During his life, as we have seen, he made thousands of sketches, some slight, some elaborate, of places, scenery, and natural effects--shorthand memoranda,’ so to speak--many of which may certainly be called ‘impressionist.’ _But all these were founded on, or were intended to add to, his accurate, minute and exhaustive study of natural forms, and a draughtsmanship which has probably never been equalled by any other landscape painter._ Then, as is notorious, he frequently altered certain features of landscapes or buildings to suit the requirements of his pictures--their symmetry, their accent, their colour-scheme--or in order to convey some suggestion as to their meaning. In a letter still preserved, he declares himself opposed to literalism in landscape--“mere map-making” he terms it. And when for any reason he thus altered the actual features of a scene, he still almost always contrived to preserve the _impression_ of it as a whole--usually under its best aspect, at its choicest moment. In this sense also he was an ‘impressionist.’ Again, when towards the close of his life he began to attempt the representation (mainly in oil colour) of pure sunlight--as in his latest _Venice_ pictures; or of form in swiftest movement--as in _Rain, Speed and Steam_; or of the mighty contending forces of Nature--as in his _Snow Storm off Harwich_, he painted _such subjects_ in the only method by which they could be intelligibly rendered. In the same way Whistler, in his Nocturnes, demonstrated for the first time in Western art, the beauty of prosaic and even ugly objects, seen in dim light. Both perforce adopted the ‘impressionist’ method, because it was the only effective, indeed the only possible one. But to me it appears that there is all the difference in the world between _these_ phases of ‘impressionist’ art and the principles of the modern landscape school, whose works a brilliant set of writers in the press of to-day are continually calling upon us to admire. The advanced ‘impressionists’ both in France and in England seem to go out of their way to represent _the ordinary aspects of nature_ with a manifest determination to avoid any but the vaguest rendering of form, no matter how clearly defined in such circumstances those forms may seem to ordinary Philistine vision. They also ordinarily abjure as ‘literary’ any kind of appeal to the intellectual faculties, and apparently confine their aim to the production of a more or less startling, but generally cleverly managed patterning of light, shade, and colour, obtained usually by means of masses of coarse, solid, and often ragged pigment, carefully arranged so that the effect intended may be found, like a fire-plug, at a certain exact, calculated spot. Surely Turner’s ‘impressionism’ was far removed from this? Surely it is hard that he should be charged with being the precursor of the landscape school to which I have alluded, whatever may be its merits? * * * * *