ons and
flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the
_Waterloo Bridge_ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette
from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a
round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey
sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of this red lead,
made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the
vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just
after Turner had left it. "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired
a gun." On the opposite wall was a picture by Jones of Shadrach Meshach
and Abednego in the Furnace. "A coal," said Cooper, "has bounced across
the room from Jones's picture and set fire to Turner's sea." Turner did
not come in again for a day and a half, and then in the last moment
allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his
picture, and shaped it into a buoy."

It was in 1835, after an unbroken popular triumph lasting over thirty
years, that the critics openly rounded on him. The occasion seized by
_Blackwood's Magazine_ was the exhibition of his first Venetian picture
exhibited in that year--it is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New
York. "What is Venice in this picture?" wrote Blackwood's critic. "A
flimsy, whitewashed, meagre assemblage of architecture, starting off
ghost-like into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected
blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the
picture). The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white,
without light or transparency, and the boats with their red worsted
masts are as gewgaw as a child's toy which he may have cracked to see
what it is made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its
character."

Ruskin was then only sixteen years old, but eight years later appeared
in print the first volume of "Modern Painters," "by an undergraduate of
Oxford," as the result of his growing indignation at this and subsequent
attacks on Turner. Without following Ruskin into the dubious regions
whither the pursuit of his romantic fancies ultimately led him, we may
in fairness quote the opening sentence of his second chapter, "Of Truth
of Colour," which will help us, moreover, in understanding the
conditions under which painting was being conducted at this period.
"There is nothing so high in art," he says, "but that a scurrile jest
can reach at, and often the great