How magic happens — J.M.W. Turner gives a demonstration

Today's Washington Post "Studio" feature follows.

Everything Shipshape by Lunch

"A First-Rate Taking in Stores" [above] by J.M.W. Turner was painted in 1818 at Farnley Hall in Yorkshire, miles from the sea. "Give me some idea of the size of a man-of-war," Walter Fawkes, the painter's host, had asked one day at breakfast. According to Fawkes's great niece, the artist's painted answer — this picture, now on view at the National Gallery of Art, which gives the wooden vessel an aircraft carrier's size — was completed before lunch. She gives this account:

"The idea hit Turner's fancy, for with a chuckle he said to Walter Fawkes's eldest son, then a boy of about fifteen, 'Come along Hawkey and we will see what we can do for Papa' and the boy sat by his side the whole morning and witnessed the evolution of 'The First-Rate Taking in Stores.' His description of the way Turner went to work was very extraordinary; he began by pouring wet paint onto the paper till it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos — but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia, came into being and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph."

....................

"J.M.W. Turner," the painter's retrospective, will remain in the gallery's West Building, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, through Janurary 6, 2008.