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accommodation is provided in the main building of the National Gallery, in accordance with the intentions of the Testator.

His executors were his friends, Mr. Hardwick, R.A.; Mr. Jones, R.A.; Mr. Munro, of Hamilton-place; Mr. Ruskin; Mr. Charles Turner, the engraver; and Mr. Griffiths, of Norwood. To each executor he left 197. 19s. 6d. legacy-duty being payable on sums amounting to 207. and more.

The oil paintings include many of Turner's finest works, as well as examples of his pencil from the very outset to the termination of his career. The finished drawings, which number several hundreds, and the sketches, which amount to some thousands, have been or are being arranged, cleaned, and mounted with rare skill and patience, by Mr. Ruskin, who volunteered his services to the Government. Among those exhibited are many admirable Drawings in colour; and numerous sepia drawings made for the Liber Studiorum, the Rivers, &c., some of which are of exquisite beauty and brilliancy of effect, probably unequalled among drawings of that character.

The Nation also possesses in the collections presented by Mr. Vernon and Mr. Sheepshanks, several other choice examples of Turner's pencil.

Mr. Leslie records this excellent trait of Turner-that he never heard him disparage any living painter, or any living man. Now, vanity generally leads its possessor to depreciate others; hence, we may conclude, Turner was not a vain man. But Turner may, probably, have felt acutely the ignorance and impertinence with which some critics were accustomed to fasten upon his pictures, year by year, in the exhibition; and much of this abuse was levelled at some of Turner's best pictures. However, the painter lived to see these miserable attempts at writing down fail, when the public, having become more educated in art, began to understand Turner's pictures; had the abuse continued, the country might have missed Turner's splendid bequest of his paintings, which, in that case would have been dispersed, instead of forming as they now do the sun or splendid centre of our National Collection.

CHARACTERISTICS, RETROSPECTIVE OPINIONS, AND PERSONAL TRAITS.

TURNER'S PRE-EMINENCE PREDICTED.

The late Thomas Greene, of Ipswich, author of Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature, was a devoted admirer of the fine arts, and possessed a sound and cultivated judgment. In this Diary we find the following evidence of his early appreciation of Turner's genius.

"June 2, 1797. Visited the Royal Exhibition. Particularly struck with a sea-view by Turner: fishing-vessels coming in, with a heavy swell, in apprehension of a tempest gathering in the distance, and casting, as it advances, a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore. The whole composition bold in design, and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist; but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department."

"June 3, 1799. Visited the Royal Exhibition, and was again struck and delighted with Turner's landscapes; particularly with fishermen in an evening, a calm before a storm, which all Nature attests is silently preparing, and seems in death-like stillness to await; and Caernarvon Castle, the sun setting in gorgeous splendour behind its shadowy towers. The latter in water-colours, to which he has given a depth and force of tone, which I had never before conceived attainable with such untoward implements. Turner's views are not mere ordinary transcripts of Nature-he always throws some peculiar and striking character into the scene he represents."

These extracts read like passages from Modern Painters, and exhibit a remarkable appreciation of the genius of a young and almost unknown artist, (Turner was then twentyfive) and a striking belief in its continuous development, which time has confirmed. Some seventeen years later, a distinguished painter gave similar presage.

Leslie, who went to see Turner's pictures, at Somerset House, in 1816, notes: "Turner is my great favourite of all the painters here. He combines the highest poetical imagination with an exquisite feeling for all the truth and individuality of nature; and he has shown that the ideal, as it is called, is not the improving of Nature, but the selecting and combining objects that are most in harmony and character with each other."

In the first year of his Associateship, he exhibited The Fifth Plague of Egypt; in the second year, The Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desert by a Whirlwind; and in the third year, The Tenth Plague of Egypt. These Scriptural subjects were not among the Painter's greatest successes; and his admirers willingly turned from them to Dutch Boats in a Gale; his Pembroke Castle—a thunderstorm approaching; his Fishermen on Lee-shore in squally weather; and his view of Ben Lomond, with its wild Ossianic effect.

TURNER'S THREE PERIODS.

Turner's career comprehends, independently of his imitations of Claude, three distinct styles. He made three visits to Italy in 1819, 1829, and 1840, and after each his style underwent a remarkable change; although the usual division, and it is the most convenient one, does not exactly correspond with these visits.

The first period reaches to about Turner's 27th year, when he was elected into the Academy, and during which he was chiefly noticeable as a water-colour painter diligently occupied in drawing from Nature, and at the same time forming for himself a style, by carefully studying (and imitating) the methods of his English predecessors, Wilson, Loutherbourg, and in a less degree, Gainsborough: "his early drawings," says Mr. Wornum, " are conspicuous for their careful completion, subdued colour, and effective light and shade ; his earliest oil pictures resemble those of Wilson in style."

In the second period, Turner's middle life, ranging from 1802 to 1830, he is seen at first a follower of Claude, and in a less degree, of Gaspar Poussin, but rapidly disencumbering himself from the trammels of every kind of pupillage to great names, and striking out a style of Landscape-painting entirely original, and wholly unrivalled for brilliancy of colouring and effect. The majority of his greatest works belong to that

time, from his Calais Pier, 1803, to the Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, 1829.

In the third period, dated from Turner's second visit to Rome, in 1830, during the last twenty years of his life, light, with all its prismatic varieties, seems to have chiefly engrossed his attention; or rather, everything else was sacrificed in the effort to attain the utmost splendour of light and colour-to make, in the strange language of his own MS. "Fallacies of Hope:"

The sun

Exhale earth's humid bubbles, and emulous of light,
Reflect her forms each in prismatic guise.

Yet, some of Turner's finest works belong to this period,-as his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, exhibited in 1832, and the Téméraire, exhibited in 1839.

Yet, during the whole of these periods, like every great artist, Turner's conceptions were always advancing and expanding, and in each period were painted pictures that would seem justly to belong to another. Judges of art pronounce widely different opinions as to the period at which he painted best. It is quite certain that up to some ten or twelve years of his death, his knowledge of the phenomena of Nature and of the resources of art continued to grow and expand, even when his hand failed to express faithfully his intentions, or his impatience prevented him setting them forth with due elaboration. Mr. Ruskin has thus nobly expressed the above views:

As

"There has been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not, like some few artists, been without childhood; his course of study has been as evidently as it has been swiftly progressive; and in different stages of the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another, has been aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his career, he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never abandoned without a gain; and his present works present the sum and perfection of his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience and passion of one who feels too much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause for expression, or ponder over his syllables." Mr. Ruskin thus eloquently sketches the former rank and progress of Turner; the standing of his present works and a powerful proof that their mystery is the consequence of their fulness. "There is in

them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy; the instinctive and burning language, which would express less, if it uttered more, which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness of sense, too bitterly the impotence of the hand, and the vainness of the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of his life; he knows her now too well, he cannot palter over the material littlenesses of her outward form; he must give her soul, or he has done nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the earth, and the oil. 'I cannot gather the beams out of the eat, or I would make them tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night-sky, or I would nake that teach you what I have seen; but read this, interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me ; for I will give you no patient mockery, no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am, and whom I serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me; but remember, that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery.'

Any one who studies Turner's works chronologically, which he may readily do by Mr. Wornum's admirable arrangement of them in the South Kensington Museum--and at the same time, has diligently studied Nature-may satisfy himself as to the accuracy of this estimate of the great painter's works.

WHO WERE TURNER'S PATRONS?

By many, and perhaps by the best judges, Turner will be placed in that class

Whose genius is such

That we never can praise it or blame it too much.

The artists, with scarcely one exception, had, from the beginning of his career, done him justice. But he passed through lite little noticed by the aristocracy, and never by Royalty. Callcott, and other painters, immeasurably below him, were knighted; and whether Turner desired such a distinction or

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