upon the foundation of chiaroscuro. In her most accidental, and apparently unpromising materials, for a work of art, Nature always has some redeeming points that assert her superiority over the laboured compositions of fireside inventions; but these must be seen and appreciated by the artist, and no one could perceive and aggrandise these beauties in a clearer or greater degree than Turner.-Burnet: Turner and his Works. PORTRAITS OF TURNER. Mr. Leslie regrets that "Turner never would sit for a portrait excepting when he was a young man, and then only for a profile by Dance. This is, therefore, the only satisfactory likeness of him extant." But there is a portrait of Turner in the collection at South Kensington: it was painted by himself, about 1802; bust, life-size, and in evening dress. In the year 1800, he sat for a series of small-sized portraits of members of the Royal Academy. He always had an impression that any knowledge of his burly form and uncouth farmer-looking appearance would affect the poetry of his works. He considered that it would throw a doubt upon their genuineness. "No one," he said, "would believe, upon seeing my likeness, that I painted those pictures." One or two portraits were, however, taken of him surreptitiously. Mr. Smith, of the British Museum, obtained a sketch of him. A very fair full-length sketch of Turner was published May 10th, 1845, in the Illustrated London News. The best and only finished portrait of him is, however, one of half-size, in oil, by J. Linnell. It was the result of a plot, which may now be revealed without offence to the honoured victim. The Rev. Mr. Daniell, a gentleman who was extremely intimate with Turner, prevailed upon his eccentric friend occasionally to dine with him. Linnell, without exciting any suspicion of his object, was always one of the party, and by sketching on his thumb-nail, and, unobserved, on scraps of paper, he at length succeeded in transferring the portly bust and sparkling eye of the great artist to his canvas. The picture was finished, and passed in due time, at the price of two hundred guineas, into the possession of Mr. Birch, a gentleman residing near Birmingham. Turner never knew it. Posterity may now come to be acquainted with the likeness of his mortality, without prejudice to the immortality of his works. Soon after Turner's death, there appeared in the shop windows a sketch by Count d'Orsay, taken at an evening party, at Mr. Bicknell's, of Clapham, which Mr. Leslie considers "most execrable." Mr. Peter Cunningham describes Turner as "short, stout, and bandy-legged, with a red, pimply face, imperious and covetous eyes, and a tongue which expressed his sentiments with a murmuring reluctance. Sir William Allan was accustomed to describe him as a Dutch skipper. His hands were very small, and owing to the long cuffs to his coats, only his fingers were seen. His look was anything but that of a man of genius." But a second glance would find far more in his face than belongs to any ordinary mind. There was a peculiar keenness of expression in his eye, which denoted constant habits of observation. His voice was deep and musical, but he was a confused and tedious speaker. He was very joyous at table, and, was very apt at repartee. He was a social man in his nature; and Mr. Leslie considers the recluse manner in which he lived to have arisen from his strong wish to have his time entirely at his command. We are inclined to agree with the writer; had it not been for his "recluse manner," Turner would, most probably, have proved a very inferior artist. The world are strangely inconsiderate, not to say dishonest, as regards the time of artists and professional persons generally: being fitted to shine in society, their "valuable time" is too often filched away by a description of persons who are the first to throw up their hands and eyes at the failings of a man of genius! TURNER ON VARNISHING DAYS. "Turner, (says Mr. Leslie,) was very amusing on varnishing, or rather, the painting, days at the Academy. Singular as were his habits, for nobody knew where or how he lived, his nature was social, and at our lunch on those anniversaries, he was the life of the table. The Academy has relinquished, very justly, a privilege for its members which it could not extend to all exhibitors. But I believe, had the varnishing days been abolished while Turner lived, it would almost have broken his heart. When such a measure was hinted to him, he said, 'Then you will do away with the only social meetings we have, the only occasions on which we all come together in an easy unrestrained manner. When we have no varnishing days, we shall not know one another.' In another page we have told how Turner availed himself of the varnishing days at the British Institution, where he was the first in the morning, and the last to leave; and where he completed many a fine landscape upon a brilliant foundation. It was upon a varnishing day at the Royal Academy, that, some sixteen years since, a clever artist* who was present, sketched Mr. Turner, as he stood before one of his pictures. At this time, there was no accessible portrait known of the great painter, and his whole-length being required for a series of portraits, to appear in the Illustrated London News, it was thus secured surreptitiously, and engraved in No. 158 of that journal: here he is—a portly figure, his handkerchief half out of his pocket; and to conceal where the sketch was obtained, he holds in his hand a sketch-book. Mr. Leslie relates a capital story of Turner eclipsing a brother artist on a varnishing day. In 1839, when Constable exhibited his Opening of Waterloo Bridge, it was placed in one of the small rooms at Somerset House, next to a sea-piece, by Turner-a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's Waterloo seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him, looking from the Waterloo to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the Great Room, where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. "I came into the room," (says Mr. Leslie,) "just as Turner left it." "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired a gun." On the opposite wall was a picture, by Jones, of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego in the Furnace. "A coal," said Cooper, "has bounced across the room from Jones's picture, and set fire to Turner's sea." Turner did not come again into the room for a day and a half and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy. **Charles Martin, son of John Martin. The gossip of varnishing days is very amusing. One cold day, Chantrey stopped before a picture by Turner, and seizing the artist's arm, placed his hands before a blaze of yellow, in an attitude of obtaining warmth, and said, with a look of delight, "Turner, this is the only comfortable place in the room. Is it true, as I have heard, that you have a commission to paint a picture for the Sun Fire Office?" In 1827, when Turner exhibited his Rembrandt's Daughter, in a red robe, the portrait of a member of one of the Universities was hung by its side, with a college-gown, that was still redder. Upon finding this out on varnishing day, Turner was observed to be very busy adding red lead and vermilion to his picture. "What are you doing there, Turner?" asked one of the hangers. "Why, you have checkmated me," was the reply, pointing to the University gown, "and I must now checkmate you." It was often remarked that Turner had never been known to give a dinner. But, when dining one day at Blackwall, the bill, a heavy one, being handed to Chantrey, (who headed the table,) he threw it to Turner, by way of joke, and Turner paid it, and would not allow the company to pay their share. Mr. Leslie, who relates this anecdote, adds: "I know also that Turner refused large offers for the Téméraire, because he intended to leave it to the nation." TURNER'S SEA-PIECES. Turner executed no subjects with greater care or more spirit than his Sea-pieces, especially when the tempest-tossed waves threaten "to swallow navigation up;" nothing can exceed the appearance of turbulent motion with which he imbues them; their forms can only be caught sight of ere they hurry into confusion, and become lost. However well Backhuysen or Vandervelde may have painted storms at sea, Turner's representations are more like Nature than either, even to the loose unsteady handling of his flowing pencil; everything in his pictures seems to be under the influence of the most boisterous hurricane-such as we see represented in his painting of the Wreck of the Minotaur, in Lord Yarborough's collection: while others are contented with loss of a few sails or spars carefully painted, Turner gives us the entire canvas blown from the masts, mingling in one mass with the foamy surge below, that seems rising up to engulph the whole in one great chaos; the boats approaching the wreck are driven in all directions, while the agitated waters heave up and down in wild confusion. Admiral Bowles, when looking at the above picture in the British Institution, said: "No ship or boat could live in such a sea; that was what Turner meant to express and convey to us-the fearless, death-defying courage of English sailors. While we are upon this subject, we must not overlook the truth of character and bluff forms of Turner's fishermen and English sailors: they are transcripts of the men they represent, and though others might draw them with greater correctness in the detail, yet in the general appearance they are portraits. The complete unity of his figures with the scene shows the advantage that the whole work derives from their being painted by the same hand. Turner used to delight to go to sea in rough weather, with smugglers or fishermen, whose trade is with storms.-Burnet; Turner and his Works. TURNER'S VERSES. The great Painter was ambitious to become a poet: he is even said to have left a long manuscript "poem," from which he selected several subjects for his pictures, and epigraphs for the Catalogue. The MS. has not, however, been found among the painter's papers. Its title was "the Fallacies of Hope"and its rhyme and reason are so faulty as to form the best illustration of the "poem" itself: it was, indeed, a fallacy to suppose Turner a poet, save in his pencil.* Specimens of the curious Fallacies of Hope may be seen in old Exhibition Catalogues, or more readily in Mr. Wornum's Catalogue of the British School, now at South Kensington. It may be amusing to quote a few passages. The first we find appended to the Snow-storm, Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps: "Craft, treachery, and fraud,-Salassian force * There seems long to have been a fashion for painters to accompany the titles of their pictures with rhymes, or quotations from accredited poets. We all remember the rhymes beneath Hogarth's subjects in his prints: they were written for the painter by various hands. The fashion was continued in Exhibition catalogues. Z |