[Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE. _By_ TURNER. A.D. 1834.] In 1789, Turner became a student in the Academy, and exhibited a picture in the next year at Somerset House, _View of the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth_. He was then only fifteen. From that time he worked with unceasing energy at his profession. Indeed, the pursuit of art was the one ruling principle of his life. He frequently went on excursions, the first being to Ramsgate and Margate, and was storing his memory with effects of storm, mist, and tempest, which he reproduced. In 1799, when made A.R.A., Turner had already exhibited works which ranged over twenty-six counties of England and Wales. In 1802 he was made full Academician, and presented, as his diploma picture, _Dolbadarn Castle, North Wales_. In this year he visited the Continent, and saw France and Switzerland. Five years later Turner was appointed Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy. We are told his lectures were delivered in so strange a style, that they were scarcely instructive. Of his water-colour paintings and of the _Liber Studiorum_ it is impossible to speak too highly; he created the modern school of water-colour painting, and his works in oil have influenced the art of the nineteenth century. He visited Italy for the first time in 1819; again ten years later, and for the last time in 1840. His eccentricity, both in manner and in art, increased with age. Though wealthy, and possessing a good house in Queen Anne Street, he died in an obscure lodging by the Thames, at Chelsea, a few days before Christmas, 1851, Turner bequeathed his property to found a charity for male decayed artists, but the alleged obscurity of his will defeated this object. It was decided that his pictures and drawings should be presented to the National Gallery, that one thousand pounds should be spent on a monument to the painter in St. Paul's, twenty thousand pounds should be given to the Royal Academy, and the remainder to the next of kin and heir at law. The National Gallery contains more than one hundred of his pictures, besides a large number of water-colour drawings and sketches. In his earlier works Turner took the old masters as his models, some of his best pictures showing the characteristics of the Dutch school, as _The Shipwreck_, and _The Sun rising in a Mist_. In _The Tenth Plague_, and _The Goddess of Discord_, the influence of Poussin is visible, whilst Wilson is imitated in _AEneas with the Sibyl_, and _A View in Wales_. Turner was fond of matching himself against Claude; and not only did he try his powers in rivalry with the older masters, he delighted to enter into honest competition with painters of the day, and when Wilkie's _Village Politicians_ was attracting universal notice, Turner produced his _Blacksmith's Shop_ in imitation of it. In his later pictures Turner sacrificed form to colour. "Mist and vapour, lit by the golden light of morn, or crimsoned with the