III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 123

true, and precious, as compared with that which suggested the landscape of the seventeenth century.

94. Now observe, how simple the whole subject becomes. You have, first, your great ancient landscape divided into its three periods-Giottesque, Leonardesque, Titianesque. Then you have a great gap, full of nonentities and abortions; a gulf of foolishness, into the bottom of which you may throw Claude and Salvator, neither of them deserving to give a name to anything. Call it “pastoral” landscape, “guarda e passa,”¹ and then you have, lastly, the pure, wholesome, simple, modern landscape. You want a name for that: I will give you one in a moment; for the whole character and power of that landscape is originally based on the work of one man.

95. Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Maiden Lane, London, about eighty years ago. The register of his birth was burned, and his age at his death could only be arrived at by conjecture.² He was the son of a barber; and his father intended him, very properly, for his own profession. The bent of the boy was, however, soon manifested, as is always the case in children of extraordinary genius, too strongly to be resisted; and a sketch of a coat of arms on a silver salver, made while his father was shaving a customer, obtained for him, in reluctant compliance with the admiring customer’s advice,³ the permission to follow art as a profession.

He had, of course, the usual difficulties of young artists to encounter, and they were then far greater than they are now. But Turner differed from most men in this,-that he was always willing to take anything to do that came in his way. He did not shut himself up in a garret to produce

¹ [Dante, Inferno, iii. 51. Ruskin quotes the words again in Cestus of Aglaia, § 80, and Præterita, i. § 254.]

² [Subsequent research, however, brought the register and other confirmatory facts to light: see Thornbury’s Life, pp. 2, 3. Turner was born on April 23 (St. George’s Day), 1775, and died on December 19, 1851. The date of his birth was wrongly implied upon the coffin as 1772 (“aged 79”; really aged 76).]

³ [Mr. Tomkinson, a silversmith: see Thornbury, p. 7.]

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