THE MARGATE HOY.

25

set, and with large but handsome features; clear grey-blue eyes and arched eyebrows; careless in dress, and generally a sturdy, determined, prudent boy, with an irresistible bias towards art. For I know not what reason, father determines now to send William to his third school, a Mr. Coleman's, at Margate, probably in the hoy immortalized by Charles Lamb. A dreary, blundering, miserable journey of a flock of huddled-together sea-sick citizens' wives and children, yet most eventful to the lad. There was, firstly, that great happiness to one of the smoked London million, pure, fluent, sapphire air; next, sunlit waves washing off and breaking in green sparkles over the gunwale; then sails luminous with transverse sunbeams and other delights to the artisteye.

Margate then must have seemed a wild, little seaside village, at a vast distance from London, and schooling, no doubt, was cheap there. Turner formed an acquaintance there with the pleasant family of a favourite schoolfellow. No wonder he retained to the end of his life an ardent love for the breezy piers and white-walled cliffs of that Kentish bathing-place; for it was there he first saw the sea, there he first learnt the physiognomy of the waves, and there, too, he first fell in love, that great revolution in the mind of youth, that temporary restoration to the lost Eden.

It was with a sister of a schoolfellow that the boy-painter fell headlong into love. She was about his own age. Close friendship now began the basis of a future love. But more of this anon.

CHAPTER II.

THE LONDON OF TURNER'S BOYHOOD.

TINTORETTO was the son of a dyer, Andrea del Sarto and the Caracci were sons of tailors, Caravaggio was the son of a mason, Correggio of a labourer, Guido of a musician, Domenichino of a ropemaker, Albano of a silk-mercer, so Turner had good precedent for being born the son of a barber-it was his only chance of being original; had he been a great man's son in that artificial age, he might have grown up a third-rate imitator of Berghem or Hobbima, and have frittered away his life lounging in the galleries of Rome or Florence. But the hard necessity of earning bread, put steel into his blood, made him a Titan for work, a lion for exertion, and filled him with an all-absorbing love of nature. Thus there was no luxury or social frivolity to weaken or impair him; all his boyhood passed in the little Maiden-lane shop, and there by contrast he learnt ardently to thirst for the fresh air and green fields.

An old

Let us see what the shop contained. writer describing the barbers' shops in Exeter-change, catalogues the contents of them as consisting of long

ALL SORTS OF WIGS.

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spiral machines for frizzing the hair, powder-puffs, toupées, silk bags, wired cushions, braiding pins fourteen inches long, crisping irons and leather rolls for forming curls. A City gentleman about 1775 would have had three wigs: two wigs for common, one of which the barber would bring nicely powdered every morning for the day's use, when he came to shave the master of the family; the third was a Sunday wig, which was taken away on the Friday and brought back on the Saturday. At spare times the barber would sit at his shop-door, surrounded by his friends while he weaved flaxen curls.

There was the eternal grinning of dummies-the ever-scorching of wigs, the clack of tongs, and now and then an artist from the studio opposite, to bring in a drawing or to talk about art with the barber-father.

"The Wycherly and Beau Fielding wigs, the horror of sculptors and the antipathy of painters," says Nollekens Smith, "cost as much as fifty guineas each." Even in Hogarth's time, old-fashioned men, such as Sir James Thornhill and Jonathan Richardson, wore the cascade wigs, and so in early life did Hogarth, before he took to such a curt Busby as Dr. Johnson wore. Nollekens Smith, writing in 1828, says, "There are persons now living who recollected seeing the father of the late Mr. Trim of Witton wearing a flowing wig."

On such wigs gazed admiringly the barber's son, or rather perhaps passed them heedlessly, as he ran off to take coach for his Brentford school. Might not those early boat trips to Brentford have led the young painter to observe the exquisite clearness of river

28

TURNING A PENNY.

sunsets, the broad gleam of sunshine on water, the rosying in twilight of the reaches of the Thames ?

Time comes that the genius must turn a penny. There can be no doubt that Turner's thrifty father, about this date, was almost inclined to make Turner an architect; while at another period he half resolved that he should be a portrait-painter. The boy had several times sat with a looking-glass before him in the dim bedroom in Maiden-lane, painting his own portrait; he had attempted, too, his friend Girtin'sPoor Tom's! Why might he not hope one day to rival the great Sir Joshua in Leicester-square, or Gainsborough in Pall-mall ? Then the lane would be blocked up by gilded, coroneted, emblazoned carriages; then flamingo-legged footmen would wave their gilt sticks, overflowing into Southampton-street; then ladies of fashion, with little Primrose Hills of powdered hair, would be painted by the son; while the father trimmed up, combed, or rearranged the Busbies or the curled wigs of their lords. As for the guineas, they would pour in like flour from the hopper-spout of a windmill on a breezy day. All that boating about Lambeth and Battersea must then be stopped. Somehow or other, through artist-customers, or else perhaps through Garrick, who knew Reynolds, the boy will presently be allowed by the great painter to come and copy portraits in his ante-room at Leicester-square.

But before I go further, let me describe the chief features of 1775, the year of Turner's birth. I have elsewhere shown, that in some respects Turner was

born at an age unhappy for his genius-an age artificial and conventionalized-when even Royal Academicians were half of them sign-painters, carriage-painters, decorators, and miniature-painters-when in, solent patronage lay only with a few of the nobility, exhausted, unoriginal, ignorant; who knew nothing of art but its pedantry, and who were half ashamed of native produce-it was an irreligious, frivolous age, barbarically ignorant of any art but that of portraiture; to which vanity Reynolds and Gainsborough had so grandly ministered—an age when our king let Wilson and Barry starve while he pampered the cold and shallow dulness of a West.

But in other respects Turner had before him a stage miserably free from competitors. England had as yet had no landscape-painter of eminence but Wilson, and his struggles had cleared the way for Turner. The rage for illustrated topographical works gave artists ample employment. The engraving speculations of Boydell had opened and enlarged the print-buying public. A great artist could now despise his former scornful patrons, and appeal to the great world, whose verdict is generally so kind and generous. Then came the rage for local histories to give him employment. But of all these events, as well as of the growing taste for art fostered by Hogarth and increased by the engravings from West, and of the origin of annual art exhibitions, the young artist was at this time, I have no doubt, recklessly indifferent, as he leant over Sandby's and Hearne's castles, trees, and abbeys, drew barges and boats, and worked