Inventor of English Water-Color Painting

Of all the artists of the 19th century, Turner is the greatest mystery. An Englishman by birth and residence, he yet was cosmopolitan, and in Art he was a school unto himself.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great landscape painter, was born in London, April 23rd, 1775. He was the son of a barber, and his mother became insane; the environments of his early life may account for his eccentricities. His genius was early developed; his drawing of Margate Church in his ninth year is still exhibited among his works. At thirteen his career as an acknowledged artist began, and at fifteen his name was registered as an exhibitor in the Royal Academy; at twenty he was honored as an associate of the Academy, and two years later became an Academician, the highest honor conferred upon an English artist. But Turner had greater honor after his death than was ever conferred upon him during his life. After sixty years devoted to Art, having achieved the title "the greatest water-color landscapist the world has ever produced," his powers began to fail, and the never-failing critic began to buzz through the press. His sensitive nature was stung to the quick, yet he only said: "A man may be weak in his old age, but you should not tell him so." He retired from the world, as it were, in 1850, but his faithful old housekeeper found him in a lodging-house near Cremorne, Chelsea, under the assumed name of Brooks, the day before he died, December 19th, 1851, aged seventy-six. He was awarded the honor of burial in the Crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, near Reynolds. Ten years before his death, John Ruskin, the great word-painter, sought an acquaintance with Turner, the then most renowned artist of the English school.

Genius and indomitable devotion to art would have rendered Joseph Mallord William Turner famous; but his art works would have fallen to decay, and his name might have fallen into dishonor, had not John Ruskin devoted the ten years of his life, from twenty to thirty, to the restoring and mounting of sketches, drawings, engravings and paintings of Turner, and the writing of a biography of his life. The names of Turner and Ruskin are so closely allied that the one almost suggests the other.

By self-denial and inexpensive living, Turner had amassed a fortune of one hundred and forty thousand pounds. His will bequeathed all of his unsold works to the National Gallery, London, provided they were exhibited in a separate department, to be called the Turner Gallery. His money, with the exception of a few annuities, he bequeathed in trust for the support of indigent artists. His will was disputed, but by a compromise his pictures were allowed to become national property; twenty thousand pounds were given to the Royal Academy, in trust, for the aid of artists; one thousand were reserved for the erection of a monument to Turner in St. Paul's, and the rest of his property was divided among his nearest kin. The two pictures which Turner considered his best were "Dido Building Carthage" and "The Sun in a Mist." Dr. Waagner, considered an impartial art critic, says, after referring to Turner's power over earth and air and sea, and his deep sympathy with the most varied moods of nature, in its grandeur, melancholy, and cheerfulness: "I should not hesitate to recognize Turner as the greatest landscape painter of all times, but for his deficiency in an undisputable element in every work of art, viz., a sound technical basis."

Turner is said to have invented modern water-color painting. He delighted in soft gradations of color, which led him to adopt the practice of painting on a white or very light ground; this he afterwards transferred to painting in oil, thus causing a great change in the British school of Art.

Ruskin was named one of his executors, and assumed the task of arranging the now famous Turner Gallery in London.

The bequests of Turner included three hundred and sixty oil paintings; one hundred and thirty-five finished water-color paintings; sketches and drawings cleaned and mounted by John Ruskin, 1757; 45 engravings of the Rivers of France; 23 engravings of the Rivers of England; 57 illustrations of Rogers' Italy; and, besides all these, Turner did not succeed in buying back some 200 paintings which had been purchased by individuals.

Ruskin in 1843 issued a short pamphlet in defense of Turner against the unjust attacks of the press; his pamphlet grew into a work of five volumes, known as "Modern Painters." After the death of Turner, Ruskin says of him, "During the ten years I knew him, years in which he was suffering most from the evil-speaking world, I never heard him say one depreciating word of any living man or man's work.

"I never saw him look an unkind or blameful look; I never knew him let pass, without sorrowful remonstrance, or endeavor at mitigation, a blameful word spoken by another.

"Of no man but Turner, whom I have ever known, could I say this."

Again he says: "Were I reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon one work I would choose the Slave Ship; its color is absolutely perfect."