROM HIS NOTE BOOKS. VI. But his temper and habits were growing worse. He had no home companion now his father was dead, and even then his house, in a way, was divided against itself. He still had his house in Queen Anne-street, but he took another on the river-edge at Chelsea, near Cre- morne Gardens, and brought his "good old Margate landlady " to keep it going. With his whimsical love of mystery in all domestic affairs, he took her name of Booth. His friends, missing him from his town house, tried to penetrate his retreat, but failed. At length the housekeeper at Queen Anne-street found a clue in a letter he had left in an old coat, and friends tracked him, faithfully enough, to his Chelsea retreat. Next day he was dead. It was December 19, 1851, and he was buried at his own request where so many other artists lie, in St. Paul's Cathedral. The will he had made twenty years beforehand was altered and lengthened several times ; when proved, with four codicils, it was sworn at nearly £140,000. After four years of litigation a compromise was set up, which gave the real estate to his heir-at-law, his pictures and drawings to the National Gallery, £1,000 for his mausoleum, and the residue to the next-of-kin. His long-cherished scheme, there- fore, of endowing a charity for " male decayed artists living in England," came to naught ; but the nation was enriched with 362 pictures, 135 finished drawings in water-colour, over seventeen hundred studies in colour, and nearly twenty thousand sketches and scraps in every state of decay. This mass of national treasure would establish his fame in perpetuity even if Ruskin 's works and all other picture collections perished. But it is im- possible to forget that he was happy in find- ing an exponent of his marvellous powers, capable even during his life of forcing us to acknowledge him as the greatest landscape painter of all time. B. P. 76 SOME CHARACTERISTIC EXAMPLES OF TURNER'S FINISHED WORKS On the following pages are given a number of some characteristic examples of Turner's finished work for the purpose of comparison with the drawings and studies. They are after photographs placed at our disposal by Mr. George Allen and Messrs. H. Dixon and Co. 77 78 79 30 32 8.5 VENUS AND ADONIS (Circa 1812). From the picture in the possession of Sir Cuthbert Quilter. 34 86 87 88 89 90 91 o m J W O W Q 94 96 2 21 GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE II ill Mill 3 3125 01409 2775