Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young PeopleBacon, Mary Schell Hoke
General
Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young People
Bacon, Mary Schell Hoke
Art -- Juvenile literature; Painters -- Juvenile literature; Painting -- Juvenile literature
Meanwhile he had been made master of perspective in the Academy, and
it was expected that he would lecture to the students, but he was not
cut out for a lecturer. He was not elegant in his manners, nor
impressive in his speech. On one occasion, when he had risen to
deliver a speech, he looked helplessly about him and finally blurted
out: "Gentlemen! I've been and left my lecture in the hackney coach!"
During these years he had tried to establish a studio like other
masters and to have pupils and apprentices about him; but the stupid
ones he could not endure, having no patience with them, and he treated
all the fashionable ones so bluntly they would not stay; so the idea
had to be given up.
He became a visitor at Farnley Hall in Yorkshire, where a friend,
Mr. Hawksworth Fawkes lived, and in the course of his lifetime Fawkes
put fifty thousand dollars worth of Turner's pictures upon his
walls. The Fawkes family described Turner as a most delightful man:
"The fun, frolic, and shooting we enjoyed together, and which,
whatever may be said by others of his temper and disposition, have
proved to me that he was, in his hours of distraction from his
professional labours as kindly hearted a man and as capable of
enjoyment and fun of all kinds as any I ever knew."
Another friend writes: "Of all light-hearted, merry creatures I ever
knew, Turner was the most so; and the laughter and fun that abounded
when he was an inmate of our cottage was inconceivable, particularly
with the juvenile members of our family."
The story of his disappointment in marriage is an interesting one. It
is said that the young lady whom he loved was the sister of a
schoolmate. They had been engaged for some time, but while he was on
one of his travels his letters were stolen and kept from the young
woman. She believed he had forgotten her, and her stepmother, who had
taken the letters, persuaded the girl to engage herself to
another. Turner returned just a week before her marriage and tried to
win her back, but although she loved him, she felt herself then bound
to her new suitor and therefore married him. Her marriage was very
unhappy and her misery, as well as his own, distressed the artist till
his death. Almost all his life, in spite of his seeming gaiety, he
worked like a slave, rising at four o'clock in the morning and working
while light lasted. When remonstrated with about this he would sadly
say: "There are no holidays for me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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