Another of these excursions was to Burr or Borough Island, in Bigbury Bay, “To eat hot lobsters fresh from the sea.”
“The morning was squally, and the sea rolled boisterously into the Sound. As we ran out, the sea continued to rise, and off Stake’s point became stormy. Our Dutch boat rode bravely over the furrows, which in that low part of the Channel roll grandly in unbroken ridges from the Atlantic.”
Two of the party were ill; one, an officer in the army, wanted to throw himself overboard, and they “were obliged to keep him down among the rusty iron ballast, with a spar across him.”
“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 sea-ward, 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.”
These reminiscences of Mr. Redding contain the most graphic picture of Turner we possess. His carelessness of comfort, his devotion to his art, his power of continuous observation in despite of tumult and discomfort, his love of the sun and the sea, his habit of sketching from a high point of view, his ability to take “pictorial memoranda” in a violent wind, are all striking and essential peculiarities.
It is interesting to learn also from Mr. Redding, that “early in the morning before the rest were up, Turner and myself walked to Dodbrooke, hard by the town, to see the house that had belonged to Dr. Walcot (sic), Peter Pindar, and where he was born. Walcot sold it, and there had been a house erected there since; of this the artist took a sketch.” Turner probably appreciated Peter’s “Advice to Landscape Painters.”
One piece of Turner’s conversation is also worthy of record, if only on account of its rarity.
“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.’