WATER COLOUR EXHIBITED AT ROYAL ACADEMY, 1795
(Print Room, British Museum)
PLATE VI
LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST
PENCIL. 1794
are generally made in a small note-book (about 4½ × 6¾ inches in size). They are invariably in pure outline, without the slightest suggestion of light and shade—nothing but the scaffolding of the more important shapes upon which the final designs were to be elaborated. On such a small scale the ease and grace of Turner’s touch are not much in evidence. The sketches are severely business-like, and done as quickly and with as little effort as possible. There is more effort and feeling in the casual studies with which the leaves of this sketch-book are interspersed. The accompanying sketch (Plate [VII.]) of a pony standing ready saddled gives a good idea of the mature wisdom of Turner’s style of sketching at this period, its determination to grasp the larger truths of form and structure, as well as the quickness, readiness, and versatility of his powers of perception.
The drawings for the more ambitious subjects are generally made on larger and separate pieces of paper about 8 × 10½ inches in size. On this scale the delicate play of the artist’s wrist becomes appreciable. The dominant impression left by a glance through these drawings is one of excessive orderliness and methodical neatness. There is no hurry, no scamped or perfunctory work, still less are there any signs of dilatoriness or even slowness. The artist’s respect for relevant fact is equalled by his appreciation of the value of time. His calm objective outlook, his steady, unwavering grasp of general principles enable him at every point to economise his labours, to store up the record of the greatest possible amount of material facts (i.e. of facts material to his purpose) with the utmost celerity, clearness, and the least possible expenditure of manual effort. This is particularly noticeable in the treatment of the towers in the Lincoln Cathedral drawing (Plate [VI.]), where every advantage has been taken of the repetition of forms. A possible, though not a very satisfactory, way of doing justice to the predominance of conceptual over purely visual elements in this work, would be to say that the artist has here drawn with his head rather than his eye, that he puts down not so much what he sees as what he understands.