'The Field of Waterloo,' exhibited in 1818, with its obvious quotation from Byron, is as dead as rider and horse, friend and foe piled in the foreground. It now hangs on the outer stair-case of the new Turner Gallery, as if in disgrace.
Turner journeyed north this year to make drawings for the Provincial Antiquities of Scotland, for which Sir Walter Scott was gratuitously writing the letterpress. He did not meet Scott on this occasion, but the artist and author met in 1831, when Turner was illustrating Cadell's edition of Scott's Poetical and Prose Works. The Provincial Antiquities drawings, which include the important 'Edinburgh from the Calton Hill,' were afterwards presented by the publishers to Sir Walter in recognition of his aid in the production of the book. For a long time they hung at Abbotsford, and the group was known by the honoured name of the 'Abbotsford Turners.' They are now scattered.
It would take a lifetime to follow the vicissitudes of all Turner's water-colours, when they were painted, and where they are to-day. The 'Heysham' of this year, with the elaborate lovely sky, is in the Salting Collection at the British Museum. To the 'Heysham' Ruskin devoted half a dozen pages in his Elements of Drawing.
Turner's water-colours are constantly changing hands. The gleaming eyes of the wizard, that some called covetous, would indeed have looked covetous could he have known that, in the twentieth century, a fine water-colour of his best period, for which he received a few guineas, may realise two thousand pounds.
'What do you think the Turner "Lake of Lucerne" will fetch?' said a Turner collector to me the day before an auction in June 1910. 'Oh, two thousand pounds,' I answered.
'Absurd!' he cried. It brought one thousand nine hundred and ninety-five pounds. I believe that there are certain men who would rather possess a fine Turner water-colour than any other work of art.
[CHAPTER XXVI]
1819: AGED FORTY-FOUR