These two drawings were made in 1789, during the artist’s fourteenth year. About the beginning of 1790 he joined the schools of the Royal Academy, acting, it is said, upon the advice of Mr. Hardwick. During part of 1790 and for the next two or three years he worked in what was then called the ‘Plaister Academy,’ _i.e._ from casts taken from the antique. Laborious chalk and stump drawings of the Apollo and Antinoüs of the Belvedere, the Venus de’ Medici, and the Vatican Meleager, as well as of the more robust forms of the Diskobolos and Dying Gaul, are still in existence to demonstrate the diligence with which he pursued these uncongenial studies. Such work must have given his masters a singularly poor and misleading opinion of his talents. In June, 1792, he was admitted to the Life Class, while still continuing to attend the Antique. This academic training, however, must have been useful as an antidote, or at least as a supplement, to the topographical work to which all his spare time was devoted. He seems to have spent his holidays in 1791 partly with his uncle at Sunningwell and partly with some friends of the family, the Narraways, at Bristol. The sketch-book in use at this time is now in the National Gallery. The volume was never a handsome one,--it was probably stitched and bound by the artist himself--but its present appearance is deplorable; the cardboard covers are broken, the rough and ready backing is almost undone, a number of the leaves have been cut or torn out, and the remainder are in a generally dirty and dilapidated condition. In spite of these disadvantages it gives us a valuable glimpse of Turner’s interests and acquirements at the age of sixteen. Our first impression is that his year’s work drawing from the cast has produced hardly any perceptible effect. The drawings of buildings are in some cases even more perfunctory than those in the ‘Oxford’ Sketch-Book. The sketch of Bath Abbey Church (on page 14 of the book), for example, is not a very creditable performance for an ambitious Royal Academy student. Its carelessness, however, may have been due to limited opportunities, but we must remember that this hasty scrawl, with the assistance of a few written notes and diagrams, was sufficient to enable the artist to produce afterwards an elaborate water-colour of the subject. A still more elaborately wrought and [Illustration: _PLATE IV_ VIEW ON THE AVON, FROM COOK’S FOLLY WATER COLOUR AND INK. ABOUT 1791]