By the year 1795, when he was twenty years of age, Turner was quite a successful young man. His drawings were hung at the Royal Academy, he sold them readily, and he had been commissioned by the Copper Plate Magazine to make a series of water-colours for engraving at two guineas apiece. In one of the volumes of that publication he is alluded to as 'The ingenius Mr. Turner.' Moreover, the public press had begun to notice the work of 'the ingenius Mr. Turner.' Here is a complimentary contemporary criticism:—
'388. "Christchurch Gate, Canterbury." W. Turner. This deserving picture, with Nos. 333 and 336, are amongst the best in the present exhibition. They are the productions of a very young artist, and give strong indications of first-rate ability; the character of Gothic architecture is most happily preserved, and its profusion of minute parts massed with judgment and tinctured with truth and fidelity. This young artist should beware of contemporary imitations. His present effort evinces an eye for nature, which should scorn to look to any other source.'
'Christchurch Gate' was one of five drawings he sent to the Academy of 1794. In 1795, 'W. Turner, Hand Court, 26 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden,' exhibited eight drawings.
It will be seen from the above extracts from the Inventory how early Turner became a traveller. He was a traveller almost to the end of his life, and, whatever else he forgot, he never left his sketch-book at home. 'No day without a note of Nature' might almost have been his motto. His sketch-books are the guides to his travels, and when I turn the pages and follow the wanderings of this unresting man of genius, there rises before me, as a companion to the sketch-books, the map that Mr. Huish compiled of Turner's tours through Great Britain. The lines of his tracks cover the map, those tracks along which he walked, or coached, or rode, and in their appointed places are marked the sixty-six castles, the twenty-seven abbeys, and the fourteen cathedrals that he drew. Some day, when I have leisure, I think I will make similar maps of his tours through France, Italy and Switzerland. He would walk his twenty miles a day with his baggage tied in a big handkerchief, his umbrella in his hand, and often his fishing-rod. But the clearest vision of him I have is that day in 1792, when, at the age of seventeen, he started off on his first tour in Wales, on a pony lent him by his friend Mr. Narraway. To be seventeen, to be conscious of great powers, all the wide world and the wide future opening, and a good little pony as companion. Has life anything better to offer than that?
In the 'South Wales' Sketch-Book of 1795, among the 'Order'd Drawings,' a list of which he has inscribed on one of the pages, is 'Newport Castle—Mr. Kershaw.' No doubt this is the 'Newport' now in the Salting Collection at the British Museum, one of the most accomplished of his early drawings, pleasant in colour and bold in mass.
[CHAPTER VIII]
1800: AGED TWENTY-FIVE