younger son, Lord Ellesmere (e. g. i. 268). To us this appears a fair amount of patronage, if we consider that it is not a necessary duty of every peer to buy pictures; that many noblemen have not the means; that many have other tastes, equally legitimate and equally expensive; that some have their galleries full; that some prefer other classes of art to landscape, which, after all, is not generally regarded as the highest class. And if it be a fact that the hereditary aristocracy leant to the painters of long-established reputation, while the men of newly-acquired wealth were the chief patrons of contemporary artists, surely there may even be something of fitness in such a difference of taste and such a division of patronage. Mr. Thornbury's abuse of the nobility for their alleged indifference to Turner, therefore, has hardly more of reasonable foundation than his assertion that it was the Reform Bill that gave birth to modern art, that threw open our exhibitions, and that originated our galleries of modern pictures.' (i. 354.) In what manner the purchase of Turners at 1500, 1732, 2000, 2520, and 3000 guineas or pounds each,* is connected with the ten-pound Franchise, we must profess ourselves unable to discover. And the statement that it was only after the Reform Bill passed both Houses, that national pictures were treated as national property and thrown open to the people' (ii. 238), is simply untrue; for, as Mr. Thornbury himself has elsewhere stated, in one of his unacknowledged appropriations from Mr. Wornum (i. 304), the National Gallery has been open to the public from the time when it was founded by the purchase of Mr. Angerstein's pictures in the spring of 1824. One well-known patron of art there is on whom Mr. Thornbury is especially severe-Sir George Beaumont, whom he sometimes calls Sir John, and whose birth he places in 1782, 'seven years after Turner,' whereas the real date was 1753 (ii. 50). That Sir George Beaumont did not encourage Turner in his early days, we believe, on the authority of Leslie; and the reason probably was that his taste was somewhat conventional,' and not likely to discern merit of a daringly novel kind. But, in mitigation of our author's unqualified scorn, let it be considered that he patronised Constable, notwithstanding the difference of their views on art; that he patronised Girtin, of whose genius Turner showed his estimate by declaring 'If Girtin had lived I should have starved' (ii. 35); and that, however conventional his taste We take these prices from vol. i. pp. 232, 391; vol. ii. pp. 403-6; yet Mr. Thornbury elsewhere speaks of 14007. as the highest price given for one of Turner's pictures since his death. Vol. 111.-No. 222. 2 I may may have been in art, he will be remembered in the history of our literature as one of the first to appreciate the most unconventional poet of his age, to whom he remained through life a familiar and a munificent friend. It appears, too, that after all Sir George wished to buy one of Turner's pictures when exhibited (i. 297); and it requires a more implicit confidence than we can place in Turner's judgment to say that the painter was right in refusing to sell it. As to the sale of Turner's pictures, the patrons of art have been charged with blame which they do not deserve. That a painting by him remained unsold was often not for want of offers, but because he would not part with it at any price, or perhaps because the offer was not made precisely at the right moment. Thus the story-which, if we remember rightly, is told by Mr. Ruskin that the Old Téméraire,' when exhibited, could not 6 purchaser at 1507. is here refuted by the evidence of a gentleman who went straight from the Academy to Turner's house, and, although the painter admitted that it was his 'two hundred guinea size only,' in vain offered three hundred, and even begged him only to put a price on it.'* And whereas the great national sin, not only in Mr. Thornbury's estimation, but seemingly in that of Mr. Jones and of Turner himself (ii. 245), consisted in allowing 'The Building of Carthage' to leave the exhibition unsold, it is remarkable that the especial prophet of Turner, Mr. Ruskin, regards that picture as 'one of the deepest humiliations which Turner's art ever sustained-as belonging to an altogether mistaken class, 'utterly heartless and emotionless, dead to the very root of thought,' and so forth (Turner Gallery, 37; Life, i. 61). In Mr. Ruskin's opinion, therefore, the public was not so entirely wrong.† Nay, Mr. Thornbury himself, while he abuses the nobility for leaving the pictures of Venice to find a market among the rich men of Manchester (i. 354, ii. 239), charges the painter with 'changing and perverting Venice,' and 'never appreciating in the right way the poetry of its Oriental Gothic palaces' (i. 237322). How is it possible to satisfy writers who thus contradict each other and themselves? Mr. Ruskin tells us that in his last years Turner suffered cruelly from the evil-speaking of the world,' i. e. apparently * ii. 342, Mr. Thornbury adds that 'in 1831 it had been mentally placed by him among the pictures he would leave to the nation;' but the subject did not fall in Turner's way until 1838, and the date of the picture was 1839 (ii. 335). +Mr. Thornbury states that the picture was originally painted for 1007. for a gentleman who declined to take it' (i. 395). This is incredible: the fact probably was that, as in another case (i. 390), 100l. were paid as forfeit. from from unfavourable criticisms on his paintings (Mod. Painters,' v. 345). To the same effect Mr. Thornbury writes that 'About 1844 the wits (wits are ever cruel) began to be very severe on the poor old painter, of whose greatness they were ignorant, and whose nobler works had pleased a previous generation. Turner felt terribly their cruelty and ingratitude. ... It was as if an ape of St. Helena had sat down to write a Life of Napoleon, judging him only from his daily observations of him in that island.'-ii. 196, 198. In proof of this he quotes from Punch'-and the references here are the only references that we have observed in the whole work-the following attack on the dying lion': "Trundler, R.A., treats us with some magnificent pieces. 34. A Typhoon bursting in a Simoom over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway; with a ship on fire, an eclipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow. ""O Art! how vast thy mighty wonders are To those who roam upon the extraordinary deep; From an unpublished poem. 4. (Great Room.) Hippopotamuses at play in the river Scamander. 1311. The Duke of Wellington and the Shrimp. (Seringapatam, early morning.) "And can it be, thou hideous imp, That life is, ah! how brief, and glory but a shrimp!" "We must protest against the Duke's likeness here for though his Grace is short, his face is not of an emerald-green colour; and it is his coat, not his boots, which are vermilion; nor is it fair to make the shrimp (a blue one) taller than the conqueror of Assaye. With this trifling difference of opinion, we are bound to express our highest admiration of the work. It is the greatest that the English school of quiet landscape has produced. The comet just rising above the cataract in the foreground, and the conflagration of Tippoo's widow in the banyan-forest by the sea-shore, are in the great artist's happiest manner.'-ii. 194, 195. No doubt much of art-criticism was then and is now written by persons alike unacquainted with art and with nature; even Mr. Thornbury himself appears to have been allowed to write on art in some periodicals, and Turner must have had to bear his share of ignorant and flippant remarks. But as to the specimen just quoted, we must say that it would be well if Mr. Punch had never been guilty of anything more unjust or more ill-natured. The titles of the supposed pictures fall short in oddity of those by which Turner about that time delighted to astonish the visitors of the Exhibition. The verses are not very decidedly worse than 212 those those which he used to quote from his 'unpublished' MS. The descriptive criticism hardly exaggerates the strange effects which he then crowded into his pictures; and the comical hit about 'quiet landscape' is aimed not at Turner, but at Mr. Ruskin. Nor was this, or more serious unfavourable criticism of the same date, intended to wound the great artist's feelings or written in ignorance of his better works. It was not, we believe, written to insult him in the decay of his powers, but because the writers supposed him to be wilfully abusing those powers; not because they knew nothing of the Crossing the Brook,' the Polyphemus,' the Childe Harold,' or the 'Téméraire,' but because they believed that, with the ability still to equal these masterpieces, he preferred to produce such monsters as 'The Exile and the Rock Limpet,' and 'The Morning after the Deluge-Moses writing the Book of Genesis.' In addition to the buyers and the critics of pictures, there were two other classes of persons from whom it is said that Turner suffered grievous injustice,-the engravers and the publishers of his plates; and in both cases the evidence appears to us to show that the wrong was on his side. As to the publishers and printsellers, it is enough to quote Mr. Thornbury's statements, that, 'regarding them as Pharaohs,' he exacted from them all that he could get (i. 398); that, when publishing the 'Liber Studiorum' on his own account, he refused to allow them the usual commission (i. 274). If, therefore, the publishers or the dealers met him in something like his own spirit, we cannot wonder or greatly blame them. To the engravers no painter was ever so much indebted: the best skill of the first artists was employed on his plates; they made him popular, by enabling the public to see in their clear black and white that which the ordinary eye could not discern through the peculiarities of his handling, and the perplexing splendour of his colours; and the greatness of his obligations to them is proved by Mr. Thornbury's frequent statements (however much these may require qualification) that his money was mainly gained, not by his pictures, but by the engravings after them. But the engravers found him troublesome beyond all other painters, by the alterations which he continually made during the progress of their plates; alterations which would have been welcome, if intended to bring out better the effect of the originals, but which were in great part deviations from these, and therefore gave just ground for complaint, on account of the additional and unremunerated labour which they entailed. Yet, we are told, it seems to be a general opinion among the engravers that Turner disliked them as a body' (i. 406). We have not space for the discussion of his quarrels with engravers, and can here only notice the illnatured way in which Mr. Thornbury loads one of these gentlemen, Mr. W. B. Cooke, with imputations wholly unwarranted by Mr. Thornbury's own evidence-from which alone we know anything of the matter. The charge of fondness for money, which has been generally brought against Turner, is fiercely denounced by the biographer, while his own pages contain not only abundant proofs of it, but strong assertions of it by Mr. Thornbury himself. Nor is the impression produced by the ordinary habits of the painter's life to be effaced by such counter-statements as that, although Turner never gave an invitation to dinner, he entertained Mr. Redding and others at a picnic in Devonshire, and sometimes paid the bill of a whole party at Greenwich or Blackwall (ii. 136, 208, 216); that he once gave a five-pound note to a petitioner whom he had treated roughly; that he declined to receive payment of a bill for 5007.; or even by the story, which looks very apocryphal, that he advanced many, many thousands-as much as 20,0007.' to a friend who was in difficulties, and long after repeated this act of generosity to his friend's son--both father and son happily living to repay him (ii. 129), although the advances had been made anonymously, and the elder gentleman never knew who was his benefactor.' For such fitful and capricious acts of generosity are recorded of many men whom the world has agreed to stigmatise as misers-of the sculptor Nollekens, for example. Nor can we even agree with the biographer's estimate of Turner's intention to found a hospital for decayed artists-his bequest of 140,000l. to the nation that neglected him' (ii. 34).* We need hardly say that his possession of such wealth is a proof that the nation did not neglect him; and it really seems necessary to remind Mr. Thornbury that Turner had not the option of carrying the money out of the world with him. Nor can we think it admirable that, for the sake (as is asserted) of this great purpose, he was content to 'live like the half-starved steward of a miser's property,' to 'let his house grow into a den,' and to bear the imputation of avarice (ii. 127-169). Surely it would have been better if his habits of life had been made to correspond with the station to which he had raised himself. And since there is such a thing as avarice-since the self-denial of a miser is a part of his character, whether the object of his hoarding be to found a charity or to enrich a family-it may be fairly asked whether charity was Turner's primary object, or whether * We have already seen that Mr. Thornbury speaks as if this intention had not been known until after Turner's death (ii. 126). But it is elsewhere truly said that 'it was known full thirty years before,' (ii. 320.) he |