124 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

unsaleable works of “high art,” and starve, or lose his senses.¹ He hired himself out every evening to wash in skies in Indian ink, on other people’s drawings, as many as he could, at half-a-crown a-night, getting his supper into the bargain. “What could I have done better?” he said afterwards: “it was first-rate practice.” Then he took to illustrating guide-books and almanacks, and anything that wanted cheap frontispieces. The Oxford Almanack, published on a single sheet, with a copper-plate at the top of it, consisting of a “View”-you perhaps, some of you, know the kind of print characteristic of the last century, under which the word “View” is always printed in large letters, with a dedication, obsequious to the very dust, to the Grand Signior of the neighbourhood-well, this Almanack had always such a view of some Oxford College at the top of it, dedicated, I think, always to the head of the College; and it owed this, its principal decoration, to Turner for many years. I have myself two careful drawings of some old seals, made by him for a local book on the antiquities of Whalley Abbey.² And there was hardly a gentleman’s seat of any importance in England, towards the close of the last century, of which you will not find some rude engraving in the local publications of the time, inscribed with the simple name “W. Turner.”³

96. There was another great difference between Turner and other men. In doing these drawings for the commonest publications of the day, and for a remuneration altogether contemptible, he never did his work badly because he thought it beneath him, or because he was ill-paid. There does not exist such a thing as a slovenly drawing by Turner. With what people were willing to give him for his work he was content; but he considered that work in its relation to himself, not in its relation to the purchaser. He took

¹ [A reference to Haydon, for whom, see below, pp. 129, 307.]

² [T. D. Whitaker’s Parish of Whalley, 1801. The book contains seven plates by Turner. Ruskin gave the drawings of the seals to Cambridge.]

³ [Of drawings of “gentlemen’s seats” done very early in Turner’s career, there are examples in the National Gallery collection; see especially one of Nuneham (No. 852).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]