In 1789, Turner became a student in the Academy, and exhibited a picture in the next year at Somerset House, View of the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth. He was then only fifteen. From that time he worked with unceasing energy at his profession. Indeed, the pursuit of art was the one ruling principle of his life. He frequently went on excursions, the first being to Ramsgate and Margate, and was storing his memory with effects of storm, mist, and tempest, which he reproduced. In 1799, when made A.R.A., Turner had already exhibited works which ranged over twenty-six counties of England and Wales. In 1802 he was made full Academician, and presented, as his diploma picture, Dolbadarn Castle, North Wales. In this year he visited the Continent, and saw France and Switzerland. Five years later Turner was appointed Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy. We are told his lectures were delivered in so strange a style, that they were scarcely instructive. Of his water-colour paintings and of the Liber Studiorum it is impossible to speak too highly; he created the modern school of water-colour painting, and his works in oil have influenced the art of the nineteenth century. He visited Italy for the first time in 1819; again ten years later, and for the last time in 1840. His eccentricity, both in manner and in art, increased with age. Though wealthy, and possessing a good house in Queen Anne Street, he died in an obscure lodging by the Thames, at Chelsea, a few days before Christmas, 1851, Turner bequeathed his property to found a charity for male decayed artists, but the alleged obscurity of his will defeated this object. It was decided that his pictures and drawings should be presented to the National Gallery, that one thousand pounds should be spent on a monument to the painter in St. Paul's, twenty thousand pounds should be given to the Royal Academy, and the remainder to the next of kin and heir at law. The National Gallery contains more than one hundred of his pictures, besides a large number of water-colour drawings and sketches. In his earlier works Turner took the old masters as his models, some of his best pictures showing the characteristics of the Dutch school, as The Shipwreck, and The Sun rising in a Mist. In The Tenth Plague, and The Goddess of Discord, the influence of Poussin is visible, whilst Wilson is imitated in Æneas with the Sibyl, and A View in Wales. Turner was fond of matching himself against Claude; and not only did he try his powers in rivalry with the older masters, he delighted to enter into honest competition with painters of the day, and when Wilkie's Village Politicians was attracting universal notice, Turner produced his Blacksmith's Shop in imitation of it. In his later pictures Turner sacrificed form to colour. "Mist and vapour, lit by the golden light of morn, or crimsoned with the tints of evening, spread out to veil the distance, or rolled in clouds and storms, are the great characteristics of Turner's art as contrasted with the mild serenity of the calm unclouded heaven of Claude." (Redgrave.) Turner in his choice of colours forsook conventionality, and "went to the cataract for its iris, to the conflagration for its flames, asked of the sea its intensest azure, of the sky its clearest gold." (Ruskin.) The same critic considers Turner's period of central power, entirely developed and entirely unabated, to begin with the Ulysses, and to close with the Téméraire, a period of ten years, 1829—1839.
JOHN CONSTABLE (1776—1837) was born at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, June 11th, 1776, and the sunny June weather in which the painter first saw the light seems to pervade all his pictures. Constable's father was a miller, and intended that his son should succeed to his business; it has been said also that it was proposed to educate him for holy orders. Constable, however, was meant for a painter, and became one of the best delineators of English scenery. In 1800, he became student in the Royal Academy. In 1802, he exhibited his first picture. In 1819, he was elected A.R.A., and became a full member ten years after. Constable's earlier efforts were in the direction of historical painting and portraiture, but he found his true sphere in landscape. He was thoroughly English. No foreign master influenced him, and rustic life furnished all he needed. He said, "I love every style and stump and lane in the village: as long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them." To this determination we owe some of the most pleasant English pictures, full of fresh, breezy life, rolling clouds, shower-wetted foliage, and all the greenery of island scenes. He loved to paint under the sun, and impart a glittering effect to his foliage which many of his critics could not understand. Indeed, Constable was not appreciated thoroughly till after his death. He seems to have known that this would be the case, for early in his career he wrote, "I feel now more than ever a decided conviction that I shall some time or other make some good pictures—pictures that shall be valuable to posterity, if I do not reap the benefit of them." Constable did not attempt bold or mountainous scenery, but loved the flat, sunny meadows of Suffolk, and declared that the river Stour made him a painter. In the National Gallery are his: The Corn-field, The Valley Farm (see Frontispiece), (a view of "Willy Lott's House," on the Stour, close by Flatford Mill, the property of the painter's father), A Corn-field with figures, and On Barnes Common.
SIR AUGUSTUS WALL CALLCOTT (1779—1844) has been styled the English Claude. He was born at Kensington Gravel Pits, then a pretty suburban spot. He was, for some years, a chorister at Westminster Abbey, but early adopted painting as his profession. Callcott was a pupil of Hoppner, and began as a portrait painter. He soon devoted himself to landscape, with an occasional attempt at history. He became a full member of the Academy in 1810, his presentation picture being Morning. His best pictures were produced between 1812 and 1826, during which period he produced The Old Pier at Littlehampton (National Gallery), Entrance to the Pool of London, Mouth of the Tyne, Calm on the Medway (Earl of Durham). Callcott married in 1827, and went to Italy. On his return in the following year he soon became a fashionable painter. "His pictures, bright, pleasant of surface, and finished in execution, were suited to the appreciation of the public, and not beyond their comprehension; commissions poured in upon him." (Redgrave.) The Queen knighted him in 1837, and in the same year he exhibited his Raphael and the Fornarina, engraved for the Art Union by L. Stocks, which, if it possesses few faults, excites no enthusiasm. In 1840 appeared Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughter, a large picture, which overtaxed the decaying powers of the artist. Among Callcott's later pictures are Dutch Peasants returning from Market, and Entrance to Pisa from Leghorn. As a figure painter he does not appear at his best. Examples of this class are Falstaff and Simple, and Anne Page and Slender (Sheepshanks Collection).
WILLIAM COLLINS (1788—1847) was born in London, where his father carried on business as a picture dealer, in addition to the somewhat uncertain calling of a journalist. The future painter was introduced to Morland, a friend of his father, and learnt many things, some to be imitated, others to be avoided, in that artist's studio. From 1807 he exhibited at the Academy, of which he became a full member in 1820. He exhibited one hundred and twenty-one pictures in a period of forty years, specially devoting himself to landscape, with incidents of ordinary life. Now he would paint children swinging on a gate, as in Happy as a King (National Gallery); children bird-nesting, or sorrowing for their play-fellows, as in The Sale of the Pet Lamb. Collins was also specially successful in his treatment of cottage and coast scenery, as in The Haunts of the Sea-fowl, The Prawn Catchers (National Gallery), and Fishermen on the look-out. After visiting Italy, Collins forsook for a time his former manner, and painted the Cave of Ulysses, and the Bay of Naples; but neither here nor in the Christ in the Temple with the Doctors, and The two Disciples at Emmaus, do we see him at his best. He wisely returned to his first style.
WILLIAM LINTON (1791—1876) was employed in a merchant's office in Liverpool, but quitted it to begin an artist's career in London. In 1821, he exhibited his first picture, The Morning after the Storm. After visiting the Continent, Linton returned to England, and produced pictures of the classic scenes he had studied. After a second foreign tour, in which he visited Greece, Sicily, and Calabria, he exhibited The Embarkation of the Greeks for Troy, The Temples of Pæstum (National Gallery), and several works of a like character.