386 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

outpouring of invention is not less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand that expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see the evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness of every touch of colour; but when the multitude of delicate touches, with which all the aerial tones are worked, is taken into consideration, it would still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completed with ease, unless we had direct evidence on the matter: fortunately, it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes’s collection of a man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual size of those of the England Series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not appear one of the most highly finished, but it is still farther removed from slightness. The hull of a firstrate occupies nearly one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and went out to shoot.¹

56. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters, and they will see the truth of what

¹ [This drawing is here reproduced, Plate XXI. The term “a first-rate,” which Ruskin uses above (as in Campbell’s poem, “The Launch of a First-Rate”; for another reference to the drawing, see Harbours of England, § 41), has gone out of use in these days, belonging as it does to the time when the British Navy was divided into six rates of vessels, according to the number of guns carried.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]