late Leander and Lord Byron by swimming the Hellespont, and, failing in the attempt, palliated his ill-success by pointing out that he tried to swim from Asia to Europe, a far more difficult feat than Lord Byron's passage from Europe to Asia. Byron replied in a letter to Murray published at the time, and Turner, in a counter rejoinder, overwhelmed his adversary with quotations from ancient and modern topographers (Moore, Life of Byron, 1846, pp. 497, 663). He published the results of his wanderings in 1820 under the title ‘Journal of a Tour in the Levant,’ London, 8vo. His diary contains many sketches of eastern customs. He is somewhat discursive, dealing rather with local manners and customs than with the political or military institutions of Turkey.
In 1824 he returned to Constantinople as secretary to the English embassy. During the absence of an ambassador, due to the removal of Lord Strangford to St. Petersburg, Turner filled the office of minister plenipotentiary. On 22 Oct. 1829 he was appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the republic of Columbia, and after filling that post for nine years he retired from the service. He died at Leamington on 10 Jan. 1867, and was buried in the vault of the parish church of Birstall in Leicestershire. A brass was erected in his memory on the north wall of the chancel. On 10 April 1824, at St. George's, Hanover Square, he married Mary Anne (1797–1891), daughter and coheir of John Mansfield of Birstall. By her he had one surviving son—Mansfield—and a daughter, Mary Anne Elizabeth (1825–1894), who married Walter Stewart Broadwood.
[Harward Turner's Turner Family; Burke's Family Records.]
TURNERELLI, PETER (1774–1839), sculptor, born at Belfast in 1774, was the grandson of an Italian political refugee named Tognarelli, and his father (who changed the name to Turnerelli) practised as a modeller in Dublin and married an Irishwoman. Peter was educated in Dublin for the church, but at the age of seventeen, on removing to London with his family, became a pupil of Peter Francis Chenu, the sculptor, and a student at the Royal Academy, where he gained a medal. In 1797 he was appointed, on the recommendation of Benjamin West, to instruct the princesses in modelling, and he resided at court for three years, during which time he executed busts of all the members of the royal family. At the conclusion of his engagement, in 1801, he was appointed sculptor in ordinary to the royal family, but declined an offer of knighthood. He was subsequently employed in a similar capacity by the Princess of Wales. In 1802 Turnerelli exhibited at the Royal Academy a bust of the youthful Princess Charlotte, and thenceforward enjoyed a fashionable and lucrative practice, chiefly as a modeller of busts. Among his many distinguished sitters were the Duke of Wellington, Prince Blücher, Count Platoff, Lord Melville, Erskine, Pitt, and Grattan. In 1809 he sculptured the ‘jubilee’ bust of George III, now at Windsor, of which eighty copies were ordered by various noblemen and public bodies; also the companion bust of the queen, and in the following year a statue of the king in his state robes. When the czar of Russia was in London in 1814 he visited Turnerelli's studio and ordered replicas of his busts of Blücher and Platoff for the Hermitage Gallery. In 1816 he was commissioned to execute the ‘nuptial’ busts of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold, and the former gave him a sitting at his studio on the morning of the wedding. Among his later works were a medallion of Princess Victoria at the age of two, and busts of Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, and Daniel O'Connell; the last was extremely popular, and ten thousand plaster copies of it are said to have been disposed of in Ireland. Turnerelli did some good monumental work, and when in 1814 a committee was formed to erect a memorial to Burns at Dumfries his design—a figure of the poet at the plough—was selected and carried out. Other good examples of his ability are the monument to Colonel Stuart in Canterbury Cathedral, and that to Sir John Hope in Westminster Abbey. At the accession of George IV he was again offered and again declined knighthood. He was appointed sculptor to the kings of France, Russia, and Portugal.
Turnerelli was a constant exhibitor at the academy from 1802 until his death, which occurred, after a few hours' illness, at his house in Newman Street, London, on 20 March 1839. He was buried in the graveyard of St. John's Chapel, St. John's Wood. Though throughout his career he earned a large income, he saved little and died intestate. His effects were therefore sold by auction and most of his models and moulds purchased by Manzoni, who reproduced them in large numbers. Turnerelli, at the suggestion of West, introduced the practice of representing sitters in their own dress, instead of the conventional classic drapery. His busts of Wellington and Melville were well engraved in mezzotint by Charles Turner and John Young respectively; engravings of
