Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/352

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Turner was not discovered by Ruskin; the contrary opinion seems to have seized popular imagination. But Turner exhibited at the Academy for the space of sixty years, and had been a Royal Academician seventeen years before Ruskin was born. Ruskin spent his childhood in feasting his eyes on the beautiful prints after Turner's pictures which were scattered up and down the publications of the day. But he popularised him, and a tribute should be paid to Ruskin's memory for the loving labour he bestowed in cataloguing and arranging the mass of water-colour drawings Turner left behind him which were in danger of being neglected. But Turner himself was not neglected. He left the nation which is supposed to have neglected him £140,000. He received an offer of £100,000 for the contents of his house in Queen Anne Street, as well as a proposal to purchase his two pictures of Carthage from a committee of which Sir Robert Peel was a member; these he generously refused, having bequeathed his pictures to the nation. Turner's will was so complicated that it led to years of litigation. Many of its provisions were set aside. But his estate left the Chancery Court at little less than its former figure, and the Royal Academy had £20,000.

Of modern engravings exhibiting the highest interpretative skill in rendering his dreamy and romantic effects with dazzling and brilliant technique, the great school whose work is found in the justly renowned "Southern Coast" series in the "England and Wales" and in the other works we have enumerated, but more particularly in the first, has no equal in