The fact that Turner always worked in this way makes it exceedingly difficult to separate his sketches from nature from the studies or designs for his pictures. Throughout his sketch books and amongst his loose drawings there are a large number of sketches in colour, and one’s first impulse is to assume that these were made immediately from nature. But careful observation shows that Turner was in the constant habit of working over his pencil sketches in colour when away from the scenes he had depicted. In this way the beautiful little sketch of “_Edinburgh from St. Margaret’s Loch_,” here reproduced (Plate VI.), is much more probably the draft of a picture the artist had in his mind’s eye than a study from nature. But the point whether such a drawing was made “on the spot” or not is relatively unimportant; what is more important is to realise how very small a part the merely imitative or representative study of the colour and tone (as opposed to form) of nature played in Turner’s work. His colour is never merely descriptive. The whole bent of his mind is so essentially pictorial that, whether he works face to face with nature or from what is loosely called “memory,” his slightest sketch as well as his most elaborate work is always an attempt to express a subjective conception, and never a merely literal transcript of what is given in sense-perception.
Perhaps the most important group of drawings in the national collection are those which Turner made during the last ten years of his working life, _i.e._, between 1835 and 1845. These drawings were not made for sale or for exhibition, hence Mr. Ruskin’s description of them as “delight drawings,” because they were done entirely for the artist’s own pleasure and delight. Several of them are reproduced in this volume, among them the beautiful sketch of “_Lucerne_” (Plate XXI.) realized for Mr. Ruskin in 1842, the almost equally fine “_Bellinzona, from the road to Locarno_” (Plate XXIV.), and “_Zurich_” (Plate XXVII.).
These inimitable and delightful sketches have been very widely admired, as they deserve to be, but they have also been praised, somewhat perversely as it seems to me, for their truth and accuracy of representation. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, these sketches “are not, strictly speaking, sketches from nature; but plans or designs of pictures which Turner, if he had had time, would have made of each place. They indicate, therefore, a perfectly formed conception of the finished picture; and they are of exactly the same value as memoranda would be, if made by Turner’s own hand, of pictures of his not in our possession. They are just to be regarded as quick descriptions or reminiscences of noble pictures.” Mr. Ruskin is also unquestionably correct when he adds “that nothing but the pencilling in them was done on the spot, and not always that. Turner used to walk about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, and make a few scratches upon a sheet or two of it, which were so much shorthand indication of all he wished to remember. When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed the pencilling rapidly, and added as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture” (“Ruskin on Pictures,” pp. 86-7).