CHAPTER XIV

TURNER

I wonder which of you, if seeing this picture for the first time, will realize that you are looking at the old familiar Thames?  It would seem rather to be some place unknown except in dreams, some phantasy of the human spirit that we ourselves could never hope to see.  And yet, in fact, this is what Turner actually did see one evening as he was sailing down the Thames to Greenwich with a party of friends.  Suddenly there loomed up before his eyes the great hull of the Temeraire, famous in the fight against the fleet of Napoleon at Trafalgar, and so full of memories of glorious battle, that it was always spoken of by sailors as the Fighting Temeraire.  At last, its work over as a battleship, or even as a training-ship for cadets, dragged by a doughty little steam-tug, it was headed for its last resting-place in the Thames, to be broken up for old timber.  As the Temeraire hove in sight through the mist, a fellow-painter said to Turner:  ’Ah, what a subject for a picture!’ and so indeed it proved.  The veteran ship, for Turner, had a pathos like the passing of a veteran warrior to his grave.

[Illustration:  THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE From the picture by Turner, in the National Gallery, London]

Turner loved the sea, and was very sensitive to its associations with the toils and triumphs of mankind.  Born beside the Thames, he grew up among boats and fraternized with sailors all his life.  It was impossible for him to be the beholder of such a scene as the Temeraire’s approach to her last moorings, save as a poet-painter; and stirred to the putting forth of all his powers, this Fighting Temeraire is his surpassing poem.

It was in 1775, while Reynolds was at the height of his fame, that Turner saw the light, born of obscure parents in an obscure house, but with a gift of vision that compelled him to the palette and the pencil his whole life long.  Yet, when he was apprenticed to an architect to learn architectural drawing, he had to be dismissed after two periods of probation because of his absolute inability to learn the theory of perspective or even the elements of geometry.  But the time was not far off when he was to become in his turn Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.

The popular distaste, or unborn taste, for landscape, which had prevented Gainsborough from following his natural bent, was changing at last.  The end of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a return to nature in art as well as in poetry.  Some artists in the eastern counties, older than Turner, were already spending their lives in the not too lucrative painting of landscape.  These men took for their masters the seventeenth-century painters of Holland.  Old Crome, so called to distinguish him from his son, founded his art upon that of Hobbema, and came so close to him in his early years that it is difficult