This childish effort seems to me of great interest as marking with extraordinary clearness the point of departure of Turner’s art. From the beginning he sees things pictorially, as elements in a conceptual whole, not as isolated and independent objects. His sense of design--both as the faculty of expression as well as of formal arrangement--is thus developed, while the merely representative qualities of art are ignored or at least subordinated. This early grasp of the idea of pictorial unity is obviously the result of Turner’s study of works of art, and not of his study of nature. Since Mr. Ruskin’s labours it will not be possible for any student to overlook the enormous profit which Turner derived in his subsequent work from his unwearied observation of the phenomena of nature; it is well, therefore, to be careful not to overlook the prior debt which Turner had contracted to art, and the extraordinary advantage his early grasp of pictorial unity gave him in appropriating the multifarious variety of natural shapes and colours. The other drawings of this period in the National Gallery only serve to emphasise Turner’s indebtedness to art. Some of these are plain straightforward copies. The most elaborate of these is the copy of ‘Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower’ which has long been exhibited in the Turner Water Colour rooms (No. 613, N.G.). This is copied from an engraving by J. Basire published in the _Oxford Almanack_ for the year 1780. The colouring, however, is original. This copy is signed and dated, ‘W. Turner, 1787.’ Among the other copies is a pencil outline of the Old Kitchen, Stanton Harcourt, from the engraving in Grose’s _Antiquities_. There is also a coloured drawing, somewhat similar in size and shape to that of St. Vincent’s Tower, of Dacre Castle, Cumberland. I am unable to say from what engraving this is copied or adapted.[3] It may have been a slightly earlier effort than the Neapolitan subject, as the Indian ink underpainting is less skilfully done and the general effect is heavier and more monotonous. These drawings, made, I believe, between Turner’s twelfth and fourteenth years, show the youthful artist in the act of acquiring the rudiments of that pictorial language which he was to use in after years with such mastery and ease. We see him acquiring this language by intercourse with his fellows who use it, not, as is the modern way, through the course of a random study of nature. He is learning from tradition, and the thought of the artistic community as expressed in the current pictorial language is gradually forming and moulding his ideas. He is imitating those around him, as a child imitates the words of its nurse and mother.