Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/355

 had no picture at the academy in 1851, but he came to the private view, and went to see his old friend David Roberts. After this he disappeared again. At length Hannah Danby, his old housekeeper in Queen Anne Street, obtained a clue to his whereabouts by a letter left in an old coat, and he was found the day before his death, which took place at Chelsea on 19 Dec. 1851. In accordance with his own request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, and his funeral was largely attended by his fellow artists and others.

Turner's will (with four codicils) was proved on 6 Sept. 1852, and the property was sworn under 140,000l. The testamentary papers were so confused that litigation lasted for four years, and resulted in a compromise to the following effect: (1) the real estate to go to the heir-at-law; (2) the pictures, &c., to go to the National Gallery; (3) 1,000l. for the erection of a monument in St. Paul's Cathedral; (4) 20,000l. to the Royal Academy, free of legacy duty; (5) remainder to be divided among next-of-kin. By this decision one of the main objects of the will, the foundation of a charity, to be called ‘Turner's Gift,’ for ‘male decayed artists living in England, and of English parents only and lawful issue,’ was entirely frustrated, but the nation became possessor of 362 pictures, 135 finished watercolour drawings, 1,757 studies in colour, and sketches innumerable. Over nineteen thousand pieces of paper, more or less drawn upon, and in every state of neglect and decay, were taken from his dirty and dilapidated house in Queen Anne Street to the National Gallery, where they were put in order and protected from further damage by Mr. Ruskin. The National Gallery also possesses palettes and other memorials of the great painter, besides a portrait of him painted by himself in 1802, when he was twenty-seven. A beautiful engraving of this painting forms the frontispiece to Wornum's ‘Turner Gallery.’ Mr Ruskin possesses another portrait. A third was painted by Linnell from memoranda taken by stealth, and there is also a full-length outline sketch, in which Turner is stirring a cup of coffee, by Count d'Orsay. Thornbury's ‘Life’ contains sketches after the portrait by Dance, and from the statue by MacDowell in St. Paul's.

Turner lived a life of continued prosperity and almost continued fame from his boyhood to his death. In later life he had to endure some ridicule, and his works were not (and he felt that they were not) fully understood or prized for the most transcendent of their qualities, but he lived to see the publication of the first two volumes of ‘Modern Painters,’ in which he was praised as no other artist was ever praised before. Not only in ‘Modern Painters,’ but in many other books, Mr. Ruskin has described and analysed the great painter's powers, both mental and artistic, with a sympathy, an enthusiasm, and a power of language which have made their names inseparable. Among Turner's strongest passions were his love of fame and his love of money, but the strongest of all was his love of nature. He studied her every day, early and late, throughout his life. On his tours, on foot, on sea, or in the coach, in England, Scotland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy, he was constantly at work, noting as he went, in swift pencil outline, all he thought worthy of memory; and his memory was equal to his industry. No mind was ever so stored with impressions of nature or was so able to weave them at will into visions of beauty.

A life so absorbed had little to spare for the ordinary claims of society, and he was by nature and bringing up shy and suspicious, but nothing conduced more to his mental and moral solitude than his incapacity to express himself in words. He had a mind of unusual range and feelings of unusual depth, but he could scarcely write a sentence of plain English.

Other artists, like Claude, Cuyp, Crome, and Constable, have painted certain familiar aspects of nature with more fidelity and completeness, but no landscape-painter has equalled Turner in range, in imagination, or sublimity. His technique in oils was unsound, but in watercolours it was supreme; and in oils his dexterity was such that he obtained unrivalled effects in that medium. It is impossible to estimate his power without study of his watercolour drawings, especially as so many of his finest works in oil are mere wrecks of what they were. Far from decreasing since his death, his fame is still extending in England and abroad, and the prices given for his works increase every year. At the sale of Mr. Elhanan Bicknell's collection in 1863, ten pictures, for which he had paid 3,750l. 11s. 9d., realised 17,261l. 10s.; but since then four only of these very pictures —‘Helvoetsluys’ (1832), ‘Antwerp’ (1833), ‘Wreckers’ (1834), and ‘Venice, the Giudecca,’ &c. (1841)—have sold at Christie's for 28,665l. The following are the ‘top’ prices fetched by Turner's oil pictures: ‘Grand Canal,’ Mendel sale, 7,000 guineas, 1875; ‘Antwerp,’ Graham sale, 6,500 guineas, 1889; ‘Sheerness,’ Wells sale, 7,100 guineas, 1890; ‘Walton Bridges,’