Such mastery was not attained without extraordinary diligence in the study of pictures. At Dr. Monro’s he could study all the best modern men, including Gainsborough, Morland, Wilson, and De Loutherbourg, and he could also study Salvator Rosa, Rembrandt, Claude, and Vandevelde. One day looking over some prints with Mr. Trimmer,[15] he took up a Vandevelde and said, “That made me a painter.” And Dayes (Girtin’s master) wrote in 1804:—“The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing where he could a drawing or a picture to copy from, or by making a sketch of any one in the Exhibition[16] early in the morning, and finishing it at home.” The character of his early works is sufficient of itself to prove the extent of his study of pictures, and we are inclined to think that most of his early practice was from works of art, and not from nature. The spirit of rivalry commenced in him very early; it was the only test of his powers, and he seems to have pitted himself in the beginning of his career against all his contemporaries, from Mr. Henderson to Girtin, and many of the old masters, and never to have entirely relinquished the habit. When we think of the number of years he spent in doing little but topographical drawings, a castle here, a town there, an abbey there, with appropriate figures in the foreground, using only sober browns and blues for colours, his progress seems to have been very slow; but when we see most of the artists of his time doing exactly the same, and that the old landscape painters whom he principally studied were almost as limited in the colours they employed, especially in their drawings, we do not see how he could well have progressed more quickly; and when we further consider the enormous distance which he travelled—from the very bottom to the very height of his art—that he should have accomplished it all in one short life appears miraculous. The milestones of his journey are not shown plainly in his early work, that is all.
That there was much conscious restraint on his part in the use of colours, that he of wise purpose devoted himself to perfection of his technical power before he endeavoured to show his strength to the world, we see no reason to believe. He could not well have done otherwise, and for such an original mind one marvels to observe how throughout his career he was led in the chains of circumstance. The poet-painter, the dumb-poet, as he has well been called, shows little eccentricity of genius in his youth. There was the strong inclination to draw, but no strong inclination to draw anything in particular, or anything very beautiful. On the contrary, he drew the most uninteresting and prosaic of things, copied bad topographical prints and ugly buildings. When it was proposed to make him an architect he did not rebel; when it was afterwards proposed to make him a portrait-painter he did not murmur. It was Mr. Hardwick, not himself, that insisted on his going to the Royal Academy. His first essay in oils was due to another’s instigation. Whatever work came to him, he did; that which he could do best, that which he had special genius for, the painting of pure landscape, he scarcely attempted at all for years. Almost every artist of that day went about England drawing abbeys, seats, and castles for topographical works. What others did, he did. What others did not do, he did not do. No doubt it was the only profitable employment he could get, and he very properly took it, and worked hard at it; he was borne along the stream of circumstance as everybody else is, but he, unlike most men of strong genius, seems never to have attempted to stem its tide, or get out of its way. His genius was a growth to which every event and accident of his life added its contribution of nourishment. Though stirred with unusual power, he was probably almost as unconscious as to what it tended as a seed in the ground; he had a dim perception of a light towards which he was growing; he was conscious that he put forth leaves, and that he should some day flower, but when, and with what special bloom he was destined to surprise the world, we doubt if he had any prophetic glimpse. His development was extraordinary, and could only have been produced by special careful training, but this training was mainly due to circumstances over which he had no control. Nature came to his assistance in a thousand different ways, and in nothing more than giving him a quiet temperament, like that of Coleridge’s child, “that always finds, and never seeks.” He was not fastidious, except with regard to his own work, and about that, more as to the arrangement and finish of it than the subject. He had an excellent constitution, early inured to rough it, and his comforts were very simple and easily obtained. He was not particular, even about his materials and tools; any scrap of paper would do for a sketch on an emergency. He was always able to work, and to work swiftly and well. No fidgeting about for hours and days because he was not in the mood; no sacrifice of sketch after sketch because they did not please him; none of that nervous restlessness which so often attends imaginative workers; and his work was imaginative from the first—if not in conception, in execution. Solitude seems to have been the only necessary condition for the free exercise of his powers, which were as happily employed in “making a picture” of one thing as of another, and when he wanted something to put in it to get it “right,” he never had much trouble in finding it. He said, “If when out sketching you felt a loss, you have only to turn round, or walk a few paces further, and you had what you wanted before you.” His physical powers were also great, and his mind was active in receiving impressions. Mr. Lovell Reeve, as quoted by Mr. Alaric Watts, says:—“His religious study of nature was such that he would walk through portions of England, twenty to twenty-five miles a day, with his little modicum of baggage at the end of a stick, sketching rapidly on his way all striking pieces of composition, and marking effects with a power that daguerreotyped them in his mind. There were few moving phenomena in clouds and shadows that he did not fix indelibly in his memory, though he might not call them into requisition for years afterwards.” He was not tied to any particular method, or bound to any particular habit; when he found that his way of sketching was too minute and slow to enable him to make his drawings pay their expenses, he changed his style to a broader, swifter one. So, without going quite to the length of Mr. Hamerton, who appears to think that everything in Turner’s youth (including ugliness and bandy legs) happened for the best in the best of possible worlds, we may safely affirm that he could scarcely have been gifted with a temperament better suited for steady progress, or one which was more calculated to make him happy, for it enabled him to exercise his body and mind at the same time, to earn his living and to lay up stores of pictorial beauty in his memory, to do whatever task was set him, and yet get artistic pleasure out of even the most commonplace study by embellishing it with his imagination.
In 1789 he became a student of the Royal Academy, and in the year after he exhibited a View of the Archbishop’s Palace at Lambeth. In 1791, 2, and 3 he exhibited several topographical drawings, but down to this time he seems to have made no sketching tours of any length. He drew in the neighbourhood of London, and his journeys to stay with friends at Margate and Bristol will account for his drawings of Malmesbury, Canterbury, and Bristol. But about 1792 he received a commission from Mr. J. Walker, the engraver (who also afterwards employed Girtin), to make drawings for his “Copper-plate Magazine.” This was the beginning of the long series of engravings from his works, and it may have been one of the reasons which decided him to set up a studio for himself, which he did in Hand Court, Maiden Lane, close to his father, where he remained till he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1800, when he removed to 64, Harley Street. A year or so after his employment by Walker he got similar commissions from Mr. Harrison for his “Pocket Magazine.” These commissions sent him on his travels over England referred to by Mr. Lovell Reeve. The copper-plates of the sketches for Walker, including some after Girtin, were found about sixty years afterwards by Mr. T. Miller, who republished them in 1854, in a volume called “Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views, sixty years since.” These drawings mark his first tour to Wales, on which he set forth on a pony lent by Mr. Narraway. The first public results of this tour were the drawing of Chepstow in “Walker’s Magazine” for November, 1794, and three drawings in the Royal Academy for that year. By the next year’s engravings and pictures we trace him to “Nottingham,” “Bridgnorth,” “Matlock,” “Birmingham,” “Cambridge,” “Lincoln,” “Wrexham,” “Peterborough,” and “Shrewsbury,” and by those of 1796 and 1797 to “Chester,” “Neath,” “Tunbridge,” “Bath,” “Staines,” “Wallingford,” “Windsor,” “Ely,” “Flint,” “Hampton Court, Herefordshire,” “Salisbury,” “Wolverhampton,” “Llandilo,” “The Isle of Wight,” “Llandaff,” “Waltham,” and “Ewenny (Glamorgan),” not including drawings of places he had been to before.
His furthest point north was Lincoln, his farthest west (in England) Bristol. The only parts in which he reached the coast were in Wales and the Isle of Wight. Lancashire and the Lakes, Yorkshire and its waterfalls, were yet to come, and nearly all coast scenery, except that of Kent.
The drawings for the Magazines were not remarkable for any poetry or originality of treatment perceptible in the engravings, the cathedrals being generally taken from an unpicturesque point of view, more with the object of showing their length and size than their beauty, to which he appears to have been somewhat insensible always; they show a great love of bridges and anglers—there is scarcely one without a bridge, and some have two; a desire to tell as much about the place as possible by the introduction of figures; they show his habit of taking his scenes from a distance, generally from very high ground, and his delight in putting as much in a small space as possible, and his power of drawing masses of houses, as in the Birmingham and the Chester.
The result of these tours may be said to have been the perfection of his technical skill, the partial displacement of traditional notions of composition, and the storing of his memory with infinite effects of nature. It was as good and thorough discipline in the study of nature, as his former life had been in the study of art, and though his visit to Yorkshire in the next year (1797) seemed necessary to bring thoroughly to the surface all the knowledge and power he had acquired, it was not without present fruit. Rather of necessity than choice, we may observe, he confined his powers mainly to the drawing of views of places supposed to be of interest to the subscribers of the Magazines, but his individual inclinations in the choice of subject, and his tendency to purer landscape and sea-view, showed themselves now and then. First in his drawing of The Pantheon, the Morning after the Fire, exhibited in 1792; next in 1793, in his View on the River Avon, near St. Vincent’s Rocks, Bristol, and the Rising Squall, Hot Wells,[17] from the same place; then in 1794, Second Fall of the River Monach, Devil’s Bridge; in 1795, View near the Devil’s Bridge, Cardiganshire, with the River Ryddol; in 1796, Fishermen at Sea; and in 1797, Fishermen coming Ashore at Sunset, previous to a Gale, and Moonlight: a study in Milbank,[18] now in the National Gallery.
That his genius was perceptible even in these early days is evident from the notice taken in a contemporary review of his drawings in 1794, when he was nineteen.
“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.”
Again in 1796, the “Companion to the Exhibition,” with regard to his first sea-piece contains this paradoxical sentence, attempting to express his peculiar power of giving a distinct impression of ill-defined objects, which was apparently evident even in this early work.
“Colouring natural, figures masterly, not too distinct—obscure perception of the objects distinctly seen—through the obscurity of the night—partially illumined.”