[CHAPTER VII]
1795: AGED TWENTY
THE DRAWINGS OF 'THE INGENIUS MR. TURNER' ARE STATED BY A NEWSPAPER OF THE DAY TO BE 'TINCTURED WITH TRUTH AND FIDELITY'
Five years have passed. Turner is now twenty. We will glance back and see how he has fared. At about seventeen he attracted the attention of Dr. Thomas Monro of Bushey, and Adelphi Terrace, physician of Bridewell and Bethlehem Hospitals, a well-known lover of art, and patron of certain clever young men who were to raise the coloured topographical drawing into the well-loved art of British water-colour painting. 'Good Dr. Monro!' The phrase has become historical. Turner was grateful to Dr. Monro all his life, although there is no evidence of any great intimacy between them. Years later he said to David Roberts: 'Girtin and I have often walked to Bushey and back to make drawings for good Dr. Monro at half a crown apiece and a supper.' Turner's affection and admiration for Girtin, that brilliant youth who died young, lasted all his life. 'Had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved,' he is reported to have said long afterwards; and of one of Girtin's drawings he remarked, 'I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that. I would many a time have given one of my little fingers to make such a one.' When quite an old man he would mutter to himself about Tom's 'golden drawings.' Thornbury says that he praised Girtin's 'White House' with rapture.
Plate VI. Derwentwater, With the Falls of Lodore. Water colour (about 1797) Tate Gallery
At Dr. Monro's house Turner, Girtin, Varley, and other young artists were set to copy drawings by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Gainsborough, and other masters; also the drawings of John Cozens, Turner's senior by twenty-three years, who had lately returned from Italy and Switzerland. Cozens, that poet with the brush, had a great influence upon him, but Turner's drawings of this period have none of the repose, quiet beauty, and spacious feeling of Cozens'. Perhaps the 'Pent House, Dover,' draws nearest to the poetry of Cozens. Simple in treatment and colour, it shows more imagination than the well-known 'Tintern Abbey' at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The 'Bristol and Malmesbury' Sketch-Book, dated 1791, has twenty-three leaves, all drawn on; the 'Bristol' Sketch-Book of the same year has seven; and in 1792 we find a drawing of the 'Burning of the Pantheon' in Oxford Street, a carefully worked water-colour with a large number of figures. On the left are firemen in their uniforms with hose and engines, and a crowd of spectators and passers-by. A drawing of the 'Pantheon the Morning after the Fire' was exhibited in the Academy of 1792. So, at the age of seventeen, while intent now, as for years to come, on the work of other painters, Turner had begun the direct study of life, of vivid realities. In the 'Hereford and Worcester' Sketch-Book, 1792-93, there are 'Two Sketches near Malvern.' Beneath the second, showing a roadway with foreground trees, the following is inscribed in his own handwriting:—'The distance last with the sky a lovely tint of Blue Lake and Indian—more as it approaches.' He probably knew exactly what he meant. And no doubt the following comment on the back of a water-colour of a 'Tree and Tower' was all he needed to impress on his mind the effect of what he had seen:—
'In the shadow the Stones the same. Some Umber and S. Green—the broken part umber and Bister, the distance part a Blue Green Sap and B.'