stantial pageant" into a finished landscape. These ad captandum effects, however, are not what his fame will depend on for perpetuity: his finest pictures are the production of great study in their composition, careful and repeated painting in the detail, and a natural arrangement of the colour and breadth of the chiaroscuro.-Burnet; Turner and his Works TURNER ELECTED R.A. For some ten or twelve years Turner painted in watercolours, with the exception of two or three fancy subjects, such as the Battle of the Nile, 1799, and the Fifth Plague of Egypt, 1800. Already it was felt that in his pictures were brilliancy of execution and close observation of nature which placed his works high above those of his contemporaries. This opinion received confirmation by his election, in 1799, as an Associate of the Royal Academy; and in 1802, he became an Academician. His diploma picture, presented to the Academy on his election, and still preserved by that body, is a view of Dolbadern Castle, North Wales, thought by some a favourable example of his art at this period. TURNER VISITS THE CONTINENT. In the year in which Turner was elected an Academician, he made his first visit to the Continent. He now launched boldly into oil-painting on canvasses of large size. He had previously visited Scotland, and the Exhibition of 1802 showed as his contributions, the Falls of the Clyde; Kileburn Castle; Edinburgh, from the Water of Leith; Ben Lomond mountains; the Traveller; besides, Jason; the Tenth Plague of Egypt; Fishermen upon a Lee-shore in squally Weather, and Ships bearing up for Anchorage. In his Continential visit, he found his first subject on landing-Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing for Sea; an English Packet arriving. From Calais he went to witness the Vintage of Maçon, of which he painted a large and fine picture for Lord Yarborough. He then pushed on into Savoy and Piedmont, and returned with his portfolio full of sketches for future pictures, of which the chief were Bonneville, with Mont Blanc, Château de St. Michael, Bonneville, and Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, one and all leading attractions at the Academy Exhibitions from 1803 to 1806. His favourite master was now Richard Wilson. In the Vintage of Maçon, he endeavoured to combine the qualities of Claude and Gaspar Poussin; in others he sought to combine all the English qualities of Gainsborough's art with the characteristics of Claude. Some of his sea-pieces were in Loutherbourg's manner, but with the freshness and poetry of Gains borough's works of this class. "THE GODDESS OF DISCORD IN THE GARDEN OF THE HESPERIDES." "All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three, Milton's Comus. This magnificent picture, which has been bequeathed by the painter to the nation, was painted in 1806, and is in his early manner. It does not remind one of Wilson, but of a compound of Salvator's Calabrian rocks, and Dughet's Vales of Romagna. This picture is full of grand invention: we are sensible of a feeling of sublimity in its beetling cliffs and thunder-cloud; while below we have the placid vale, with its chequered lights and umbrageous recesses. The figures, too, are excellent-far beyond the usual Turner. In his later pictures, real men and women are as if wraiths of Children of the Mist; but here the Immortals are given with all the beauty and grace of the tangible flesh and blood of those delicious southern regions which furnished models for the chisel of a Phidias, and the pencil of a Nicholas Poussin. In none of the pictures of Turner is the story told with more distinctness. The daring feat of the Dragon is successful: we do not deride, but curiously examine the monster guardian of the fruit, who was destined in the sequel to be destroyed by Hercules; and we admit one of the most difficult feats of painting has been accomplished. This work stands at the threshold of Turner's so-called classical style; up to this time he had almost exclusively painted home scenery. No longer tied down by the effort to surmount technicality, he now ventures a bolder flight to the airy regions of fancy. This grand work will be found engraved for the first time in the Illustrated London News for Jan. 31, 1857; whence the above details are abridged. THE LIBER STUDIORUM. An important circumstance in the earlier career of Turner was his publication of the Liber Studiorum, which was commenced in 1808. This now famous work was undertaken in rivalry of the book of sketches known as the Liber Veritatis of Claude, in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, of which a series of fac-simile aqua-tinta engravings were made by Earlom and others. Turner's series, engraved in a similar style, some of them by Turner himself, embraced examples of all the principal forms of landscape composition, and displayed a fertility of resource and an intimate observation of nature, such as the publications of no previous landscape-painter had approached. The work was long extremely rare, and when brought to sale commanded a very high price. Among the earliest scenes of this great work occur the magnificent Mont St. Gothard and Little Devil's Bridge. Now, it is remarkable that after Turner's acquaintance with this scenery, so congenial in almost all respects with the energy of his mind, the proportion of English to foreign subjects should in the rest of the work be more than two to one, and that those English subjects should be-many of them— of a kind peculiarly simple, and of every-day occurrence; such as the Pembury Mill, the Farm-yard composition with the White Horse, that with the Cocks and Pigs, Hedging and Ditching, Watercress Gatherers (scene at Twickenham), and the beautiful and solemn rustic subject called a Water-mill; and that the architectural subjects, instead of being taken, as might have been expected of an artist so fond of treating effects of extended space, from some of the enormous Continental masses, are almost exclusively British: Rivaulx, Holy Island, Dumblain, Dunstanborough, Chepstow, St. Katherine's, Greenwich Hospital, an English Parish Church, a Saxon ruin, and an exquisite reminiscence of the English lowland castle in the pastoral with the brook, wooden bridge, and - wild duck; with the greys of Vandevelde. The sea in the Great Yarmouth should be noticed for its expression of water in violent agitation, seen in enormous extent from a great elevation. There is almost every form of sea in it,-rolling waves dashing on the pier-successive breakers rolling to the shore a vast horizon of multitudinous waves-and winding canals of calm water along the sands, bringing fragments of bright sky down into their yellow waste. There is hardly one of the views of the Southern Coast which does not give some new condition or circumstance of sea. "ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS.” This is one of Turner's grandest triumphs, and was painted in 1829. The subject is taken from that immortal voyage which is the Patriarch of all Romaunt. A narrowly-understood Christianity leads us to look down with contempt on the mythology of the Greeks. Not so the sympathetic inagination of a more Catholic Christianity, which can, without effort, look upward to the religious sentiment and religious forms of the Greeks from the lower plane of darker ages, cruder intelligence, and the more ungraceful mythology of Baal and Osiris. Ruddy sky, such as we never saw in any other picture, is graduated with fan-like expression through floating clouds of gold in one part of the picture, which harmoniously contrasts with cool, grey-tinted masses of supernatural shadow at the other extremity. A magnificence of invention and conception strikes at once upon the spectator. Great as the execution is, we feel that form and colour have limits which do not express but rather shackle the soul of the poet-painter. This picture is more than Claude in execution, and almost more than Milton in that power which lies in a vague impression of preternatural sublimity.* TURNER AN AFFECTIONATE SON. Turner was always attentive and affectionate to his father; and as soon as he expressed a wish to leave Maiden-lane, and retire from business, he was received by his son into his own house. The father died in Queen Anne-street in 1829, at the age of 84, and was buried in the church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, where his grave is marked by a very simple tablet erected by his son. The father's habits of getting and saving were as eager as Turner's own. It is said that the old man took shillings from visitors for showing his son's pictures; but this is peremptorily denied by Mr. Alaric Watts. Turner's father was born at Southampton, Devonshire, which place he left at an early age, to settle in Maiden-lane. A son of Stothard, living at the time of Turner's death, perfectly remembers his father relating to him that, in early * Illustrated London News, Jan. 31, 1857. life, he went one day to Turner, the hair-dresser's shop in Maiden-lane to get his hair cut, when the barber remarked to him in conversation, "My son is going to be a painter." THE OLD TEMERAIRE TOWED INTO HER LAST BERTH. Turner invested this subject, exhibited in 1839, with all the interest it was capable of receiving. The Fighting Téméraire, as the sailors used to designate her, was well known to veterans of the war with France: she was taken from the French at the battle of the Nile, and after a warrior's career, finished it gloriously at the battle of Trafalgar, leading the van under Collingwood, and breaking the line of the combined fleets. She was always, therefore, a crack ship with our British tars, and the subject, no doubt, of many a long yarn; when she left Plymouth on her last cruise for Greenwich, she was saluted with several hearty cheers by the officers and men in the dockyards. She was towed round to her last destination off Deptford, as the hospital-ship for the seamen of all nations. Turner has, therefore, treated her, in the evening of her days, with a glorious sunset. Haydon, in his picture of Bonaparte musing at St. Helena, and his Wellington on the field of Waterloo, had availed himself of the same association of ideas; but it was reserved for Turner to spread a halo over the last days of a British man-of-war.-Burnet; Turner and his Works. "THE SLAVE-SHIP." This was the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 1840; when nothing could exceed the critical violence with which it was attacked. "But," says Mr. Ruskin, "I think, the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and if so, the noblest, certainly, ever painted by man, is that of the Slaveship. It is a sunset on the Adriatic, after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deepdrawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour of which burns like gold, and bathes |