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.