"Turner was unquestionably, in his best time, the greatest master of water color who had ever lived. He may have been excelled since then in some special departments of the art, in some craft of execution, or in the knowledge of some particular thing in nature; but no one has ever deserved such generally high rank as Turner in the art of water-color painting. His superiority even goes so far that the art, in his hands, is like another art, a fresh discovery of his own.

TURNER.

"The color, in his most delicate work, hardly seems to be laid on the paper by any means known to us, but suggests the idea of a vaporous deposit, and besides the indescribable excellence of those parts of Turner's water-colors which do not look as if they were painted at all, there is excellence of another kind in those parts which exhibit dexterities of execution. Nor is the strange perfection of his painting in water color limited to landscape; his studies of still life, birds and their plumage, bits of interiors at Petworth, etc., are evidence enough that, had he chosen to paint objects rather than effects, he might have been as wonderful an object painter as William Hunt was, though in a different and more elevated manner." Thus writes Philip Gilbert Hamerton.

Turner was born April 23, 1775, in Maiden Lane, London, over a barber shop, in which his father, William Turner, lived and worked. The latter was an economical, good-natured, uneducated man, who taught his boy to be honest and saving.

The mother, Mary Turner, belonged to a family of Marshalls or Mallords near Nottingham, superior in position to the family of William Turner. She had an ungovernable temper, and is said to have led the barber "a sad life." Later, she became insane, and was sent to an asylum.

The boy William very early began to show his skill in drawing. In his first school at New Brentford, when he was ten years old, his birds, flowers, and trees on the walls of the room attracted attention, so that his schoolmates often did his work in mathematics for him while he made sketches. His father had intended him to be a barber, but, perceiving the lad's talent, encouraged him, hung his drawings in his shop windows, and sold them for a few pence or shillings each.

At twelve years of age, William was sent to "Mr. Palice, a floral drawing-master" in Soho; at thirteen, to a Mr. Coleman at Margate, where he loved and studied the sea; and at fourteen, to the Royal Academy. Meanwhile, he earned money by coloring prints, making backgrounds and skies for architects' plans, and copying pictures for Dr. Munro, who lived in one of the palaces on the Strand. This physician owned many Rembrandts and Gainsboroughs, with sketches by Claude, Titian, Vandevelde, and others.

This house proved a valuable place for study to the barber's son, who considered himself fortunate to receive half a crown and a supper for each evening's work.

When pitied by some one in later life, because of the hard work of his boyhood, he said, "Well! And what could be better practice?"

In 1792, when he was seventeen, he received a commission from Mr. J. Walker, an engraver, to make drawings for his Copperplate Magazine, and soon after from Mr. Harrison for his Pocket Magazine. To make these sketches, the youth travelled through Wales, on a pony lent him by a friend, and on foot, with his baggage in his handkerchief tied to the end of a stick, through Nottingham, Cambridge, Lincoln, Peterborough, Windsor, Ely, the Isle of Wight, and elsewhere.

"The result of these tours," says W. Cosmo Monkhouse, "may be said to have been the perfection of his technical skill, the partial displacement of traditional notions of composition, and the storing of his memory with infinite effects of nature."

His first water color at the Royal Academy Exhibition was a picture of Lambeth Palace, when he was fifteen, and his first oil painting at the exhibition, according to Redgrave, the "Rising Squall, Hot Wells," when he was eighteen. Hamerton thinks "Moonlight," a study in Milbank, was his first exhibited work in oil. "The picture," he says, "shows not the least trace of genius, yet it has always been rather a favorite with me for its truth to nature in one thing. All the ordinary manufacturers of moonlights—and moonlights have been manufactured in deplorably large quantities for the market—represent the light of our satellite as a blue and cold light; whereas in nature, especially in the southern summer, it is often pleasantly rich and warm. Turner did not follow the usual receipt, but had the courage to make his moonlight warm, though he had not as yet the skill to express the ineffably mellow softness of the real warm moonlights in nature."

At twenty-one, Turner hired a house in Hand Court, and began to teach drawing in London and elsewhere at ten shillings a lesson. But he soon grew impatient of his fashionable pupils, and the teaching was abandoned.

At twenty-two, he journeyed into the counties of Yorkshire and Kent, and soon produced "Morning on the Coniston Fells," in 1798; "Cattle in Water; Buttermere Lake," 1798; and "Norham Castle on the Tweed." Twenty years afterward, as he was passing Norham Castle, with Cadell, an Edinburgh publisher, he took off his hat to the castle. Cadell expressed surprise. "Oh," said Turner, "I made a drawing or painting of Norham several years ago. It took; and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute."

In Yorkshire, the rising young artist, natural and genial in manner, though small and somewhat plain in person, made many warm friends. He was often a guest at Farnley Hall, owned by Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes, who afterward adorned his home with fifty thousand dollars' worth of Turner's pictures.

Mr. Fawkes's son speaks of "the fun, frolic, and shooting we enjoyed together, and which, whatever may be said by others of his temper and disposition, have proved to me that he was, in his hours of distraction from his professional labors, as kindly-hearted a man, and as capable of enjoyment and fun of all kinds, as any I ever knew."

Mrs. Wheeler, a friend in these early years, says: "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."

Somewhere between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, a sorrow came which seemed completely to change Turner's nature. While at the Margate school, he had fallen in love with the sister of a schoolmate; the love had been reciprocated, and an engagement followed a few years later. During a long absence in his art work, their letters were intercepted by the young lady's stepmother, who finally prevailed upon her to become engaged to another. A week before the wedding, Turner arrived at Margate, and besought her to marry him; but his betrothed considered herself in honor bound to the new lover. The marriage proved a most unhappy one, and Turner remained a disappointed and solitary man through life.

His art now became his one absorbing thought; he worked early and late, often rising for work at four o'clock in the morning, saying sadly that there were "no holidays for him."

In 1799, when he was twenty-four, he was made an associate of the Royal Academy, and a full academician in 1802. Hamerton says: "His election is the more remarkable, that he had done nothing whatever to bring it about, except his fair hard work in his profession. He was absolutely incapable of social courtiership in any of its disguises. He gave no dinners, he paid no calls, he did nothing to make the academicians believe that he would be a credit to their order in any social sense. Even after his election, he would not go to thank his electors, in obedience to the established usage. 'If they had not been satisfied with my pictures,' he said to Stothard, 'they would not have elected me. Why, then, should I thank them? Why thank a man for performing a simple duty?' His views on the subject were clearly wrong, for the rules of good manners very frequently require us to thank people for performing simple duties, and the academicians were not under any obligation to elect the young painter so soon; but how completely Turner's conduct in this matter proves that he can only have been elected on his merits!...

"His elevation to the full membership was of immense value to him in his career, and he knew this so well that he remained deeply attached to the Academy all his life. He was associate or member of it for a full half-century, and during fifty years was only three times absent from its exhibitions."

This year, 1802, he removed to 64 Harley Street, taking his plain old father home to live with him. He took his first tour on the Continent, this year, making studies of Mont Blanc, the Swiss lakes and mountain passes. The exhibitions of 1803 to 1806 contained, among other pictures, "The Vintage at Macon," the celebrated "Calais Pier" in a gale; "The Source of the Arveiron," "Narcissus and Echo," "Edinburgh from Calton Hill;" his famous "Shipwreck," now in the National Gallery; and the magnificent "Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of Hesperides," also in the National Gallery.

In 1807, Turner began, at the suggestion of his friend, Mr. W. F. Wells, the Liber Studiorum, issued in dark blue covers, each containing five plates, the whole series of one hundred plates to be divided into historical, landscape, pastoral, mountainous, marine, and architectural. The work was intended as a rival to Claude Lorraine's Liber Veritatis.

After seventy plates had been published, the project came to an end in 1816, because of disagreement with engravers, and lack of patronage. The principal pictures were "Æsacus and Hesperia," "Jason," "Procris and Cephalus," the "Fifth and Tenth Plagues of Egypt," "Christ and the Woman of Samaria," "Rizpah," "Raglan Castle," the "River Wye," "Solway Moss," "Inverary," the "Yorkshire Coast," "Mer de Glace," the "Lake of Thun," "St. Gothard Pass," the "Alps from Grenoble," "Dunstanborough Castle," and others.

"So hopeless and worthless did the enterprise seem, at one time," says M. F. Sweetser, "that Charles Turner, the engraver, used the proofs and trials of effect as kindling paper. Many years later, Colnaghi, the great print-dealer, caused him to hunt up the remaining proofs in his possession, and gave him fifteen hundred pounds for them. 'Good God!' cried the old engraver, 'I have been burning bank-notes all my life.'... In later days three thousand pounds had been paid for a single copy of the Liber."

"The most obvious intention of the work," says Monkhouse, "was to show Turner's own power, and there never was, and perhaps never will be again, such an exhibition of genius in the same direction. No rhetoric can say for it as much as it says for itself in those ninety plates, twenty of which were never published. If he did not exhaust art or nature, he may be fairly said to have exhausted all that was then known of landscape art, and to have gone further than any one else in the interpretation of nature....

"Amongst his more obvious claims to the first place among landscape artists are his power of rendering atmospherical effects, and the structure and growth of things. He not only knew how a tree looked, but he showed how it grew. Others may have drawn foliage with more habitual fidelity, but none ever drew trunks and branches with such knowledge of their inner life.... Others have drawn the appearance of clouds, but Turner knew how they formed. Others have drawn rocks, but he could give their structure, consistency, and quality of surface, with a few deft lines and a wash; others could hide things in a mist, but he could reveal things through mist. Others could make something like a rainbow, but he, almost alone, and without color, could show it standing out, a bow of light arrested by vapor in mid-air, not flat upon a mountain, or printed on a cloud.... If we seek the books from which his imagination took fire, we have the Bible and Ovid; the first of small, the latter of great and almost solitary power. Jason, daring the huge glittering serpent; Syrinx, fleeing from Pan; Cephalus and Procris; Æsacus and Hesperia; Glaucus and Scylla; Narcissus and Echo. If we want to know the artists he most admired and imitated, or the places to which he had been, we shall find easily nearly all the former, and sufficient of the latter to show the wide range of his travel. In a word, one who has carefully studied the Liber has indeed little to learn of the range and power of Turner's art and mind, except his color and his fatalism."

In 1808, Turner was appointed professor of perspective in the Royal Academy, which position he held for thirty years, though he rarely gave lectures to students, owing to his confused manner and obscurity in the use of language. Ruskin says: "The zealous care with which Turner endeavored to do his duty is proved by a large existing series of drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely colored, all by his own hand, of the most difficult perspective subjects; illustrating not only directions of line, but effects of light, with a care and completion which would put the work of any ordinary teacher to utter shame. In teaching generally, he would neither waste time nor spare it; he would look over a student's drawing at the Academy, point to a defective part, make a scratch on the paper at the side, say nothing. If the student saw what was wanted, and did it, Turner was delighted; but if the student could not follow, Turner left him."

Turner this year moved to the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, where his garden extended to the Thames. In this he had a summer-house, where some of his best work was done. He still retained the Harley-Street house, and lived in it much the life of a recluse. Mr. Thornbury tells the following incident:—

"Two ladies called upon Turner while he lived in Harley Street. On sending in their names, after having ascertained that he was at home, they were politely requested to walk in, and were shown into a large sitting-room without a fire. This was in the depth of winter; and lying about in various places were several cats without tails. In a short time our talented friend made his appearance, asking the ladies if they felt cold. The youngest replied in the negative; her companion, more curious, wished she had stated otherwise, as she hoped they might have been shown into his sanctum or studio. After a little conversation he offered them wine and biscuits, which they partook of for the novelty, such an event being almost unprecedented in his house. One of the ladies bestowing some notice upon the cats, he was induced to remark that he had seven, and that they came from the Isle of Man."

Turner was fond of his pet cats, and would let no harm come to them. After he had moved, in 1812, to 47 Queen-Anne Street, one of his favorite pictures, "Bligh Shore" was used as a covering for a window. A cat desiring to enter the window scratched the picture severely, and was about to be punished for the offence, by Mrs. Danby, the housekeeper, when Turner said, "Never mind," and saved the cat from the whipping.

At his house in Twickenham, which he bought and rebuilt in 1813 or 1814, calling it Solus Lodge on account of his desire to be alone, and afterwards Sandycomb Lodge, the boys named him "Blackbirdy," because he protected the blackbirds in the adjacent trees, not allowing their nests to be robbed. Turner sold this place after having owned it about twelve years, because his aged father, whom he always called "Dad," was always working in the garden and catching cold.

The eccentric artist must have been at this time quite rich, as well as famous. He had painted "The Sun rising in Mist," in 1807; the well-known "Wreck of the Minotaur," in 1810; "Apollo killing the Python," in 1811; "Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps in a Snowstorm," in 1812; and "Crossing the Brook," and "Dido building Carthage," in 1815. "The first ('Crossing the Brook')," says Monkhouse, "is the purest and most beautiful of all his oil pictures of the loveliness of English scenery, the most simple in its motive, the most tranquil in its sentiment, the perfect expression of his enjoyment of the exquisite scenery in the neighborhood of Plymouth. The latter ('Dido building Carthage'), with all its faults, was the finest of the kind he ever painted, and his greatest effect in the way of color before his visit to Italy."

It is said that "Crossing the Brook" was painted for a gentleman who ordered it with the promise of paying twenty-five hundred dollars for it, but was disappointed in it when finished, and refused to take it. Turner was afterwards offered eight thousand dollars for it, but would not sell it.

In 1815, the artist, now forty years old, was again disappointed in love. He wrote to one of his best friends, Rev. H. Scott Trimmer, vicar of Heston, concerning his sister, Miss Trimmer: "If she would but waive her bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer instead of expecting one, the same (Sandycomb Lodge) might change occupiers." But Miss Trimmer had, at this time, another suitor, whom she married, and Turner never again attempted to win a wife.

In 1817, "The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire" was exhibited, a companion piece to the Building of Carthage. Years later, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Hardinge, and others, offered twenty-five thousand dollars to Turner for the two pictures, intending to present them to the National Gallery. "It's a noble offer," said the painter, "but I have willed them." He had already made his will, privately, giving these and other pictures to the nation.

The artist is said to have once remarked to his friend Chantrey, the sculptor: "Will you promise to see me rolled up in the 'Carthage' at my burial?"

"Yes," was the reply; "and I promise you also that, as soon as you are buried, I will see that you are taken up and unrolled."

In 1819, Turner made his first visit to Italy, after which his works became remarkable for their color. In 1823, says Monkhouse, "he astonished the world with the first of those magnificent dreams of landscape loveliness with which his name will always be specially associated: 'The Bay of BaiÆ, with Apollo and the Sibyl.'"

The "Rivers of England" was published in 1826, with sixteen engravings after Turner's designs. Monkhouse says: "For perfect balance of power, for the mirroring of nature as it appears to ninety-nine out of every hundred, for fidelity of color to both sky and earth, and form (especially of trees), for carefulness and accuracy of drawing, for work that neither startles you by its eccentricity nor puzzles you as to its meaning, which satisfies without cloying, and leaves no doubt as to the truth of its illusion, there is none to compare with these drawings of his of England after his first visit to Italy."

During this year, 1826, among other pictures, Turner exhibited his "Cologne—the Arrival of a Packet-boat—Evening." "There were," says Hamerton, "such unity and serenity in the work, and such a glow of light and color, that it seemed like a window opened upon the land of the ideal, where the harmonies of things are more perfect than they have ever been in the common world." The picture was hung between two of Sir Thomas Lawrence's portraits, the golden color of the "Cologne" dulling their effect. Turner at once covered his picture with lampblack, thereby spoiling it for the public view. When reproached by the critics, he said: "Poor Lawrence was so unhappy. It will all wash off after the Exhibition." "Was there ever," says Hamerton, "a more exquisitely beautiful instance of self-sacrifice?" The "Cologne" was sold, in 1854, to Mr. John Naylor, for two thousand guineas.

Turner made designs for twenty illustrations in Rogers's poem of "Italy," for which, it is asserted, he would accept but five guineas each, as the execution of the work pleased him so well; thirteen illustrations for "The Provincial Antiquities of Scotland," for which Sir Walter Scott wrote the letter-press; and twenty-six pictures for Finden's "Illustrations of the Bible." Turner generally received from twenty to one hundred guineas for each drawing used, which was returned to him that he might sell it, if he so desired.

In 1827 the first part of his largest series of prints was published: "England and Wales." The work was discontinued twelve years later, because it was not a pecuniary success.

Bohn offered twenty-eight hundred pounds for the copper plates and stock, but Turner himself bid them in, at the auction, for three thousand pounds, saying to Bohn: "So, sir, you were going to buy my 'England and Wales' to sell cheap, I suppose—make umbrella prints of them, eh? But I have taken care of that."

He disliked steel engravings, or any plan to cheapen or popularize art. He once told Sir Thomas Lawrence that he "didn't choose to be a basket engraver." Being asked what he meant, he replied: "When I got off the coach t'other day at Hastings, a woman came up with a basketful of your 'Mrs. Peel,' and wanted to sell me one for a sixpence."

The painter's hard-working life, with little comfort save what fame brings to a man who eagerly seeks it, received its greatest shock in the death of the aged father, in 1830. Turner said, "The loss was like that of an only child." His friends the Trimmers said, "He never appeared the same man after his father's death."

The plain barber had lived with his son for thirty years, and had seen him gain wealth and renown. He could do little save to encourage with his affection and be proud and grateful for the painter's success. And this was enough. He was buried in St. Paul's, Covent Garden, the artist writing this inscription for his monument:—

IN THE VAULT
BENEATH AND NEAR THIS PLACE
ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF
WILLIAM TURNER,
MANY YEARS AN INHABITANT OF THIS PARISH,
WHO DIED
SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1830.
TO HIS MEMORY AND OF HIS WIFE,
MARY ANN,
THEIR SON J. M. W. TURNER, R. A.,
HAS PLACED THIS TABLET,
AUGUST, 1832.

In 1832, Turner exhibited his memorable "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; Italy," in which he seemed to combine the mountains, the trees, the cities, and the skies he had loved in that beautiful country. From 1833 to 1835 he produced his exquisite series, "The Rivers of France." Ruskin says: "Of all foreign countries, Turner has most entirely entered into the spirit of France; partly because here he found more fellowship of scene with his own England; partly because an amount of thought which will miss of Italy or Switzerland will fathom France; partly because there is in the French foliage and forms of ground much that is especially congenial with his own peculiar choice of form.... He still remains the only, but in himself the sufficient, painter of French landscape."

In 1833 Turner exhibited the first of his eleven remarkable Venetian pictures, one of the finest being, "The Sun of Venice going to Sea." "The characteristics which they have in common," says Hamerton, "are splendor of color and carelessness of form; the color being, in most instances, really founded upon the true Venetian color, but worked up to the utmost brilliance which the palette would allow, the forms simply sketched, exactly on the principles of the artist's own free sketching in water colors.... It is believed, and with probability, that he blocked out the picture almost entirely in pure white, with only some very pale tinting, just to mark the position of the objects, and that this white preparation was thick and loaded from the beginning. On this he afterwards painted thinly in oil or water-color, or both, so that the brilliance of the white shone through the color, and gave it that very luminous quality which it possesses. This is simply a return to the early Flemish practice of painting thinly on a light ground, with the difference, however, that Turner made a fresh ground of his own between the canvas and his bright colors, and that the modelling of the impasto with the brush was done in this thick white. The result was to unite the brilliance of water-color to the varied and rich surface of massive oil-painting."

These pictures called forth much adverse criticism, but they soon had a Herculean defender in the "Oxford Undergraduate" of 1836, the Ruskin of "Modern Painters." In 1839, Turner exhibited "The fighting TÉmÉraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838." Thornbury tells how the subject was suggested to Turner.

"In 1838, Turner was with Stanfield and a party of brother artists on one of those holiday excursions, in which he so delighted, probably to end with whitebait and champagne at Greenwich. It was at these times that Turner talked and joked his best, snatching, now and then, a moment to print on his quick brain some tone of sky, some gleam of water, some sprinkling light of oar, some glancing sunshine cross-barring a sail. Suddenly there moved down upon the artist's boat the grand old vessel that had been taken prisoner at the Nile and that led the van at Trafalgar. She loomed pale and ghostly, and was being towed to her last moorings at Deptford by a little fiery, puny steam-tug.

"'There's a fine subject, Turner,' said Stanfield," and the suggestion was gladly acted upon.

Hamerton says: "The picture is, both in sentiment and execution, one of the finest of the later works. The sky and water are both magnificent, and the shipping, though not treated with severe positive truth, is made to harmonize well with the rest, and not stuck upon the canvas, as often happens in the works of bad marine painters. The sun sets in red, and the red, by the artist's craft, is made at the same time both decided in hue and luminous, always a great technical difficulty. Golden sunsets are easy in comparison, as every painter knows. This picture has more than once been associated by critics with the magnificent 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus,' which was painted ten years earlier. Both are splendid in sky and water, and both are florid in color. Mr. Ruskin's opinion is that the period of Turner's central power, 'entirely developed and entirely unabated, begins with the Ulysses, and closes with the TÉmÉraire.'

"This decade had been a time of immense industry for Turner. In that space he had made more than four hundred drawings for the engraver, had exhibited more than fifty pictures in the Royal Academy, and had executed, besides, some thousands of sketches, and probably many private commissions which cannot easily be ascertained."

One reason of his aversion to society was his desire to save time for this great amount of work. The TÉmÉraire, though sought by several persons, the artist refused to sell at any price, and bequeathed it to the nation.

From 1840 to 1845, Turner painted a few pictures of great power. The "Slave Ship, slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying, typhoon coming on," was exhibited in 1840. It became the property of Mr. Ruskin, who sold it, and it is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It represents a sunset on the Atlantic after a storm. It is gorgeous in color, and is regarded by many as the grandest sea which Turner ever painted. The "Snowstorm," in 1842, was harshly criticised, and called "soapsuds and whitewash." The picture represents a steamer off a harbor in a storm, making signals.

Ruskin says: "Turner was passing the evening at my father's house, on the day this criticism came out; and after dinner, sitting in his armchair, I heard him muttering low to himself at intervals, 'Soapsuds and whitewash!' again, and again, and again. At last I went to him, asking 'why he minded what they said.' Then he burst out: 'Soapsuds and whitewash! what would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it!'"

Turner had been in the storm, and knew that he had painted truthfully. One night, when the Ariel left Harwich, he "got the sailors to lash him to the mast, to observe the storm," and remained there four hours, not expecting to survive it.

"Peace—Burial at Sea," now in the National Gallery, was exhibited also in 1842. It was painted to commemorate the funeral of Sir David Wilkie, the Scottish artist, which had taken place in June, 1841, off Gibraltar, some distance from shore. Whilst the picture was on the easel, Stanfield entered Turner's studio and said, "You're painting the sails very black," to which the artist made answer, "If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it."

The deaths of Chantrey, in 1841, and of Callcott, in 1844, deeply affected Turner. "In the death-chamber of the former," says George Jones, "he wrung my hands, tears streaming from his eyes, and then rushed from the house without uttering a word." When William Frederick Wells, the artist, died a few years previously, Turner went to the house, sobbing like a child, and saying to the daughter, "O Clara, Clara! these are iron tears. I have lost the best friend I ever had in my life."

In 1843, he took his last journey to the Continent, making many sketches about Lake Lucerne, which was very dear to him. From 1847 to 1849, he paid several visits to the photographic artist Mayall, calling himself a master in chancery, as he did not wish to be recognized. He was deeply interested in the progress of photography. When Mayall was in pecuniary trouble in consequence of a lawsuit about patent rights, Turner, unasked, brought him fifteen hundred dollars, telling him to repay it sometime if he could. He gladly accepted the loan and paid it. After nearly two years, Turner found that his personality had become known, and could never be induced to visit the place again.

In 1850, he sent his last pictures to the Academy: "Æneas relating his Story to Dido," "Mercury sent to admonish Æneas," "The Departure of the Trojan Fleet," and "The Visit to the Tomb."

He was now seventy-five years old. In 1851, he exhibited no pictures, and ceased to attend the Academy meetings, which had always given him so much pleasure. David Roberts, the artist, wrote him, and begged to be allowed to see him. Two weeks later, Turner called at the studio. "I tried to cheer him up," says Roberts, "but he laid his hand upon his heart and replied, 'No, no; there is something here which is all wrong.' As he stood by the table in my painting-room, I could not help looking attentively at him, peering in his face, for the small eye (blue) was brilliant as that of a child, and unlike the glazed and 'lack-lustre eye' of age. This was my last look."

For several months, the aged artist was absent from his home in Queen-Anne Street. Finally, Hannah Danby, who had been his housekeeper for fifty years, and was said to have been his mistress, found a letter in the pocket of an old coat, which led her to believe he was in Chelsea. She and a relative sought him, and found him, December 18, 1851, very ill, in a small plain cottage on the banks of the Thames, owned by Sophia Caroline Booth. He was called "Admiral Booth" by her neighbors, who thought him an admiral in reduced circumstances. He died the day after his friends found him. An hour before his death, he was wheeled to the window to look out upon the Thames, and bathe in the sunshine which he so dearly loved.

"So died," says Monkhouse, "the great solitary genius, Turner, the first of all men to endeavor 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.... Sunlight was his discovery; he had found its presence in shadow; he had studied its complicated reflections before he commenced to work in color. From monochrome he had adopted the low scale of the old masters, but into it he carried his light; the brown clouds, and shadows and mists, had the sun behind them, as it were, in veiled splendor. Then it came out and flooded his drawings and his canvases with a glory unseen before in art. But he must go on, refine upon this; having eclipsed all others, he must now eclipse himself. His gold must turn to yellow, and yellow almost into white, before his genius could be satisfied with its efforts to express pure sunlight."

Turner was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, between the tombs of Sir Joshua Reynolds and James Barry, the service being read by Dean Milman. By his will, he left all his pictures and drawings to the nation, to be preserved in a "Turner Gallery," specifying that "The Sun Rising in Mist" and "Dido building Carthage" should be hung between the two pictures painted by Claude, the "Seaport" and "Mill." During his life he is said to have refused two offers of five hundred thousand dollars for the pictures in his Queen-Anne Street house. He left one hundred thousand dollars to the Royal Academy, five thousand dollars for a monument to himself in St. Paul's, a few small bequests for relatives, money for a medal to be given for the best landscape exhibited at the Academy every two or three years, and the remainder of a large fortune for the maintenance of "poor and decayed male artists being born in England and of English parents only, and lawful issue;" the latter gift to be known as "Turner's Gift."

The will was contested by relatives, and, after four years of litigation, the testator's intention to provide for aged artists was disregarded, and the property given to the "nearest of kin." Such instances are teaching our great men to carry out their benevolent wishes in their lifetime. Though Turner had great faults,—it is stated that he drank to excess in later years,—he had great virtues. Though parsimonious with himself, he was generous to others. Ruskin tells these incidents:

"There was a painter of the name of Bird, and when Bird first sent a picture to the Academy for exhibition, Turner was on the hanging committee. Bird's picture had great merit; but no place for it could be found. Turner pleaded hard for it. No, the thing was impossible. Turner sat down and looked at Bird's picture a long time; then insisted that a place must be found for it. He was still met by the assertion of impracticability. He said no more, but took down one of his own pictures, sent it to the Academy, and hung Bird's in its place.... At the death of a poor drawing-master, Mr. Wells, whom Turner had long known, he was deeply affected, and lent money to the widow until a large sum had accumulated. She was both honest and grateful, and, after a long period, was happy enough to be able to return to her benefactor the whole sum she had received from him. She waited on him with it; but Turner kept his hands in his pocket. 'Keep it,' he said, 'and send your children to school and to church.' He said this in bitterness; he had himself been sent to neither."

Once, after sending an importunate beggar from his house, he relented, ran after her, and gave her a five-pound note.

Says Thornbury: "An early patron of Turner, when he was a mere industrious barber's son, working at three-shilling drawings in his murky bedroom, had seen some of them in a window in the Haymarket, and had bought them. From that time he had gone on buying and being kind to the rising artist, and Turner could not forget it. Years after, he heard that his old benefactor had become involved, and that his steward had received directions to cut down some valued trees. Instantly Turner's generous impulses were roused; his usual parsimony (all directed to one great object) was cast behind him. He at once wrote to the steward, concealing his name, and sent him the full amount; many, many thousands—as much as twenty thousand pounds, I believe.

"The gentleman never knew who was his benefactor; but, in time, his affairs rallied, and he was enabled to pay the whole sum back. Years again rolled on, and now the son of Turner's benefactor became involved. Again the birds of the air brought the news to the guardian angel of the family; again he sent the necessary thousands anonymously; again the son stopped the leak, righted himself, and returned the whole sum with thanks."

Ruskin says: "He had a heart as intensely kind and as nobly true as God ever gave to one of his creatures.... Having known Turner for ten years, and that during the period of his life when the highest qualities of his mind were in many respects diminished, and when he was suffering most from the evil speaking of the world, I never heard him say one depreciating word of living man or man's work. I never saw him look an unkind or blameful look. I never saw him let pass, without some sorrowful remonstrance or endeavor at mitigation, a blameful word spoken by another. Of no man but Turner whom I have ever known could I say this; and of this kindness and truth came, I repeat, all his highest power; and all his failure and error, deep and strange, came of his faithlessness." Probably Mr. Ruskin means lack of religious faith, as Mr. Thornbury says Turner feared that he would be annihilated.

Turner was a most pains-taking worker. "Every quarter of an inch of Turner's drawings," says Ruskin, "will bear magnifying; and much of the finer work in them can hardly be traced, except by the keenest sight, until it is magnified. In his painting of 'Ivy Bridge,' the veins are drawn on the wing of a butterfly not three lines in diameter; and I have one of his smaller drawings of 'Scarborough' in my own possession, in which the muscle shells on the beach are rounded, and some shown as shut, some as open, though none are as large as the letters of this type: and yet this is the man who was thought to belong to the 'dashing' school, literally because most people had not patience or delicacy of sight enough to trace his endless details."

He loved poetry, and sometimes attempted to write it. He was seldom true to nature in his work. Hamerton says: "With an immense and unwearied industry, Turner accumulated thousands and thousands of memoranda to increase his knowledge of what interested him, especially in the mountains, rivers, and cities of the Continent, and the coasts of his native island. Amidst all this wealth of gathered treasure, his imagination reigned and revelled with a poet's freedom. With a knowledge of landscape vaster than any mortal ever possessed before him, his whole existence was a succession of dreams. Even the hardest realities of the external world itself, granite and glacier, could not awaken him; but he would sit down before them and sketch another dream, there, in the very presence of the reality itself. Notwithstanding all the knowledge and all the observation which they prove, the interest of Turner's twenty thousand sketches is neither topographic nor scientific, but entirely psychological. It is the soul of Turner that fascinates the student, and not the material earth."

With little education from the schools, without distinguished ancestry, in the midst of many disappointments and much censure, Turner came to great renown. He had talent, but he had also untiring industry and unlimited perseverance.