The Times Great Victorian Lives. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ Carthage’ and the ‘Crossing the Brook’ rank among the choicest specimens of his finest manner.

      Mr. Turner seldom took much part in society, and only displayed in the closest intimacy the shrewdness of his observation and the playfulness of his wit. Everywhere he kept back much of what was in him, and while the keenest intelligence, mingled with a strong tinge of satire, animated his brisk countenance, it seemed to amuse him to be but half understood. His nearest social ties were those formed in the Royal Academy, of which he was by far the oldest member, and to whose interests he was most warmly attached. He filled at one time the chair of Professor of Perspective, but without conspicuous success, and that science has since been taught in the Academy by means better suited to promote it than a course of lectures. In the composition and execution of his works Mr. Turner was jealously sensitive of all interference or supervision. He loved to deal in the secrets and mysteries of his art, and many of his peculiar effects are produced by means which it would not be easy to discover orto imitate.

      We hope that the Society of Arts or the British Gallery will take an early opportunity of commemorating the genius of this great artist, and of reminding the public of the prodigious range of his pencil, by forming a general exhibition of his principal works, if, indeed, they are not permanently gathered in a nobler repository. Such an exhibition will serve far better than any observations of ours to demonstrate that it is not by those deviations from established rules which arrest the most superficial criticism that Mr. Turner’s fame or merit are to be estimated. For nearly 60 years Mr. Turner contributed largely to the arts of this country. He lived long enough to see his greatest productions rise to uncontested supremacy, however imperfectly they were understood when they first appeared in the earlier years of this century; and, though in his later works and in advanced age, force and precision of execution have not accompanied his vivacity of conception, public opinion has gradually and steadily advanced to a more just appreciation of his power. He is the Shelley of English painting – the poet and the painter both alike veiling their own creations in the dazzling splendour of the imagery with which they are surrounded, mastering every mode of expression, combining scientific labour with an air of negligent profusion, and producing in the end works in which colour and language are but the vestments of poetry. Of such minds it may be said in the words of Alastor:—

      ‘Nature’s most secret steps

      ‘He, like her shadow, has pursued, wheree’er

      ‘The red volcano overcanopies

      ‘The fields of snow and pinnacles of ice

      ‘With burning smoke; or where the starry domes

      ‘Of diamond and of gold expand above

      ‘Numberless and immeasurable halls,

      ‘Frequent with crystal column and clear shrines

      ‘Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.

      ‘Nor had that scene of ampler majesty

      ‘Than gems or gold – the varying roof of heaven

      ‘And the green earth – lost in his heart its claims

      ‘To love and wonder……’

      It will devolve on our contemporaries, more exclusively devoted than ourselves to the history of the fine arts to record with greater fullness and precision the works of Mr. Turner’s long and active life; but in these hasty recollections we have endeavoured to pay a slight tribute to the memory of a painter who possessed many of the gifts of his art in extraordinary abundance, and who certainly in dying leaves not his like behind. He will be buried, by his own desire, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, by the side of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

      Turner, who had been born on 23 April 1775, died on 19 December 1851 at his cottage on Cheyne Walk at Chelsea. The fate of the many major paintings remaining unsold in his possession was not known until his will was made public. His estate, amounting to some £140,000, was not finally settled until 1857, the will having been disputed by relatives. Two pictures – Dido building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour – were specifically left to the newly founded National Gallery on condition that they should hang next to two pictures by Claude. The other ‘finished’ paintings in his collection were also left to the nation under the proviso that they should be housed within ten years in a building attached to the National Gallery called ‘Turner’s Gallery’. He also left money for the establishment of almshouses for ‘decayed artists’. These two ambitions were frustrated. Although the National Gallery (and, by succession, the Tate) inherited the paintings, no dedicated ‘Turner Gallery’ was established until the ‘Clore’ Gallery, designed by James Stirling, was added to Tate Britain in 1982-1986. The Times’s pious hope that ‘an early opportunity of commemorating the genius of this great artist’ was very belatedly, and only in part, realised when the Turner Prize for visual artists under the age of 50 was initiated in 1984.

       ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL

       Engineer: ‘born an engineer.’

      15 SEPTEMBER 1859

      OUR COLUMNS OF Saturday last contained the ordinary record of the death of one of our most eminent engineers, Mr. I. K. Brunel. The loss of a man whose name has now for two generations, from the commencement of this century to the present time, been identified with the progress and the application of mechanical and engineering science, claims the notice due to those who have done the State some service. This country is largely indebted to her many eminent civil engineers for her wealth and strength, and Mr. Brunel will take a high rank among them when the variety and magnitude of his works are considered, and the original genius he displayed in accomplishing them. He was, as it were, born an engineer, about the time his father had completed the block machinery at Portsmouth, then one of the most celebrated and remarkable works of the day, and which remains efficient and useful. Those who recollect him as a boy recollect full well how rapidly, almost intuitively, indeed, he entered into and identified himself with all his father’s plans and pursuits. He was very early distinguished for his powers of mental calculation, and not less so for his rapidity and accuracy as a draughtsman. His power in this respect was not confined to professional or mechanical drawings only. He displayed an artist-like feeling for and a love of art, which in later days never deserted him. He enjoyed and promoted it to the last, and the only limits to the delight it afforded him were his engrossing occupations and his failing health.

      The bent of his mind when young was clearly seen by his father and by all who knew him. His education was therefore directed to qualify him for that profession in which he afterwards distinguished himself. His father was his first, and, perhaps, his best tutor. When he was about 14 he was sent to Paris, where he was placed under the care of M. Masson, previous to entering the college of Henri Quartre, where he remained two years. He then returned to England, and it may be said that, in fact, he then commenced his professional career under his father, Sir I. Brunel, and in which he rendered him important assistance – devoting himself from that time forward to his profession exclusively and ardently. He displayed even then the resources, not only of a trained and educated mind, but great, original, and inventive power. He possessed the advantage of being able to express or draw clearly and accurately whatever he had matured in his own mind. But not only that; he could work out with his own hands, it he pleased, the models of his own designs, whether

      in wood or iron. As a mere workman he would have excelled. Even at this early period steam navigation may be said to have occupied his mind, for he made the model of a boat, and worked it with locomotive contrivances of his own. Everything he did, he did with all his СКАЧАТЬ