Thomas Turner

“ Turner spent money freely, and often when he could ill afford it. He had a social status to maintain: he was the son of a county magistrate; had distinguished himself in college; [Pg 98] belonged to an honourable profession. He was the trustee of marriage settlements. He was 'Lord Downshire's friend!' If he continued to wear his mask well, why might he not aspire to attain, in America at least, the high official rank of his late colleague and fellow-prisoner, Thomas Addis Emmet, whom she at last honoured by a public funeral and a monument raised by national subscription? ”

“ The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, in the prison where he was confined, and acknowledged by him to be such when read before the Court of Southampton ”

“ I believe all stout people are the same, a little weakness of the flesh, you know”; and Miss Kinross gave her visitor a smile so winning, so encouraging, that Miss Bibby’s heart began to beat in its normal fashion again.
“But first,” continued Miss Kinross, “we will have some tea. Now don’t say you have had yours, if there is one thing I dislike it is drinking my afternoon tea in solitary state.”
No, Miss Bibby had not had tea; Thomas’s letter and the Serenade together had put even her severe afternoon drink of plain cold water out of her head. ”

“ In this year Sir Thomas Lawrence also died. The Turner Collection at Millbank contains a sketch of the funeral, looking like [Pg 163] a double-page in an illustrated weekly. The following letter shows how the death of Lawrence affected him:—
Plate XXV. The Old Chain Pier, Brighton (1830) Tate Gallery
'Dear Jones,—I delayed answering yours until the chance of this finding you in Rome, to give you some account of the dismal prospect of Academic affairs, and of the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourn from whence no traveller returns. ”

“ XXXIV. 1828 (aged 53) . The Year when Constable described Turner's Visions as 'Golden, Glorious, and Beautiful'147
XXXV. 1829 (aged 54) . The Year of 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'151
PART SIX (1830-1834)
FROM THE 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' TO THE PERIOD OF THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS
XXXVI. 1830 (aged 55) . He paints the 'Interior at Petworth,' and mourns the death of his Father, and of Sir Thomas Lawrence157
XXXVII. 1831 (aged 56) . He turns his 'magic limelight' on 'Caligula's Palace and Bridge,' visits Sir Walter Scott, and makes his Will164
XXXVIII. 1832 (aged 57) . ”

“ Of our many gifted, enthusiastic, and eloquent men, few have been more favored by nature than Henry M. Turner. A native of South Carolina, he seems to have the genius and fire of the Calhouns and McDuffies, without possessing a drop of their blood. Mr. Turner is a good-sized, fine-looking, brown-skinned man, of forty years of age, with a splendid voice, fluent in speech, pleasing in gestures, and powerful in his delivery. It is said that at the tender age of twelve, he had a dream in which he saw multitudes of men coming to him to be taught. ”

“ A CRITIC IS CRITICAL, AND A PAINTER IS ENTHUSIASTIC
'Waft me to sunny Baiæ's shore' wrote Turner in the Fallacies of Hope, one of the simple lines, a line that it was quite permissible to print in the catalogue of the Academy of 1823 against his much discussed, much criticised, and much loved 'Bay of Baiæ.' The picture indeed wafts us to Baiæ, one of the most beautiful spots in Italy, and we are content with its beauty if we neglect the pines, their heavy shadows, and the figures of Apollo and the Cumæan Sibyl posing in the shade. ”

“ So passed the greatest of all landscape painters, weary of men and of orthodox ways, an old man tired of the fret of life, but not tired of nature, an enthusiast to the end in his study of light and its brother colour, and all phenomena, that which is plain to the eyes, and that which hides. Sentiment was in heyday in 1851, and so David Bogue, who made the picture of the 'house where Turner died, sent a ray of sunlight streaming down to the Chelsea room by the river, as if a parent were smiling on a loving and life-loyal child. ”

“ If you only knew the good your peacock's feathers have done me, and if you could only see the clever drawing I'm making of one from the blue breast! You know what lovely little fern or equisetum stalks of sapphire the filaments are; they beat me so, but they're coming nice.
That is so intensely true what you say about Turner's work being like nature's in its slowness and tenderness. I always think of him as a great natural force in a human frame. ”

“ Turner lived outside the world—in his dreamland. When the buoyancy of youth had passed; when 'dad' was dead, he grew more morose, more untidy and more exclusive, but his dream did not change. No! it became more mystical, more subtle, more unrealisable to his ageing eyes. Was he not in dreamland on that Varnishing Day of the Royal Academy of 1846 when George Parrott made a humorous sketch of him. There were four varnishing days in those halcyon times, and it was Turner's habit to send in his pictures merely laid in with white and grey, and to finish them on the walls. ”

“ One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner’s landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist nor the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory—but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. ”

“ He stands upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the universe of God, and forward over the generations of men. Let every work of his hand be a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each exertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy; adoration to the Deity, revelation to mankind.'
That is Ruskin at his finest: here is Turner at his—well, as Turner. ”

“ SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Why doth It so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among Turner's strongest passions were his love of fame and his love of money, but the strongest of all was his love of nature. He studied her every day, early and late, throughout his life. On his tours, on foot, on sea, or in the coach, in England, Scotland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy, he was constantly at work, noting as he went, in swift pencil outline, all he thought worthy of memory; and his memory was equal to his industry. No mind was ever so stored with impressions of nature or was so able to weave them at will into visions of beauty. ”

“ The challenger has his desire, but Claude is not conquered. The great Englishman does not dethrone the great Frenchman on his own ground. Claude is unrivalled in the balance of his classical pictures, and in their cool and temperate colour. The real Turner, the Turner who challenged the sun, had not yet found himself. In his periods of Power and Splendour, between the ages, say, of forty-five and sixty-five, dominated by such masterpieces as the 'Ulysses' and the 'Fighting Téméraire,' Turner disregarded all other painters. ”

“ They included the 'Snowstorm, Avalanche and Inundation,' described as a 'tumult of cloud, wind and raging torrent in the gorge,' the sketch for which he had made on his way to Italy with Munro of Novar; and the 'Departure of Regulus,' which Ruskin included among the 'nonsense pictures.'
Troubles begin to gather about him. Nothing will go right. The beautiful England and Wales series had been received with so little favour that it was decided to discontinue the issue. The stock was put up for auction, but Turner opened negotiations and purchased the whole privately for three thousand pounds. ”

“ So Nature works, and the good folk who would 'select' parents for their wholesomeness and sanity may not be as successful in producing a genius as Nature in her unpremeditated way. Joseph Mallord William Turner was baptized at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in the following month.
Ruskin has devoted a brilliant chapter to contrasting the boyhoods of Turner and Giorgione. But is Turner to be pitied? Art occurs, and perhaps there could not have been a more suitable place for a great landscape painter to be born than in a dark court off Maiden Lane by the Strand. ”

“ Yet, while at a first view this distinction between Turner as a man and Turner as an artist seems complete, further study shows that the man had a great and often a fatal influence on the artist, and that this was not without reaction both serious and deep, and so we find that his art and himself are no more to be divided in any human view of him than were his body and his soul when he was yet alive. ”

“ From this period onward till about 1840 Turner's life was one of unceasing activity. Nothing is more astonishing than his prodigious fertility; he rose early, worked from morning till night, entirely absorbed in his art, and gradually became more and more solitary and isolated. Between 1829 and 1839 he sent fifty-five pictures to the Royal Academy, painted many others on private commission, made over four hundred drawings for engravers, besides thousands of studies and sketches from nature. His industry accounts for the immense quantity of work he left behind him. ”

“ Landscape might be classically beautiful according to Claude, classically sublime according to Salvator, homely and mildly sunny according to Cuyp, conventionally maritime according to Vandevelde. Turner as a youth was not the man to break tradition. The cunning tradesman in him preferred the well-beaten path. It was his destiny to compete against the popular idols in turn, to sweep past them to Nature herself, and so onwards and upwards to the sun, the source of all light and colour. ”

“ What would they have said had they known that Ruskin, the champion of Turner, the foe of Impressionism, when, in 1856, he sifted the nineteen thousand Turner water-colours, drawings, studies, and the "unfinished" paintings, had condemned the sunshine and atmosphere canvases now in the Tate Gallery to half a century of obscurity, because in his opinion they were "unfinished." Turner purposely left them unfinished and elusive as sunrise itself, momentary impressions of the glory of the world. The sun is new each day, ever uncompleted: so are these records of the flame of Turner. ”

“ In 1802, the year in which Turner became a Royal Academician, he took his old father, who still carried on the barber business in Maiden Lane, to live with him. The powder tax, imposed in 1795, drove out wigs and spoiled the old man's trade. "It is precisely," says Mr Hamerton, "when the painter wins the full honours of the Academy—honours which give a recognized and envied position in London society—that he takes his father home; a meaner nature would have tried to keep the old man at a safe distance." Turner's relations with his father were of the most dutiful and filial kind to the last. ”

“ In a good deal of Turner’s later work there was a certain theatrical strain, and at times even a garishness in colour, while his intense idealism led him to strive after effects beyond the reach of human art. We may however put out of view everything in Turner’s œuvre to which reasonable exception may on these grounds be taken, and there will still remain a body of work which for extent, variety, truth and artistic taste is like the British fleet among the navies of the world. ”

“ Turner put his whole heart and soul into the Liber, and also into the business arrangements with the engravers, and with the public; but that was the heart and soul of a tradesman, not of an artist. Yet the artist is very evident in his corrections on the proofs of the Liber, as of all his engraved work. His way may have been rough, ungenerous and grasping, but his corrections were always towards perfection.
Men love the Liber, men whom the modern movement in art does not intrigue. One I know counts 'The Straw Yard' the most desirable of his possessions ”

“ Turner was also employed to sketch from nature in all directions about London. In these tasks he had for a constant companion “Honest Tom Girtin,” a young fellow of Turner’s own age, who afterward married a wealthy lady, had rich patrons, and died before he was thirty. Had he lived to mature years, Girtin would have been a powerful rival to Turner. They were most excellent friends, and when Girtin died in Rome, Turner was one of his most sincere mourners. Toward the close of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ life, Turner frequented his studio, copied pictures, and acquired some art secrets. ”

“ The works of his declining period exercised the wit of the critics. Turner felt these attacks keenly. He was naturally kind-hearted and acutely sensitive to censure. “A man may be weak in his age,” he once remarked, “but you should not tell him so.”
After 1845 all the pictures shown by Turner belong to the period of decay — mere ghosts and shadows of what once had been. ”

“ It is probable that the Mary Turner who was removed from St. Paul's, Covent Garden, and admitted into Bethlehem Hospital on December 27th, 1800, was Turner's mother. She was discharged uncured in the following year.
'Dad' was sane and cheerful, a friend and companion to his son, proud of his genius, and helpful to him. His name will often appear in these pages. He is described by Henry Trimmer, vicar of Heston, one of Turner's few intimate friends, as a chatty old fellow who talked fast. ”