A free rendering of the _London from Greenwich Park_ was engraved in the “Liber Studiorum” and published 1st January, 1811. The plate is inscribed, “Picture in the possession of Walter Fawkes, Esq., of Farnley.” Turner must, however, have bought back or exchanged the picture, as it was in his gallery at the time of his death, and thus passed into the National Gallery. Soon after its first exhibition at Marlborough House, in 1856, Mr. Ruskin published a curious “note” upon it, bewailing in eloquent terms the fact that Turner should waste his genius upon such an unworthy subject as London and a view of the Thames. “What a sorrowful matter it is,” he explained, that there was no one who “had sense and feeling enough” to tell Turner to paint the Rhone instead of the Thames, the Simplon instead of Richmond Hill, and Rouen Cathedral instead of Greenwich Hospital. Turner found his way at last to these subjects, Mr. Ruskin added, “but not till many and many a year had been wasted on Greenwich and Bligh Sands.” We need not on the present occasion trouble to examine too curiously the reasons which induced Mr. Ruskin to take such an entirely perverse view of the kind of subjects an English landscape painter ought to choose. It is sufficient to point out that an artist can only paint with his full power those scenes which he knows and loves intimately. Turner was born in London, and the Thames with its shipping about London Bridge stirred Turner’s imagination with memories of his boyhood, his early dreams and aspirations, in a way that the Rhone, or the Rhine, or the Danube could never stir it. No doubt these rivers are broader and deeper than the Thames, fairer to the eye of the tourist, and richer in historical associations; but these advantages are no compensation for that affectionate intimacy which guides and inspires the artist when he is dealing with scenes familiar to him since his boyhood. I will not hesitate to assert that Turner’s paintings and drawings of his native land and its rivers and ports stir my imagination and emotions far more powerfully and harmoniously than those of foreign parts. In spite of the tranquil splendour of the Farnley _Dort_, the magnificence of Mr. Naylor’s _Cologne_ and Mr. Ralph Brocklebank’s _Ehrenbreitstein_, and the intricate play of cunning line and gorgeous colour in the water-colour of _Heidelberg_ (in the Donald Currie Collection), I would not exchange any of these works for the sober harmonies and beautiful feeling of _London from Greenwich Park_, or the more moving drama of the fisherman’s daily life on the Thames enshrined in the _Shoeburyness Fisherman hailing a Whitstable Hoy_. The picture of the _Victory_ returning from Trafalgar was painted about the same time as the _Shoeburyness Fisherman_. It is hallowed by association with Nelson’s glorious end, but it is lacking in that unity and energy of pictorial motive which make the _Shoeburyness Fisherman_ such a masterpiece of sea-painting.