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 usefulness: he was often at a loss for words to express his ideas, and when he had recourse to his notes he found difficulty in reading them. Mr Ruskin says, "The zealous care with which Turner endeavoured to do his duty is proved by a series of large drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely coloured, all by his own hand, of the most difficult perspective subjects, illustrating 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." In teaching he would neither waste time nor spare it. "If a student would take a hint, Turner was delighted and would go on with him giving hint after hint; if he could not follow, he left him. Explanations are wasted time; a man who can see understands a touch; a man who cannot misunderstands an oration." With his election to the associateship of the Academy in 1799, Turner's early struggles may be considered to have ended. He had emancipated himself from hack work, had given up making topographical drawings of castles and abbeys for the engravers—drawings in which mere local fidelity was the principal object—and had taken to composing as he drew. Local facts had become of secondary importance compared with effects of light and colour. He had reached manhood, and with it 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 pictures of 1797-99 had shown that he was a painter of no ordinary power, one having much of the poet in him, and able to give expression to the mystery, beauty, and inexhaustible fulness of nature. His work at this period is described by Mr Ruskin as "stern in manner, 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, and it was on this occasion that he made the acquaintance, which afterwards 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 and for its hospitable master. A caricature, made by Fawkes, and " thought by old friends to be very like," shows Turner as "a little Jewish-nosed man, in an ill-cut brown tail-coat, striped waistcoat, and enormous frilled shirt, with feet and hands notably small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost level with his waist." It is evident from all the accounts given that Turner's personal appearance was not of a kind to com mand much attention or respect. This may have pained his sensitive nature, and led him to seek refuge in the solitude of his painting room. Had he been inclined he had abundant opportunity for social and friendly intercourse with his fellow- men, but he gradually came to live more and more in a state of mental isolation, keeping himself to himself, entirely absorbed in his art. "This man must be loved for his works, for his person is not striking nor his conversation brilliant," is the testimony of Dayes, the water-colour painter (and Girtin's master), in 1804. Turner could never make up his mind to visit Farnley again after his old friend's death, and his voice would falter when he spoke of the shores of the Wharfe.
Turner visited Scotland in 1800, and in 1801 or 1802 he made his first tour on the Continent. In the following year, of the seven pictures he exhibited six were of foreign subjects, among them Bonneville, the Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon, and the well-known Calais Pier in the National Gallery. The last-named picture, although heavily painted and somewhat opaque in colour, is magnificently composed and full of energy. A better idea of its masterly composition can be formed from Mr Seymour Haden's vigorous etching than from the picture itself, which is now greatly darkened by time.
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.[1]
In 1804 Turner made a second tour on the Continent, and in the following year painted the Shipwreck and Fishing Boats in a Squall (in the Ellesmere collection), seemingly in direct rivalry of Vandervelde, in 1806 the Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides (in rivalry of Poussin), and in 1807 the Sun rising through Vapour (in rivalry of Claude).[2] The last two are notable works, especially the Sun. In after years it was one of the works he left to the nation, on the special condition of its being hung beside the Claudes in the National Gallery. In this same year (1807) Turner commenced his most serious rivalry. Possibly it arose out of a desire to break down Claude worship, the then prevailing fashion, and to show the public that there was a living artist not un worthy of taking rank beside him. That the Liber Studiorum was suggested by the Liber Veritatis of Claude, and was intended as a direct challenge to that master, is beyond doubt. There is, however, a certain degree of unfairness to Claude in the way in which the challenge was given. Claude made drawings in brown of his pictures as they left the easel, not for publication, but merely to serve as private memoranda. Turner's Liber drawings had no such purpose, but were intended as a direct appeal to the public to judge between the two artists. The first of the Liber drawings were made in the autumn of 1806, the others at intervals till about 1815. They are of the same size as the plates and carefully finished in sepia. About fifty of them are now to be seen in the Turner rooms of the National Gallery. The issue of the Liber began in 1807 and continued at irregular intervals till 1819, when it stopped at the fourteenth number. Turner had resolved to manage the publishing business himself, but in this he
- ↑ Turner's father died in 1830, and the loss of "poor old Dad," as he used to call him, left a terrible void. He had lived in his son's house for nearly thirty years, looking after the frugal affairs of his household, and making himself useful in various ways. It is said that he used to prepare and strain his son's canvases and varnish them when finished, which may explain a saying of Turner's that "his father used to begin and finish his pictures for him." He also attended to the gallery in Queen Anne Street, showed in visiters, and took care of the dinner, if he did not himself cook it. Turner was never the same man after his father's death, living a life of almost complete isolation.
- ↑ This spirit of rivalry showed itself early in his career. He began by pitting himself against his contemporaries, and afterwards, when his powers were more fully developed, against some of the old masters, notably Vandervelde and Claude. During these years, while he kept up a constant rivalry with artists living and dead, he was continuing his unresting and untiring study of nature, and, while seemingly a mere follower of the ancients, was accumulating that immense store of knowledge which in after years, when his true genius asserted itself, he was to use to such purpose.
