Turner's Water-Colours at Farnley Hall

On the death of Mr. Walter Fawkes Farnley Hall passed to his son, Mr. Francis Hawksworth Fawkes. He was a boy when Turner first became friendly with the family. He had romped, walked, shot with Turner, and had sat at his elbow while he was making many of the wonderful drawings in the Farnley Collection. No doubt young Hawksworth was one of the party in the carriage which Turner insisted upon driving tandem from the shooting tent on the Farnley moors, and which he managed to capsize “amid shouts of good-humoured laughter"—an exploit which earned the artist the nickname of “Over-Turner.” It was to young “Hawkey” that Turner called one day in 1810, when he stood on the terrace at Farnley watching the storm rolling and shafting out its lightning over the Wharfedale hills—the storm effect he was to paint in his picture of Hannibal Crossing the Alps. The same boy sat watching him for three hours as he sat one morning between breakfast and lunch-time making the beautiful drawing of A First-Rater taking in Stores, the artist all the time “working like a madman” and “tearing up the sea with the eagle-claw of a thumbnail.” It was young Hawksworth who induced his father to buy the large oil painting of Dort from the exhibition of 1818.