There was, however, much of pleasure in this life for a boy like Turner, for though he evidently worked hard, he liked work and the work he had to do was especially congenial to him. He met friends and encouragers on all sides; from his father to his school-fellows. However much reason he may have had for disappointment in later years, there was none in his early life. He was “found out” in his childhood. Encouraged by his father, with his drawings finding a ready sale to such men as Mr. Henderson, Mr. Crowle, and Mr. Tomkison, with plenty of employment in no slavish mean work for such a youngster, such as colouring prints and putting in backgrounds to drawings, with Mr. Porden generously offering to take him as an apprentice for nothing, with a kind friend like Dr. Monro always willing to give him a supper and half-a-crown for sketches of the country near his residence at Bushey, or the result of an evening’s copying of the then best attainable water colours; his life was far more agreeable, far more tended to make him think well of the world and of the people in it than has been usually represented, and probably as good as he could have had for attaining early proficiency in his art. London at that time was not a bad place for a landscape artist. It was neither so clouded nor so sooty as it is now; there were healthier trees in it, and more of them, a more picturesque and a purer river, and within less than half an hour’s walk from Maiden Lane there were green fields, for north of the British Museum the country was still open.
But he was not entirely dependent upon his art and his employers for enjoyment, or for forming his opinion of the human race. There were houses at which he visited and where he was received warmly. When at school at Margate he got an “introduction to the pleasant family of a favourite school-fellow;” at Bristol there was Mr. Narraway,[8] a fellmonger in Broadmead, and an old friend of his father, at whose house he drew two of the children and his own portrait; and at the house of Mr. William Frederick Wells, the artist, he was evidently one of the family, as is proved by the charmingly tender reminiscences of Mrs. Wheeler.
“In early life my father’s house was his second home, a haven of rest from many domestic trials too sacred to touch upon. Turner loved my father with a son’s affection; and to me he was as an elder brother. Many are the times I have gone out sketching with him. I remember his scrambling up a tree to obtain a better view, and then he made a coloured sketch, I handing up his colours as he wanted them. Of course, at that time, I was quite a young girl. He was a firm affectionate friend to the end of his life; his feelings were seldom seen on the surface, but they were deep and enduring. No one would have imagined, under that rather rough and cold exterior, how very strong were the affections which lay hidden beneath. I have more than once seen him weep bitterly, particularly at the death of my own dear father,[9] which took him by surprise, for he was blind to the coming event, which he dreaded. He came immediately to my house in an agony of tears. Sobbing like a child, he said, ‘Oh, Clara, Clara! these are iron tears. I have lost the best friend I ever had in my life.’ Oh! what a different man would Turner have been if all the good and kindly feelings of his great mind had been called into action; but they lay dormant, and were known to so very few. He was by nature suspicious, and no tender hand had wiped away early prejudices, the inevitable consequence of a defective education. Of all the light-hearted merry creatures I ever knew, Turner was the most so; and the laughter and fun that abounded when he was an inmate of our cottage was inconceivable, particularly with the juvenile members of the family.”—THORNBURY’S Life of Turner (1877), pp. 235, 236.
A man who knew this lady for sixty years, and about whom so kind a heart could have thus written, could not have been driven to a life of morbid seclusion because the world had treated him so badly in his youth. His home may have been, and probably was a cheerless one, and we may well pity him on that account. The rest of our pity we had better reserve for his want of education, and the secretive, suspicious disposition which nature gave him, and which he allowed to master his more genial propensities.
CHAPTER III.
YOUTH.
1789 to 1796.
THE only rebuff with which the young artist appears to have met was from Tom Malton, the perspective draughtsman, who sent him back to his father as a boy to whom it was impossible to teach geometrical perspective. As Mr. Hamerton observes, “There is nothing in this which need surprise us in the least. Scientific perspective is a pursuit which may amuse or occupy a mathematician, but the stronger the artistic faculty in a painter the less he is likely to take to it, for it exercises other faculties than his. Besides this, he feels instinctively that he can do very well without it.” No doubt he did feel this, and the feeling very much lessened the disappointment at being “sent back,” and he did very well without it, so well that he was appointed Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy without it, and not unfrequently exhibited pictures on its walls, which showed how very much “without it” he was.
Otherwise he met with no rebuffs in his art. We have seen that he got plenty of employment, and have expressed an opinion that that employment—colouring engravings, and putting in backgrounds and foregrounds and skies for architectural drawings—was no mean employment for a youngster. He himself, when pitied in later years for this supposed degradation and slavery, replied, “Well, and what could be better practice!” and it was this and more. It not only taught him to work neatly, to lay flat washes smoothly and accurately, but it taught him to exercise his ingenuity and artistic taste. He probably succeeded so well, because it gave him an opportunity of displaying his artistic faculty. Every sketch that he had thus to beautify presented an artistic problem, how best to light and decorate and make a picture of the bare bones of an architectural design. It gave him a sense of power and importance thus to be the converter of topography into art; it taught him the value of light and shade, and the decorative capacities of trees and sky. His success gave him self-reliance. It also, and this was perhaps a more doubtful advantage, taught him to consider drawing as a skill in beautifying. He got the habit of treating buildings as objects less valuable as objects of art in themselves, than for the breaking of sunbeams, and as straight lines to contrast with the endless curves of nature; and also the habit of using trees as he wanted them, of bending their boughs and moulding their contours in harmony with the poem-picture of his imagination. To this early treatment of architectural drawings may be traced his great power of composition, and also much of his mannerism.
That he soon knew his power, and had his secrets of manipulation, may be one reason for his early secretiveness about his art; for though there is little in these early works of his to prefigure his coming greatness, he, when a youth, attained a proficiency equal to that of the best water-colour artists of his day, and, with his friend Girtin, soon surpassed all except Cozens; and he could not have done this without a sense of superiority and many private experiments; or, on the other hand, he may, like many men, have required complete solitude to work at all, though this was not the case in later life, as he often painted almost the whole of his pictures on the Academy walls. At all events, the degree of his secretiveness is extraordinary. “I knew him,” says an old architect, “when a boy, and have often paid him a guinea for putting backgrounds to my architectural drawings, calling upon him for this purpose at his father’s shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He never would suffer me to see him draw, but concealed, as I understood, all that he did in his bedroom.” When in this bedroom one morning, the door suddenly opened, and Mr. Britton entered.[10] In an instant Turner covered up his drawings and ran to bar the crafty intruder’s progress. “I’ve come to see the drawings for the Earl.”[11] “You shan’t see ’em,” was the reply. “Is that the answer I am to take back to his lordship?” “Yes; and mind that next time you come through the shop, and not up the back way.” When Mr. Newby Lowson accompanied him on a tour on the continent he “did not show his companion a single sketch.” Similar stories could be added to show how this habit continued through his life.