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Table of Contents

Turner’s first drawings—‘St. Vincent’s Tower’—Turner’s copies and imitations—His debt to Art—Work with Mr. Hardwick—Oxford sketches—‘Radley Hall’—Drawings from the Antique—The Bristol sketch-book—End of the apprenticeship.

THE legend runs that Turner’s first drawings were exhibited in his father’s shop-window, ticketed for sale at prices ranging from one to three shillings.

There is nothing improbable in this story, though the drawings referred to by Thornbury,[2] as having been bought by a Mr. Crowle under these conditions, do not happen to have been made by Turner. I have not, indeed, been able to discover any drawing which can confidently be said to have been purchased from the barber’s shop in Maiden Lane, but there are some in the National Gallery which show us exactly what kind of work Turner was capable of producing at the time when he might have resorted to this rough and ready method of attracting patronage.

A typical drawing of this kind is the brightly-coloured view of St. Vincent’s Tower, Naples, reproduced on Plate I. of the present volume. It is oval in shape, measuring about 8 × 10 inches, and has evidently been cut out without mechanical assistance, as the curves of the oval are somewhat erratic. As the youthful artist had not visited Italy at this period, I thought it probable that this drawing was based upon the work of some other artist, and I was fortunate enough to be able to trace it to

PLATE I

ST. VINCENT’S TOWER, NAPLES

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1787

PLATE II

CENTRAL PORTION OF AN AQUATINT BY PAUL SANDBY, AFTER FABRIS

PUBLISHED 1 JAN., 1778

its source. It is copied and adapted from an aquatint by Paul Sandby, after Fabris, published on 1st January 1778, entitled ‘Part of Naples, with the Ruin’d Tower of St. Vincent.’ Sandby’s engraving is a large one (about 13¼ × 20 inches), and comprises an extensive view of the harbour and bay of Naples, with the Castel dell’ Uovo in the middle distance, and St. Elmo crowning the buildings on the right. Turner has picked out as it were the pictorial plum of this mass of topographical information. He has set the ruined tower boldly in the centre of his design, and has used only just so much of the surrounding buildings and scenery as was necessary to make an appropriate background or setting for it. He has reduced the Castle of the Egg to insignificance, and closed up his distance with appropriate but imaginary mountains. In the engraving a passing boat with figures divides our interest with the tower. Turner has suppressed it. He has also reduced the size of the quay upon which the tower stands, thus increasing the apparent height of the tower. The few meagre weeds clinging to the battlements in the engraving have developed luxuriantly in Turner’s drawing, thus adding considerably to its picturesqueness. The foreground figures seem to have been adapted from those in the engraving.

It is probable that these slight differences between the engraving and the water-colour were made involuntarily, for it is evident that Turner did not have the engraving under his eyes while he was making the drawing. He had probably seen the engraving in some shop-window, and had made a hasty pencil sketch of the part that interested him. That he was working from a somewhat perfunctory sketch and not direct from the original is proved by the fact that he has introduced three arches into the building on the quay immediately at the foot of the tower, instead of the two in Sandby’s engraving. But in the engraving there is a small rounded turret on the battlements of the quay which comes just in front of the place where Turner has introduced his third arch. It is clear that he mistook the indication of this turret in his rough sketch for a third arch in the building beyond.

It would, of course, be imprudent to suppose that Turner chose to work in this way partly from memory, with the deliberate intention of giving his imagination freer play; he was probably forced to do so by the material exigencies of his position. But certainly this way of working was admirably calculated to strengthen his memory and call into play his innate powers of arrangement and adaptation.

The colour scheme, which is probably the artist’s own invention, is light and pleasing. The golden rays of the setting (? rising) sun are painted with evident enjoyment. The warm yellow light of the sun is transfused over the whole of the sky, turning the distant clouds into crimson. The keynote of the colour is thus orange yellow, passing through pink to burnt sienna. In spite of the lightness of the colour the drawing was worked over a black and white foundation, light washes of Indian ink having been used to establish the broad divisions of light and shade in the design. These washes afterwards formed the ground-work of the greys and cooler colours, being warmed in parts (as in the tower) with washes or touches of pink and burnt sienna, or worked up into more positive hues by subsequent washes of blue and yellow.

The handling of the drawing—the sharp decided touches, the neatness and dexterity of its washes, and the rapid march of the whole work—shows what a hold the idea of a unified work of art had already obtained over Turner’s mind. The clear, determined workmanship shows that he must have been thinking of the whole from the beginning, and not of the representation of a number of separate natural objects.

This childish effort seems to me of great interest as marking with extraordinary clearness the point of departure of Turner’s art. From the beginning he sees things pictorially, as elements in a conceptual whole, not as isolated and independent objects. His sense of design—both as the faculty of expression as well as of formal arrangement—is thus developed, while the merely representative qualities of art are ignored or at least subordinated. This early grasp of the idea of pictorial unity is obviously the result of Turner’s study of works of art, and not of his study of nature. Since Mr. Ruskin’s labours it will not be possible for any student to overlook the enormous profit which Turner derived in his subsequent work from his unwearied observation of the phenomena of nature; it is well, therefore, to be careful not to overlook the prior debt which Turner had contracted to art, and the extraordinary advantage his early grasp of pictorial unity gave him in appropriating the multifarious variety of natural shapes and colours.

The other drawings of this period in the National Gallery only serve to emphasise Turner’s indebtedness to art. Some of these are plain straightforward copies. The most elaborate of these is the copy of ‘Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower’ which has long been exhibited in the Turner Water Colour rooms (No. 613, N.G.). This is copied from an engraving by J. Basire published in the Oxford Almanack for the year 1780. The colouring, however, is original. This copy is signed and dated, ‘W. Turner, 1787.’ Among the other copies is a pencil outline of the Old Kitchen, Stanton Harcourt, from the engraving in Grose’s Antiquities. There is also a coloured drawing, somewhat similar in size and shape to that of St. Vincent’s Tower, of Dacre Castle, Cumberland. I am unable to say from what engraving this is copied or adapted.[3] It may have been a slightly earlier effort than the Neapolitan subject, as the Indian ink underpainting is less skilfully done and the general effect is heavier and more monotonous.

These drawings, made, I believe, between Turner’s twelfth and fourteenth years, show the youthful artist in the act of acquiring the rudiments of that pictorial language which he was to use in after years with such mastery and ease. We see him acquiring this language by intercourse with his fellows who use it, not, as is the modern way, through the course of a random study of nature. He is learning from tradition, and the thought of the artistic community as expressed in the current pictorial language is gradually forming and moulding his ideas. He is imitating those around him, as a child imitates the words of its nurse and mother.

On the present occasion, I need do no more than call attention in passing to the immense advantage Turner enjoyed in being initiated thus early and in this easy and natural way into the sphere of art. He was thus saved from those years of futile and heart-breaking experiment to which the modern system of nature study dooms all those students whose native powers are not entirely deadened by its influence. The habit thus early forced upon him of regarding himself as an actual producer, i.e. as a maker of articles with a definite market value, must also have been beneficial to him. The existence of a class of real patrons, whose tastes had to be consulted and whose pockets contained actually exchangeable coin of the realm, must have placed some insistence upon the social aspect of art, and have helped to prevent the boy from making the mistake which so many subsequent artists have made, of considering their work merely as a means of self-expression, instead of as a means of super-individual or universal communication. Another important result of these early employments was the facility and mastery in the use of his material which they gave him. Between the water-colours of different periods of Turner’s career there are the most astonishing contrasts of subject-matter and sentiment, but in all of them one finds the same inimitable grace, strength, and dexterity of workmanship, the same unequalled technical mastery over the medium; and this purely executive address—this ‘genius of mechanical excellence,’ to use Reynolds’s expression—could have been attained only as the result of an early familiarity with this particular form of artistic expression.

About his fourteenth year (1789) Turner was placed with an architect, Mr. P. Hardwick. It seems to me doubtful whether he was regularly apprenticed, or was intended to take up the study of architecture from a practical point of view. The evidence upon this point is extremely limited, but what little there is points to his employment upon purely pictorial tasks, such as the dressing out of projects or views of buildings with a plausible arrangement of light and shade and a pleasing setting of landscape background. We know that Mr. Hardwick built the New Church at Wanstead,[4] and that Turner made for his master a water-colour drawing both of the old church which was pulled down and the new one that took its place. I have not been fortunate enough to trace the

PLATE III

RADLEY HALL: SOUTH FRONT

WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1789

present owner of these drawings, but the water-colour of the old church was exhibited at the Old Masters (R.A.) in 1887. There is, however, in the National Gallery a pencil outline of the new church, squared for enlargement, which shows no signs of training in the practical work of the architect’s profession.

The earliest of Turner’s sketch-books now in the National Gallery was in use during the period of this connection with Mr. Hardwick. A pencil sketch of a church by the river, easily recognisable as Isleworth Old Church, with barges moored beside the bank, is probably the note from which the water-colour was made which Mr. Hardwick’s grandson lent to the Old Masters in 1887. Most of the other drawings, however, appear to have been made during a stay near Oxford. There are sketches of Clifton Nuneham (then Nuneham Courtenay), near Abingdon; of Radley Hall, between Abingdon and Oxford; of a distant view of Oxford; a sketch of a ruined tower which may represent Pope’s Tower in the ruins of the Harcourts’ house at Stanton Harcourt, and two drawings of Sunningwell Church, a village about two miles from Radley and three from Abingdon. As Turner’s uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, his mother’s elder brother, after whom he was named, was then living at Sunningwell, it is probable that these drawings were the result of a summer holiday spent with his relative.

These drawings represent Turner’s first attempts to draw from nature. They are characterised by an absence of blundering and a sense of pictorial logic and requirements which could only belong to a beginner whose eye and hand had already been disciplined in the production of works of art. One cannot but feel that the mould into which the immediate experiences of the artist were to be cast had already been firmly set before his pencil was placed upon the paper, nay, before the particular sights in question were actually seen. In other words, the pictorial formula into which the material gathered from nature was to be worked up had been clearly determined before the artist set out to gather such material for himself. Turner’s confidence in the unbounded felicity of immediate contact with nature was not commensurate with that of modern artistic theorists. He does indeed entrust himself to the open fields, but it is not until he has armed himself with a stout though flexible panoply of artistic convention.

But though the draughtsmanship is conventional, I do not think it can fairly be called mannered. The actual statements made are made with the utmost simplicity and directness. In the drawings of Sunningwell Church (on p. 12 of the sketch-book), of Radley Hall (pp. 9 and 14), and of Isleworth Old Church (p. 22), the general proportions and main facts of the buildings are noted with deliberate and methodical care. The artist knows what facts he will want when he comes to make his finished water-colours, and he takes those facts and calmly ignores all the particular effects of light and shade, colour and accident which his experience of other artists’ work had shown him would not be useful to him. Thus there is a strongly marked selective activity at work, which gives what I think can be more correctly described as style than as manner. Yet I should not be surprised to find the term mannerism applied to the curiously monotonous calligraphic scribbles which stand for trees and clouds in these drawings. That they are conventional and singularly indefinite I readily admit, yet they are not deliberately learnt ‘ways of doing trees’ like those, for instance, which a student of J. D. Harding’s teaching might adopt. They are as they are because their immediate function is clearly determined by their ultimate purpose. In making his finished water-colour drawing at home the trees and clouds, as well as the whole system of light and shade, were merely the docile instruments of pictorial effectiveness. The exact shape of each tree and cloud in his drawing, and even their exact positions, were determined as the work progressed by purely pictorial requirements. A detailed statement of the exact shape of any particular tree or cloud in the actual scene from which the sketch was made would therefore have been not only of no use to the artist, but a positive hindrance, as it would have complicated the problem of formal arrangement before the artist, even if it did not actively hinder its solution. In these sketches from nature Turner therefore takes his skies and foliage for granted as much as possible, merely hinting at their general existence in a loose and tentative way.

But if the charge of mannerism cannot be fairly brought against the sketches made face to face with nature, it is otherwise with the water-colours which were afterwards elaborated from them. Drawings like the view of ‘Radley Hall,’ reproduced on Plate III., and the ‘View of the City of Oxford’ might almost be said to consist of little else than mannerisms. The manner of doing trees and skies and of arranging the planes of the scene is taken over directly from Paul Sandby, as are also the method of working in transparent washes and the gamut of colours used. The ‘View of Oxford’ is indeed nothing but a feeble echo of some of Sandby’s fine drawings; it tells us little of Turner himself, beyond an indication of a certain liking for scenes of this kind. Perhaps the most noteworthy point in the drawing is the demonstration it affords of the superior development of his sense of tone to his sense of form; the buildings sway to and fro in the wind, the foliage is childish and ridiculous, but the difference between the broad expanses of ground and sky is clearly marked, and the limpid sky gives an undeniable charm to it all.

There is perhaps a little more of himself in the view of ‘Radley Hall.’ The way the tree-trunks seem to blow themselves out, and toss themselves this way and that, while their branches explode in the wildest and most fantastic contortions,—all this is given with such keen and frank enjoyment, that it points to something more than a mere passive reproduction of a purely technical recipe. The trees in those drawings of Sandby which Turner had studied do indeed behave in this way, but Turner identifies himself so closely with the inner meaning of these forms that they become his own legitimate property. The sense of exuberant freedom in the trees is intensified by contrast with the rigid restraint of the building in the middle distance. It is as though the boy’s imagination was glad to get away from the realm of necessity and disport itself in aimless gambols through space, free from the encumbrance of inert matter and of the laws of gravitation. It is this habit of getting at the inner emotional content of the pictorial conventions he adopts, that stamps Turner’s whole career of imitation and appropriation with its peculiar character, making him invariably richer for all his borrowings, and more original for all his imitations.

These two drawings were made in 1789, during the artist’s fourteenth year. About the beginning of 1790 he joined the schools of the Royal Academy, acting, it is said, upon the advice of Mr. Hardwick. During part of 1790 and for the next two or three years he worked in what was then called the ‘Plaister Academy,’ i.e. from casts taken from the antique. Laborious chalk and stump drawings of the Apollo and Antinoüs of the Belvedere, the Venus de’ Medici, and the Vatican Meleager, as well as of the more robust forms of the Diskobolos and Dying Gaul, are still in existence to demonstrate the diligence with which he pursued these uncongenial studies. Such work must have given his masters a singularly poor and misleading opinion of his talents. In June, 1792, he was admitted to the Life Class, while still continuing to attend the Antique. This academic training, however, must have been useful as an antidote, or at least as a supplement, to the topographical work to which all his spare time was devoted.

He seems to have spent his holidays in 1791 partly with his uncle at Sunningwell and partly with some friends of the family, the Narraways, at Bristol. The sketch-book in use at this time is now in the National Gallery. The volume was never a handsome one,—it was probably stitched and bound by the artist himself—but its present appearance is deplorable; the cardboard covers are broken, the rough and ready backing is almost undone, a number of the leaves have been cut or torn out, and the remainder are in a generally dirty and dilapidated condition. In spite of these disadvantages it gives us a valuable glimpse of Turner’s interests and acquirements at the age of sixteen.

Our first impression is that his year’s work drawing from the cast has produced hardly any perceptible effect. The drawings of buildings are in some cases even more perfunctory than those in the ‘Oxford’ Sketch-Book. The sketch of Bath Abbey Church (on page 14 of the book), for example, is not a very creditable performance for an ambitious Royal Academy student. Its carelessness, however, may have been due to limited opportunities, but we must remember that this hasty scrawl, with the assistance of a few written notes and diagrams, was sufficient to enable the artist to produce afterwards an elaborate water-colour of the subject. A still more elaborately wrought and

PLATE IV

VIEW ON THE AVON, FROM COOK’S FOLLY

WATER COLOUR AND INK. ABOUT 1791

carefully considered water-colour was the result of another sketch (on the reverse of page 16) in this book, a view of ‘Stoke, near Bristol, the seat of Sir H. Lippencote,’ now in the possession of Mrs. Thomas. This pencil sketch is quite as perfunctory as that of Bath Abbey. It is evident that nature ‘put him out’ or that the artist’s youthful impatience induced him to hurry over the first stages of his work. These sketches from nature were merely means to an end, and so long as they contained sufficient hints to set his subsequent work going he was perfectly satisfied. However, in some of the drawings where the first sketch from nature has been worked over subsequently (as in the water-colour of Captain Fowler’s seat on Durdham Downs [on pp. 17a and 18]), we can trace an increased delicacy of hand, an added capacity for dealing with complex and irregular forms, and greater knowledge of the natural forms of trees.

But it is evident that the wild and romantic scenery of the Avon gorge made a deeper impression on the young artist’s imagination than the spick and span seats of the gentry. The ruins of Malmesbury Abbey are sketched from every available point of view, and there are hurried and clumsy sketches of ‘The Ruins of a Chapel standing on an Island in the Severn,’ ‘A View of the Welsh Coast from Cook’s Folly,’ and others of ‘Blaze Castle and the Deney and Welsh Coast,’[5] and the ‘Old Passage.’ The drawing described as a ‘View from Cook’s Folley (sic), looking up the River Avon with Wallis Wall and the Hot Wells’ (reproduced on Plate IV.), shows clearly the bent of Turner’s mind towards the wildness and freedom of nature, as well as his strong love of ships.

If it were our intention to follow Turner’s work year by year, we should have to study in detail the drawings of Oxford, Windsor, Hereford and Worcester, and especially the Welsh and Monmouthshire sketches which belong to the years 1792 and 1793. As it is, it is sufficient for our purpose to notice that the work of these two years shows a gradual increase of power in making sketches from nature. The young artist slowly gathers confidence in himself. Nature ceases to ‘put him out,’ to fluster him with her multitudinous details and ever-varying effects. He begins to treat nature as a conquered enemy, and there is just a suspicion of youthful impertinence in the cool and methodical way in which he gathers up the kind of facts he wants, and ignores everything that does not come within the scope of his pictorial formulas. But by this time it is evident that his period of apprenticeship is at an end, and that we must turn our attention to the work of the brilliant young topographical draughtsman.