WHAT makes Turner’s water-colour drawings so profoundly interesting—apart from their extraordinary and enduring attractiveness—is the fact that in them lies before you, plainly visible, the whole course and development of his art. And the continuousness and regularity of that development are remarkable. There are no pauses, no gaps, hardly a table-land; only one steady, continued progress. No matter how high a point he reached, he was never content to rest there, but was always pressing onward to fresh achievement, trying new effects, challenging new difficulties even down to the last years of his life. To anyone familiar with his work in water-colour, it is generally easy to date his drawings within a year or two.

No doubt the growth of his art can also be traced in his oil pictures, but with some important differences. In them, even up to middle life, he was constantly and strongly influenced by the work of other painters whom he was often consciously or unconsciously rivalling. First Richard Wilson, then Van de Velde and Bakhuysen, afterwards Gaspar Poussin, Claude, Cuyp, Rembrandt, Titian and others, all in turn had their effect on him. As a result of this rivalry, his oil pictures were less spontaneous, less sincere than his water-colours. His lack of education also unfitted him to be the painter of the classical and sacred subjects in which he attempted to compete with the old masters. No doubt there were brilliant exceptions—such, for example, as Mercury and Herse, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, and others, but I think Ruskin was justified in calling many of them “nonsense pictures.” Moreover, in his oil paintings Turner was constantly experimenting—not always successfully—both with his materials and his methods and, as a consequence, many, especially those of his later years, have greatly suffered with time.

But in his water-colours, after his first years or training and experiment, he was simply and always himself—he was Turner. Paul Sandby, John Cozens, Malton, Hearne, De Loutherbourg, and others of the older water-colour painters, all had their influence on him, but in no case did it last long. The two men who affected him most were Cozens and Girtin, his friend and fellow student, of whom more will be said hereafter. But by 1800, or at the latest 1802, Turner had passed all his contemporaries, and stood alone, the acknowledged head of the English school of water-colour painting, which in the-first half of the nineteenth century was to reach its zenith. Before attempting to trace the course of his art from its simple beginnings to its glorious close, a few brief words may be desirable as to his early life and surroundings.

Born, it is usually supposed (but by no means known with certainty), in 1775, of humble parents—his father was a barber in Maiden Lane, Strand—at a quite early age he developed unusual powers of drawing. The barber proudly exposed his boy’s works in his shop window, and occasionally sold them for a shilling or two apiece; he also showed them to his customers, amongst whom was Thomas Stothard, R.A., who praised them and advised him to make an artist of his son. It is impossible accurately to trace his life before 1789, when he was presumably fourteen, but it is clear that he had only some brief intervals of schooling, first at a suburban and then at a sea-side academy—both probably of the cheapest and poorest middle-class type—in fact he never had any education worthy the name. He received lessons in drawing, however, from various teachers, including Malton and probably Paul Sandby, R.A. At about twelve or thirteen years of age, he was placed in the workshop of the great mezzotint engraver, John Raphael Smith, who, like many of his craft, was also a print dealer. Here Turner, along with his future companion Girtin, was chiefly occupied in colouring prints for sale, but he also learnt a great deal about engraving which was to stand him in good stead in after life. After possibly another interval of schooling, he passed, somewhere about his fourteenth year, into the office of Mr. Hardwick, a distinguished architect, who employed him in drawing and tinting “elevations,” adding landscape backgrounds to plans, etc. It was here, no doubt, that he laid the foundation of the fine architectural draughtsmanship which is noticeable in his earliest exhibited works and throughout his life. Long before he had mastered trees and foliage he could render accurately the lines and structure of a great building, as well as its intricacies of detail, as, for example, in the West Front of Peterborough Cathedral, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy a year or two later. Water, also, seems to have presented comparatively little difficulty to him from the first; owing possibly to early studies at Brentford and Margate, at both or which places he was at school. Very few, however, of his quite boyish drawings—I refer to those before 1790—have survived, and those few are mostly copies of prints or of works of other artists. One, Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower, Oxford (taken from the heading of an Oxford Almanack), may be seen in the National Gallery (No. 613 N.G.); another in my possession, A Roadside Inn—the earliest dated work by him (1786) known to me—is possibly original, but more probably copied from a drawing by M. A. Rooker, A.R.A.

From the architect’s office, at the instigation it is believed of Mr. Hardwick himself, Turner in 1789 became a student at the Royal Academy, and may be said to have definitely taken up an artist’s career. In the following year, 1790, he sent his first drawing to the Royal Academy Exhibition, then held in Somerset House. This was the View of the Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth, reproduced here ([Plate I.]). For the work of a boy of fifteen, the good architectural drawing, the admirable rendering of reflected light on the houses, the careful treatment of the figures (the costumes are quite correct for 1790), and still more, the effectiveness of the composition are remarkable. There is, however, nothing original in the style, which is simply that of Malton and Sandby.

To the next year’s exhibition (1791) he sent two drawings, one of which, The Interior of King John’s Palace, Eltham, is a striking work, of great originality. Not only has it the sound architectural draughtsmanship before alluded to, but in its strong chiaroscuro, its rendering of sunlight breaking through the ruined windows and lighting the gloom, its sense of poetry and mystery, it would be creditable to any artist of mature age.

A curious phase in Turner’s work of the next year—1792—merits notice. Influenced probably by the pictures of De Loutherbourg, a French painter, who had settled in England and had been made an R.A., Turner, for a few months entirely changed his scheme of colour, adopting a curious range of greyish and purplish browns as his prevailing tone, in place of the pale greys, blues, and neutral tints, which, in common with the other water-colour painters of the period, he had hitherto employed. In this style are several drawings of Richmond Park, one or two of a fire at the Pantheon, and many of the beautiful scenery on the downs beyond Bristol, where, during his early life, he often stayed with relatives. One, The Mouth of the Avon, is reproduced here ([Plate II.]). In nearly all the Bristol drawings one special feature is noticeable. Turner had evidently been struck by the unusual spectacle of the masts and sails of the tall East-Indiamen, which were daily to be seen in full sail under the thick woods of the Clifton downs, beating their way up the narrow gorge of the Avon to the port of Bristol.

Turner continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1793 and 1794. He sold his drawings readily, and, although I cannot discover any public references to his work before 1796, he must have attracted notice, as in 1793 he received a commission—his first—for drawings for engraving. The “Copper-plate Magazine” (afterwards known as “The Itinerant”) was one of many serials then in vogue which were illustrated by the water-colour painters—“draftsmen” they were usually called—and in one of its five volumes he is alluded to as “the ingenious Mr. Turner.” He is said to have been paid two guineas apiece for these drawings, with a very small allowance for travelling expenses, it being stipulated that every subject should be drawn on the spot. With his slender wardrobe and his painting materials on his back, carrying usually also his fishing-rod, he tramped the country; he found his way into Kent, across Wales, through Shropshire and Cheshire, on to Cumberland, and returned by the Midlands. A reproduction of one of the “Copperplate Magazine” drawings—Peterborough Cathedral from the North—will be found here ([Plate III.]). Although on a small scale, it is typical of his work of this period, and it shows the strong influence on him of his contemporaries, Rooker, Hearne, and Dayes; yet there is always a decided individuality of his own. As the late Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse[A] has well remarked of these early drawings:—

“The great fact in comparing Turner and the other water-colour painters of his own time is this, that while each of the best of the others is remarkable for one or two special beauties of style or effect, he is remarkable for all. He could reach near, if not quite, to the golden simplicity of Girtin, to the silver sweetness of Cozens; he could draw trees with the delicate dexterity of Edridge, and equal the beautiful distances of Glover.... He was not only technically the equal, if not the master of them all, but he comprehended them, almost without exception.”