TRAGEDY AND GENIUS

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 December 1929, Page 3

TRAGEDY AND GENIUS

TURNER’S GIFT TO NATION Joseph Mallard William Turner was born in 1773 in Maiden Lane, off the Strand. His father, William Turner, was a Devonshire man, a barber’ by trade, illiterate and close-fisted. He had the inspiration, however, to give his son as liberal an education as his scant means would afford. Tor the benefit of his health the boy was sent to an uncle who kept a butcher s shop in Brentford. After attending an “academy” there for some time, he ■was despatched, at the age of thirteen, to a school at Margate.' Here he began -his disastrous love affair. The object of his passion was the sister of one of his schoolfellows. Conscious that his genius would carry him far, he proposed, and was accepted. At nineteen, engaged to be married, he set out for a lengthy sketching tour in the north. Finally, the girl was persuaded to receive the addresses of. another lover. A marriage was arranged. Turner, returning to London, learned with horror how matters stood, and madly, passionately, besought the girl to break off her engagement. She refused. • When a few days later her marriage took place Turner, disillusioned and broken hearted, turned his back for ever on the opposite isex. From that moment he lived for art alone, and what the artist gained by this concentration the man undoubtedly lost. In order to live he engraved; he painted only for fame. His Carthage was exhibited at the Royal Academy. The critics were so hostile that the gentleman who had ordered it refused to pay the agreed sum of £lOO. It was the barber’s son, who had never been praised except for saving a halfpenny, who declared shortly afterwards, when he was offered thousands for the same picture, “This is indeed a triumph ! In the hackneyed phrase of commercial success he now had the world at his feet. His pictures commanded any price he asked for them. .He removed with his father, the barber ,to “Turner’s Den” —No 48, Queen Anne Street, yy.—where the windows were nevercleaned and the broken panes filled with rags or patched with paper, and the front door.was innocent of paint. He had begun to accumulate money at an astonishing rate, but he neveraltered the standard of life he had learned in Maiden Laire. Though it is true he had only to ask what he liked for his pictures to receive it, he hated to part with a painting. With genuine tears in his eyes he would exclaim, after one of these transactions: “I lost one of my children this week.”

His penurious habits became a byword. He refused to pay a bill for 7/6 for some masoni-y work in connection with a tablet placed in St. Paul’s and the Southend boatman liired to pull him about the Thames while lie was sketching once exclaimed indignantly : “He a great man I Over the left I Why, he takes out a big bottle of gin, regular, and never axes us to have a nip.” - Mr. Gillat, a wealthy manufacturer, of Birmingham, once called at Queen Anne Street, and, receiving the usual reply, “You can’t come in,” got his foot in the doorway and made a forcible entry. Turner, hearing strange footsteps on the first landing, rushed out and furiously confronted the in--truder.

PICTURES OF NOTE ‘ “What do you want here?” “I am come to purchase some of your pictures.” “I have none to sell.” “But you won’t mind exchanging them for some of mine? You’ve seen our Birmingham pictures?” “Never heard of ’em.” I will show you some,” rejoined Mr. Gillat, pulling out a roll of Bank of England note's to the amount of £5OOO. “You’re a rum ’un,” said Turner, with a grin. “Those are pictures, too, that must not be copied.”

By this piece of effrontery Mr. Gillat secured for his £5OOO pictures probably worth twenty times as much nowadays. But his" transaction was an exception. When Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister, decided to buy Turner’s twcF great pictures of the rise' and fall of Carthage for the National Gallery for the sum of £5OOO, Turner refused, adding, however that the nation would most likely have the pictures after all. But with all his penuriousness he could be greatly generpus. A, man who had believed in him in his youth and had bought the pictures he painted in that dingy bedroom in. Maiden Lane fell on evil days. Hearing that be was about to sell the timber on his estate, Turner sent £20,000 anonymously to his steward. He was free also from any petty feelings of professional jealously and eager to recognise young artists of merit. He had one remaining weakness —a horror of death, and as his time drew near he sought, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, to forget the pain of existence in unconvivial potations. Quite suddenly, with merely a change of linen, he left Queen Anne Street and took lodgings in a cottage at Chelsea. Here, only, after a long search, was he found by his faithful housekeeper, Mrs Dauby. He was then dying, but refused to believe m his approaching dissolution. A doctor he had known at Margate—that place hallowed for him by the memory of his one romance —was sent for, and after a long examination told him the brutal truth. A few hours later, on December 19, 1851, Turner died, at the age of seven-ty-six. Only then did the world know for what he had been secretly working. By his will he bequeathed £140,000 to 'found an asylum for poor artists born in England and a magnificent collection of pictures to his country including the “Rise and Fall of Carthage,” for which he had refused £5OOO during his life.