Excerpt........There was a boy who grew up in the seventies of last century when the name of Turner aroused no particular interest or emotion: he was a classic, and he was treated with the incurious veneration that is given to classics. Turner was am ... Read more

Excerpt........There was a boy who grew up in the seventies of last century when the name of Turner aroused no particular interest or emotion: he was a classic, and he was treated with the incurious veneration that is given to classics. Turner was among the gods, and if a descent to the ground-floor of the National Gallery, where a selection of his water-colours was shown, did startle the wayfarer into amazement at the lyrical loveliness of those visions, compared with the sombre and heavy magnificence of most of the oil pictures, well, they were by Turner, and Turner being a classic, was not a subject for debate. He was with the masters—fit and few—a classic. I think no one dreamed of the extraordinary revival of interest in Turner and increasing admiration for his genius that was to mark the twentieth century, when the 'unfinished oils' were exhibited, and later when the Turner Gallery at Millbank was opened. The boy who grew up in the seventies, and to whom, in the first idealism of youth, Turner seemed almost superhuman, has closely followed the public manifestations of interest in the flame and fame of Turner; and now that he is about to write a book on the man of whom M. de la Sizeranne wrote:—'All the torches which have shed a flood of new light on Art, that of Delacroix in 1825, those of the Impressionists in 1870, have in turn been lit at his flame,'—he likes to return in memory to those days in the seventies when Turner first became wonderful, something not quite to be explained, in his life. Less