JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM, the great founder of the school of English landscape-painting—for Wilson, great as he was, must rather be classed as the last of the old continental masters, than the first of our new local masters—was the son of William Turner, an humble barber of Maiden Lane. In this poor suburb of Covent Garden, where Voltaire lodged when he visited England, and at No. 26, now a grocer's, over his father's shop of a shop, Turner was educated, if not born in 1775 (?); but the executors have still a doubt as to whether, in putting on Turner's coffin "aged 76," they were right or not. The date is, however, probably not far wrong. From the applications of the next of kin after Turner's death, it was discovered that the Turner family originally came from near Barnstaple; so that, indirectly, in Turner the county of Reynolds, Jackson, Northcote, and Haydon may claim another famous painter. On the north side of the lane, at No. 26, near the corner of Hand Court, Turner's father curled wigs, puffed and powdered toupees, and sifted out his snowy dust, amid the usual smell of scorched hair and smoking curl-paper. As at that time great actors lived in and near "the Garden," the father, if he did not lay by money, must have earned many golden guineas by bending over shaved heads and wigs of hyacinthine curl.

The only son was destined for the same profession, and used to accompany his father to gentlemen's houses to observe how wigs were to be trimmed, how bags were tied on, and how the "patient's" complexion and age were humoured and flattered. But an accident soon showed the strong bias of the boy's mind, and the intense activity of the dominating faculty that already ruled him, and would rule him for ever. At the house of Mr Tomkison, whom his father and himself waited on, the boy saw on a salver a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a nosegay of heraldic colours, and with a raging lion either as a supporter or crest. He was delighted, and on returning home drew the heraldic monster from memory. The father was pleased, and encouraged the lad; and ever after, when the question of customers was, "Well, Turner, what's William to be?" the ready and decisive answer was, "William's going to be a painter." The course of true love for once ran smoothly and happily.

The boy became a painter, God's will and man's will for once going harmoniously together. The father bought the son water-colours and brushes, and he soon began to take his place among the founders of our English water-colour school—Girtin, Cozens, and Dayes. With Girtin, who was two years older than himself, he worked at print-colouring for John Raphael Smith, a crayon-painter and draughtsman, and an early patron of Chantrey, residing near the barber's shop in King Street, Covent Garden. He also attended a school for perspective, kept by one Thomas Malton, a writer on that art, and who mentioned him afterwards, in one of his works, as "young Turner, who imitates many of the great painters, and excels them all." Turner also occupied his "prentice hand" in dashing in skies and foregrounds—i.e., blue skies and dock-leaves—to enrich the designs and elevations of a new forgotten architect named Porden; an ill-paid occupation, that, however, gave the painter power and facility. Girtin already had probably led Turner's mind to landscape, and Cozen's practice led him to think of atmospheric effect.

The year Turner was born, Dr Johnson had visited Wales. In 1789, when the doctor had been dead for years, Turner was admitted a student of the Royal Academy, where he studied the figure, of which his sketch-books show many creditable examples, in outline and colour; and in 1790 he sent to the Somerset House Exhibition a water-colour view of Lambeth Palace, which was hung in a small room devoted to statues, drawings, miniatures, and wax models, where even "a Raphael" would have been buried. Slowly the young genius felt his way along the Thames and Medway before he launched into the full ocean of his great ambition. In 1791 he exhibited "the Palace at Eltham," and "Swakeley House, near Uxbridge." At first walks on foot, long dusty tramps—then coach excursions and boatings—to "Malmesbury Abbey," "the Avon, near St Vincent Rocks," "St Augustine's Gate at Canterbury," "St Anselm's Chapel, Canterbury," "the Porch of Malvern Abbey," "Tintern Abbey," "the Second Fall of the Monach in Cardiganshire." Perhaps, too, it was about this time that he and an artist named Cook, who afterwards became a stone-mason, visited Oxford—Cook by coach, and Turner on foot. Many years later he began to do the designs for the Oxford Almanac, which tradition said he continued to do from some early liking he had conceived for the stately city of learning, for in his first tour he had visited Oxford.

Even at this time, though his style was small, pale, and careful, there was power in Turner's work. He spread more sunshine over his paper, and filled it with more light, than other men could do. He was daring, too, in his search after new effect; and his "View of the Pantheon after the Fire in 1792," exhibited in 1792, and his "Rising Squall over St Vincent Rocks at Bristol" (1793), were hailed as proofs of a rising man, more daring than Zuccarelli or Smith of Chichester, and possibly a worthy successor of Wilson and Gainsborough.

As soon as it was discovered that Turner's works had a market value, need we say that patrons sprang up thick as mushrooms. Among the most conspicuous were Mr Tomkison, a pianoforte-maker in "the Garden;" Dr Monro, and Mr Henderson, who aided young artists and bought their works; and the Rev. Mr Crowle, whose special hobby it was to illustrate Pennant's London. Monro, it is said, first saw Turner's drawings in a window in the Haymarket or Maiden Lane; but he probably was introduced to Turner through his friend Cozens or Raphael Smith. "Girtin and I," Turner used to say, "have often walked to Bushy to make drawings for good Dr Monro at half-a-crown a piece, and sometimes we got our supper—and no bad thing either." It was the stormy daybreak-time of English art. There was no water-colour society till 1805, and the early watchers for the light died before the light came to their longing eyes. The younger Cozens, whom Beckford patronised, died in 1799 in a mad-house; Girtin in 1802, of consumption; and Dayes slew himself in 1804. Turner, the hardier and greater spirit, survived them all. Being known now as an excellent designer for topographical works, he became largely employed, in 1794, for Walker's Itinerant and the Pocket Magazine. He now ransacked England, and took blackmail everywhere of the beautiful and the wonderful. The Academy catalogues show that in 1795 he had already visited Oxford, Peterborough, Lincoln, Shrewsbury, and Wrexham; in 1796 he had seen Ely, Llandaff, and the Isle of Wight; in 1798 the abbeys of Yorkshire, the castles of Northumberland, and the fells and lakes of Cumberland. He became, also, known as a sea-painter, for in 1796 he exhibited "Fishermen at Sea;" 1797, "Fishermen coming on Shore at Sunset, previous to a Gale;" and 1798, "Fishermen Becalmed, previous to a Storm—Twilight."

Even at this time the critics—then harsher, cruder, and more ignorant than they now are—spoke highly of Turner's pictures. They called his colouring "natural and masterly," and pronounced his works the productions of an original mind. Even the dreadful Anthony Pasquin (Williams), who, we believe, to have been just, though stern and sanguine, eulogised "the coming man." Pasquin praised his genius and judgment; declared he copied no one, and had revived marine painting. His fame grew, and the most palpable proof of it was that, in 1799, when Flaxman succeeded Bacon as royal academician, Turner was elected associate. Upon this promotion, his restless ambition began to put forth fruit. He struck out new social paths, and he determined that the world should see he was getting on. He left his father's shop, and took a house in Norton Street, Portland Road, where he stayed three years, removing then to No. 64 Harley Street, where Malone and Fuseli lived. Hitherto he had ignored his full Christian name; now he figured in catalogues and court guides as "J. M. W." Hitherto he had only grappled with Thomson's Seasons, now he essayed to illustrate the Bible and God's great visitations on the wicked. In 1800 he exhibited "The Fifth Plague of Egypt;" 1801, "The Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desert by a Whirlwind;" 1802, the "Tenth Plague of Egypt." Stunned by these great works, mediocre people preferred what they could understand, and praised, with more sincere eulogy, the "Dutch Boats in a Gale;" "Pembroke Castle—Thunderstorm approaching;" "Fishermen upon a Lee-shore in Squally Weather;" "Falls of the Clyde;" "Edinburgh from the Water of Leith;" and "Ben Lomond." The result of these Scotch scenes was that, in 1802, Turner was elected R.A., his diploma picture being "Dolbaden Castle, North Wales," which is still mellowing within the academic walls.

This year, 1802, Turner, who had not yet visited, and never did visit Ireland, crossed to France; and for the first time set foot on the continent, ready for fresh conquests. Full of Wilson, Loutherbourg, and Vandervelde, he turned into a dark massive picture the first historical object he saw on landing—i.e., the "Pier, with French boatmen putting to Sea, just as the English Packet is arriving." Turner, indeed, always retained a love for Calais, and made many drawings of its best points. From Calais he pushed on to Macon to see the vintage, which he afterwards painted for Lord Yarborough. From thence he urged his conquests into Savoy and Piedmont, returning with materials for many future pictures. Years after, when Turner accompanied Mr Monro abroad, he took his friend to the Valley of Aosta, as one of the spots that had seemed to him, in earlier life, specially beautiful. This tour, beginning with the "Pas de Calais," was the first of many an annual tour, his silent absence in which caused much anxiety to Chantrey and his other attached friends. In 1807, the year of Willie's "Blind Fiddler," Turner exhibited his "Forge, and the Sun rising through Vapour." The story of his reddening the forge to injure the young Scotch artist's picture is utterly untrue. In 1807 Turner, who had already outshone Vandervelde and Wilson, began to make deep inroads into the fame of Claude Lorraine by commencing his Liber Studiorum, which Charles Turner, Mr Lupton, and others engraved. Turner himself was skilful in mezzotint, and possessed the most thorough and exquisite knowledge of engraving contrasts. As much as L.5000 has been offered for a set of early proofs of the "Liber," for which Turner gave only seven guineas a plate; one unpublished one, "The Man Overboard," is one of the artist's most famed conceptions of the ferocity of sea-storms. In 1807, Turner was elected Professor of Perspective in the Royal Academy in the room of Edwards, A., who wrote the Supplement to Walpole. Turner, however, from his singular want of expression, was a bad though conscientious lecturer, and entangled the young artist in a sad cobweb of lines and angles. Though for nearly forty-nine years academicianship, Turner missed sending his works to only four exhibitions, yet some of his greatest pictures were never seen by the general public. His "Gale at Sea," now in the Bridgewater Gallery; his "Wreck," now in the Turner Gallery; and his "Shipwreck," also in the same great collection, were never sent to Somerset House. In 1851 Turner was present at the private view, but did not exhibit. Even then he seemed breaking up fast. In December he grew rapidly worse, and after a few days' illness, died on the 19th, aged seventy-six years. A short time before his death he was taken to the window to see the sun rise. His last thoughts were to behold God's world, of whose beauty he had been for sixty years so eloquent and profound an exponent. Turner left some sixty pictures, an immense store of engravings, and several thousand sketches and drawings in various stages. The paintings are now in the Turner Gallery at Kensington, but the money which he left to the nation, through a flaw in the will, has gone to the next of kin, irrecoverably. By his own request, Turner, whose early dream had been Westminster Abbey, was buried in St Paul's, near Sir Joshua Reynolds. Turner was a little stout man, with a coarse, red, weather-beaten complexion and eagle eyes; he had been handsome in youth, and, even in old age, when animated, happy, and at his ease, was pleasing in expression. In look he was something between a Dutch captain and a journeyman carpenter, but the sense of power and genius was always as a halo round him. He was never married; and an old housekeeper managed his rather forlorn house in Queen Anne Street. His old father, the barber, Turner always guarded with the staunchest affection. The old man tended and exhibited with pride his son's gallery, and dying in 1829, aged eighty-four, was buried in St Paul's, Covent Garden, where a simple monument was erected to his memory.

Turner's opinions on art are difficult to discover except from his works. Claude was his special rival in aerial beauty. Hobbima, he said, painted trees nearly as well as Claude, and better than Ruysdael and Wilson; Poussin he sometimes imitated; Reynolds and Girtin he talked much of; and it is thought he derived from Calcott the principle of the preponderance of light over shadow in a picture. Even by his most intimate friends, Turner in the course of his whole life was never known but once to condemn a living artist's work. Where he could not praise he was silent. Though obstinate, Turner often took advice and hints of subjects from friends; and when he painted one of his Trafalgar pictures, was untiringly patient in submitting to naval criticism. From friends he bore raillery, in his more fanciful works, not only with good-nature, but with all the chuckling enjoyment of a humorist. Turner's first residences were Maiden Lane, and Harley Street. In 1808 he went to the Mall at Hammersmith; four years later he removed to No. 47 West Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square.

His country-house he kept up for some time, then exchanged it for John's Lodge, Twickenham—a villa in sight of the Thames and Sir Joshua's old house. From about 1828 till a short time before his death, when he took lodgings by the water-side, at Chelsea, he lived in Queen Anne Street, seldom seeing friends, but spending long days at the easel, and his evenings at the Athenaeum Club. In society he was shy and reserved; but with bosom friends he unbent, and was shrewd, poetical, joyous, and cheerful. At the academy he was ever the staunch advocate of all efforts to keep that body independent of the government, and to reserve all its funds for the erecting an independent building. At the councils he talked much, but in a confused and obscure way; yet those who listened with respect and attention always found that Turner's views were sound and correct, and characterised by excellent sense and thorough honesty of purpose.

Turner's prices, from 1803 to 1815, were not large. His income, as with so many other men in this unjust world, began to increase just as his works began to grow more eccentric and willful, and to decline in merit. From Dr Monro, the art-patron and the physician, who attended George III. during his madness, he had early in life gone away happy with half-a-crown for a night's work. Later he got a ready market for his rivalries of Vandervele and Claude, at L150 to L200. But it must be remembered that the old masters were still dominant; any black daub from Italy commanded great prices; our national art was still in leading-strings, and noblemen were the only purchasers. Wilson only twice obtained more than L100 for a picture; Calcott was scarcely luckier; Morland and Nasmyth painted for pawnbrokers, and to defray their tavern-bills. In 1810 Lord Yarborough gave Turner three hundred guineas for the "Wreck," a picture that would now sell for thousands. For a long time Sir George Beaumont's courtly condemnation kept down Turner. For his earliest fantasies (so weird and beautiful) of Venice—which he himself designated to friends as "scraps" and "rubbish," and which he probably painted partly as experiments, partly as wilful defiance of a public that had neglected his more solid pictures—he received L250 each; one of them, though much damaged, was since bought for L1500. For one of the great pictures that he had determined to leave the nation, Turner is known to have refused L5000. For his drawings for books he received prices varying from twenty to twenty-five guineas each. Those executed for Campbell the poet he was never paid for. One of them, the "Flint Castle," has since been sold for L152, and the value of these wonderful works still advances. Many have since been sold at four or five times the sum that Turner received for them. He also gained money by lending them to be engraved.

The accusations against Turner, as a miserable, sullen miser, an unsocial sot, and a parsimonious boor, are utterly untrue. His economy arose at first from early indelible habits of care and saving; latterly from the burning and all-absorbing desire to leave his greatest pictures to the nation, and to bequeath a large sum of hard-earned money to found an asylum for decayed artists. This was the one dream, and aim, and hope of his existence. He had lived alone with art till he had grown indifferent to society. He lived alone that he might think and work undisturbed and incessantly. Leslie says of him, "His nature was social, and at our lunch on these anniversaries (varnishing days), he was the life of the table." G. Jones, R.A., who knew him half his life, declares that by all the friends to whose tables he introduced Turner, the painter was respected and esteemed, and that he continued till his death their constant visitor. At academy councils, in all questions of charity, he was the most untrusting and liberal in his proposals. He gave no dinners, because he was shy and unable to organise and direct a party; but he has been known at a large Blackwall artist party to take the whole cost upon himself. We have already seen what large prices he refused for the pictures he had vowed to himself to put apart for the nation. Turner, with all his brusque, suspicious, shy manner, had a right good heart, and the proofs of it are innumerable. When Bird, then unknown, sent his picture to the Academy, and no room could be found for it, Turner took down one of his own works, and hung Bird's in its place. When a picture of his, by its vividness, injured one of Sir Lawrence's female portraits, Turner disfigured his own picture to redeem the accident. When a friend's picture has been badly hung, Turner has been known to pray the hanging committee in vain to allow him to sacrifice one of his own places for the benefit of his friend. If he painted a picture which did not please a patron, Turner never objected to retain the rejected work, though he would not repeat the attempt to please. He was thoroughly aware of the general opinion of his parsimony and avarice; but being a reserved, proud, secretive man, and a humorist withal, he enjoyed the imputations, which he knew the mere reading of his will would at once dispel. There were many stories he knew of his selling pictures for large prices, and then squabbling about the price of the frame, the packing-case, or the coach that brought him to the place of meeting. When congratulated on the large prices he obtained, he would reply, "Yes, but there is the carriage, or the time in altering and varnishing." Like Reynolds, Turner was too reserved to praise living artists. (Sothard was an exception), but he was never heard but in one case to blame. He readily forgave; he bore no rankling hatreds to any one; he was always the first to try and appease the irritability of friends. When a friend was ill, no one was more attentive and tender than Turner.

The day after Chantrey died, Turner entered a friend's studio, assayed to speak, broke down, burst into tears, and left the house. At Petworth, and in his annual visit to Sir J. Wyatville at Windsor Castle, Turner displayed great fondness for fishing, and with the rudest tackle in the world was very successful.

The painter seems, about 1812, to have been seized with an uncontrollable desire to become a poet. From that year till 1850, his last season of exhibition, he adorned the Academy catalogue with strange, rambling extracts from a poem called by the author The Fallacies of Hope. They were in all sorts of metre, from Tate and Brady, and the rhymes of penny song-books, to Homeric and Miltonic blank verse. Sometimes they display a certain grandeur, but usually they are shapeless and confused, and often they are the vilest doggrel. In his sketch-books, amongst flute music and careful botanical notes, were found attempts at patriotic songs, scraps of the Fallacies, and short landscape-poems of some merit.

Great as he was as a painter, still it was, after all, by the engravings from his works that Turner won at first his chief reputation and the larger part of his fortune. He worked for the print-sellers and publishers. He illustrated Scott, Rogers, Byron, Campbell, Milton, Moore, besides endless topographical works. In commenting on Scott, Byron, and Rogers he is specially happy; Campbell and Milton deal less with landscape. The best engravers worked for him, and he was skilful in discerning young men of genius. The two Cookes, Miller, Lupton, Racole, Armitage, Le Keux, Goodall, Pye, Prior, Wallis, and Willmore, all worked for him, and he knew the whole range of the art as well as any of them. Some avoided him because his work was laborious and difficult; others, more ambitious and enthusiastic, preferred his works to any others, and considered his hints rendered the toil light. He wrangled with them about prices, but he was always just and exact. He devoted much time to touching on the proofs, altering the minutest twig, and adding effects. He would take the greatest pains to carry the engraving further than the picture, adding figures, and heightening and enlarging the buildings. Many of his proofs still in existence are covered with notes, pointing out places to be altered. Of these proofs, and of all sketches, and even notes of effect, he was jealously careful, knowing their future value. Indeed, after his death nearly every sketch-book that he had ever had was found hidden away in his boxes.

In early life Turner studied architectural draughtsmanship; and from Malton attained a very thorough knowledge of perspective. Later, Wilson's breadth and colour, and rich low tone attracted him, while his friend Girtin taught him to select landscapes, and to re-arrange his light and shade. From Calcott's cold and tame manner, some critics think, not unreasonably, that Turner was led to introduce more light into his pictures; and as Rembrandt has darkened and darkened, till he left but one-eighth of light in his pictures, so Turner lightened and lightened till he left but one-eighth of dark. As he went on, he aimed more and more at multitude and infinity; with these, fulness, variety, and great breadth of shadow, was impossible. He began with almost monochrome, a conventional gloom, rich, deep, and true, if you grant his premises. He went on to poetical truth, and ended in poetry without truth, in prismatic fantasies—in fire-works; his work at last became mere transparent works of opaque colour, with a dark spot or two on a distorted figure in the foreground. As Burnnett truly says, however, "his excellency in composition never seems to have left him, through all the changes of light and shade and colour; the component parts became gradually smaller in size as the breadth of light increased." At first Turner tried to excel in that quality of landscape that he found the world admiring—that is, abstract light and shade. This was when he had to follow the world; when he could lead, he aimed at positive colour, aerial distance, and multitude. To obtain grand light and shade, he was at first simple and broad; latterly, to gain distance and infinity, he crowded whole kingdoms into his canvas. Wilson had painted no foreground nearer than 30 feet. Turner drew things as he saw them—near and far; he also introduced objects at a greater distance, in order to maintain a breadth of light. The Shakespeare of landscape-painting, Turner paints sunlight oftener and better than any of his predecessors. He laid his axe to the root of that "brown tree," which Sir George Beaumont had planted like an upas-tree in every studio. He painted skies and seas blue as they were, and peopled them with all the true reflections. No one ever painted distance as he did. Less cold, simple, pure, and artificial than Claude, he is much more varied and natural, has more of the infinity of the eternal, more of the infinity of nature. Even admirers of Claude confess that his pictures look dark and dingy beside Turner's; that Claude's trees are heavy compared with Turner's lighter, more varied, and more elegant forms. In his best pictures, Turner's figures are not inferior to Claude's, which are indeed often mere barley-sugar puppets, frivolous and effeminate in their rendering. His severest critics indeed allow that Turner's figures, though not severely drawn, have "a broad general look of nature." His fishermen are particularly good; and we know that he studied the class, being in the habit of going out in mackerel boats and colliers in rough weather, to study sea effects. No one surpasses him either in the judicious introduction of figures, where a point is wanted either "for the repetition of colour, or bringing a near object under the most retiring." He knew best of all men how best to give the effect of space, and to assist the perspective diminution of the scene.

Besides a wonderful system of shorthand pencil-sketching, and a rapid mode of jotting down colours and effects, Turner possessed the advantage of an iron constitution, and a matchless artistic memory. Driving down once to Mr Woodburn's house at Hendon, Turner stopped the carriage to observe a sunset, of which, however, he made no written note and no pencil-sketch. Nothing more was said; but some weeks after, when Mr Woodburn next visited the Queen Anne Street Gallery, he saw this sky glowing on a canvas. He instantly offered to buy it, but Turner refused to part with it. The following anecdote, too, well illustrates the sureness and quickness of his eye, and the tenacity of his memory. In a certain representation of an Alpine valley, Turner's exact imitation of the very spots and stratified veins of the boulders of a Swiss torrent, arrested the attention of an English traveller, who was curious to know with what degree of care Turner had studied and copied the water-rounded stones. On being asked, Turner said he had painted them from a sketch made on the back of a letter, as he rolled by on the top of a diligence, and that he had never been in the valley before or since.

Turner's first great aim was breadth and tone; obtaining these, he successfully grappled with Vandervelde and Hobbima; then trying for aerial space entirely, and for purer and more radiant colour, he poured his broadsides into Claude, and fought him as Nelson did the Santissima Trinidadada at Trafalgar. Claude's elegance, purity, and air he strove hard to surpass, and often, but not always did so. For Claude's eternal blue clearness and calm Arcadian sunshine, Turner gave us a thousand varieties of sky changes, chameleon colour and Protean dyed. Claude gave us an ever-sunny lawn and a calm sea. Turner raised storms round his easel by his enchantments, and led us miles further into a blue mystery of distant air. Wouvermans has soft rolling clouds, and Wilson towering thunders, but Turner's skies are in better perspective, and melt deeper into the canvass. He had seen nature in more varied aspects than Claude, and remembered better her different moods. His mind was cast in a less luxurious and calm body, and in a stronger mould. Claude was of the lower empire; Turner was one of the Pyramid builders, a pure demigod in brain and body. Turner borrowed from every painter, but always to improve and to reconstruct. He melted the gold he borrowed, and always ran it into fresh shapes. Every painter that he set himself down to rival, he equalled or surpassed,—every style he attempted, he became pre-eminent in; and he attempted more styles than any other painter has done. You may find in him the sombre richness of Wilson, and the mellow gold of Cuy; Milton's grandeur and Shelley's lyric sweetness; he was, in a word, as we have before said, the very Shakspeare of landscape.

In early life, when he copied portraits in Reynolds' rooms, he promised great excellence in portraiture. In "The Forge," he displayed great power in figures. In the "Calais Pier" he equalled Vandervelde. In "The Building of Carthage," many thought he surpassed Claude. In his water-colour sketches, he outdid all rivals in that new art. In the "Polyphemus," "Téméraire," and "Venice," he triumphed in real and ideal colour. He finished better than other men; he sketched better than any. In everything he was the facile princeps. The strongest and the most tender notes in the great gamut of art were all within his compass. How much truer he is to nature than Claude or Constable, or any of the Dutchmen, Mr Ruskin has eloquently and convincingly shown. In art, as distinct from the mere copying of indiscriminate nature, he was equally learned and pre-eminent. Mr Burnett, the engraver, in his thoughtful remarks on "The Works of Turner," sums up very usefully some of this art Napoleon's technical principles.

When Turner tempers his harshest darks with softness, they are not so black as they seem; but standing against the highest light they seem so. His forms melt into one another. His skies are calm and simple when his scenes are complicated or have many parts; and when they are simple, then his skies are weird, stormy, and changeful, serving for contrast and for harmony. In his Claude compositions, he is fond of bringing a dark clump of green stone pines against the sky, in broad, soft shadow. This mass of dark he spreads and diffuses by smaller and thinner groups, and harmonises the whole by the strong, dark light of his foreground figures. He is fond, in sunsets, of placing the sun bold and full in the centre of the canvass, making it the burning focus that irradiates the picture; and being just over the point of sight, it is also the centre to which the perspective lines all point; thus obtaining by the same means originality, simplicity, and grandeur.

Turner is fond of introducing a broken frieze or a crumbling column, with inscriptions copied from the Vatican galleries, to give his compositions a classical look. He found them useful in reflecting the lighter greys of the sky, and thus fixing the upper and lower tones of his pictures. Like Claude, and unlike Wilson, Turner generally kept his foregrounds light and warm, so as to give greater force to the foreground figures, and to make the distance more retiring. His later water-colour drawings are as strong and rich as if they were painted in oil. His early oil-pictures are dark, solid, and massive; sometimes heavy. He then used light washes and scumbles of thin, opaque colour, to lighten his works. Rich glazings he seldom used. Then came his great characteristic when colour was his sole dream, to the neglect of outline, and, finally, to the forgetfulness of truth. As if to aid him, chemistry just then discovered fresh colours. Turner was the first to dare to use the gorgeous chromes; Turner was the first to imitate the Lake school in poetry, and resolve to show us nature unconventionalised. He taught us first to paint daylight, and to love daylight. He, as it were, took the roof off the old studio, and let in for ever God's blessed sunshine. He got the freshness of his distant mists, semi-opaque blueness, and clouded sapphires, by painting dim, dark outlines, and then scumbling over them with lighter tints, driven, thin, and filmy. No one ever painted atmosphere as he has. He is never harsh or coarse, but sometimes almost too undefined; so that his works have a fairy-like and spectral appearance, as if they would vanish before you had done looking at them; as in his "Burial of Wilkie," and some of his wilder and more untrue Venetian scenes. His upper foliage is never "cut out" black against white, but melts into grey clouds. His aerial reds and yellows become luminous and transparent from the lighter parts of his skies having no strength of colour. His colour is so true, and his chiaroscuro so magical, that his pictures engrave well, and lose nothing by translation into black and white. Turner's great law was, according to Burnett, "light upon light;" and "dark within dark;" "these two masses are reconciled to each other by an exchange of subordinate lights and darks, and to give the whole work the firmness and solidity of nature, strong dark touches and bright lights cross over into each other's boundaries." He maintained also the same antagonism between hot and cold tints, and in his later days sent his pictures to the academy with only these distinctions roughly but carefully mapped out, some ten hours' work on varnishing-day sufficing for all the details. In Turner's early pictures the colours are in low monochrome tone; in his later style he is often rather hot and mustardy in colour; but in his best pictures, of all his different periods, he is always regal, jewelled, and gorgeous. He obtained his effects not by lumps of raw colour, impudently and daringly contrasted, but by magic subtleties of contrast. It is by the very semi-tones of semitints, minutely and wonderfully intermingled, that Turner gave such value to his touches of pure colour. He knew when to heighten and when to subdue—when to lower and when to raise. They are more broken than Cuy's semitints, more delicate and spiritual than Claude's. Volumes might be written on the principles of colour and composition to be discovered in Turner's works, yet it would only be to discover rules that the great man used instinctively, yet never thought of. His lights are of a "good shape" and "full of variety," because he had observed the lights in nature for sixty years, and knew what and when to select.

Turner is essentially the great founder of English landscape-painting—the greatest poet-artist our nation has yet produced. His experiments, his challenges, and his sensitivities we do not defend, though we think even these valuable as warnings, and as daring but unsuccessful attempts at discovery. He excelled in everything from mere diagram and topographic map to the most consummate truth and the most refined idealism. In every touch of his there was profound thought and meaning. He never painted or spoke for the sake of speaking or painting. If he is never so coldly calm as Claude, he is often more radiant and divine; if never so still and quiet as Vandervelde in calm, he is alone in storms. As Napoleon said of Kleber, "he wakes on the day of battle." Other storms are tame and respectful compared to his, where all hell seems loose in holocaust, and the great ocean boils like a devil's caldron brimming with howling victims. "No ship could live in such a sea," said Admiral Bowles when looking at Turner's "Wreck of the Minotaur." His "Man Overboard" is still more gigantic in its Shakspearian horror—in its more than Dantesque sense of raging evil, of man's screaming hopelessness and utter despair.

Inferior to the greatest figure-painters (merely in degree) merely because a tree is a lower thing than a man, Turner's fame will grow and grow; for even more than Hogarth did he paint for the world as well as for England. Titian is more majestic, Cuyp more radiant, Claude more coldly calm, Rubens sometimes more facile; but Turner is more versatile than them all. He best illustrated and pictorially commented on our national poets; he first revealed to us the beauties of our own land; he first showed us the wider beauties of the continent, and so set our great army of travellers "a'gadding." He gave our young art its love for colour, and made us the new Venetians of the modern school. From towing an old war-ship to her last moorings, to Wilkie's burial and the burning of the Houses of Parliament, he let no event of his lifetime pass without record or comment. He showed men that whereas Claude had put neatly and elegantly some three hundred yards of air into his canvas, and paled in with gilt frames some four or five dull-drawn, cold barley-sugar temples, there was no law of nature forbidding his putting some twenty miles of air, and mountain, and valley into perpetual imprisonment upon canvas. He exhausted ancient mythology; he illustrated sacred and profane history; and he surfeited our rough island sea-faring minds with every perturbation of rage or fear that the sea that girdles us in like a wall can assume; and when he had exhausted sun, and sea, and earth, and air, he made for himself a new world, with new elements, and there alone, in that sublime solitude, this great enchanter disported himself, like the mammoth in the world before man came.

But here let us sum up Turner's merits. Born a barber's son, without advantages, a cold hour or two before the dawn of English art, Turner appeared, merely, it might be thought, to live an inglorious life, colouring architectural drawings and illustrating topographical magazines. He soon breaks forth, like Napoleon, "50,000 strong," rivals all the old masters, and excels most of them in their own manner. Still his prices remain poor, and his engravings sell badly. Gradually his fame increases, his prices advance; he is known to every one; his later more ideal pictures sell at enormous prices, and the great man, a shy recluse, too late for his enjoyment or his happiness, finds the world stretching its thousand hands towards the great one it had so long slighted. He changes not; he remains in sordid obscurity; he is branded as a miser, as a mean, ill-tempered sot, as a churl, as a fool of one poor faculty; he dies unchanging; his will is opened, and lo! it is found the surly miser has left sixty pictures, one alone worth £5,000, and all invaluable; some £30,000 worth of sketches and drawings; a matchless store of engravings; and £120,000 to found an asylum for decayed British artists. This was indeed a good-hearted and a vast-minded great man.

(w.r.)

Sharon, a distinguished historian, was born at London, September 24, 1768. He received his education at a school at Pentonville, and at the age of fifteen was articled to an attorney in the Temple. On the death of his master, before his term of clerkship had expired, Turner took up and carried on the business on his own account. Even while a clerk, he had indulged during his leisure hours a taste for literature and composition; and soon after his establishment in business for himself, he began to collect materials for his chief work, The History of the Anglo-Saxons; the first volume of which was published in 1799, and the third in 1805. He afterwards continued the history down to the death of Queen Elizabeth; and the whole work, comprising 12 vols., has taken its place among the standard books upon the subject. He wrote also The Sacred History of the World, in 3 vols., and several essays and poems. Until an advanced age, he continued to conduct an extensive business in the midst of his literary labours. Sharon Turner died in London, February 13, 1847.