nations.

Yet, while at a first view this distinction between Turner as a man and Turner as an artist seems complete, further study shows that the man had a great and often a fatal influence on the artist, and that this was not without reaction both serious and deep, and so we find that his art and himself are no more to be divided in any human view of him than were his body and his soul when he was yet alive. For these reasons we shall keep as close together as possible the histories of his life and his art, a task always difficult and sometimes impossible on account of the scantiness of trustworthy data for the one and the almost infinite material for the other.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY DAYS.

1775 TO 1789.

THE appearance of Turner’s genius in this world is not to be accounted for by any known facts. Given his father and his mother, his grandfather and grandmother, on the father’s side, which is all we know of his ancestry, given the date of his birth, even though that was the 23rd April (St. George’s day, as has been so childishly insisted on), 1775, there seems to be positively no reason why William Turner, barber, of 26, Maiden Lane, opposite the Cider Cellar, in the parish of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and Mary Turner, née Marshall, his wife, should have produced an artist, still less, one of the greatest artists that the world has yet seen. There is only one fact, and that a very sad one, which might be held to have some connection with his genius. “Great wits are sure to madness near allied,” sang Dryden,[1] and poor Mrs. Turner became insane “towards the end of her days.” This, however, will in no way account for the special quality of Turner’s genius. He arose like many other great men in those days to help in opening the eyes of England to the beauties of nature, one of the large and illustrious constellation of men of genius that lit the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, and with that truth we must be content.

The earliest fact that we have on record which had any influence on Turner is that his paternal grandfather and grandmother spent all their lives at South Molton in Devonshire. Although he is not known to have visited Devonshire till he was thirty-seven years of age;[2] he appears to have been proud of his connection with the county, and to have asserted that he was a Devonshire man. This is, as far as we know, the solitary effect of Turner’s ancestry upon him. Of his father and mother the influence was necessarily great. From his father he undoubtedly obtained his extraordinary habits of economy, that spirit of a petty tradesman, which was one of his most unlovely characteristics, and, be it added, his honesty and industry also. Of his father we have several descriptions by persons who knew him; of his mother, one only, and that, unfortunately, not so authentic. We will give the lady the first place, and it must be remembered that this unfavourable picture is drawn by Mr. Thornbury from information derived from the Rev. Henry Syer Trimmer, the son of Turner’s old friend and executor, the Rev. Henry Scott Trimmer, of Heston, who obtained it from Hannah Danby, Turner’s housekeeper in Queen Anne Street, who got it from Turner’s father.

This as the result of a painted portrait by her son, and verbal description by her husband, is not too flattering, and it is all we know of the character and appearance of poor Mary Turner. Of her belongings we know still less. She is said to have been sister to Mr. Marshall, a butcher, of Brentford, and first cousin to the grandmother of Dr. Shaw, author of “Gallops in the Antipodes,” and to have been related to the Marshalls, formerly of Shelford Manor House, near Nottingham.[3] We are able to add to this scanty information that she was the younger sister of Mrs. Harpur, the wife of the curate of Islington, who was grandfather of Mr. Henry Harpur, one of Turner’s executors. He (the grandfather) fell in love with his future wife when at Oxford, and their marriage brought her sister to London. We are also informed that the hard-featured woman crooning over the smoke, in an early drawing by Turner in the National Gallery (An Interior, No. 15), is Turner’s mother, and the kitchen in which she is sitting, the kitchen in Maiden Lane. We have also ascertained that one Mary Turner, from St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, was admitted into Bethlehem Hospital on Dec. 27th, 1800, one of whose sponsors for removal was “Richard Twenlow, Peruke Maker.” This unfortunate lady, whether Turner’s mother or not, was discharged uncured in the following year. Altogether what we know about Turner’s mother does not inspire curiosity, and we fear that she was never destined to figure in an edition of “The Mothers of Great Men.” The “sad life” which she is said to have led her husband could scarcely have been sadder than her own.

Of his father we have fuller information.

This description is of him when an old man, but he must have been not very different from this when about one year and eighteen months after his marriage, which took place on August 29th, 1773, the little William was born. He was not a man likely to alter much in habit or appearance. He was always