fine colourists in the British school of water-colour painting, but it is just in his drawing and his sense of the beauty and significance of line that he is supreme. As Titian in Venice excelled the great colourists of his time, such as Bonifazio and Paris Bordone, so by his drawing and sense of form Turner excelled as a draughtsman even more than as a colourist. CHARLES HOLROYD. THE WATER-COLOUR DRAWINGS OF J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. BY W. G. RAWLINSON. 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.