Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/349

 sister of a school friend at Margate) had been intercepted, and that she was about to be married to another; but it is impossible to test the truth of this story, to which no date is assigned.

Turner presented ‘Dolbadern Castle’ to the academy as his diploma work, and removed from Hand Court to 64 Harley Street. Now what Mr. Ruskin calls Turner's ‘period of development’ was over, and with 1800 commenced his ‘first style,’ in which he ‘laboured as a student imitating various old masters.’ In 1800 he exhibited ‘The Fifth Plague of Egypt,’ the first of three scenes of destruction from the Old Testament, the others being ‘The Army of the Medes destroyed in the Desert by a Whirlwind—foretold by Jeremiah, xv. 32–3,’ exhibited in 1801, and by ‘The Tenth Plague of Egypt’ in 1802. In 1801, 1802, and 1803 his address in the academy catalogues is 75 Norton Street, Portland Road, but in 1804 it is again 64 Harley Street. He visited Scotland in 1801. In 1802 he was elected a full member of the academy, and for the first time he appears in the catalogue as Joseph Mallord William Turner. He was called William at home, and his name is printed as W. Turner in previous catalogues, except in 1790, when it is J. W. Turner. In this year (1802) the death of Girtin removed his only serious rival. He is reported to have said, ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved;’ and of one of Girtin's ‘yellow’ drawings he said that he would have given one of his little fingers to have made such a one. He owed far more to Girtin than Girtin to him, but between them they did more than any others to develop the art of watercolour in England, by raising topography to a fine art and superseding the old tinted monochromes by drawings in colour which merited the name of paintings (see, Introduction to the Catalogue of Watercolours at South Kensington Museum). There seems to have been some estrangement between them for some years before Girtin's death, but Turner went to Girtin's funeral, and expressed an intention of erecting a stone to his memory. But this was done by others.

The exhibition of 1802 showed that Turner's ambitions went far beyond the poetical topography of Girtin. Besides Girtinesque views of Edinburgh and Scottish scenery, he sent two sea-pieces and also two works of pure imagination, ‘The Tenth Plague’ and ‘Jason.’ Turner had beaten ‘Loutherbourg and every other artist all to nothing’ (see Andrew Caldwell's letter to Bishop Percy in Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, viii. 43). In 1802 Turner took his first tour abroad, and in 1803 sent to the academy five pictures or drawings of the Savoy Alps, including the large ‘Festival upon the opening of the Vintage of Macon,’ belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. He also sent ‘Calais Pier’ and a ‘Holy Family.’ Both of these latter are in the National Gallery, as well as a splendid series of sketches (in very black pencil on tinted paper) of the Alps about Chamouni, Grenoble, and the Grande Chartreuse. From this year to 1812, though he is said to have paid another visit to the continent in 1804, he did not exhibit any foreign subject except the ‘Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen’ (1806). It was a period of great rivalry of many masters, living and dead; of the Dutch sea-painters, especially Van de Velde, in such works as the ‘Boats carrying out Anchors, &c.’ (1804), ‘Spithead’ (1809), the famous ‘Shipwreck,’ painted for Sir John Fleming Leicester (afterwards the first Lord de Tabley) [q. v.] in 1805, but not exhibited (all these are now in the National Gallery), and the ‘Fishing Boats in a Squall,’ painted for the Marquis of Stafford, and now in the Ellesmere Gallery; of Claude and Wilson in ‘Narcissus and Echo’ (1804) and ‘Mercury and Herse’ (1811) (lately purchased by Sir Samuel Montagu at the Pender sale for seven thousand guineas), of Poussin in the ‘Garden of the Hesperides’ (British Institution, 1806), and probably of Titian in ‘Venus and Adonis,’ though this work was not exhibited till 1849; of Wilkie in ‘A Country Blacksmith disputing, &c.’ (1807). In 1807 also appeared one of the most celebrated and most individual of his pictures, ‘Sun rising through Vapour,’ now in the National Gallery—the first decided expression on an important scale of his master-passion in art, the love of light and mystery in combination (see, Life, pp. 99, 100). It was a period also in which he was much employed by noblemen and gentlemen whose patronage had taken the place of the topographical publishers. There were two views of ‘Tabley, the seat of Sir J. Leicester, bart.,’ in 1809, two of Lowther Castle (Earl of Lonsdale) and one of Petworth (Earl of Egremont) in 1810. It was the period also of the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ the first number of which was published by the artist himself on 20 Jan. 1807. Turner's ‘Liber’ was suggested by the ‘Liber Veritatis’ of Claude, and was partly in rivalry with it, though no fair comparison could be made between the two, as Claude's consisted of slight sketches to identify his pictures by, whereas Turner's