572 DILECTA

Turner carried it how the tail dragged on the grass, while his own coattails were but little further from the ground; also that a roll of sketches, which I picked up, fell from a pocket in one of these coat-tails, and Turner, after letting my father have a peep at them, tied the bundle up tightly with a bit of the sacred line. I think he had taken some twine off this bundle of sketches when making his stone rocket apparatus, and that this led to the roll working out of his pocket. My father knew little about fishing or fishing-tackle, and asked Turner, as a matter of curiosity, what the line he had nearly lost was worth. Turner answered that it was an expensive one, worth quite half a crown.

“Turner’s fish was served for dinner that evening; and, though I was not there to hear it, my father told me how old Lord Egremont joked Chantrey much about his having trolled the whole of the day without even a single run, while Turner had only come down by coach that afternoon, gone out for an hour, and brought in this big fish. Sir Francis was a scientific fisherman, and president of the Stockbridge Fishing Club, and, no doubt, looked upon Turner, with his trimmers, as little better than a poacher. Still there was the fish, and Lord Egremont’s banter of Chantrey must have been an intense delight to Turner as a fisherman.

2. “It was about this time that I first went with my father to the Royal Academy upon varnishing days, and, wandering about watching the artists at work, there was no one, next to Stanfield and his boats, that I liked to get near so much as Turner, as he stood working upon those, to my eyes, nearly blank white canvases in their old Academy frames. There were always a number of mysterious little gallipots and cups of colour ranged upon drawing stools in front of his pictures; and, among other bright colours, I recollect one that must have been simple red-lead. He used short brushes, some of them like the writers used by house decorators, working with thin colour over the white ground, and using the brush end on, dapping and writing with it those wonderfully fretted cloud forms and the ripplings and filmy surface curves upon his near water. I have seen Turner at work upon many varnishing days, but never remember his using a maul-stick.* He came, they said, with the carpenters at six in the morning, and worked standing all day.¹ He always had on an old, tall beaver hat, worn rather off his forehead, which added much to his look of a North Sea pilot.

(Parenthetic.)

“Have you noticed the sky lately in the north-west when the sun is about a hand’s breadth above the horizon; also just after sunset, when your ‘storm cloud’ has been very marked, remaining like a painted sky, so still, that it might have been photographed over and over again by the slowest of processes?”

* Italics mine. I have often told my pupils, and, I hope, printed for them somewhere,² that all fine painting involves the play, or sweep, of the arm from the shoulder.

¹ [Compare what Ruskin says, of Turner’s work on varnishing days, in Modern Painters, vol. v. (Vol. VII. p. 248).]

² [See Vol. XIX. p. 120 and Vol. XXIV. p. 20.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]