III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 125

a poor price, that he might live; but he made noble drawings, that he might learn. Of course some are slighter than others, and they vary in their materials; those executed with pencil and Indian ink being never finished to the degree of those which are executed in colour. But he is never careless. According to the time and means at his disposal, he always did his best. He never let a drawing leave his hands without having made a step in advance, and having done better in it than he had ever done before; and there is no important drawing of the period which is not executed with a total disregard of time and price, and which was not, even then, worth four or five times what Turner received for it.

Even without genius, a man who thus felt and thus laboured was sure to do great things; though it is seldom that, without great genius, men either thus feel or thus labour. Turner was as far beyond all other men in intellect as in industry; and his advance in power and grasp of thought was as steady as the increasing light of sunrise.

97. His reputation was soon so far established that he was able to devote himself to more consistent study. He never appears literally to have copied any picture; but whenever any master interested him, or was of so established a reputation that he thought it necessary to study him, he painted pictures of his own subjects in the style of that master, until he felt himself able to rival his excellencies, whatever they were. There are thus multitudes of pictures by Turner which are direct imitations of other masters; especially of Claude, Wilson, Loutherbourg, Gaspar Poussin, Vandevelde, Cuyp, and Rembrandt. It has been argued by Mr. Leslie¹ that, because Turner thus in his early years imitated many of the old masters, therefore he must to the end of his life have considered them greater than himself. The non sequitur is obvious. I trust there are few men so unhappy as never to have learned anything from their

¹ [Probably in some anonymous article, or lecture delivered at the time, by C. R. Leslie, R.A., then Professor of Painting at the Academy. The remark does not occur in his subsequently published notices of Turner.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]