Joseph Mallord William Turner

TURNER, JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM (i 1851), English painter, was born in London on April 23, 1775. His father, William Turner, a native of Devonshire, kept a bar ber's shop at 26 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. His mother died insane. The earliest known drawing by Turner, a view of Margate Church, dates from his ninth year. His father taught him to read, and this and a few months at a school at New Brentford and after wards at Margate were all the schooling he ever had; he never mastered his native tongue. Yet, one of his strongest character istics was a taste for associating his works with personages and places of legendary and historical interest.

Early Training.

By the time Turner was thirteen he had chosen an artist's career. In 1788-89 he was receiving lessons from Palice, "a floral drawing master ;" from T. Malton, a per spective draughtsman ; and from Hardwick, an architect. He also attended Paul Sandby's drawing school in St. Martin's Lane. Part of his time was employed in making drawings at home, which he exhibited for sale in his father's shop window, two or three shillings being the usual price. He coloured prints for engravers, washed in backgrounds for architects, went out sketching with Girtin, and made drawings in the evenings for Dr. Munro "for half a crown and his supper." In 1789 Turner became a student of the Royal Academy. He also worked for a short time in the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1790 he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy, a "View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth." About 1792 he received a commission from Walker, the engraver, to make drawings for his Copper-Plate Magazine, and this topographical work took him to many interesting places. A year or two after he accepted a similar commission for the Pocket Magazine, and before his twentieth year he had travelled over many parts of England and Wales. None of these magazine drawings is remarkable for originality or for artistic feeling Until 1792 Turner's practice had been almost exclusively in water colour, and his early works show how much he was in debted to some of his contemporaries, such as J. R. Cozens. His first exhibited oil picture appeared in the Academy in 1793. In 1794-95 Canterbury Cathedral, Malvern Abbey, Tintern Abbey, Lincoln and Peterborough Cathedrals, Shrewsbury, and King's College Chapel, Cambridge, were among the subjects exhibited, and during the next four years he contributed no less than thirty nine works to the Academy. In the catalogue of 1798 he first began to add poetic quotations to the titles of his pictures, showing that his mind was now occupied with something more than the merely topographical element of landscape, Milton's Paradise Lost and Thomson's Seasons being laid under frequent contribu tion for descriptions of sunrise, sunset, twilight or thunderstorm. Turner's first visit to Yorkshire took place in 1797. It seems to have braced his powers and possibly helped to change the student into the painter. Until then he was little more than a painstaking and tolerably accurate topographer ; but even under these condi tions he had begun to attract the notice of his brother artists and of the critics. The only formidable rivals Turner had to contend

with were De Loutherbourg and Girtin, and after the death of the latter in 1802 he was left undisputed master of the field.

(l799-1804).

In 1799 he was elected A.R.A. (age 24), and by 1800 had moved to Harley Street. He was elected R.A. in 1802.

He enjoyed the dignity of Academician for nearly half a century, and he took an active share in the direction of the Academy's affairs. His speeches are described as "confused, tedious, obscure, and extremely difficult to follow"; but at council meetings he was ever anxious to allay anger. His opinions on art were always listened to with respect ; but on matters of business it was often difficult to know what he meant. His friend Chantrey used to say, "He has great thoughts, if only he could express them." When appointed professor of perspective to the Royal Academy in 1808, this painful lack of expression stood greatly in the way of his use fulness. Ruskin says, "The zealous care with which Turner endeavoured to do his duty is proved by a series of large drawings, exquisitely tinted, of the most difficult perspective subjects, illus trating 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." With his election to the associateship of the Academy Turner's early struggles may be considered to have ended. He abandoned topographical fidelity and began to paint his dreams, the visionary faculty—the true foundation of his art— asserting itself, nature being used to supply suggestions and materials. His work is described by Ruskin as "stern in man ner, reserved, quiet, grave in colour, forceful in hand." Turner's visit to Yorkshire in 1797 was followed a year or two later by a second, when he made the acquaintance, which after wards ripened into a long and staunch friendship, of Fawkes of Farnley Hall. From 1803 till 1820 Turner was a frequent visitor at Farnley. The large number of his drawings still preserved there—English. Swiss, German and Italian, the studies of rooms, outhouses, porches, gateways, of birds shot while he was there, and of old places in the neighbourhood—prove the frequency of his visits and his affection for the place. Turner visited Scotland in 180o, and in 1801 or 1802 he made his first tour on the Con tinent. In the following year, of the seven pictures he exhibited, six were of foreign subjects, among them "Bonneville," "The Fes tival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon," and the well known "Calais Pier" in the National Gallery. The last-named pic ture, although heavily painted and somewhat opaque in colour, is magnificently composed and full of energy. In 1802 he took his father, who still carried on the barber business in Maiden Lane, to live with him. Turner was never the same man after his father's death in 1830, when he lived a solitary life.