Eliza Turck

Eliza Turck (1832–1891), was an English portrait (including miniatures), genre, bird and landscape painter, illustrator and writer.

Turck was born in Islington in London, the daughter of Herman Jochim Christian Turck, banker (b. 1792 Bailiwick of Guernsey) and Anne Louisa Tielkens (b. 1800 London). Eliza showed an early aptitude for art and received lessons from her mother who was a talented amateur artist. She was educated initially in Germany and on her return to England, in 1848, studied for 6 months at Cary’s School of Art in London. Afterwards, she took lessons in oil painting from William Gale, and, in 1852, entered the figure class of the Female School of Art in Gower Street for a further year. She studied for 14 months, from 1859 to 1860, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, and was given some instruction by Nicaise de Keyser, the director.

Turck exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1854, and also at the British Institution, Suffolk Street and elsewhere. Her work included genre paintings, literary subjects, coastal scenes, architecture, birds and miniatures, painted in oil or watercolour. Her works at the Royal Academy included ‘Rus in Urbe’, 1858, ‘Lady Dorothy in Breton Costume’, 1880 and ‘In St. Mark’s, Venice’, 1885. Her Royal Academy picture of 1856 ‘Cinderella’ was one of forty pictures selected by John Ruskin for criticism in his Academy Notes: “Very pretty, and well studied, but Cinderella does not look the lady of the fairy tale. I am rather puzzled myself to know how her relationship to her remarkable godmother could best be indicated so as to leave her still a quite real little lady in a real kitchen. But I am glad to see this sternly realistic treatment, at all events’.

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