Plate XLI. Lake With Distant Headland and Palaces. Water colour (1840 or after) Tate Gallery
The following pen-picture is no parody. Wilkie Collins told Thornbury that when a boy—
'He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers seeing Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at the Academy lunch), seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush, and now receded from. Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat and old age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch meaning something, every pin's head of colour being a note in the chromatic scale.'
There is nothing sad in that; but who can look at or recall that 'grey, dim drawing, with one or two specks of light from craft on the river,' called 'Twilight in the Lorreli,' without emotion? This was one of the fifty-three drawings that Turner had brought years before straight to Farnley on his return from the Rhine. Long afterwards, possibly in this year, Hawkesworth Fawkes conveyed the set to the dreary house in Queen Anne Street to show to their creator. The old man turned over the drawings until he came to 'Twilight in the Lorreli.' His eyes filled with tears, and he muttered, 'But, Hawkey! but, Hawkey!'
[CHAPTER LIII]
1847, 1848 AND 1849: AGED SEVENTY-TWO TO SEVENTY-FOUR