THE "FIGHTING TEMERAIRE" TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH. FROM A PAINTING BY J.M.W. TURNER.
The "Fighting Téméraire" was a line-of-battle ship of ninety-eight guns which Lord Nelson captured from the French at the battle of the Nile, August 1, 1798. In the battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805, she fought next to the "Victory"—the ship from which Nelson commanded the battle, and aboard which, in the course of it, he was killed. She was sold out of the service in 1838, and towed to Rotherhithe to be broken up. Turner's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1839. His picture touched the popular heart, and though no reproduction in black and white can approach the splendor of color in the original, the engraving renders faithfully the sentiment of the picture.
"I love," he said, "every stile and stump and lane in the village; as long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them." He ceased to "hold a brush" on the 30th of March, 1837.
Turner, who was born a year before Constable, on April 23, 1775, was, unlike the miller's son of Bergholt, a child of the city. He was born in London, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father was a hair-dresser; and when only fourteen entered the Royal Academy schools as a student. The next year he exhibited a drawing of Lambeth Palace; and in 1799 was made an associate, and in 1802 a member, of the Royal Academy. His career was probably more successful than that of any other artist of modern times. Of his life the more that is said in charity the better; for as the sun rises oftentimes from a fog bank, so the luminous dreams of color by which we know Turner emanated from an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and rapacious bickering—of his life naught became him like the leaving. He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his pictures—three hundred and sixty paintings and nearly two thousand drawings—should become the property of the nation, the only condition attached being that two of the pictures should be placed between two paintings by Claude Lorraine in the National Gallery. Twenty thousand pounds were left to the Royal Academy for the benefit of superannuated artists; and one thousand pounds were appropriated for a monument in St. Paul's, where this curious old man knew the English people would be proud to lay him.
For many years Turner had refused to sell certain of his pictures; while for others, and for the published engravings after his work, he had exacted prices of a character and in a manner that smacked of dishonesty. But as in obscure and dingy lodgings his brain had evolved the splendor of sunset and mirage, so, undoubtedly, his imagination had foreshadowed the noble monument which the Turner room at the National Gallery has created to his memory.
JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER. FROM A DRAWING BY SIR JOHN GILBERT.
This portrait, made many years ago, is a sketch from life, and realizes the crabbed, sturdy painter, Turner, as we may imagine him.
Turner's work, as has been said before, is peculiarly his own. It is true that in the earlier pictures the influence of Claude Lorraine is evident; but upon this root is engrafted an audacity in the conception of color, a research of luminosity in comparison with which nearly all painting is eclipsed. That this refulgence is tinged now and then with exaggeration, with a forcing of effect that destroys the sense of weight and solidity in depicted objects where this sense should prevail, is certain. But it is not the least of his merits that he was endowed with a sureness of taste which enabled him to avoid the rock on which all his imitators have split—his work is never spectacular. It is perhaps at its best when he has the simple elements of sea and sky as his theme. Here, with the intangible qualities of air and light, textureless and diaphanous, he is most at home. When it becomes a question of the representation of earth, buildings, or trees, one feels the lack of loving subservience to nature; the spirit against which the art of Constable is eloquent lurks here too much.