The sketches and drawings of this period have all the old delicacy, combined with a greater breadth of treatment, and an amazing wealth and range of colour. Sixty years’ experience had given Turner’s hand--which up to the very last retained its extraordinary delicacy and certainty--a marvellous cunning. In many cases the drawings were swiftly painted, in others carefully stippled in details; usually with a dry brush worked over body-colour. Sir Hickman Bacon’s beautiful _Swiss Lake_ (Plate XXII.), _Lausanne_ (Plate XXV.), _The Seelisberg, Moonlight_ (Plate XXVIII.), Mr. Ralph Brocklebank’s highly finished _Schaffhausen_ (Plate XXIX.), and _Tell’s Chapel, Fluelen_ (Plate XXX.)--which Ruskin believed to be Turner’s last sketch on the Continent--along with most of the reproductions from the National Gallery, are examples of this time. This last phase of Turner’s art was, however, at the time neither understood nor appreciated, probably owing largely to the new development which had recently taken place in his oil pictures. In these he had set himself, in his old age, the last and hardest tasks of his life--the painting of pure light, of swift movement, of the tumultuous, elemental forces of Nature. Some of the _Venice_ subjects, the marvellous _Snow Storm at Sea_, and the _Rain, Steam and Speed_, were entirely misunderstood and ridiculed. “Blackwood’s Magazine” led the attack, and “Punch” and Thackeray added their satire. No doubt several of his late oil pictures were far-fetched in subject, fantastic in treatment, and eccentric in colour. Probably, also, no one knew better than he that he had not reached the goal of his ambition; but he also knew that his critics understood his aims as little as they did the difficulties which he had to encounter in striving to reach them, and the old man felt the attacks keenly. Ruskin tells us that he came one evening to his father’s house in Denmark Hill, after an especially bitter onslaught on the _Snow Storm at Sea--Vessel in Distress off Harwich_, of 1842, which the critics had described as “soapsuds and whitewash.” Ruskin heard him, sitting in his chair by the fire, muttering to himself at intervals “Soapsuds and whitewash,” again and again and again. “At last,” he says, “I went to him asking, ‘Why he minded what they said?’ Then he burst out ‘Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like. I wish they’d been in it.’” As a matter of fact, Turner had actually been on board the boat at the time lashed to the mast, at the risk of his life.