It is probable that the Mary Turner who was removed from St. Paul's, Covent Garden, and admitted into Bethlehem Hospital on December 27th, 1800, was Turner's mother. She was discharged uncured in the following year.
'Dad' was sane and cheerful, a friend and companion to his son, proud of his genius, and helpful to him. His name will often appear in these pages. He is described by Henry Trimmer, vicar of Heston, one of Turner's few intimate friends, as a chatty old fellow who talked fast. We are also told that his cheerfulness was greater than his son's, and that a smile was always on his face. To this strangely assorted couple, a chirpy father and a crazy mother, a son was born on the 23rd of April 1775, about one year and eight months after their marriage. So Nature works, and the good folk who would 'select' parents for their wholesomeness and sanity may not be as successful in producing a genius as Nature in her unpremeditated way. Joseph Mallord William Turner was baptized at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in the following month.
Ruskin has devoted a brilliant chapter to contrasting the boyhoods of Turner and Giorgione. But is Turner to be pitied? Art occurs, and perhaps there could not have been a more suitable place for a great landscape painter to be born than in a dark court off Maiden Lane by the Strand. For, being born in a dark court, he had to seek the world of beauty, the wonder of undefiled sunrises and sunsets, green fields and purple hills, pale streams and opalescent lakes. He had to make an effort to find them.
At home there was at least mental excitement. His father's customers were continually coming and going, curious men from the outside world, who talked wittily and wore pretty clothes, and gave to the watchful boy glimpses of the vivid world in which they lived. And near by was the river, with its shipping, and the ever-changing aspect of the tides, the old Thames, which he loved all his life, and from which he derived inspiration and consolation.
[CHAPTER VI]
1790: AGED FIFTEEN