384 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

52. But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of subjects from Winchelsea.¹ That in the Liber Studiorum, “Winchelsea, Sussex,” bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving bears date 1817. It has two women with bundles, and two soldiers toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage waggon in the distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he did another for the England Series, of which the engraving bears date 1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage waggon is there, having got no farther on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added, and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen.

53. Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents that Turner’s memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of colour or arrangement that have pleased him-the fork of a bough, the casting of a shadow, the fracture of a stone-will be taken up again and again, and strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.²

54. I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner’s powers of memory, because I wish it to be thoroughly seen how all

¹ [(1) The drawing for the Liber Studiorum Plate is No. 487 in the National Gallery. (2) The second drawing, “Winchelsea from the Rye Road” (now in the possession of Mr. Abel Buckley), was etched by W. B. Cooke for the Southern Coast, but the plate was never finished. The drawing has since been engraved in Hastings and its Vicinity; see for another reference to it, Ruskin’s Notes on his Drawings by Turner, No. 34. (3) The third drawing (for which see also above, p. 370), made for the England and Wales Series, was given to Ruskin by his father in 1840: see Præterita, vol. ii. ch. i., and the Notes just mentioned, No. 34.]

² [One of the Liber compositions referred to is doubtless the “Procris and Cephalus”; probably another is the unpublished “Huntsman in a Wood.”]

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