As Thomas Stothard was a customer of Turner's father, and as many artists lived about Covent Garden, the boy's interest in art must have been early aroused. It is said that at the age of nine young Turner made a drawing of Margate Church, shortly before he went to his first school at New Brentford.
An old schoolfellow tells how he drew cocks and hens on the walls, and birds and flowers and trees from the schoolroom windows; and there is a story, which has been learnedly revised by Notes and Queries, of a sketch which he made of a coat-of-arms from a drawing at Mr. Tomkison's the jeweller. At the age of thirteen he is described as short and thick-set, with grey-blue eyes and arched eyebrows, a handsome boy, careless of dress, but sturdy and determined.
Turner's education was perfunctory; indeed, he had no real education at all, but he acquired the rudiments at New Brentford and in Mr. Coleman's school at Margate. We are told that he made the journey 'in a hoy, a bluff-bowed cutter-rigged craft, with a long bowsprit and heavy main boom.' That voyage must have been one of the events of his boyhood.
Mr. Palice, a floral drawing-master, also had the honour of instructing him, and Mr. Thomas Malton, a perspective draughtsman. Later he learnt something at Paul Sandby's Drawing Academy in St. Martin's Lane, but more from Mr. Hardwick, the architect, who employed him in adding landscape backgrounds to plans, etc., and who introduced him, it is believed, to the schools of the Royal Academy, where we find him enrolled as a student in 1789. But all this was fugitive and not very important. His real lifelong teacher was Nature, and he learnt how to express the ways of Nature by first studying the works of his contemporaries and predecessors.
He developed slowly. 'Folly Bridge and Bacon's Tower,' which appears as the first item in the Inventory, under the year 1787, when he was twelve, is not an original drawing. Turner showed little or none of the early facility of genius. For long years he leaned on and learned from others. 'Folly Bridge' is merely a copy of a steel engraving by J. Besire of a drawing perhaps by E. Dayes. The colouring, says Mr. Finberg, is probably the boy's own invention. It is signed and dated W. Turner, 1787, and hangs to-day on a wall of the new Turner Gallery at Millbank.
From an early age he made money. His father showed his drawings and coloured prints in his shop-window, and sold them at prices ranging from one to three shillings. The acquisition of wealth remained one of the most persistent occupations of his life. He was 'found out,' as Monkhouse says, almost in his childhood, was paid for colouring prints and washing in the skies for architects—excellent practice. The knowing boy knew it. When, in after life, somebody expressed wonder that he should have worked for half a crown a night, he retorted that nothing could have been better practice. Sometimes he received as much as a guinea. An old architect told Thornbury that he paid him that sum in the shop in Maiden Lane for putting in a background.
But the most important episode of Turner's boyhood was the meeting with Girtin, at about twelve or thirteen years of age, in the workshop of the famous engraver, John Raphael Smith—Thomas Girtin, who was to have such an influence on his dawning art, and whose personality was to be one of the happiest memories of his life.
Turner's work up till about the age of fifteen has been summed up thus: (1) Making drawings at home to sell; (2) Colouring prints for John Raphael Smith; (3) Washing in backgrounds for architects; (4) Sketching with Girtin.
Even in those early days Turner was secretive. Nobody was allowed to see him draw, and he was as determined as he was secretive. Thornbury tells the following story:—