What makes Turner’s water-colour drawings so profoundly interesting--apart from their extraordinary and enduring attractiveness--is the fact that in them lies before you, plainly visible, the whole course and development of his art. And the continuousness and regularity of that development are remarkable. There are no pauses, no gaps, hardly a table-land; only one steady, continued progress. No matter how high a point he reached, he was never content to rest there, but was always pressing onward to fresh achievement, trying new effects, challenging new difficulties even down to the last years of his life. To anyone familiar with his work in water-colour, it is generally easy to date his drawings within a year or two.
No doubt the growth of his art can also be traced in his oil pictures, but with some important differences. In them, even up to middle life, he was constantly and strongly influenced by the work of other painters whom he was often consciously or unconsciously rivalling. First Richard Wilson, then Van de Velde and Bakhuysen, afterwards Gaspar Poussin, Claude, Cuyp, Rembrandt, Titian and others, all in turn had their effect on him. As a result of this rivalry, his oil pictures were less spontaneous, less sincere than his water-colours. His lack of education also unfitted him to be the painter of the classical and sacred subjects in which he attempted to compete with the old masters. No doubt there were brilliant exceptions--such, for example, as _Mercury and Herse_, _Ulysses deriding Polyphemus_, and others, but I think Ruskin was justified in calling many of them “nonsense pictures.” Moreover, in his oil paintings Turner was constantly experimenting--not always successfully--both with his materials and his methods and, as a consequence, many, especially those of his later years, have greatly suffered with time.
But in his water-colours, after his first years or training and experiment, he was simply and always himself--he was Turner. Paul Sandby, John Cozens, Malton, Hearne, De Loutherbourg, and others of the older water-colour painters, all had their influence on him, but in no case did it last long. The two men who affected him most were Cozens and Girtin, his friend and fellow student, of whom more will be said hereafter. But by 1800, or at the latest 1802, Turner had passed all his contemporaries, and stood alone, the acknowledged head of the English school of water-colour painting, which in the-first half of the nineteenth century was to reach its zenith. Before attempting to trace the course of his art from its simple beginnings to its glorious close, a few brief words may be desirable as to his early life and surroundings.