William Turner

“ One is her parentage. I have been making inquiries about her father, and find that William Turner was a most unholy scoundrel, a man who would shrink at nothing to gain his ends, always escaping the penalties of the law by the skin of his teeth. He slipped from beneath the hand of justice over and over again, and finally bolted to South America, where he is reported to have died. ”

“ Turner sits on a stool [Pg 37] up in the clouds, painting; the tail of his coat flaps over towards the earth, his boot is crooked into the support of the easel, and beneath him rises the sun with the word "Turner" blazoned amid the rays. But the best of the series, because it has that touch of caricature which often approaches nearer to life than a reasoned drawing, is the portrait by William Parrott made on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1846, when he was seventy-one. Turner is painting furiously upon his picture. ”

“ William Turner, tertius (1788–1853) , son of the preceding, was born at Newcastle on 13 Jan. 1788. He was educated at Glasgow University, where he graduated M.A. in 1806, at Manchester College (then at York) , and at Edinburgh University (1808) . From 1809 to 1827 he was tutor at Manchester College in mathematics and philosophy. In February 1829 he became minister of Northgate End chapel, Halifax, where he exerted great influence as a promoter of educational and scientific culture. He died on 30 Dec. ”

“ Little more than a fortnight after, namely, on Monday next after Twelfth Day, 1620, he revoked nuncupatively the gift of the clock to Sir William Alford, saying, “he forgets his old friends,” and gives it to his nephew William Turner. To this were witnesses Thomasine Newton, Henry Dent, and Alice Atkinson, who depose that William Turner reminded him that there had been much kindness between him and Sir William. [Pg 31] This was a few days before his death. In this codicil he is described of York, so that it was probably made there. ”

“ Turner was a man of powerful and original mind. In politics he was not merely a whig, but a republican, and openly sympathised with the American colonies. He was also an atheist, and, though he did not venture to display his religious views with the same frankness, yet in 1782 he published ‘An Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever,’ London, 8vo, under the pseudonym of ‘William Hammon,’ in which he attacked Priestley's argument from design with considerable cogency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turner, who was an F.S.A. and an associate of the Royal Society of Literature, had been in receipt of a civil list pension (of 300l.) since 1835. His youngest son, Sydney, is briefly noticed below; his third daughter, Mary (d. 1870) , married William Ellis (1800–1881) [q. v.] Turner was intimate with Isaac Disraeli, and godfather of his son Benjamin.
Turner's Anglo-Saxon work stands in something of the same relation to the revival of the study in history as Horace Walpole's ‘castle’ at Strawberry Hill to the later revival of Gothic architecture. ”

“ Turner was always from his youth fond of stones (we shall see presently why) . Whether large or small, loose or embedded, hewn into cubes or worn into boulders, he loved them as much as William Hunt loves pineapples and plums. So that this great litter of fallen stones, which to any one else would have been simply disagreeable, was to Turner much the same as if the whole valley had been filled with plums and pineapples, and delighted him exceedingly, much more than even the gorge of Dazio Grande just above. ”

“ Few men that come to be questioned, but shall have some come and say, he is a very honest man; I never knew any hurt by him: But is this anything against the evidence of the fact? But you have here the whole; I shall leave it to you.
Bridgman, Lord Chief-Justice, summed up even more shortly, mentioning a few of the absurdities of Turner's story. The jury withdrew for an hour, and then returned with a verdict of Guilty against Col. Turner, and Not Guilty against all the others.
On the 19th of January Col. Turner and William Turner made a confession as to their share in the crime. ”

“ Lancelot Turner” on Jan. 16, 1620.
Upon the death of his uncle, William Turner made Towthorpe [37] his principal perhaps his only place of abode, and exactly two years after that event, [Pg 41] viz., on Jan. 14, 1621-2, his marriage to Thomasine Newton was solemnized at the little church of the parish of Huntington, in which the township of Towthorpe is situate. The extreme youth of the lady was most probably the cause of the postponement of the marriage (which, as you observe, had evidently been contemplated by the uncle) until the expiration of two years after his death. ”

“ TURNER, THOMAS HUDSON (1815–1852) , antiquary, born in London in 1815, was the eldest son of Thomas Turner, a printer in the employ of William Bulmer [q. v.] The elder Turner was a man of culture, possessed considerable knowledge of English literature, and assisted William Gifford (1756–1826) [q. v.] in his edition of ‘Ben Jonson’ with many valuable suggestions.
The younger Turner lost his father at an early age. He was left in poverty and received assistance from Bulmer and from Bulmer's nephew William Nicol. ”

“ Sir George Turner is of a retiring disposition, hating all the public appearances necessary in connection with his position. He is a very hard worker, a great master of detail, and a plain, straightforward, lucid speaker, making no pretentions to the name of orator. ”

“ In this year he sent from Italy his solitary contribution to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, called ‘A Landscape, with Hannibal, in his March over the Alps, showing his army the fertile plains of Italy,’ a picture said to have been in oil colours, and so fine that Turner spoke of it as a work from which he learned more than anything he had seen before. ”

“ Turner, Samuel (d. 1647?) : for According to Wood . . . . foreign university. read He graduated M.D. at the university of Padua in 1611 (Sloane: MS. 1729) . 366 i 29 Turner, William (1653-1701) : for 1600 read 1680 368 i 19 Turner, William (1714-1794) : for Lyne read Lyme 374 ii 7 Turnour, George : for Candragupta read Chandragupta 385 ii 25 Tweddell, Ralph H.: for Hawthorne read Hawthorn 392 ii 18 Twiss, Horace: omit editor of the 'Times,' 19-20 ⁠for who succeeded Bacon read editor of the 'Times' 394 i 21 Twiss, Sir Travers: omit 1. ”

“ This influence has been indirect, through the works of his great contemporary Turner, and those of such followers as Cotman, Francia, Bonington, and De Wint, but it has not been less true on that account. ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved,’ said Turner, and Mr. Ruskin has written of his work: ‘He is often as impressive to me as Nature herself; nor do I doubt that Turner owed more to his teaching and companionship than to his own genius in the first years of his life.’ Most of Girtin's finest drawings are in private hands, but by the bequests of Mr. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From this period on ward 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Alas, I listen for a word unspoken,
⁠And wail for arms that have embraced their last.
I wish no more, as once I wished, each feeling
⁠To grow immortal in my happy breast;
Since not to feel, will leave no wounds for healing;
⁠The pulse that thrills not has no need of rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who can bear the sweet anguish of Heaven's pure fire?
Who will drug his own soul with despair?—
The roses whose odors wake endless desire,
The poppies of dreams, who can bear?
If he seeks but the bliss that perfumeth the top,
If he seeks but its sweetness divine.
Let him leave it, for anguish and joy, drop for drop,
Are expressed in this exquisite wine.
The lips that have thrilled at the goblet flow fast
With a madness they cannot forbear :
The gods what they will of the future and past
Through these oracles boldly declare. ”

“ 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. ”