Mr. J.J.  Ruskin wrote, on February 19 and 21, 1852: 

“I have just been through Turner’s house with Griffith.  His labour is more astonishing than his genius.  There are L80,000 of oil pictures done and undone—­Boxes half as big as your Study Table, filled with Drawings and Sketches.  There are Copies of Liber Studiorum to fill all your Drawers and more, and House Walls of proof plates in Reams—­they may go at 1/-each....

“Nothing since Pompeii so impressed me as the interior of Turner’s house; the accumulated dust of 40 years partially cleared off; Daylight for the first time admitted by opening a window on the finest productions of art buried for 40 years.  The Drawing Room has, it is reckoned, L25,000 worth of proofs, and sketches, and Drawings, and Prints.  It is amusing to hear Dealers saying there can be no Liber Studiorums—­when I saw neatly packed and well labelled as many Bundles of Liber Studiorum as would fill your entire Bookcase, and England and Wales proofs in packed and labelled Bundles like Reams of paper, as I told you, piled nearly to Ceiling ...

“The house must be dry as a Bone—­the parcels were apparently quite uninjured.  The very large pictures were spotted, but not much.  They stood leaning against another in the large low Rooms.  Some finished go to Nation, many unfinished not:  no frames.  Two are given unconditional of Gallery Building—­very fine:  if (and this is a condition) placed beside Claude. The style much like the laying on in Windmill Lock in Dealer’s hands, which, now it is cleaned, comes out a real Beauty.  I believe Turner loved it.  The will desires all to be framed and repaired and put into the best showing state; as if he could not release his money to do this till he was dead.  The Top of his Gallery is one ruin of Glass and patches of paper, now only just made weather-proof ...

“I saw in Turner’s Rooms, Geo. Morlands and Wilsons and Claudes and portraits in various stiles all by Turner. He copied every man, was every man first, and took up his own style, casting all others away.  It seems to me you may keep your money and revel for ever and for nothing among Turner’s Works.”

Among the quantities so recklessly thrown aside for dust, damp, soot, mice and worms to destroy—­some 15,000 Ruskin reckoned at first, 19,000 later on—­there were many fine drawings, which had been used by the engravers, and vast numbers of interesting and valuable studies in colour and in pencil.  Four hundred of these were extricated from the chaos, and with infinite pains cleaned, flattened, mounted, dated and described, and placed in sliding frames in cabinets devised by Ruskin, or else in swivel frames, to let both sides of the paper be seen.  The first results of the work were shown in an Exhibition at Marlborough House during the winter, for which he wrote another catalogue.  Of the whole collection he began a more complete account, which was too elaborate to be finished in that form; but in 1881 he published a “Catalogue of the Drawings and Sketches of J M.W.  Turner, R.A., at present exhibited in the National Gallery,” so that his plan was practically fulfilled.