380 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

most modern landscape painters multiply a favourite subject twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in different places, and “inventing,” as they are pleased to call it, a new “effect” every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner’s subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of impressions actually received by him at some favourite locality, or else repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and again realised as his increasing powers enabled him to do better justice to it. In either case we shall find them records of seen facts; never compositions in his room to fill up a favourite outline.

47. For instance, every traveller-at least, every traveller of thirty years’ standing-must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself in a strange world.¹ Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:² there is first the “Pas de Calais,” a very large oil painting, which is what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the French side. It is a careful study of French fishing-boats running for the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the distance. Then there is the “Calais Harbour” in the Liber Studiorum: that is what he saw just as he was going into the harbour-a heavy brig warping out, and very likely to get in his way or run against the pier, and bad weather coming on. Then there is the “Calais Pier,” a large painting, engraved some years ago

¹ [The classical passage in Ruskin on Calais is Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. i. §§ 2, 3. In one of his early writings he had also expressed the feelings here described: see Vol. II. p. 341.]

² [(1) The “Pas de Calais” was exhibited at the Academy in 1827, under the title “‘Now for the Painter’: Passengers going on board.” It is in the collection of Mr. Naylor at Leighton Hall. (For an anecdote about the title, see Thornbury, p. 293.) (2) “Calais Harbour in the Liber Studiorum,” called also “Entrance to Calais Harbour,” published in No. 11 of the Liber (Jan. 1, 1816). (3) For “Calais Pier” (exhibited 1803), see above, p. 378 n. (4) The “Fort Rouge” is the “Calais Sands, low water: Poissards collecting bait,” exhibited at the Academy in 1830, bought by Messrs. Agnew at the Gillott sale in 1872. There is a sketch of the Fort, and the sands at low water, in the National Gallery collection, No. 421 (c). (5) The “Scott” Calais is in Vol. 27 of the Prose Works (1834). In the National Gallery collection there are several sketches at Calais, described by Ruskin in his Catalogue of the Sketches and Drawings, etc., 1857-1858 (see Vol. XIII.).]

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