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by special appointment to sup upon Welsh rabbit (toasted cheese). This must have been about the year 1840 or ‘41, as it was at the time my father was engaged upon a portrait of Lord Chancellor Cottenham; and during the evening Turner went into the painting-room, where the robes, wig, etc., of the Chancellor were arranged upon a lay-figure; and, after a little joking, he was persuaded to put on the Lord Chancellor’s wig, in which, my mother says, Turner looked splendid, so joyous and happy, too, in the idea that the Chancellor’s wig became him better than any one else of the party.
“I must have been away from home then, I think in America, for I never should have forgotten Turner being at our house; and this, I believe, is the only time he ever was there.
“Turner, my father, and the Yankee captain were excellent friends about this time, as the captain took a picture of Turner’s to New York which my father had been commissioned to buy for Mr. Lenox.1 There used to be a story, which I daresay you have heard, of how Turner was one day showing some great man or other round his gallery, and Turner’s father looked in through a half-open door and said, in a low voice, ‘That ‘ere’s done,’ and that Turner taking no apparent notice, but continuing to attend his visitor, the old man’s head appeared again, after an interval of five or six minutes, and said, in a louder tone, ‘That ‘ere will be spiled.’ I think Landseer used to tell this story as having happened when he and one of his many noble friends were going the round of Turner’s gallery about the time that Turner’s chop or steak was being cooked.”
12. “6, MOIRA PLACE, SOUTHAMPTON,
“June 30th, 1884.
“MY DEAR MR. RUSKIN,-After sending you that photograph of the Téméraire, it occurred to me to see if I could find out anything about the ship or her building in an old book I have (Charnock’s Marine Architecture), and I was surprised to find there, in a list of ships in our navy between the years 1700 and 1800, TWO ships of that name-one a seventy- four, taken from the French in 1759, the other a ninety-eight gun ship, built at Chatham in 1798. This made me look again at Mr. Thornbury’s account of the ship and her title,2 and leads me to doubt three things he has stated: first, that the ship (if she was the French Téméraire) ‘had no history in our navy before Trafalgar’; secondly, that ‘she was taken at the battle of the Nile’; and, thirdly, that the Téméraire which fought at Trafalgar was French at all.
“The model we have here, and which has the name Téméraire carved upon her stern, is a ninety-eight gun ship, and would be the one built at Chatham in 1798. But what I am driving at, and the point to which all this confusion leads, is, that after all, perhaps, dear old Turner was perfectly right in his first title for his picture of ‘The Fighting Téméraire,’
1 [The picture was a sunset view of Staffa, and Mr. Lenox complained that the picture was “indistinct.” “You should tell him,” said Turner to Leslie, “that indistinctness is my forte”: see C. R. Leslie’s Autobiographical Recollections, 1860, vol. i. pp. 206-207.]
2 [See ch. xlii. in Thornbury’s Life of Turner, 2nd ed., 1877.]
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