Studio: international art (55.1912)

Turner at Farnley Hall

of interest in its immediate neighbourhood. The
views of the interior are full of interest to the
visitor to Farnley Hall, because they show how
very little the house has changed during the last
hundred years. The dining-room, with its fluted
columns, its painted ceiling, its beautiful marble
chimney-piece executed by Fisher of York, is
practically the same to-day as when Turner drew
it one morning with the table set for the family
breakfast. The view of the drawing-room here
reproduced gives an excellent idea of the loving
care with which Turner wrought the whole of
these drawings. The picture above the mantel-
piece is the splendid oil painting which Turner
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818, under
the title of Dort, or Dordrecht—The Dort Packet
Boat, from Rotterdam, becalmed. The two smaller
paintings on either side of the Dort are “ The
Victory ” returning from Trafalgar, beating up the
Channel, in three positions, and a
Coast Scene — Sunset. These no
longer form part of the Farnley col-
lection. But there still hangs on the
opposite wall to the Dort—the wall
not shown in this drawing — the
famous Red Cap, or Pilot hailing a
Whitstable Ploy in Stormy Weather,
one of the best preserved and most
beautiful of Turner’s incomparably
noble paintings of the sea. This is
certainly the finest of all Turner’s
works in this wonderful collection,
and Mr. Ruskin was not far wrong
when he declared, on one of his last
visits to Farnley Hall, that it was one
of the best of all Turner’s oil paint-
ings, for it is as a painter of the sea
and of sailors that Turner’s real
greatness is most incontestably
shown. The stained glass in the
centre window on the left in the
drawing, displays the principal quar-
terings of the families of Hawks worth
and Fawkes. This has since been
removed from the drawing-room to
a more appropriate place in the
Church. Other drawings show the
conservatory—or the “ root-house ”
as it was called in Turner’s day—
the library, the oak-panelled room,
and the old oak staircase, crowded
with ancient weapons and banners,
and there are two views of the grand
new staircase, one from below, and
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the other from above, in which we catch a glimpse
of a gorgeous flunkey carrying a tray into the
drawing-room.

The views of the exterior of the Hall are as
numerous as those of the interior. One of them
here reproduced shows the old Elizabethan part
of the building, seen from the flower garden.
Other drawings show the handsome wing added to
the old building in the latter part of the eighteenth
century by Mr. Walter Fawkes’s father. One
brightly coloured “ fancy picture ” shows us what
the artist thought Farnley Hall might have looked
like in the far-off days of Charles II. or William
and Mary. The facts about the buildings and
grounds were taken from an old engraving, but
the gaily dressed group of huntsmen and ladies in
the foreground were drawn from the artist’s imagina-
tion. This is quite a pretty and pleasing drawing,
but it is not on the same plane of artistic achieve-

“ DEAD GROUSE.” FROM A WATER-COLOUR DRAWING BY J. M. W.
TURNER, R.A.

/ Farnley Hall Collection)