But if the charge of mannerism cannot be fairly brought against the sketches made face to face with nature, it is otherwise with the water-colours which were afterwards elaborated from them. Drawings like the view of ‘Radley Hall,’ reproduced on Plate III., and the ‘View of the City of Oxford’ might almost be said to consist of little else than mannerisms. The manner of doing trees and skies and of arranging the planes of the scene is taken over directly from Paul Sandby, as are also the method of working in transparent washes and the gamut of colours used. The ‘View of Oxford’ is indeed nothing but a feeble echo of some of Sandby’s fine drawings; it tells us little of Turner himself, beyond an indication of a certain liking for scenes of this kind. Perhaps the most noteworthy point in the drawing is the demonstration it affords of the superior development of his sense of tone to his sense of form; the buildings sway to and fro in the wind, the foliage is childish and ridiculous, but the difference between the broad expanses of ground and sky is clearly marked, and the limpid sky gives an undeniable charm to it all. There is perhaps a little more of himself in the view of ‘Radley Hall.’ The way the tree-trunks seem to blow themselves out, and toss themselves this way and that, while their branches explode in the wildest and most fantastic contortions,--all this is given with such keen and frank enjoyment, that it points to something more than a mere passive reproduction of a purely technical recipe. The trees in those drawings of Sandby which Turner had studied do indeed behave in this way, but Turner identifies himself so closely with the inner meaning of these forms that they become his own legitimate property. The sense of exuberant freedom in the trees is intensified by contrast with the rigid restraint of the building in the middle distance. It is as though the boy’s imagination was glad to get away from the realm of necessity and disport itself in aimless gambols through space, free from the encumbrance of inert matter and of the laws of gravitation. It is this habit of getting at the inner emotional content of the pictorial conventions he adopts, that stamps Turner’s whole career of imitation and appropriation with its peculiar character, making him invariably richer for all his borrowings, and more original for all his imitations.