I should have liked to add to this volume accurate lists of Turner’s works and the engravings from them, with information of their possessors, and the extraordinary fluctuation in the prices which they have realized, but this would have entailed great labour and have swelled unduly the bulk of this volume, which is already greater than that of its fellows. Fortunately this information is likely to be soon supplied by Mr. Algernon Graves, whose accurate catalogue of Landseer’s works is sufficient guarantee of the manner in which he will perform this more difficult task.
The edition of Thornbury’s “Life of Turner” referred to throughout these pages, is that of 1877.
1775 TO 1797. DAYS OF EDUCATION AND PRACTICE.
1797 TO 1820. DAYS OF MASTERY AND EMULATION.
Yorkshire and the young Academician--1797 to 1807 38
Harley Street, Devonshire, Hammersmith, and Twickenham 75
The task of writing a satisfactory life of Turner is one of more than usual difficulty. He hid himself, partly intentionally, partly because he could not express himself except by means of his brush. His secretiveness was so consistent, and commenced so early, that it seems to have been an instinct, or what used to be called by that name. Akin to the most divinely gifted poets by his supreme pictorial imagination, he also seems on the other side to have been related to beings whose reasoning faculty is less than human. When we look at such pictures as _Crossing the Brook_, _The Fighting Téméraire_, and _Ulysses and Polyphemus_, we feel that we are in the presence of a mind as sensitive as Keats’s, as tender as Goldsmith’s, and as penetrative as Shelley’s; when we read of the dirty discomfort of his home and of the difficulty with which his patrons, and even his relations, obtained access to his presence--how even his most intimate friends were not admitted to his confidence--we can only think of a hedgehog, whose offensive powers being limited, is warned by nature to live in a hole and roll itself up into a ball of spikes at the approach of strangers.
We are used to having our idols broken; but we still fashion them with a persistency which seems to argue it a necessity of our nature, that we should think of the life and character of gifted men as being the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace we perceive in their works. It is this habit which makes any attempt to write a life of Turner pre-eminently unsatisfactory, for his refined sense of the most ethereal of natural phenomena is not relieved by any refinement in his manners, his supreme feeling for the splendour of the sun is unmatched by any light or brilliance in his social life; his extreme sensibility, a sensibility not only artistic but human, to all the emotional influences of nature, stands for ever as a contrast to his self-absorbed, suspicious individuality. There is of course no reason why a landscape painter should be refined in manner or choice in his habits. There is no necessary connection between the subjects of such an artist and himself, except his hand and eye. He lives a life of visions that may come and go without affecting his life or even his thought, as we generally use that word. The most tremendous phenomena of nature may be seen and studied, and reproduced with such power as to strike terror into those who see the picture, and yet leave the artist unaltered in demeanour and taste. Even those men of genius who, instead of employing their imagination upon nature’s inanimate works, devote themselves to the study of man himself, socially and morally, do not by any means show that relation between themselves and their finest work that we appear naturally to expect.