* These are among the drawings selected for reproduction in the present publication.
These entries were made, I am inclined to think, either in the year 1809 or 1810. It is easy to identify most of the drawings referred to in this list, in spite of Turner’s rather arbitrary spelling. I can, however, find no trace of the drawings described as Armutic Rock and Gordale, and I have never seen either the sketch or the finished drawing of the Mill. I am not even sure what mill it can have been. It was probably the one at Otley, which stands close to the lodge at the entrance to the Farnley Hall grounds. A View of Otley Mills, with the River Wharfe and Mill Weir, said to have been presented by Mr. Fawkes to the family of its owner, was sold at Christie’s in June 1890, and bought by the famous French dealer, M. Sedelmeyer. It was probably this drawing to which Mr. Fawkes refers in the only fragment of a letter in his handwriting which I have been able to discover among the Turner papers in the National Gallery. The body of the letter has been destroyed, but the last two paragraphs and the signature remain. This fragment says:—
“By to-morrow’s coach I shall send you a box containing two pheasants, a brace of partridges, and a hare—which I trust you will receive safe and good. We have tormented the poor animals very much lately and now we must give them a holiday.
“Remember the Wharfdales—everybody is delighted with your Mill. I sit for a long time before it every day.
“Ever very truly yrs.,
W. Fawkes.”
The “Wharfdales” are evidently the series of drawings of Wharfedale scenery which Turner had in hand for Mr. Fawkes. The allusions to the drawing of the Mill give us a clue to the real bond of union between the two men, viz., the patron’s sincere and unaffected delight in the artist’s work.
Mr. Fawkes’s liberality as a buyer of Turner’s work is demonstrated by some financial jottings made in one of his sketch-books (CXXII, Turner Bequest), during the years 1809 and 1810. In one of these statements of Turner’s assets Mr. Fawkes is debited with £500, in the other he is entered as the artist’s debtor to the extent of £1,000.
In 1811 Turner threw himself enthusiastically into the project of writing a long poem extolling the beauties and recounting the history of all the chief places of interest on the southern coast of England. The poem was to be illustrated by a series of engravings to be made from water-colours specially painted by the artist for the work. The poem was never completed, but Turner seems to have spent the greater part of the summer of 1811 wandering along the coast from Christchurch, in Hampshire, to Land’s End, in Cornwall, diligently making hundreds of wonderfully delicate and accurate sketches, and with equal diligence, and perhaps just as much enjoyment to himself, grinding out even a greater number of lame and halting lines of the most indifferent verse. He returned along the northern sides of Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, sketching and rhapsodizing upon the whole coast from Penzance to the Mendip Hills. This work and play must have kept him too busy to visit Farnley that year.
Turner was back in Devonshire and Cornwall in 1813, but I believe he managed to pay a rather lengthy visit to Farnley in 1812. The “Large Farnley” and “Woodcock Shooting” Sketch-Books (CXXVIII and CXXIX, Turner Bequest) seem to have been used on this occasion. The water-colour of Woodcock Shooting (painted for Sir H. Pilkington, and dated 1813), now in the Wallace Collection, represents a winding road among tall spruce firs, exactly like those which crown the rocky heights of the Otley Chevin. In the latter of these two sketch-books there are several pencil drawings of the fir trees on the slopes of the Chevin, with figures of beaters and sportsmen carrying guns. The former sketch-book contains drawings of Mr. Fawkes’s tent on the Farnley moors, with dogs, guns, game, and ale barrels scattered in the foreground—notes from which the water-colour of this subject in the Farnley Collection was painted. Other pages of the same book contain beautiful drawings, some of them partly finished in colour, of Farnley and Wharfedale from Caley Park. Some loose leaves from this book were in the collection of the late Mr. J. E. Taylor, who presented one of them to Sir Frank Short.
In 1814 Turner was, I believe, too busy sketching the southern coast from Hastings to Margate, and his “Views in Sussex”, to have much time for any lengthy visit to Farnley. But he was certainly there in 1815, as a passage in a letter to the Rev. H. Scott Trimmer proves. The letter is given in full in Monkhouse’s “Turner” (p. 90). It is dated “Tuesday, Aug. 1, 1815.” In it Turner says: “After next Tuesday—if you have a moment’s time to spare, a line will reach me at Farnley Hall, near Otley, Yorkshire, and for some time, as Mr. Fawkes talks of keeping me in the north by a trip to the Lakes, &c., until November.” The evidence of the sketch-books suggests that this trip to the Lakes did not take place.