All these trial sketches, this laborious piecing together of the designs, suggest that Turner was not trying to realise something that he had actually seen. No doubt this was the case, yet we must not hastily conclude that he was simply making it all up out of his head, as the common saying runs. His smaller sketch-books show that he had constantly watched such scenes. The object of his trial sketches was therefore to find an adequately expressive form which would do justice to the wealth of his experience. He was not trying simply to make an abstractly beautiful composition. His task was rather to knit together into conceptual unity his wide range of experience, and then to body this forth in a carefully selected and articulated sequence of sensuous signs. But some of the pages of the book in which the sketches referred to above occur, prove that the well-known picture of ‘Calais Pier’ is in the main an attempt to realise a scene that Turner had actually witnessed. On pages 58 and 59 there is a vigorous drawing in black and white chalk inscribed ‘Our landing at Calais--nearly swampt.’ The packet boat had evidently had a rough crossing, and now the passengers are being landed in boats with considerable difficulty. In this sketch the boat seems to have stuck on the harbour bar, and, beyond, the packet which the passengers have just left is lowering its mainsail. Another sketch shows the small boat flung finally on the shore with the passengers struggling among the surf. The picture is no doubt an attempt to realise the scene which presented itself immediately on the arrival of the packet boat, before the passengers began to land. This was Turner’s general idea, but the composition had to be invented and appropriate details found to sustain and reinforce the main idea. This incident occurred in 1802, and we have to go back to the previous year to find what seem to me the materials used in the construction of Lord Iveagh’s superb ‘Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather,’ a picture that will be fresh in the public mind, as it formed one of the chief attractions at the exhibition of English pictures at the Franco-British Exhibition held in London last year (1908). Two little pocket-books, used during Turner’s journey to the Scotch lakes, are filled with drawings of the heavy billows of the North Sea thundering on a lee shore. The first book was used on the Yorkshire coast, the other on the wild coast between Berwick and Edinburgh. The Yorkshire book bears Turner’s label, ‘Guisborough Shore,’ on the back. It consists of a small number of pages of coarse blue paper. These pages are filled with magnificent impressions of waves dashing against rocks, and of dark, heavy fishing-boats silhouetted against the foaming white sea. The ‘Liber’ design of the ‘Coast of Yorkshire near Whitby’ (R. 24) was doubtless suggested on this occasion.