But of all the pictures produced this year the cracked and faded 'New Moon,' with the sunset sky, and the funny additional title, 'I 've lost my boat, you shan't have your hoop,' seems to me the most personal to Turner. He is back in his boyhood at Margate or elsewhere, running on the sands with little companions and dogs at sunset, when the new moon was in the sky, and the world was young,—a mild, pathetic little picture, a strange contrast to the 'Slave Ship.'
[CHAPTER XLVII]
1841: AGED SIXTY-SIX
HOW TURNER DID IT? HE 'GRASPED THE HANDLE AND PLUNGED THE WHOLE DRAWING INTO A PAIL OF WATER'
Turner was represented by six pictures at the Royal Academy this year—unimportant, not one worthy of his reputation. There was a topographical Venice, which Chantrey bought on Varnishing Day before he had seen it; and the rather decorative, rather splendid, rather fatigued picture called 'Depositing of Giovanni Bellini's three pictures in the Church of the Redentore, Venice,' not one of which modern expert criticism allows to Bellini. Little that would have mattered to Turner; he was concerned with the look of the pageant only, a little confused—gold, red and blue surging in sunlight. No doubt it pleased the old man to add the name of Giovanni Bellini to the famous painters who are associated with the descriptions of his pictures.
The titles of the Sketch-Books of this year evoke all manner of visions of beautiful places and the works associated with them—Lucerne, the Rhine, Thun, Zug, Goldau, Fluelen, Bellinzona, Como, Splugen and Grenoble.
