olor in
the original, the engraving renders faithfully the sentiment of the
picture.]

"I love," he said, "every stile and stump and lane in the village; as
long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them."
He ceased to "hold a brush" on the 30th of March, 1837.

Turner, who was born a year before Constable, on April 23, 1775, was,
unlike the miller's son of Bergholt, a child of the city. He was
born in London, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father was a
hair-dresser; and when only fourteen entered the Royal Academy schools
as a student. The next year he exhibited a drawing of Lambeth Palace;
and in 1799 was made an associate, and in 1802 a member, of the Royal
Academy. His career was probably more successful than that of any
other artist of modern times. Of his life the more that is said in
charity the better; for as the sun rises oftentimes from a fog bank,
so the luminous dreams of color by which we know Turner emanated from
an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low
intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary
lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and
rapacious bickering--of his life naught became him like the leaving.
He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his pictures--three
hundred and sixty paintings and nearly two thousand drawings--should
become the property of the nation, the only condition attached being
that two of the pictures should be placed between two paintings by
Claude Lorraine in the National Gallery. Twenty thousand pounds were
left to the Royal Academy for the benefit of superannuated artists;
and one thousand pounds were appropriated for a monument in St.
Paul's, where this curious old man knew the English people would be
proud to lay him.

For many years Turner had refused to sell certain of his pictures;
while for others, and for the published engravings after his work,
he had exacted prices of a character and in a manner that smacked of
dishonesty. But as in obscure and dingy lodgings his brain had evolved
the splendor of sunset and mirage, so, undoubtedly, his imagination
had foreshadowed the noble monument which the Turner room at the
National Gallery has created to his memory.

[Illustration: JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER. FROM A DRAWING BY SIR
JOHN GILBERT.

This portrait, made many years ago, is a sketch from life, and
realizes the crabbed, sturdy painter, Turner, as we