THE GREAT TURNER

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 136, 5 December 1929, Page 26

THE GREAT TURNER

AN ARTIST OF MERIT

TRAGEDY AND GENIUS

HIS GIFTS TO NATION

One of the most delightful places in London —or, indeed, any city in the world —is the Turner Auuexe of (.lie Tate Gallery, where the walls are allame with the painter's vivid tones and poetic visions, and where thousands upon thousands of his wateruolours and sketches are jealously preserved. Jealously, because there has never been much doubt of Turner's immortality. The whole history of landscape painting may be divided into two distinct perios—Before Turner and After Turner (says "John of London's Weekly"). Very great men are unimpressive in the flesh, but few men of genius hid their greatness under so coarse an exterior as Turner. He was small, with crooked legs, sallow complexion, a prominent nose, and was sometimes mistaken for a Jew. Tight-listed, untidy ill-educated, so that he could hardly write a sentence of plain English, sensitive and very proud, he was conscious both of his superlative talents and his social inferiority, and perhaps this explains his habitual reserve and suspicion. A LUNATIC MOTHER. Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Maiden lane, Covent Garden ni 1775. His father was a barber! His mother a woman of violent temper, who died a lunatic. When he was nme he went to school, and immediately proceeded to decorate the walls with paintings and drawings. Next he coloured a hundred and forty engravings for a local brewer at fourpenee a plate. He had already made drawings for his father's shop, where they sold for a shilling or two apiece, and his father who had wanted him to become a barber, was soon persuaded by the artists who frequented the little shop to make him an artist instead. The lad w^as accordingly sent to art schools, and in 1789 to the Royal Academy School, where he was popular as :i leader of boyish mischief. A year later, at the age of fifteen, he began to exhibit at the Academy. A lon<* series of commissions for sketches from magazine editors followed, and took him over most of England and Wales For the most part he went on foot' like a tramp, with his scanty baggage slung on to the end of a stick. Eack in London, for a time he gave lessons in drawing for five shillings each, and, he once said, "I have often walked to Bushey and back to make drawings for good Dr. Monro at half a crown apiece and a supper." Usually he worked in a small back room above his father's shop, dressed in an ill-cut rusty brown frock-coat, striped waistcoat, and enormous frilled shirt; so secretive that he allowed no one to watch him at work. He had two great friends, his father and Thomas Girtin, a precocious genius born in the same year as Turner, and who during their early years greatly influenced him. An exhibition by Girtm of pictures of York and Jedbursh exciting Turner to make a tour of the north, very soon he was recognised as a master of landscape painting in oils and water-colour, and by the time he was tweaty-four he was an A.R.A. and at the top of his profession. Still shy and unpolished, he returned from a lone tour to find that his letters to his lover had been intercepted, and that she was about to be married to another man. THE ACADEMICIAN. In 1802 he was elected a full member of the Academy, and in the same year Girtin died. The two friends had been estranged for some time, but Turner's admiration for Girtin persisted to the end of_his life "Had Tom Girtin hved, I should have starved," he once exclaimed with poetic extravagance and of one of his friend's drawings he said he would have given his little tnger to have produced such a one Girtin was certainly a great painter^ but in later years Turner reached a height which made competition a remote possibility. It was in his "Sun Rising Through Vapour," now in the National Gallery that he made his first successful atte")P* at the form of expression of which he became a master: the subtle mingling of light and mystery. A visit to Italy inspired him to still greater ightness and brilliancy of colour, and he now aimed at beautiful ideal compositions. . He designed a house for himself in Queen Anne street, and another at wS?w? ?' Where he made friends with the Vicar of Heston, who tried to teach hjm Greek . Turner wa 1° marry his sister, but was too shy to propose. ' AT SEA. In 1826 his "Cologne" was hung between two portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence and obscured them with its vividness whereupon Turner coated it with lampblack. "It will all wash off " he said "and Lawrence was so unhappy." On another occasion, while at sea, he had himself lashed to a mast to observe a terrific snowstorm. "I did not expect to escape," he told ''bu,t I felt bound to record it if I did." The result was characterwhitew^h™' Crite-''- P sndsand his canvases, varnished his pictures acted as cook and gardener, and even as butler. Turner's moodiness increased; his work became more and more dreamlike and mysterious Towards the end of his life "he lived secretly m Chelsea with a former landlady. ■ His friends failed to discover his retreat, until his housekeeper found a clue by a letter in an old coat, and Turner was found the day before his w i£i #•? plaron 19th December 1851 Under the terms of his muddled will (it caused four years' lit? gation) the Eoyal Academy benefited by £20,000, and the nation by 362 pic tures, 1757 colour studies ™a £ 19,000 sketches. He Jl Tburief in" St