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Of Turner’s many pictures I will mention in detail but two, both of which are to be seen on the walls of the National Gallery. First, “The Old Temeraire.” This warship had been sold out of service and was being towed away to be broken up. The scene was photographed on Turner’s brain, and he immortalized it on canvas. We can not do better than borrow the words of Mr. Ruskin:

“Of all pictures not visibly involving human pain, this is the most pathetic ever painted.

“The utmost pensiveness which can ordinarily be given to a landscape depends on adjuncts of ruin, but no ruin was ever so affecting as the gliding of this ship to her grave. This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief victory–surely, if ever anything without a soul deserved honor or affection we owe them here. Surely, some sacred care might have been left in our thoughts for her; some quiet space amid the lapse of English waters! Nay, not so. We have stern keepers to trust her glory to–the fire and the worm. Nevermore shall sunset lay golden robe upon her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps where the low gate opens to some cottage garden, the tired traveler may ask, idly, why the moss grows so green on the rugged wood; and even the sailor’s child may not know that the night dew lies deep in the warrents of the old Temeraire.”

“The Burial of Sir David Wilkie at Sea” has brought tears to many eyes. Yet there is no burial. The ship is far away in the gloom of the offing; you can not distinguish a single figure on her decks; but you behold her great sails standing out against the leaden blackness of the night and you feel that out there a certain scene is being enacted. And if you listen closely you can hear the solemn voice of the captain as he reads the burial service. Then there is a pause–a swift, sliding sound–a splash, and all is over.

Turner left to the British Nation by his will nineteen thousand pencil and water-color sketches and one hundred large canvases. These pictures are now to be seen in the National Gallery in rooms set apart and sacred to Turner’s work. For fear it may be thought that the number of sketches mentioned above is a misprint, let us say that if he had produced one picture a day for fifty years it would not equal the number of pieces bestowed by his will on the Nation.

This of course takes no account of the pictures sold during his lifetime, and, as he left a fortune of one hundred forty-four thousand pounds (seven hundred twenty thousand dollars), we may infer that not all his pictures were given away.

At Chelsea I stood in the little room where he breathed his last, that bleak day in Eighteen-Hundred Fifty-one. The unlettered but motherly old woman who took care of him in those last days never guessed his greatness; none in the house or the neighborhood knew.

To them he was only Mr. Booth, an eccentric old man of moderate means, who liked to muse, read, and play with children. He had no callers, no friends; he went to the city every day and came back at night. He talked but little, he was absent-minded, he smoked and thought and smiled and muttered to himself. He never went to church; but once one of the lodgers asked him what he thought of God.

“God, God–what do I know of God, what does any one! He is our life–He is the All, but we need not fear Him–all we can do is to speak the truth and do our work. Tomorrow we go–where? I know not, but I am not afraid.”

Of art, to these strangers he would never speak. Once they urged him to go with them to an exhibition at Kensington, but he smiled feebly as he lit his pipe and said, “An Art Exhibition? No, no; a man can show on a canvas so little of what he feels, it is not worth the while.”

At last he died–passed peacefully away–and his attorney came and took charge of his remains.

Many are the hard words that have been flung off by heedless tongues about Turner’s taking an assumed name and living in obscurity, but “what you call fault I call accent.” Surely, if a great man and world-famous desires to escape the flatterers and the silken mesh of so-called society and live the life of simplicity, he has a right to do so. Again, Turner was a very rich man in his old age; he did much for struggling artists and assisted aspiring merit in many ways. So it came about that his mail was burdened with begging letters, and his life made miserable by appeals from impecunious persons, good and bad, and from churches, societies and associations without number. He decided to flee them all; and he did.

The “Carthage” already mentioned is one of his finest works, and he esteemed it so highly that he requested that when death came, his body should be buried, wrapped in its magnificent folds. But the wish was disregarded.

His remains rest in the crypt of Saint Paul’s, beside the dust of Reynolds. His statue, in marble, adorns a niche in the great cathedral, and his name is secure high on the roll of honor.

And if for no other reason, the name and fame of Chelsea should be deathless as the home of Turner.