ct more distinct than with respect to any other element of
landscape. Of plants, rocks, or architecture, there were very few
careful pieces of anatomical study. But several drawers were entirely
filled with these memoranda of shipping.

In executing the series of drawings for the work known as the Southern
Coast, Turner appears to have gained many ideas about shipping, which,
once received, he laid up by him for use in after years. The evidence of
this laying by of thought in his mind, as it were in reserve, until he
had power to express it, is curious and complete throughout his life;
and although the Southern Coast drawings are for the most part quiet in
feeling, and remarkably simple in their mode of execution, I believe it
was in the watch over the Cornish and Dorsetshire coast, which the
making of those drawings involved, that he received all his noblest
ideas about sea and ships.

Of one thing I am certain; Turner never drew anything that could be
_seen_, without having seen it. That is to say, though he would draw
Jerusalem from some one else's sketch, it would be, nevertheless,
entirely from his own experience of ruined walls: and though he would
draw ancient shipping (for an imitation of Vandevelde, or a vignette to
the voyage of Columbus) from such data as he could get about things
which he could no more see with his own eyes, yet when, of his own free
will, in the subject of Ilfracombe, he, in the year 1818, introduces a
shipwreck, I am perfectly certain that, before the year 1818, he had
_seen_ a shipwreck, and, moreover, one of that horrible kind--a ship
dashed to pieces in deep water, at the foot of an inaccessible cliff.
Having once seen this, I perceive, also, that the image of it could not
be effaced from his mind. It taught him two great facts, which he never
afterwards forgot; namely, that both ships and sea were things that
broke to pieces. _He never afterwards painted a ship quite in fair
order._ There is invariably a feeling about his vessels of strange awe
and danger; the sails are in some way loosening, or flapping as if in
fear; the swing of the hull, majestic as it may be, seems more at the
mercy of the sea than in triumph over it; the ship never looks gay,
never proud, only warlike and enduring. The motto he chose, in the
Catalogue of the Academy, for the most cheerful marine he ever painted,
the Sun of Venice going to Sea, marked the uppermost feeling in his
mind:

"Nor heeds the Demon