Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/354

 power, he went during the next five years to produce some of the most characteristic and inimitable of his works. Among those most remarkable for their simplicity, their grandeur and splendour of colour, are the drawings executed in 1842—three from sketches made by him in Switzerland in 1840, 1841, and perhaps 1843 (see notes by Mr. Ruskin on his drawings by Turner, exhibited at the Fine Arts Society in 1878). Of one of the drawings, ‘The Splugen,’ Mr. Ruskin says that it is ‘the best Swiss landscape yet painted by man.’ Another (‘Lucerne’) Mr. Ruskin sold for 1,000l., and probably it would fetch a great deal more now.

To these five years belong such exquisite Venetian visions as the ‘Giudecca, &c.’ (1841), and ‘Depositing of John Bellini's three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore’ (1841), ‘The Campo Santo’ (1842) (now belonging to Mr. Keiller), and ‘The Approach to Venice’ (1843), besides a few works of singular interest and power, like ‘Peace—Burial at Sea’ (1842), ‘The Snowstorm’ of the same year, and ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed’ (1844), all in the National Gallery. ‘Peace—Burial at Sea,’ is an imaginative sketch of Wilkie's funeral by night off Gibraltar, with rockets in the distance, a glare of light on the sponson, and sails hanging black against the cold sky. When Stanfield complained of the blackness of the sails, Turner answered, ‘If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it.’ The ‘Snowstorm’ is an impression of a storm while he was on board the Ariel, a Margate steamer, when he had himself lashed to the mast to observe it, remaining so for four hours. ‘I did not expect to escape,’ he said to Charles Kingsley, ‘but I felt bound to record it if I did.’ It was described as ‘soapsuds and whitewash,’ to the artist's great annoyance. ‘Soapsuds and whitewash!’ he said to Mr. Ruskin. ‘What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like. I wish they had been in it.’ ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed’ represents an extensive landscape seen through a mist of rain. A thousand veiled objects gradually reveal themselves as you look at it. It well realises his saying that ‘indistinctness was his forte.’ Some others of his later works were more open to ridicule—vain endeavours to represent vague thoughts in colour language, such as ‘War—the Exile [Napoleon at St. Helena] and the Rock Limpet,’ ‘Shade and Darkness—the Evening of the Deluge,’ and ‘Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis.’ These pictures and the quotations from that melancholy manuscript, ‘The Fallacies of Hope,’ with which their titles were accompanied in the catalogues, afforded easy sport to the young wits of ‘Punch’ and other periodicals (a collection of some of the cleverest of their jeux d'esprit will be found in Life, chap. xxxvi). Turner was very sensitive to such attacks. They were to him, says Mr. Ruskin, ‘not merely contemptible in their ignorance, but amazing in their ingratitude. “A man may be weak in his age,” he said to me once at the time when he felt he was dying, “but you should not tell him so”.’

In addition to his Venetian pictures of 1841, he exhibited ‘Rosenau, the seat of H.R.H. Prince Albert of Coburg,’ intended perhaps as a compliment to the queen, and in 1843 a picture painted in honour of the king of Bavaria, called ‘The Opening of the Walhalla, 1842.’ He sent this picture, which was very inaccurate and probably painted from an engraving, as a present to the king, who returned it to the artist, thus affording another instance of ‘the fallacies of hope.’ It is now in the National Gallery. In 1841 (the year when both Wilkie and his old friend Chantrey died) he complained that his health was ‘on the wain.’ His sight was now beginning to fail, and in 1842 he was very ill and living by rule. In 1843 he paid his last recorded visits to the continent and to Margate. The year 1845 is assigned by Mr. Ruskin as the end of his third period, when mind and sight began to fail; but the pictures of the few remaining years of his life, if incoherent, were often of great beauty in colour, and his mind was still active. He began a new class of subjects, ‘Whalers,’ of which he sent several pictures to the academy, and he took great interest in the new art of photography, then in the daguerreotype stage. He paid Mayall a visit in 1847, and was photographed several times; but he concealed his identity, calling himself a master of chancery, and the plates were not preserved.

For some time before his death his frequent absence from Queen Anne Street led his friends to suspect that he had another home. He had taken a house at Chelsea by the side of the river near Cremorne Gardens, where he lived with Sophia Caroline Booth, his ‘good old Margate landlady’ Mr. Ruskin calls her. He adopted her name, and both at Chelsea and at Margate he was known as Mr. Booth, Admiral Booth, or ‘Puggy’ Booth. Many of his friends tried in vain to discover his retreat, but were always foiled with great ingenuity by Turner. He