Plate XVII. View on the Moselle. Water colour (1834) In the collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq. (Size, 7 3/8 x 5 1/2)
Many of us have happy, very happy, memories of days spent among the Turner water-colours in the National Gallery, where they seemed more at home in those little rooms on the ground floor than in their august abode at Millbank. It was an experience to turn (with 'Calais Pier' and the other dark pictures fresh in the mind) to such lyrical moments as the four sketches of 'Evening at Petworth Park,' to such wonders as 'Ehrenbreitstein,' 'Bellinzona,' 'The Bridge on Moselle at Coblenz,' and the 'Rigi from Lucerne.' But I am again anticipating.
In The Harbours of England, the handling is still a little hard, and he does not always escape from the thrall of convention; but there is beauty in the white towers of 'Dover Castle,' rising up from the golden sward; in the rainbow arching over 'The Medway'; in the splendid theatricality of 'North Shields,' with a huge white moon riding in an excited blue sky, and in the golden loveliness of 'Scarborough Castle.'
In 'Totnes on the Dart,' in The Rivers of England, he has almost discarded the foreground muddle and allows himself merely one boat, and a group of water birds. Magnificent, overpowering, is the rainbow cutting the picture in 'Arundel Castle.' What a glory of space he shows in 'Arundel Park,' and what a tumult of distant rain in 'More Park.' The ruins of 'Kirkstall Abbey' have a foreground of red, brown and white cattle, as decorative as a Brueghel. One of the simplest and the most beautiful of them all is 'Brougham Castle': the ruin rises from the meadow against a threatening grey-blue sky, cut at the left by a rainbow; the trees are well observed and simply stated, and very attractive is the foreground water with the streaming red and yellow reflections of the castle.
At Cooke's Gallery, he exhibited a water-colour of Hastings, showing the fish-market on the beach. Perhaps this formal 'Hastings' was the parent of that most lovely Hastings, one of the 'unfinished' oils, the Hastings with the red sail, and the flecks of gold and red in the sky.