Excerpt from The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R. A: Founded on Letters and Papers Furnished by His Friends and Fellow-Academicians The marvellous combination of such a genius with such a nature it was my duty, as a man of truth, to record; and I did so very imperfectly, no diaries or journals of the painter's having been preserved many of his old friends refusing to furnish me with any facts that revealed the darker side of his character, and others declining to give me any assistance at all. With the aid, however, of his surviving engravers, who did not love him sufficiently to conceal the bitter truth, of the great pile of his sketch-books which Mr. Ruskin allowed me carefully to examine before they were thrown open to the world, and of some scattered letters which good fortune directed into my hands, reinforced by the assistance of a few of his intimate friends who loved truth too well to conceal either good or bad, I was enabled by degrees to piece together a memoir, of which the present is a revised and considerably enlarged edition. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.