The Fighting Téméraire, by J. M. W. Turner. National Gallery,

London.

To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver,
Téméraire Téméraire!

And she's fading down the river,
Téméraire! Téméraire!

"There's a fine subject," said one of the artists, and Turner, filled with the sentiment and the beauty of the scene, produced the great painting.

Any kind of prints in black and white, can give but little idea of Turner's paintings, for they are brighter and lighter and more brilliant than such reproductions can suggest. One must see the original.

This great brilliancy and luminosity is partly due to Turner's method of underlaying his color by a thick coat of white paint, over which his rich, high-keyed colors were laid rather thinly.

His works were so blazing with brilliant reds, light blues, and luminous yellows and show so little of the details of drawing that at first they looked ridiculous to the public. Even the intelligent critics abused him cordially. People said that some of his canvases looked as though a tomato omelette had been thrown at them.

But he soon came to have strong defenders. Ruskin devoted hundreds, if not thousands, of pages to praising and minutely explaining Turner's methods and the results of his work, and Ruskin's books have become as famous as Turner's paintings. Ruskin made many mistakes in his judgments in art matters, according to opinion to-day, but the world supports him in what he found in Turner.

Although there is so little drawing evident in many of Turner's paintings, he was really one of the best drafts

men of all time. He worked with infinite care in drawing and sketching during his travels, and has left many thousands of wonderful water-color drawings. These were the means by which he accumulated the mass of knowledge which enabled him to paint his great effects from which details were obliterated. The labor of years gave him the strength and knowledge by which he became a

master.

Ruskin says he is the only man who truly represented rocks; he showed their structure. He seemed to show his trees growing. Some one has said that other artists could hide things in a mist, but that Turner revealed things through a mist.

Hammerton, the critic, says: "With a knowledge of landscape vaster than any mortal ever possessed before him, his whole existence was a series of dreams."

He would sit down in the presence of a real scene in nature and build up a dream in the face of the reality. "It is the soul of Turner and not the material world that fascinates the student," says another.

A large new wing of the Tate Gallery in London contains thousands of works by Turner, including most of his wonderful canvases bequeathed by him to the nation.

ANECDOTES OF TURNER.

Turner was born April 23, 1775, in Maiden Lane, in Chelsea, a poor, unpleasing part of London, over a barber shop, in which his father, William Turner, lived and worked. The latter was an economical, good-natured, uneducated man, who taught his boy to be honest and saving.

Dido building Carthage, by J. M. W. Turner. This painting suggests the influence of Claude Lorrain. National Gallery, London.

The young Turner kept the sidewalk swept and the windows clean, but early showed his talent for drawing. At ten his birds and trees on the walls of his school attracted attention.

One day he used one of his father's barber-brushes with which to paint a picture. The next morning, when the barber began to lather a customer's face, instead of turning a snowy white it became a fiery red.

His father did not discourage his talents, although he had intended to make him a barber. He hung the drawings about the shop and sometimes sold one for a few pence.

At twelve the boy began to study under a London master; at thirteen he was sent to a Mr. Coleman at Margate where he loved and studied the sea; at fourteen he was sent to the Royal Academy.

At this time he made small sums by copying pictures for a Dr. Munro, who lived in a palace on the Strand and possessed Rembrandts and works by other famous artists. This was good practice indeed.

In 1792, when he was seventeen, he got a commission to make some drawings for magazines. To make the sketches the boy traveled through Wales on a pony lent him by a friend, and on foot through many English counties, an experience that perfected his hand and stored his mind with the effects seen in nature.

At twenty-one he hired a house and took pupils, but he soon grew tired of this, and at twenty-two we find him in Yorkshire and Kent, where he made warm friends, one of whom afterwards bought $50,000 worth of Turner's works.