On one of these excursions Turner once actually gave a picnic 'in excellent taste.' 'Our host,' says Redding, was 'agreeable but terse, blunt, and almost epigrammatic at times. Never given to waste his words, nor remarkably choice in their arrangement, they were always in their right place and admirably effective.' An account has also been preserved of a scene in an inn where they conversed until nearly midnight, when Turner laid his head upon the table and was soon sound asleep. They were up with the sun, and it was at that early hour that Turner made his sketch for 'Crossing the Brook' exhibited in 1815. Another excursion was by sea. The morning was squally, and the sea rolled boisterously into the sound. Then they landed and—
'Turner was all the while quiet, watching the troubled scene, and it was not unworthy his notice. The island, the solitary hut upon it, the bay in the bight of which it lay, and the long gloomy Bolt Head to seaward, against which the waves broke with fury, seemed to absorb the entire notice of the artist, who scarcely spoke a syllable. While the fish were getting ready, Turner mounted nearly to the highest point of the island rock, and seemed writing rather than drawing. The wind was almost too violent for either purpose; what he particularly noted he did not say.'
And here is a specimen of Turner's conversation, showing how true was his observation:—
'He was looking at a seventy-four gun ship, which lay in the shadow under Saltash. The ship seemed one dark mass.
'"I told you that would be the effect," said Turner, referring to some previous conversation. "Now, as you observe, it is all shade."
'"Yes, I perceive it; and yet the ports are there." '"We can only take what is visible—no matter what may be there. There are people in the ship; we don't see them through the planks."'
Turner's friends could have told Ruskin how untrue was such a statement as 'he was without hope.' Like ordinary mortals he had his good days and his bad days, his hours of fun and his hours of gloom, his moments of kindness and his moments of cruelty.
Plate XIII. Scarborough. Water colour (1811) Tate Gallery
'His spirits,' says Thornbury, 'were high, deep as were occasionally his fits of melancholy.' Once he wrote a letter to Calcott, in which he drew a wild duck or mallard, a pun on his second name; and as to his kindness, there is the story, one of many, of his generosity at the 1811 Academy to a young artist called Bird, whose picture had been crowded out. Turner begged the Hanging Committee to restore the work, insisting that it was too good to be rejected. They agreed, but declined to alter the hanging. Turner had another long look at Bird's picture, and then, taking down one of his own of the same size, hung Bird's in its place. I wonder was that 'one of his own' the 'Scarborough,' exhibited this year, the large, beautiful, and simple sketch for which is in the National Collection, one of the 'unfinished' water-colours reproduced in these pages.
We begin to understand something of Turner the man as well as of Turner the artist. As an artist he seems the more wonderful, the more one studies him. To-day I looked again at his 'Innsbruck,' his 'Sketch of an Italian Town,' and his 'Lake of Brienz' at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Those three water-colours, stages in his development, are sufficient to make an ordinary painter's reputation.