These drawings, made, I believe, between Turner’s twelfth and fourteenth years, show the youthful artist in the act of acquiring the rudiments of that pictorial language which he was to use in after years with such mastery and ease. We see him acquiring this language by intercourse with his fellows who use it, not, as is the modern way, through the course of a random study of nature. He is learning from tradition, and the thought of the artistic community as expressed in the current pictorial language is gradually forming and moulding his ideas. He is imitating those around him, as a child imitates the words of its nurse and mother.
On the present occasion, I need do no more than call attention in passing to the immense advantage Turner enjoyed in being initiated thus early and in this easy and natural way into the sphere of art. He was thus saved from those years of futile and heart-breaking experiment to which the modern system of nature study dooms all those students whose native powers are not entirely deadened by its influence. The habit thus early forced upon him of regarding himself as an actual producer, i.e. as a maker of articles with a definite market value, must also have been beneficial to him. The existence of a class of real patrons, whose tastes had to be consulted and whose pockets contained actually exchangeable coin of the realm, must have placed some insistence upon the social aspect of art, and have helped to prevent the boy from making the mistake which so many subsequent artists have made, of considering their work merely as a means of self-expression, instead of as a means of super-individual or universal communication. Another important result of these early employments was the facility and mastery in the use of his material which they gave him. Between the water-colours of different periods of Turner’s career there are the most astonishing contrasts of subject-matter and sentiment, but in all of them one finds the same inimitable grace, strength, and dexterity of workmanship, the same unequalled technical mastery over the medium; and this purely executive address—this ‘genius of mechanical excellence,’ to use Reynolds’s expression—could have been attained only as the result of an early familiarity with this particular form of artistic expression.
About his fourteenth year (1789) Turner was placed with an architect, Mr. P. Hardwick. It seems to me doubtful whether he was regularly apprenticed, or was intended to take up the study of architecture from a practical point of view. The evidence upon this point is extremely limited, but what little there is points to his employment upon purely pictorial tasks, such as the dressing out of projects or views of buildings with a plausible arrangement of light and shade and a pleasing setting of landscape background. We know that Mr. Hardwick built the New Church at Wanstead,[4] and that Turner made for his master a water-colour drawing both of the old church which was pulled down and the new one that took its place. I have not been fortunate enough to trace the
PLATE III
RADLEY HALL: SOUTH FRONT
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1789
present owner of these drawings, but the water-colour of the old church was exhibited at the Old Masters (R.A.) in 1887. There is, however, in the National Gallery a pencil outline of the new church, squared for enlargement, which shows no signs of training in the practical work of the architect’s profession.