blinded Samson, indeed!-a fallen angel forgetful of his lost Paradise.'-ii. 167, 168. We should not have copied this passage, but that it has already been so often quoted as to be generally known. In so far as we can discover, the statement as to Turner's 'wallowing' at Wapping has been received by those who knew him with astonishment, incredulity, and indignation. One of the most eminent among his brother artists, on hearing the story, thought it a sufficient refutation to exclaim, 'Only look at his pictures!' For ourselves, since no authority is given for it, and since we have seen -as in the cases of Scott's study, Howard's cat, and the old man of Auchterless-that Mr. Thornbury is incapable of reporting the simplest fact without some alteration, we hold ourselves entitled to disbelieve this tale until it comes to us better accredited. We do not venture to say that there is no foundation for it; but it will be very unlike such of Mr. Thornbury's stories as we have been able to test if it do not either vanish altogether when investigated, or come out of the trial shorn of all that is most startling in it. But supposing it all true, what a principle of biography is this! Are the lives of eminent men to be written with the aid of the detective police? Turner's professional character is, of course, public property, as the literary character of an author is. But to pry into the private conduct of a man just dead-conduct with which the world has no concern; which, if faulty, he had the decency to hide, and of which the exposure, while discreditable to him, can be of no benefit to any one-to circulate statements which he has never heard, charges which he has had no opportunity of answering, and all this under the pretence of a reverence approaching to idolatry -this is something which cannot be too severely reprobated. And we are sorry to say that, although Mr. Thornbury's book is an extreme example of such outrage, there have been of late too many biographies which offend in the same manner. Indeed, Turner is more fortunate than many others in one respect,—that, as he wrote but few letters, his biographer has not been able, like many other late biographers, to thrust on the public a mass of correspondence which, if it were ever to see the light, ought at least to have been withheld until it could be published without giving pain to the living or exciting bitter thoughts against the dead. It is a favourite doctrine both with Mr. Ruskin and with Mr. Thornbury, that Turner was deeply wronged by the world, and that on the world his faults ought to be charged. We must express our entire disbelief of such a theory. We had, indeed, trusted that it had already been exploded by Leslie's well-known remarks on on Mr. Ruskin; but here we have again the old complaint, with the odd variation that the idea of Turner's unsociability, which had been brought forward by Mr. Ruskin as a proof of his having been grievously injured by the world, is now-after Leslie's refutation of it-described by Mr. Thornbury as a base and malignant invention of his enemies! In truth, few men have been more successful than Turner; and his success was early, unbroken, and increasing to the very end. The son of a very small tradesman, he received an education which, although scanty, might have been turned to greater account, if he had been disposed, like multitudes of men less favourably started in life, to follow it up by self-education; † at all events, whether by the help of a timely legacy or otherwise, (i. 53), the father was able to give him as good an education in art as England could offer. We are told again and again that early sufferings from grasping patrons and dealers in art made him distrustful; but in reality it would seem that, far from having had worse struggles than other men who have risen from humble beginnings, he must have escaped very easily. If he sold his early drawings for three shillings each, the price was probably as much as could have been expected by a boy of his age and condition. If he had died immediately after having executed those drawings, they would probably have never fetched more. And it was by the small earnings of his youthful days, as a draughtsman, as a teacher, and as an illustrator of topographical books, that he was enabled to maintain himself, until, at an unusually early age, he reached the first place in his art, and obtained the highest prices for his works. At twenty-four, he was an Associate of the Royal Academy ; at twenty-seven, a full Academician, although * Autobiographical Recollections,' i. 201-5. Turner was a man of keen observation, and in one sense was always educating himself. But, although he seems to have read a good deal of poetry, his literary acquirements were always very defective. He could never spell: for instance, he writes wife, 'whife' (ii. 91). His penmanship, too, was probably bad; for it is clear that in the letters and verses which are printed there are many mistakes. And Mr. Thornbury seems to have been led by the misspelling of an autograph codicil into a misstatement as to his will at vol. ii. 289, where it is stated that Hannah Danby (whom Mr. Thornbury elsewhere calls Ellen, ii. 273) was 'appointed custodian of the Turner Gallery, at 1007. a year, with 501. more for her services.' This is clearly nonsense. But on turning to the Appendix (p. 414) we find the original words to be one hundred a-year for her service, and fifty pounds for her assistance service which may be required to keep the said gallery in a viewable state.' 'Assistance seems to be Turner's way of spelling assistant's.' We need not say that it is mere nonsense when Mr. Thornbury writes of him, after his election as A.R.A., Then he is back again to London (sketching the Savoy Chapel in gray) perhaps with Girtin, for Dr. Munro's [i. e. Monro's] half-a-crown a-day and supper,' i. 357. Dr. Monro's patronage was, indeed, most kind and valuable to both Turner and Girtin. He set before them good models, directed although Mr.Thornbury, while he abuses others for having been slow to understand him, has nothing but violent abuse for the Academy which so early showed its appreciation of his merit. (See vol. i. p. 99.) For fifty years before his death he was acknowledged to be the greatest landscape-painter of his own time, at least-for nothing can be more utterly groundless than the fancy which has lately grown up, that Mr. Ruskin, a few years before the painter's death, was the first to discover his surpassing excellence; and, having begun the world with nothing, he left property the amount of which is very inadequately represented by the appraiser's valuation, of 140,0007.* If his life was not happy, its unhappiness did not arise from any want of public encouragement. Even if it were true that a man is justified in avenging himself for early sufferings at the hands of a few persons by unamiable behaviour to a different, a far larger, and a wholly innocent set of persons in maturer years, we do not think with Mr. Thornbury (i. 393) that Turner had any such justification. Mr. Thornbury thinks that Turner was ill-used by the nobility, who spent their money on the old masters; and that the first true recognition of him was reserved for the rich manufacturers of Birmingham and Manchester. But we find him employed by Lord Essex, a very early patron; largely employed by Lord Egremont, whom Mr. Thornbury, with his usual blundering affectation of knowledge, particularises as 'Lord Leconfield, the third Earl,'† (i. 306,) and whom he delights to speak of as a man of 'rough' and rustic manners, whereas he was notoriously a most accomplished and polished gentleman; ‡ by Sir John Leycester, afterwards Lord de Tabley; by Lord Harewood, Lord Yarborough, by the Marquis of Stafford, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, and we believe, by his directed them in their sketching from nature, and paid them as much as they could at that time have got anywhere. If the drawings executed for him have since risen in value, there is no ground for charging him with niggardliness. *Turner's property,' says Mr. Wornum, was sworn under 140,000l., his pictures being appraised at the ordinary value of such effects.' (Memoir,' xx.) We have been informed on good authority that the pictures and drawings bequeathed to the nation may alone be now fairly estimated at four hundred thousand pounds! † We need hardly say that the present owner of Petworth is the first person who has borne this title. At vol. ii. p. 48, the notorious Jack Fuller' and the story of his insulting the Speaker of the House of Commons are dragged in without any reason; and he is described as a 'boisterous country gentleman of the Lord Egremont stamp!' As to Lord Egremont, we may refer to the article on Leslie in this Review, vol. evii. pp. 493-4. A friend writes to us-'I once met Turner at Lord Egremont's house in Grosvenor Place, as long ago, I think, as 1829. There were, so far as I recollect, six or seven besides the host and myself; but Turner is the only one of whom I have any distinct remembrance, an indication of his power, which strongly impressed my boyish mind; for at that time he was by no means the popular hero he has now become.' younger 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 find a 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), 1007. were paid as forfeit. from |