There is no mention in the diary of any visit of Turner to Farnley Hall in 1818, but it is probable that he called there on his way back from Scotland. The water-colour of _A First Rater taking in Stores_, which is said to have been painted at Farnley Hall, is dated 1818. The water-colour drawing of _The Drawing-room at Farnley_, to which I have already referred, must also have been painted that year, as the picture of _Dort_ could not have been in its place before then, and the drawing was included in the exhibition of Turner’s works which Mr. Fawkes held in April 1819. To appreciate fully the importance of this exhibition it will be necessary for us to glance for a moment at the conditions of artistic patronage in this country during the earlier years of the nineteenth century. As we had no National Gallery then, opportunities for becoming familiar with the works of the great European painters of the past were extremely limited. With a view to educating the taste of the public, some of the artists made the suggestion that the nobility and gentry, who owned collections of works by the old masters, should admit the public to their galleries or houses on a certain day in each week during the fashionable season. The Marquess of Stafford and Earl Grosvenor acted upon this suggestion. But after a time complaints were made that the taste for the old masters was prejudicial to the claims for recognition of the living native artists of the day. To redress the balance Lord de Tabley, who had formed a fine collection of exclusively British paintings, decided to throw open his gallery to the public. Many of his friends tried to dissuade him from doing this, as they thought that the British School could not emerge with credit from the inevitable comparisons which would be made with the more famous Schools of the Continent. But he invited and allowed the public to visit his gallery on one day in the week during the season of 1818. His experiment was so successful that it was repeated the following year. William Carey, a dealer who had assisted Lord de Tabley in forming his collection, tells us that “the splendour of the British School produced a favourable conviction on the minds of foreign visitors. The effect was indescribable. It increased on each year of the exhibition, and the periodical press, in bearing testimony to the general enthusiasm which seized all the upper classes, rapidly spread the fame of the British School through the Empire” (“Some Memoirs of the Patronage and Progress of the Fine Arts,” &c., published in 1826). The success of Lord de Tabley’s bold experiment seems to have suggested to Mr. Walter Fawkes the idea of admitting the public to see the large collection of English water-colours he had formed. The writer referred to above tells us that he “had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Fawkes mention his intended exhibition to a small circle of amateurs, with a doubt whether the