574 DILECTA

“I have written all this in great haste to answer your questions, dear Mr. Ruskin; and am sorry I have so little to tell, and that I am obliged to bring myself forward so much in the matter.

5. “I have often thought that Turner went out to catch that pike because he knew that Chantrey had been unsuccessful the day before.

“I don’t know whether you were ever a fisherman; if you were, you would understand the strange fascination that the water has from which you snatched your first fish, after feeling the tug and sweep of it upon the line. Now the lake in Petworth Park had that fascination for my early fishy mind. Most boys’ minds are very fishy, and shooty too,* as you have pointed out, and I was no exception; but I was always intensely boaty as well, caring less for rowing than sailing; and when I could not get afloat myself, I was never tired, even as a big boy, of doing so in imagination in any form of toy sailing-boat I could devise or get hold of. Hence it was that when I saw Turner’s fish upon the grass, and was told that he was a sea painter, I looked upon him at once as something to fall down and worship-a man who could catch a big fish, and paint sea and boats! My father, though he had much of the backwoodsman in his nature, and could make himself a bootjack in five minutes when he had mislaid or lost his own, was no sportsman, and cared little for boating beyond taking a shilling fare sometimes from Hungerford Stairs in a wherry.

6. “As to my recollections of Turner upon the varnishing days, you must bear in mind that, as I had been used to spend from a child many hours a day in a painting-room, I never recollect a time when I was not well up in all matters relating to paint and brushes; and the first thing that struck me about Turner, as he worked at the R. A., was, that his way of work was quite unlike that of the other artist; and it had at once a great interest for me, so that I believe I watched him often for long spells at a time. I noticed, as I think I told you, that his brushes were few, looked old, and that among them were some of those common little soft brushes in white quill used by house-painters for painting letters, etc., with. His colours were mostly in powder, and he mixed them with turpentine, sometimes with size, and water, and perhaps even with stale beer, as the grainers do their umber when using it upon an oil ground, binding it in with varnish afterwards; this way of painting is fairly permanent, as one knows by the work known to them as wainscotting or oak-graining. Besides red-lead, he had a blue which looked very like ordinary smalt; this, I think, tempered with crimson or scarlet lake, he worked over his near waters in the darker lines. I am almost sure that I saw him at work on the Téméraire, and that he altered the effect after I first saw it. In fact, I believe he worked again on this picture in his house long after I first saw it in the R. A. I remember Stanfield at work too, and what a contrast his brushes and whole manner of work presented to that of Turner.

7. “My brother George tells me to-day that he too has seen Turner at work, once at the R.A., and describes him as seeming to work almost

* Dear Leslie, might we not as well say they were bird’s-nesty or dog-fighty? Really useful fishing is not play; and to watch a trout is indeed, whether for boy or girl, greater pleasure than to catch it, if they did but know!

[Version 0.04: March 2008]