Five more years have passed. Turner has made his North of England tour about which Ruskin wrote so eloquently—and so unconvincingly. Cosmo Monkhouse, while reproving Ruskin for the partial untruth of his beautiful prose, says of that 1797 journey:—
'The effect upon Turner of the fells and vales of Yorkshire and Cumberland seems to have been much the same as that of Scotland upon Landseer: it braced all his powers, developed manhood of art, turned him from a toilsome student into a triumphant master.'
Turner was not yet a triumphant master. He had progressed towards triumph in water-colour, shown in the spacious, harmonious, and atmospheric rendering of 'Derwentwater, with the Falls of Lodore,' and the very beautiful 'Study for a Picture of Norham Castle'—rising golden rocks and rosy sky reflected in the rosy water, one of two early drawings of this subject, displayed in the new Turner Gallery, and reproduced in these pages: but oil was still beyond him. He had not mastered the difficulties of that medium; he could do no better than the dark and dispiriting 'Morning on the Coniston Fells, Cumberland,' and the still darker 'Buttermere Lake,' that for years has been banished to a provincial gallery. The young chief had advanced; he had been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy; he had removed from dingy Hand Court to decorous Harley Street; and he was about to make the acquaintance of Mr. Walter Fawkes, the squire of Farnley Hall, near Leeds, which was to mean so much to him; but he was not yet a triumphant master. Only in his water-colours has he begun to show glimmerings of his golden visions. In oil he is studying detail rather than light; he is pondering over masses looming in dim airless spaces; he has not even yet begun to see the ethereal manifestations of his maturity.
No doubt he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 for the remarkable water-colours that he exhibited in that and in the previous year, which included the powerful sunset-glowing 'Warkworth Castle' now at South Kensington; the gloomy and magnificent 'Kirkstall Abbey' in the Soane Museum, and the 'Norham Castle' with the golden rocks and the rosy sky of dawn.
Norham Castle was Turner's mascot. He painted that picturesque ruin again and again; it appears in the Liber Studiorum and in The Rivers of England series, and 'Norham Castle' is the subject of two of the 'unfinished oils,' disembodied spirits of loveliness, that caused such a sensation when they were exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1906.
In later life, when Turner was travelling with Cadell, the Edinburgh bookseller, making sketches for Provincial Antiquities, the artist suddenly raised his hat to the ruins and made them a low bow.
'What are you up to now? ' asked Cadell.
'Oh,' was Turner's reply, 'I made a drawing of Norham Castle several years since. It took, and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute.'
Perhaps the interest of this period for students are certain early oil paintings, showing the germs, so meagre of promise, from which his magnificent life-work arose. The small 'Moonlight, a study at Millbank,' exhibited in 1797, is now so dark that the picture seems to be encompassed in a perpetual fog, dominated by a round wafery, whitey-yellow moon; the sprawling 'Morning on the Coniston Fells' of 1798; the 'Caernarvon Castle' of 1800, silhouetted against a cloudy sky, so small and unimposing, that, remembering what Turner became, one has for it a sentimental affection; and the dark, disappearing 'Dolbadern Castle' that hangs in the Diploma Gallery in Burlington House. It was exhibited in 1800; but as Turner was not elected a full Royal Academician until 1802, this can hardly be his Diploma picture. The 'Tenth Plague of Egypt,' exhibited in 1802, has been honoured by a place on the line in the new Turner Gallery at Millbank.