Turner’s unfamiliarity with the sea no doubt accounted to some extent for its attraction. His imagination was here free to disport itself untrammelled by the bonds of experience, and safe from the irksome yoke of the familiar. When we come to study Turner’s first important sea-piece, the fine picture in the Bridgewater House collection of ‘Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen endeavouring to put their Fish on Board’--first exhibited in 1801, we can see how little art is bound to depend upon the individual artist’s personal experience. Turner had painted landscapes before he knew the country, and buildings before he had seen them, so now he paints sea-pieces before he has been to sea. There is no evidence to show that he had ventured out of sight of land before 1802, and then it was only to cross the Channel from Dover to Calais. But before this he had exhibited not only the Bridgewater picture to which I have referred, but a large ‘Battle of the Nile’ (1799), Lord Iveagh’s superb ‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’ (1802), and the almost equally fine ‘Ships bearing up for Anchorage’ (1802), in the Petworth gallery. It is true that he had used to the uttermost the few opportunities which had fallen in his way of observing the sea from the shore, and that he had some little experience of ships and sailors in rivers and on the coast. (See, for example, the series of sketches of boats’ crews towing men-of-war in the River Usk, in the ‘Cyfarthfa’ Sketch-Book of 1798.) What direct knowledge of this kind he possessed he naturally used, but there can be no doubt that the main body of his knowledge as well as inspiration was derived not at first-hand, but indirectly, at first, through the pictures of English painters like De Loutherbourg, and later, through the pictures and drawings of the Dutch sea-painters. The point is worth the attention of those who treat the close connection between art and nature which happens to exist just at present as an inherent characteristic of pictorial art, and make much of this supposed characteristic in opposition to the freedom of music. When we cease to keep our attention riveted on the naturalistic art of the present, we soon find indications that the essential forms of pictorial art are as much independent constructions of the creative mind as the forms of music.