The sixth chapter deals with the designs engraved in the _Liber Studiorum_, and the sketches on which they were based. The seventh is devoted mainly to the work engraved in the _Southern Coast_, _Richmondshire_, Scott’s _Antiquities_, the _Rivers_ and _Ports_, and the _England and Wales_ series, the work by which the artist is perhaps best known. My eighth chapter treats of the period when signs of mental decay began to be apparent. These years saw the production of what have been called the first Impressionistic pictures. Then, by way of bringing to a head some of the observations on the nature of artistic expression which our investigations have forced upon our notice, I have added a final chapter dealing mainly with the relation between Art and Nature. The subject-matter of this chapter is not so attractive as that of the others, but I do not think it right to omit it. This selection of the facets of Turner’s dazzling and complex genius is necessarily arbitrary and incomplete. The aspects I have chosen to throw into relief can make no pretence to be exhaustive. They must be taken as a poor but necessary device for the introduction of a kind of superficial order into our present task--as a concession to the weakness and limitations of the powers of the student, rather than as a successful summary of the multifarious forms into which one of the most prolific and many-sided creative activities of modern art has poured itself. And the threads of this living activity which I have sought to isolate, never existed in isolation. Turner was not at one period of his life a romantic and at another a pseudo-classic or Academic painter, a sea-painter at one time, and a painter of ‘simple Nature’ at another. Turner was always a sea-painter and a topographer, a romantic, a pseudo-classic, and an impressionist, as well as a master of homely realism. While he was painting ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ he had the ‘View of High Street, Oxford’ on his easel; the ‘Abingdon’ and the ‘Apollo’ were painted at the same time as were the ‘Frosty Morning’ and the ‘Dido and Aeneas.’ He could paint a huge dull empty canvas like ‘Thomson’s Lyre’ when his muse was putting forth its lustiest and most vigorous shoots; he could give us ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ when his powers seemed stifled amid the fumes of early Victorian sentimentality. His genius is hot and cold like Love itself, a fine and subtle spirit that eludes the snares of our plodding faculties. But unless we desire merely to bedazzle and intoxicate our senses, we cannot afford to dispense with the poor crutches upon which our pedestrian intellect must stumble. CHAPTER I SEVEN YEARS’ APPRENTICESHIP--1787-1793 Turner’s first drawings--‘St. Vincent’s Tower’--Turner’s copies and imitations--His debt to Art--Work with Mr. Hardwick--Oxford sketches--‘Radley Hall’--Drawings from the Antique--The Bristol sketch-book--End of the apprenticeship.