Loftiness in London

When Joseph Mallord William Turner died in London a century ago, he left 200 of his oils and no fewer than 19,000 water-colors and drawings to the British nation. Last week the British Museum put 300 of the watercolors on display. The lot showed, as no single picture can, that Turner stands among the greatest artists who ever lived.

He studied art hard, and before he was 20 Turner knew about all there was to learn about painting pretty pictures of castles, ruined abbeys and snug landscapes. Trips on the Continent vastly broadened his range. He enjoyed the old masters without often caring to imitate them, for Turner's drive was toward an art of the future--impressionism--not toward the past. But each new view he had of the world struck Turner as a challenge; he tackled and translated into paint everything from Alpine peaks and torrents down to Venetian gondolas and delicately tinted palaces. Turner studied the shimmering hugeness of the sea more closely than any previous painter. Once during a Channel crossing in a blizzard he had himself lashed to the mast, the better to observe the storm.

In triumphant old age, Turner took into his province such formless things as snow, wind, mist and sunlight, painted them with a radiance that has not yet been surpassed. As a young art critic, John Ruskin saw their greatness, but most of Turner's fellow academicians did not. Because Turner dared paint sunsets as they really look, and because toward the end he cared not a hoot for composition, he was accused of tastelessness. He still is, but good taste remains a refuge of minor artists, one Turner had no need of.

Ruskin was sharp eyed, enthusiastic and 21 when he first met Turner. He hurried home and wrote in his diary: "Introduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge . . . I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentleman."

Though his art was lofty, Turner made no pretensions of being so. A barber's son, he scorned society, saved his money, kept his own counsel, and downed his liquor in heroic quantity. He had a big house on Queen Anne Street where he lived with his favorite paintings, and a hideaway on the Thames where he lived with his favorite woman (they were known in the neighborhood as Captain and Mrs. Booth).

Turner was supposed to be something of a misanthrope, but he got along fine with simple people and painters, left most of his -L-140,000 fortune for "the Maintenance and Support of Poor and Decayed Male Artists."

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