'Dido Directing the Equipment of the Fleet, or the Morning of the Carthaginian Empire.'
'East Cowes Castle, the seat of J. Nash, Esq. The Regatta beating to windward.'
'East Cowes Castle, the seat of J. Nash, Esq. The Regatta Starting for their Moorings.'
'Boccaccio relating the Tale of the Bird-cage.'
Hardly the finest examples of Turner's golden visions; but Constable found them glorious and beautiful. What did Constable think of the Turner exhibited next year, that magnificent riot of the imagination, 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'?
It was probably during his second visit to Italy that he made the slight and lovely 'Sketch of an Italian Town,' now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This, like the 'Orvieto,' is essential Italy. Rarely has the feeling of an Italian hill town been given with such intimacy of observation, just as it looks, a moment snatched and recorded, artlessly, but with great art.
THE YEAR OF 'ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS'
Of all Turner's pictures, 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus' makes the strongest appeal to the popular imagination. Call it scenic, call it theatrical; say that it is like the transformation scene at a pantomime; admit that it is all wrong, artistically; that it is lighted from anywhere and everywhere; concede all its impossibilities and incongruities, and the 'Ulysses' still remains a magnificent effort of the imagination, a glory to behold, from the figure of Phœbus, rising with his horses from the sea, to the vast Polyphemus, who, not being a mortal and bearing no resemblance to nineteenth--century man, is the most convincing figure that Turner ever painted. How often I visited the old Turner room at the National Gallery to study this picture or that, but always finding myself, sooner or later, drawn to this supreme effort of his imagination.
And now that he had emptied himself of all he knew and all he had dreamed, of wonder and splendour, came the reaction, and his humorous contempt of the chatter about this masterpiece, the wonder of the 1829 exhibition. (Yet nobody bought it.)
Thornbury recounts that at a dinner party at which Turner was present, a lady (she exists to-day, and is still making similar observations) who had seen the 'Ulysses' said to her neighbour, Mr. Judkins, 'the clerical artist,'--'Don't you now think it is a sweet picture?'