TURNER.*
FOR most people, the name of Turner is associated with the painter of dreams, and visions, and landscapes, whose forms are considered to have a very conventional sublimity, while their mysterious colouring is generally disposed of, in most real misti- ness of expression, as being " Turneresque." But amongst artists, and those who have studied Turner, men of every shade of differ- ence of opinion, he is on all hands admitted to be one of the very first of painters, not only for extreme beauty and poetry, but for keenest scientific truth as well. His works have been searched and analysed with probably more elaboration than those of any other painter, indeed to find a parallel example of such extent of individual criticism in the Arts, we must turn to the critics of Shakespeare. For in the works of Turner the beauty and truth are various enough to appeal to each kind of mind that will care- fully examine them.
At this time of the year, when kindliness and good-wishes love to express themselves in the material forms of gift-books and Christmas presents, this fine volume will be gladly welcomed. Within its /eaves will be found recorded the memories of summer skies of Italy, reflected in fairy-like Venetian waters ; the simple grace of English hedgerow and foliage, sheltering quiet cottage labour ; the dip and sway of the sea from its sunset calm to its state of maddest fury, in the " Snowstorm at Sea,"—a picture, by the way, that is really worthily engraved in this volume. Though entitled the Works of Turner, the book contains en- gravings from his oil pictures alone, which is to be noted the more carefully, because Turner was certainly the chief founder of English water-colour painting.
In his vast series of water-colour drawings he recorded his impressions of almost every spot in England round which are gathered associations or treasured memories. Whether the scene were a ruined abbey—just warm with the first sunlight, standing alone in the fields that are still deep with white dew— or one of his multitudinous views over a far horizon, Turner calmly worked out his drawing of it, in water-colour no lean than in oil painting, to its last oloudlet and its last blade of grass. In his equally great series of oil pictures he generally strove to realise the highest powers of imagination on subjects of romantic legend or mythology, so that we have chosen, as his themes, Apollo slaying the Python, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, tier beyond tier of Carthaginian palace and Roman architecture. But in some of his best oil pictures he returned to subjects of land- scape, as in his Italian pictures and pictures of the sea in all its aspects.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, on April 23, 1775, a day much honoured by being Shakespeare's supposed birthday and ascertained date of death, and St. George's Day. His mother dying when he was quite young (she seems to have been of good Nottinghamshire family), left him to the charge of his father, the barber, who early encouraged his love of Art. Very early indeed he began to work in water-colour, tinting in a few simple colours, as the then man- ner was ; exhibiting in the Royal Academy as early as his fifteenth year. From that year, 1790, be begins at the Royal Academy his wonderful and always widening series of pictures, that is not to be closed until 1850, the yearbefore his death, on December 19, 1851. Turner's life was essentially the life of an artist, working from dawn to sunset, devoted to that work, and resolved to carry it through until the time came "when no man can work." As such, though the story of his life is chiefly of value to artists, there is also much in it of great general interest. The unfortunate end- ing to his love-affair in early life—he was jilted by the lady to whom he had been long engaged—the particulars of which will now probably never be exactly known, was the first means of giving a tinge of gloomy intensity to his life and pursuit of art. A lithographed portrait of him, drawn from life by a fellow Academician (George Dance) when Turner was twenty-five years old, shows a fine, even handsome face, with a good deal of grace in it, that, however, mostly faded when his life entered upon its solitary devotedness. As an example of the effect that his person produced even upon those with whom he was intimate in later life, the following is taken from Messrs. Redgrave's Century of Pointers:— "In the last twenty years of his life, during which we knew him well, + The Works of J. M. II', Turner, Rat. With a Biographical Sketch and Critical and Descriptive Notes. By Jamee Dafferne. London : \lane and Co.
his short figure had become corpulent, his face, perhaps from continual exposure to the air, was unusually red, and a little inclined to blotches. His dark eye was bright and restless, his nose aquiline. He wore his hat while painting on the varnishing-days,' or otherwise a large wrapper over his head; whilst on the warmest days he generally had another wrapper or comforter round his throat though occasionally ho would unloose it, and allow the two ends to dangle down in frost, and pick up a little of the colour from his ample palette. This, together with his ruddy face, his rollicking eye, and his continnous, though, except to himself, unintelligible jokes, gave him the appearance of one of that now nearly extinet race, a long-stage coachman.'
A very interesting sketch of him by Maclise, who may be trusted for veracity in his drawing, is now being exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, near some of Turner's finest water-colours. From such scraps as these may be gained a few characteristics of the man who was to open a completely new field in art. Turner was the first artist who really, essentially fulfilled for the moun- tains and the sunset-clouds the office of the interpretation of their beauty, that the Greeks, or Leonardo, or Titian helped to fulfil for the grandeur of the human form.
Amongst his brother artists, more especially his fellow Acade- micians, Turner was much liked. His kindness of heart was extreme, though its expression was generally somewhat sternly reserved for those whom be considered deserving of sympathy. At times he made very great self-sacrifices to help others. When Sir Thomas Lawrence had uttered some complaints in Turner's hearing as to the effect of two of his portraits being spoiled by a glowing " Cologne " by Turner, hung between them at the Academy, Turner resolutely passed a layer of dark water-colour over his picture, so as to obliterate its glory, although many critics had already admiringly seen it ; and so allowed it to re- main until the close of the exhibition, when the colour was washed off again. The charge of avarice has usually been brought against him, as against Gibson and other great artists, but now that his real life becomes better known, this is being gradually dispelled. The chief ambition of his life after his paint- ing was to provide a home for decayed artists past work ; to this end, he pinched and spared himself through his whole life, and in his will desired that his large fortune should be thus devoted. Through some technical illegality in the will, it was annulled, and so the hope of his long, untiring frugality was frustrated. He was elected Associate of the Royal Academy, to the honour of that body, in his twenty-fifth year, and full Academician two years later. Always a very staunch supporter of the Academy, Turner used to take its part so fervently that when, years after, he heard of the suicide of the painter Haydon, instead of appearing shocked, he exclaimed, with deep seriousness,
Ile stabbed his mother,—he stabbed his mother," referring to Hayden's life-long warfare with the Academy.
From the year 1812 until his death Turner lived in Queen Anne Street. Here were gradually assembled the works that are now in the National Gallery, Turner persistently re- fusing very large sums for several of these pictures, having made up his mind to bequeath them n all to the nation. The reader of this, book will find a strange account of the condition of the house and gallery after Turner's death. Towards the end of his life his health and hopes quite failed him, and he seems to have lost all care or regard for the pictures that were once to him as his "children,"—to use his own expression. The gallery was quite neglected, tho damp streamed down the walls, large stacks of pictures were piled against the wall, still iridescent in loveliness of surface beneath all the dirt, and piles and rolls of the finest proof engravings, rich in certain qualities that were never known before Turner, the pro- ductions of a school of engraving which was to vanish with him from the world, mildewed there unheeded. For some time before his death he absented himself altogether from Queen Anne Street, having taken lodgings in a small house at one of the haunts of his far-off youthful days at Chelsea, close to Battersea Bridge. There is a railed-in space on the roof of this little house (which still exists intact) whence he used to watch the sunrise, often rising from his bed, up to the period of his last illness, merely flinging a dressing-gown over him, to watch the colour spreading over the morning sky and brightening the face of the familiar river. His first exhibited oil-picture was a view near this spot, and here the old painter, worn out with a life of herculean labour, died, in December, 1851, quite alone, with the winter sun shining on his face. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, by the side of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
The reader of Mr. Dafforne's book will find it, on the whole, the most satisfactory that has yet appeared about Turner's life. T ornbury's Life of Turner is written in a style hopelessly vulgar, and there is a great deal of rubbishy garnishing of book-making in it. The various short memoirs of Turner, many of them unobjection- able, are too brief to be of much real value ; while the greatest authority of all, Mr. Rusidn's elaborate and beautiful analysis of Turner's work, is now nearly inaccessible, so that the present volume will be the best fitted to give some true notions both about Turner's life and work. There are copious extracts from Modern Painters all through the book ; much of what is important in Thornbury's Life is here, too, incorporated, and in addition, Mr. Dafforne has made many sensible deductions from his mass of material, which show that he has knowledge of Turner's work, no less than extreme admiration for it. Nearly all the lesser writers about Turner seem bewildered by the study of that strange, solitary life, and broach startling theories about him, which possess much attraction for minds which cannot bear to think of truth as inconsistent with effects not of a firework character. It is a pity that Mr. Dafforne allows himself now and then a little of the weakness that is too often supposed to stamp a man with critical power, and consists in demonstrating at great length some minor detail to be un- scientific, quite disproportionately to the neglect of the general meaning. The most salient example of this sort of thing—an utter mistake in addition, and a real blot on the book—is when Mr. Dafforne remarks upon the position of the sun in the "Old Tdmdraire "as being a "glaring error," made to set in the east, " behind" the ship that is coming up the river. Mr. Dafforne should know perfectly well that the sun is rather " before " than "behind" the vessel, if these words can be used in such a case ; and quite ignores the fact that there is many a bend on the Thames, often nearly at right angles, whence some such general position as in the picture could be obtained. He might as well say that every painter who does not use a concave canvas when painting a great expanse of earth and sky commits a "glaring error."
The steel engravings in the book are careful and by the best of our engravers, some of them Turner's own old engravers. But as we said above, no engraving after Turner executed since his death possesses much trace of the real magnificence of those plates which the master himself so carefully corrected before they were printed. Still, thongh many of these plates are very poor, some have good passages in them, and we may mention as among the best "The Snowstorm at Sea," "Petworth Park," "Decline of Carthage," "Boats off Calais," the Venetian scenes, and " The Old Temeraire ' Tugged to her last Berth to be Broken Up." And well it is that this last picture is tolerably repro- duced, for the like of it exists nowhere else in the world but in smoky London,—a picture, too, that is among the least altered of all Turner's pictures, pathetic in remembrance of the days of wooden ships-of-the-line. But to call up true memories of it, we must turn to the description of Mr. Ruskin, which we devoutly wish had been inserted in place of that disquisition on the "glaring error," and so allowed us to meiltion without cavil this further memorial of our great painter. That marvel- lous translation of the Turnerian spirit into words describes how, "if ever anything without a soul deserved honour or affection, we owed them here. Those sails that strained so full bent into the battle—that broad bow that struck the surf aside, enlarging silently in stedfast haste, full front to the shot, resistless and without reply—those triple ports, whose choirs of flame rang forth in their courses into the fierce, revenging monotone, which, when it died away, left no answering voice to rise any more upon the sea against the strength of England—those sides that were wet with the long runlets of English life-blood, like press-planks at vintage, gleaming goodly crimson down to the east and clash of the washing foam—those pale masts that stayed themselves up against the war-ruin, shaking out their ensigns through the thunder, till sail and ensign drooped—steep in the death-stilled pause of Andalusian air, burning with its witness-cloud of human souls at rest,—surely, for these some sacred care might have been left in our thoughts, some quiet space amidst the lapse of English waters ?—Nay, not so. We have stern keepers to trust her glory to, the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunset lay golden robe on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps where the low gate opens to some cottage-garden, the tired traveller may ask, idly, why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood ; and even the sailor's child may not answer, nor know, that the night-dew lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old
Tdmdraire.' "
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