"It was impossible however not to like Turner, there was something so social and cordial in his nature and I believe him to have had a excellent heart."

“Turner is my great favourite of all the painters here. He combines the highest poetical imagination with an exquisite feeling for all the truth and individuality of nature; and he has shown that the ideal, as it is called, is not the improving of Nature, but the selecting and combining objects that are most in harmony and character with each other.”

“The gentleness, so utterly removed from insipidity, of Raphael, is a thing of which true taste never tires.”

“To me the prevailing tone of Rembrandt's mind, as shown in his art, is serenity. Where the subject allows him, his natural disposition seems always tranquil. He is the painter of repos”

“Turner was a very different man to Constable, yet quite like him in one respect, namely, his entire reliance on a guide within himself, always a characteristic of genius.”

“Turner will be placed in that class whose genious is such that we can never praise him too much or blame him too much.”

“Turner did not talk well, and never talked of his own art, or of the art of others.”