Turner not only kept his secret from his friends, but from Mrs. Danby, who, says Mr. Thornbury—
“One day, as she was brushing an old coat of Turner’s, in turning out a pocket, she found and pounced on a letter directed to him, and written by a friend who lived at Chelsea. Mrs. Danby, it appears, came to the conclusion that Turner himself was probably at Chelsea, and went there to seek for him, in company with another infirm old woman. From inquiries in a place by the river-side, where gingerbread was sold, they came to the conclusion that Turner was living in a certain small house close by, and informed a Mr. Harpur,[48] whom she and Turner knew. He went to the place and found the painter sinking. This was on the 18th of December, 1851, and on the following day Turner died.”
So died the great solitary genius, Turner, the first of all men to endeavour to paint the full power of the sun, the greatest imagination that ever sought expression in landscape, the greatest pictorial interpreter of the elemental forces of nature, that ever lived. His life, and character, and art, complex as they were in their manifestation, were as simple in motive as those of the most ordinary man. Art, fame, and money were what he strived for from the beginning to the end of his days, and those days were embittered at the end by fallacies of hope with regard to all three. Critics laughed at him, he was given no social honour, (neither knighted nor made President of the Royal Academy), and his money was useless. For the meanness and isolation of his existence he had no one to thank but himself, but this was also, as we hope we have shown in the course of these pages, the natural result of the motives of his life.
The nobleness of his life consisted in his devotion to landscape art, and this should cover many sins. He found it sunk very low: he left it raised to a height which it had never attained before. That he could have done this by painting falsely is absurd. The falsity of his works is just of that kind which comes from almost infinite knowledge of truth. He knew little else but art and nature, and he knew these by heart. He could make nature, and this confidence in his creative power led him sometimes into strange errors, which no one else could have made, such as putting the sun and moon in impossible positions in the same picture, and making boats sail in opposite directions before the wind; but how much more truth of natural phenomena has he not given even in such pictures than can be found in any literal transcript of nature! His colour appears to many to be untrue; but this is greatly due to his clinging from first to last to one central truth—the sun. It was that which gave the pitch to his light, and his colour too, as in nature. To that great light all must be subservient; it is not the local colour of an object in the foreground, or the strength of shade of a particular cave, that controls the chiaroscuro and colouring of nature, but the sun. So all things were sacrificed to this; the green must go from the grass, and the shadows must become scarlet, rather than this truth should be lost. His preference for harmonies of blue, red, and yellow, to the exclusion of green, never giving, as Mr. Leslie pointed out, the “verdure” of England, is remarkable; he is the only artist we know who, instead of the usual “bit of red,” to correct the green of a landscape, introduces a bit of “green” (generally harsh crude green), to correct its too great redness. (See, for instance, the apron of the woman in the left-hand corner of his drawing of Rouen Cathedral for the “Rivers of France.”) His constant fault, and, as we think, an inexcusable one, is the careless drawing of his figures. It is not an excuse to say that they must not be painted so as to draw attention from the landscape; first, because Turner in his earlier pictures showed that he could introduce well-finished figures without doing this; and secondly, because Turner’s figures in his later pictures do this by their badness. This carelessness gradually grew on him, because he would not take pains with them. He could draw very small figures very well, giving more spirit and essence than any other artist, in a touch. He could indicate a shamble, a strut, a march, lassitude, confidence, any physical or mental quality of a figure as easily as he could a bough or a cloud; but when he had to draw a figure to which time must be given, to perfect a definite, complex, organized form, he scamped it. His indication of the spirit of animals is often wonderful, as in the deer in Arundel Park, and the dogs in Troyes.
Of Turner’s mind and character apart from his art not much can be said in praise. The former we have already said so much about that we need only say here that although not of a very high order, except in sensibility and perception, he showed now and then capacities which might have been turned to good account by more generous training. Although his jokes were mainly practical, or of that kind which is understood by the term “waggery;” a few good things which he said have been reported, such for instance as that “indistinctness was his forte;” and though his poetry is generally miserable, it here and there contains a fine expression. It is remarkable, however, how both his wit, and what is good in his poetry, are connected with his art. He never said a thing worth recording about anything else, and the few good bits in his poetry are all reflections of a pictorial image. The utter helplessness of his mind, when he tried to put his reasoning into words, is shown by Mr. Hamerton, in one wonderful extract. (See his “Life of Turner,” p. 143.) We do not wonder that his attempts at teaching (though he is said at one time in his youth to have got as much as a guinea a lesson) and his lectures as a professor of perspective were failures.
As to his character, it was mainly negative, on all points except art and money. The best part of it was the tenderness of his heart; but though we have no doubt about this fact, or that he could occasionally in his later years be generous even in money,[49] this does not raise our opinion of him much, for he had more than he wished to spend. If he was remarkable for kind and generous impulses, he was still more remarkable for the success with which he, in general, controlled them. We cannot dispute Mr. Ruskin’s assertion that he never “failed in an undertaken trust,” but we have yet to learn that he ever undertook one.
If it be really true that, unasked and without any question of repayment, he gave a sum of many thousand pounds on more than one occasion to the son of one of his friends and patrons, such an act deserves more accurate record and complete proof. The money was repaid in both cases, it is said.
He showed his best disposition in his kindness to children and animals, and his fellow-artists. Of the last he always spoke kindly, and to young or old was ever just and kind and patient. Poor Haydon said that he “did him justice;” he assisted many a young man with a useful hint, and once took down one of his pictures at the Academy to find a place for one of an unknown man. He took great interest in the founding of the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, and meant his accumulated wealth to be spent in a home for decayed artists.
There is no doubt that long before he died he felt the uselessness of wealth and a desire to dispose of his own in a good way. The only proof we have of his notions of a good way is his will, and that, as we have already said, is not an unselfish document, and the codicils which he added to it from 1831 to 1849 do not show any increase of unselfishness. On the contrary, he revoked his legacies to his uncles and cousins, and left his finished pictures to form a Turner Gallery, and money to found a Turner medal and a monument to himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral.