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TURNER, JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM. 



TURNER, JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM. 



201 



colour drawings and engravings at his residence in the Adelphi, and 

 he not only gave his two favourite protege's, Turner and Girtin, free 

 access to his treasures, with permission to copy them, but directed 

 their studies, and encouraged them to make coloured sketches of the 

 scenery .around London, which he readily purchased at prices satis- 

 factory to the modest students. In these sketching rambles, Turner 

 and Girtin were constant companions, and they formed for themselves 

 a style of water-colour painting very different from that of any of 

 their predecessors unless indeed it be Cozens, a man of some gt uius 

 and a friend of Dr. Monro, from whose drawings and conversation 

 much was probably learned by the two young painters. Qirtin was 

 Turner's senior by a year or two, and as he was the more regularly 

 educated artist, it is not unlikely that he was to some extent his 

 companion's tutor; certain it is that their drawings were very similar 

 in style the chief difference being thal^Turner made out hia details 

 more carefully and some have fancied that had Girtin lived he 

 would have been as great a painter as his friend. He gave way, 

 however, to intemperance, and died (Nov. 1802) at the early age of 

 twenty-seven. Turner with more self-control and perseverance 

 laboured steadily on and rose in good time to the undisputed supre- 

 macy in his branch of art. 



Two years before he entered the academy as a student, in 1787, 

 when only twelve years of age (supposing his bapti-mal year was the 

 year of his birtli), Turner made his bow to the public as an exhibitor 

 at the Royal Academy (under the name of W. Turner) of two 

 drawings, 'Dover Castle' and 'Wanstead House;' his next appear- 

 ance being in 1790, the year following his admission as a student, 

 when he sent a ' View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth.' From 

 this time till his death a period of sixty years he regularly con- 

 tributed to every exhibition of the Royal Academy, with the exception 

 of the years 1821, 1824, and 1848, sending in all 259 pictures, a very 

 large proportion of them being paintings of considerable magnitude. 

 But these alone would give a very inadequate notion of his remarkable 

 facility and industry, as during that period he also sent to the 

 British Institution some twenty oil paintings which had not been 

 exhibited at the Academy, and painted a large number, and some of 

 them his chief works, which were never exhibited at all, besides many 

 hundreds of water-colour drawings and designs for engraving. 



For some ten or twelve years he painted chiefly, if not exclusively, 

 in water-colours, his pictures with the exception of two or three 

 fancy subjects, such as 'The Battle of the Nile,' 1799 ; 'The Fifth 

 Plague of Egypt,' 1800 being confined to the representation of 

 English and Welsh scenery. But already it was felt that there was a 

 degree of brilliancy of execution united with close observation of 

 nature which placed his works quite apart from those of any of his 

 contemporaries, and justified the highest anticipations of his future 

 success. The popular opinion received professional confirmation by 

 his election in 1799 as an associate of the Royal Academy; in 1802 he 

 became an academician. He now visited Scotland, France, Switzer- 

 land, and the Rhine ; launched boldly into oil painting on canvasses 

 of large size, and began to look into the Greek and Roman poets 

 or their substitute Lempriere for subjects for his pencil. This year, 

 1802, the exhibition afforded a fair illustration of the wide and daring 

 range his pencil was taking, his contributions being ' The Falls of the 

 Clyde;' ' Kilchurn Castle;' 'Edinburgh from the Water of Leith ;' 

 ' Ben Lomond Mountains the Traveller ; ' ' Jason ; ' ' The Tenth 

 Plague of Egypt;' 'Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather;' 

 and ' Ships bearing up for Anchorage.' He evidently felt his strength ; 

 yet year after year, while showing himself sufficiently conscious that 

 he knew his proper walk, he kept on putting forth strange experi- 

 ments in subjects and methods ; thus one year (1803) saw his ' Holy 

 Family,' another (1807) 'A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the 

 price charged to the Butcher for shoeing his Pony,' another (1808), 

 ' The Unpaid Bill, or the Dentist reproving his Son's Prodigality,' and 

 another (1809), ' The Gazetteer's Petition ; ' but even from these strange 

 whims he seemed to gather new strength. At this time however he 

 appears to have studied with most earnestness the stormy ocean, and 

 never yet has the sea in its wildest fury been represented on canvas 

 with such wondrous might and majesty as in his noble 'Shipwreck: 

 Fishing-boats endeavouring to rescue the Crew,' now at Marlborough- 

 House ; the ' Gale at Sea/ belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere; and 

 the ' Wreck of the Minotaur,' the property of Lord Yarborough. But 

 even alongside of these the poetic treatment of views of places, such 

 as his 'Edinburgh from Calton Hill,' 1804; 'Fall of the Rhine at 

 Schaffhausen,' 1805, and 'Sun Rising through Vapour,' 1806, not only 

 enabled them to hold their place, but obtained for him perhaps even 

 a wider popularity, while with the connoisseurs his ' Narcissus and 

 Echo,' 1814, ' Mercury and Herse",' and 'Apollo and Python,' 1811, his 

 'Dido and ./Eneas,' 'Apuleia,' and a long list of other mythological 

 themes, won him fame as a poetic painter, though now, despite their 

 pictorial richness and daring, they are generally felt to be in truth the 

 least poetical of his works, and infinitely inferior to his other and 

 more purely imaginative productions of this period, ' Snow storm 

 Hannibal crossing the Alps,' and the like, in which he almost for the 

 first time pourtniyed with gome approach to the vastnessand sublimity 

 of nature the fierce encounter of the elements, the splendour of the 

 rarer phenomena of the atmosphere, and the beauty and glory of the 

 mountains. 



In 1807 Turner was elected professor in perspective to the Royal 

 Academy, and for several years he continued to give courses of lectures 

 to the students, in which he spoke of the systems of pictorial compo- 

 sition adopted by the great landscape painters of earlier times, of 

 their principles of effect and of colour, and compared them though 

 sparingly with the teaching of nature ; but the lectures were jiever 

 printed, and as far as we know no record of them is left. Report has 

 always spoken of them however as ill-arranged and ill-delivered, con- 

 fused in style, and obscure in illustration. They never succeeded in 

 securing the attention of the students, and for many years before ho 

 resigned his professorship he had ceased to deliver any lectures. 



An important circumstance in the earlier career of Turner was the 

 publication of hid 'Liber Studiorum,' which was commenced in 1808. 

 This now famous work was undertaken in rivalry of the book of 

 sketches known as the 'Liber Veritatis' of Claude, in the pcs 

 of the Duke of Devonshire, of which a series of fac-simile aqua-tiuta 

 engravings was made by Earlom and others. Turner's series, engraved 

 in a similar style, embraced examples of all the principal forms of 

 landscape composition, and displayed a fertility of resource and an 

 intimate observance of nature such as the publication of no previous 

 landscape painter had approached. The work has long been extremely 

 rare, and when brought to sale commands a very high price : two 

 republications of it have been lately announced. From this time to 

 his death Turner remained the most in request with publishers and 

 engravers of any English landscape-painter, both for the landscape 

 illustration of books and for series of engravings ; and even where his 

 'eccentricities of colour,' as they are called, repel, his engraved designs 

 are with few exceptions received with unmitigated delight. Among 

 the most famous of these engraved works may be mentioned the 

 ' Scenery of the Southern Coast,' ' England and Wales,' ' Rivers of 

 England,' 'Rivers of France,' Rogers's 'Italy' and 'Poems,' of all his 

 vignette engravings the most exquisite, the poems of Byron, Scott, &c. 

 From his paintings likewise some very noble line-engravings of large 

 size have been made by Pye, Willmore, Miller, Prior, &c. ; while 

 Turner's grand engraving of 'The Shipwreck' is one of the richest 

 specimens of mezzotinto. 



We cannot in a sketch like this tracj the progress of the painter by 

 the only really important events recorded of his life the production 

 of his chief pictures. He made three visits to Italy in 1819, 1829, 

 and 1840, and after each his style underwent a remarkable change. 

 The usual division of his style, and on the whole it is the most conve- 

 nient one, does not however exactly coincide with his Italian visits. 

 Turner's career, it is saLI, comprises three distinct periods; the first 

 reaches to about his twenty-seventh year, when he was elected into 

 the Academy, and during which he was chiefly noticeable as a water- 

 colour painter diligently occupied in drawing from nature, and at the 

 same time forming for himself a style, by carefully studying (and 

 imitating) the methods of his English predecessors, Wilson, Louth> r- 

 bourg, and, in a less degree, Gainsborough, the iufluence of whose 

 works is very apparent in his earliest oil-paintings : the second period 

 ranges from 1802 to 1830, in which ho is seen at first a follow; r <>f 

 Claude, and, in a less degree, of Caspar Poussin, but rapidly disen- 

 cumbering himself from the trammels of every kind of pupilage to 

 great names, and striking out a style of landscape painting entirely 

 original and wholly unrivalled for brilliancy of colouring and effect : 

 while the third period, dating from his second visit to Rome in 1830, 

 is one in which everything else was sacrificed in the effort to attain the 

 utmost splendour of light and colour to make (in the strange language 

 of his own ' MS. Fallacies of Hope ') " the sun 



Exhale earth's humid bubbles, and, emulous of light, 

 lleflect her forms, each in prismatic guise." 



But while such a division is convenient, it must not be regarded as 

 anything more. Like every great artist, his conceptions were always 

 advancing and expanding, and in each period were painted pictures 

 that would seem justly to belong to another. At which period he 

 painted best it is difficult to say, and judges of art pronounce widely 

 diflerent opinions. It is quite certain that up to some ten or twelve 

 years before his death, his knowledge of the phenomena of nature and 

 of the resources of art continued to grow and expand, even when hia 

 hand failed to express faithfully his intentions, or his impatience pre- 

 vented him getting them forth with due elaboration. Any one who 

 has carefully studied Turner's works chronologically, and who has at 

 the same time diligently studied nature, will sympathise if he cannot 

 entirely concur in the strong statement of Turner's most ardent 

 admirer, Ruskin : " There has been marked and constant progress in 

 his mind ; he has not been, like some few artists, without child- 

 hood ; his course of study has been as evidently as it has been swiftly 

 progressive, and in different stages of the struggle, sometimes one 

 order of truth, sometimes another, has been aimed at or omitted. 

 . . . . As he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was 

 absorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and 

 never abandoned without a gain ; and his latest works present the sum 

 and perfection of his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impa- 

 tience and passion of one who feels too much and knows too much, 

 and hns too little time to say it in, to pause for expression, or to ponder 

 over his syllables." (' Modern Painters,' i. 407.) 



It would be easy to refer to examples illustrative of Turner's 



