who knew this lady for sixty years, and about whom so kind a heart could have thus written, could not have been driven to a life of morbid seclusion because the world had treated him so badly in his youth. His home may have been, and probably was a cheerless one, and we may well pity him on that account. The rest of our pity we had better reserve for his want of education, and the secretive, suspicious disposition which nature gave him, and which he allowed to master his more genial propensities.

CHAPTER III.

YOUTH.

1789 to 1796.

THE only rebuff with which the young artist appears to have met was from Tom Malton, the perspective draughtsman, who sent him back to his father as a boy to whom it was impossible to teach geometrical perspective. As Mr. Hamerton observes, “There is nothing in this which need surprise us in the least. Scientific perspective is a pursuit which may amuse or occupy a mathematician, but the stronger the artistic faculty in a painter the less he is likely to take to it, for it exercises other faculties than his. Besides this, he feels instinctively that he can do very well without it.” No doubt he did feel this, and the feeling very much lessened the disappointment at being “sent back,” and he did very well without it, so well that he was appointed Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy without it, and not unfrequently exhibited pictures on its walls, which showed how very much “without it” he was.

Otherwise he met with no rebuffs in his art. We have seen that he got plenty of employment, and have expressed an opinion that that employment—colouring engravings, and putting in backgrounds and foregrounds and skies for architectural drawings—was no mean employment for a youngster. He himself, when pitied in later years for this supposed degradation and slavery, replied, “Well, and what could be better practice!” and it was this and more. It not only taught him to work neatly, to lay flat washes smoothly and accurately, but it taught him to exercise his ingenuity and artistic taste. He probably succeeded so well, because it gave him an opportunity of displaying his artistic faculty. Every sketch that he had thus to beautify presented an artistic problem, how best to light and decorate and make a picture of the bare bones of an architectural design. It gave him a sense of power and importance thus to be the converter of topography into art; it taught him the value of light and shade, and the decorative capacities of trees and sky. His success gave him self-reliance. It also, and this was perhaps a more doubtful advantage, taught him to consider drawing as a skill in beautifying. He got the habit of treating buildings as objects less valuable as objects of art in themselves, than for the breaking of sunbeams, and as straight lines to contrast with the endless curves of nature; and also the habit of using trees as he wanted them, of bending their boughs and moulding their contours in harmony with the poem-picture of his imagination. To this early treatment of architectural drawings may be traced his great power of composition, and also much of his mannerism.

That he soon knew his power, and had his secrets of manipulation, may be one reason for his early secretiveness about his art; for though there is little in these early works of his to prefigure his coming greatness, he, when a youth, attained a proficiency equal to that of the best water-colour artists of his day, and, with his friend Girtin, soon surpassed all except Cozens; and he could not have done this without a sense of superiority and many private experiments; or, on the other hand, he may, like many men, have required complete solitude to work at all, though this was not the case in later life, as he often painted almost the whole of his pictures on the Academy walls. At all events, the degree of his secretiveness is extraordinary. “I knew him,” says an old architect, “when a boy, and have often paid him a guinea for putting backgrounds to my architectural drawings, calling upon him for this purpose at his father’s shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He never would suffer me to see him draw, but concealed, as I understood, all that he did in his bedroom.” When in this bedroom one morning, the door suddenly opened, and Mr. Britton entered.[10] In an instant Turner covered up his drawings and ran to bar the crafty intruder’s progress. “I’ve come to see the drawings for the Earl.”[11] “You shan’t see ’em,” was the reply. “Is that the answer I am to take back to his lordship?” “Yes; and mind that next time you come through the shop, and not up the back way.” When Mr. Newby Lowson accompanied him on a tour on the continent he “did not show his companion a single sketch.” Similar stories could be added to show how this habit continued through his life.

The dates of these two early stories are not given by Mr. Thornbury, nor the name of the “old architect,” but they show that he was early employed by a nobleman, and that he got a guinea a piece for his backgrounds, not only “good practice,” but good pay for a youth; he was, in fact, better employed and better paid than any young artist whose history we can remember. Nor does it seem to have been the fault of Providence if he did not enjoy the crowning happiness of life, a friend of suitable tastes, for Girtin was sent to him, a youth of his own age endowed with similar gifts, and of a most sociable disposition; nor did he want a capable mentor, for he had Dr. Monro, “his true master,” as Mr. Ruskin calls him.

It was at Raphael Smith’s that he formed an intimacy with Girtin, says Mr. Alaric Watts.[12] “His son, Mr. Calvert Girtin, described his father and young Turner as associated in a friendly rivalry, under the hospitable roof and superintendence of that lover of art, Dr. Monro (then residing in the Adelphi). Nor was Turner forgetful of the Doctor’s kindness, for on referring to that period of his career, in a conversation with Mr. David Roberts, he said, ‘There,’ pointing to Harrow, ‘Girtin and I have often walked to Bushey and back, to make drawings for good Dr. Monro, at half-a-crown apiece and a supper.’”

If a saying quoted by T. Miller in his “Memoirs of Turner and Girtin” may be trusted,[13] Turner may have met Gainsborough and other eminent painters of the day at Dr. Monro’s. Speaking of Dr. Monro’s conversaziones, “Old Pine, of ‘Wine and Walnuts’ celebrity, used to say, ‘What a glorious coterie there was, when Wilson, Marlow, Gainsborough, Paul, and Tom Sandby, Rooker, Hearne, and Cozins (sic) used to meet, and you, old Jack,’ turning to Varley, ‘were a boy in a pinafore, with Turner, Girtin, and Edridge as bigwigs, on whom you used to look as something beyond the usual amount of clay.’” As Gainsborough died in 1788, when Turner was