Joseph Mallord William Turner
was an artist of great genius, and has exercised a powerful influence on the art of the nineteenth century. He was the son of a barber, and was born in Maiden Lane, London (a squalid alley in the parish of Covent Garden), on April 23, 1775. When the boy was five years old, he was taken by his father to the house of a customer of the barber's, and while the shaving and combing went on, the child studied the figure of a rampant lion engraved upon a piece of silver. After his return home, he drew a copy of the lion so excellent that it decided his career, for then and there the father determined that his son should be an artist. As a child and youth, he was always sketching, and while he was fond of nature in all her features, he yet had a preference for water views with boats and cliffs and shining waves.
In 1789, when fourteen years old, he entered the classes of the Royal Academy, where he worked hard in drawing from Greek models. He had the good fortune to be employed by Dr. Munro to do some copying and other works, and by this stroke of luck he revelled in the fine pictures and valuable drawings with which the house of his patron was filled. Toward the end of Sir Joshua Reynolds's life, Turner was a frequent visitor at his studio.
In 1790, he sent his first contribution to the Academy Exhibition; it was a view of Lambeth Palace, in water-colors. During the next ten years, he exhibited more than sixty works, embracing a great variety of subjects. The pictures included views from more than twenty-six counties of England and Wales.
In 1802, he was made a full member of the Academy and he also visited the continent for the first time, traveling through France and Switzerland only. He visited Italy in 1819, in 1829, and again in 1840.
The pictures of Turner are often compared with those of Claude Lorraine, and at times he painted in rivalry with Cuyp, Poussin, and Claude, aiming to adopt the manner of these masters.
In 1806, Turner followed the example of the great Lorraine in another direction. Claude had made a Liber Veritatis, or "Book of Truth," containing sketches of his finished pictures, in order that the works of other painters could not be sold as his. Turner determined to make a Liber Studiorum, or "Book of Studies." It was issued in a series of twenty numbers, containing five plates each, and the subscription price was £17.10s. There were endless troubles with the engravers and it was not paying well, and was abandoned after seventy plates were issued. It seemed to be so worthless that Charles Turner, one of the engravers, used some of the proofs for kindling paper. After the artist became famous, however, this Liber Studiorum grew to be very valuable. Before Turner died, a copy was worth thirty guineas, and more recently a single copy has brought three thousand pounds, or nearly fifteen thousand dollars. Colnaghi, the London print dealer, paid Charles Turner fifteen hundred pounds for the proofs which he had not destroyed; and when the old engraver remembered how he had lighted his fires, he exclaimed, "I have been burning bank-notes all my life."
COUNTESS GREY AND CHILDREN. (FROM A PORTRAIT BY SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE.)
Turner grew very rich, but he lived in a mean, careless style. As long as his father lived, he waited upon his great son as a servant might have done; and after his death, an untidy, wizened old woman, Mrs. Danby, was the only person to care for the house or the interests of the painter. His dress was that of a very common person, and it is impossible to understand how a man who so admired the beautiful in nature could live in so miserly a manner as that of Turner.
Some time before his death, Turner seemed to be hiding himself; his friends could not discover his retreat, until, at last, his old housekeeper traced him to a dingy Chelsea cottage. When his friends went to him, he was dying, and the end soon came. His funeral, from Queen Anne street, was an imposing one. The body was taken to St. Paul's Cathedral, and there, surrounded by a large company of artists and followed by the faithful old woman, it was laid to rest between the tombs of Sir Joshua Reynolds and James Barry. His estate was valued at about seven hundred thousand dollars and he desired that most of it should be used to establish a home for poor artists, to be called Turner's Gift. But the will was not clearly written—his relatives contested it, and in the end, his pictures and drawings were given to the National Academy; one thousand pounds was devoted to a monument to his memory; twenty thousand pounds established the Turner Fund in the Academy and yields annuities to six poor artists; and the remainder was divided amongst his kinsfolk.
Perhaps there never was a painter about whose works more extreme and conflicting opinions have been advanced. Some of his admirers claim for him the very highest place in art. His enemies can see nothing good in his works and say that they may as well be hung one side up as another, since they are only a mixture of splashes of color, and lights and shades. Neither extreme is correct. In some respects, Turner is at the head of English landscape painters, and no other artist has had the power to paint so many different kinds of subjects or to employ such variations of style in his work. His water-colors are worthy of the highest praise; indeed, he created a school of water-color painting. At the same time, it is proper to say that the works executed in his latest period are not even commended by Ruskin,—his most enthusiastic admirer,—and are not to be classed with those of his earlier days and his best manner.
This master was so fruitful, and he made so vast a number of pictures in oil and water-colors, of drawings, and of splendid illustrations for books, that we have no space in which to speak properly of the different periods of his art. A large and fine collection of his paintings is in the South Kensington Museum; "The Old Temeraire," the picture which he would never sell, is there. "The Slave Ship," one of his finest pictures, is owned in Boston, and other celebrated works of his are in New York; but most of his pictures, outside the South Kensington Museum, and the National Gallery, are in private collections, where no catalogues have ever been made, so that no estimate of the whole number can be given.
I shall tell you of but one more English painter,—an artist whose life and works are both very interesting, and of whom all young people must be fond,—