Then carriages began to stop before the dingy building at Forty-seven Queen Anne Street, and broadcloth and satin mounted the creaking stairs to the studio. It happened about this time that Turner's prices began to increase. Like the sibyl of old, if a customer said, "I do not want it," the painter put an extra ten pounds on the price. For "Dido Building Carthage," Turner's original price was five hundred pounds. People came to see the picture and they said, "The price is too high." Next day Turner's price for the "Carthage" was one thousand pounds. Finally, Sir Robert Peel offered the painter five thousand pounds for the picture, but Turner said he had decided to keep it for himself, and he did.
In the forepart of his career he sold few pictures—for the simple reason that no one wanted them. And he sold few pictures during the latter years of his life, for the reason that his prices were so high that none but the very rich could buy. First, the public scorned Turner. Next, Turner scorned the public. In the beginning it would not buy his pictures, and later it could not.
A frivolous public and a shallow press, from his first exhibition, when fifteen years of age, to his last, when seventy, made sport of his originalities. But for merit there is a recompense in sneers, and a benefit in sarcasms, and a compensation in hate; for when these things get too pronounced a champion appears. And so it was with Turner. Next to having a Boswell write one's life, what is better than a Ruskin to uphold one's cause!
Success came slowly; his wants were few, but his ambition never slackened, and finally the dreams of his youth became the realities of his manhood.
At twenty, Turner loved a beautiful girl—they became engaged. He went away on a tramp sketching-tour and wrote his ladylove just one short letter each month. He believed that "absence only makes the heart grow fonder," not knowing that this statement is only the vagary of a poet. When he returned the lady was betrothed to another. He gave the pair his blessing, and remained a bachelor—a very confirmed bachelor.
Perhaps, however, the reason his fiancee proved untrue was not through lack of the epistles he wrote her, but on account of them. In the British Museum I examined several letters written by Turner. They appeared very much like copy for a Josh Billings Almanac. Such originality in spelling, punctuation and use of capitals! It was admirable in its uniqueness. Turner did not think in words—he could only think in paint. But the young lady did not know this, and when a letter came from her homely little lover she was shocked, then she laughed, then she showed these letters to a nice young man who was clerk to a fishmonger and he laughed, then they both laughed. Then this nice young man and this beautiful young lady became engaged, and they were married at Saint Andrew's on a lovely May morning. And they lived happily ever afterward.
Turner was small, and in appearance plain. Yet he was big enough to paint a big picture, and he was not so homely as to frighten away all beautiful women. But Philip Gilbert Hamerton tells us, "Fortunate in many things, Turner was lamentably unfortunate in this: that throughout his whole life he never came under the ennobling and refining influence of a good woman."
Like Plato, Michelangelo, Sir Isaac Newton and his own Claude Lorraine, he was wedded to his art. But at sixty-five his genius suddenly burst forth afresh, and his work, Mr. Ruskin says, at that time exceeded in daring brilliancy and in the rich flowering of imagination, anything that he had previously done. Mr. Ruskin could give no reason, but rumor says, "A woman."
The one weakness of our hero, that hung to him for life, was the idea that he could write poetry. The tragedian always thinks he can succeed in comedy; the comedian spends hours in his garret rehearsing tragedy; most preachers have an idea that they could have made a quick fortune in business, and many businessmen are very sure that if they had taken to the pulpit there would now be fewer empty pews. So the greatest landscape-painter of recent times imagined himself a poet. Hamerton says that for remarkable specimens of grammar, spelling and construction Turner's verse would serve well to be given to little boys to correct.
One spot in Turner's life over which I like to linger is his friendship with Sir Walter Scott. They collaborated in the production of "Provincial Antiquities," and spent many happy hours together tramping over Scottish moors and mountains. Sir Walter lived out his days in happy ignorance concerning the art of painting, and although he liked the society of Turner, he confessed that it was quite beyond his ken why people bought his pictures.