carefully considered water-colour was the result of another sketch (on the reverse of page 16) in this book, a view of ‘Stoke, near Bristol, the seat of Sir H. Lippencote,’ now in the possession of Mrs. Thomas. This pencil sketch is quite as perfunctory as that of Bath Abbey. It is evident that nature ‘put him out’ or that the artist’s youthful impatience induced him to hurry over the first stages of his work. These sketches from nature were merely means to an end, and so long as they contained sufficient hints to set his subsequent work going he was perfectly satisfied. However, in some of the drawings where the first sketch from nature has been worked over subsequently (as in the water-colour of Captain Fowler’s seat on Durdham Downs [on pp. 17a and 18]), we can trace an increased delicacy of hand, an added capacity for dealing with complex and irregular forms, and greater knowledge of the natural forms of trees. But it is evident that the wild and romantic scenery of the Avon gorge made a deeper impression on the young artist’s imagination than the spick and span seats of the gentry. The ruins of Malmesbury Abbey are sketched from every available point of view, and there are hurried and clumsy sketches of ‘The Ruins of a Chapel standing on an Island in the Severn,’ ‘A View of the Welsh Coast from Cook’s Folly,’ and others of ‘Blaze Castle and the Deney and Welsh Coast,’[5] and the ‘Old Passage.’ The drawing described as a ‘View from Cook’s Folley (_sic_), looking up the River Avon with Wallis Wall and the Hot Wells’ (reproduced on Plate IV.), shows clearly the bent of Turner’s mind towards the wildness and freedom of nature, as well as his strong love of ships. If it were our intention to follow Turner’s work year by year, we should have to study in detail the drawings of Oxford, Windsor, Hereford and Worcester, and especially the Welsh and Monmouthshire sketches which belong to the years 1792 and 1793. As it is, it is sufficient for our purpose to notice that the work of these two years shows a gradual increase of power in making sketches from nature. The young artist slowly gathers confidence in himself. Nature ceases to ‘put him out,’ to fluster him with her multitudinous details and ever-varying effects. He begins to treat nature as a conquered enemy, and there is just a suspicion of youthful impertinence in the cool and methodical way in which he gathers up the kind of facts he wants, and ignores everything that does not come within the scope of his pictorial formulas. But by this time it is evident that his period of apprenticeship is at an end, and that we must turn our attention to the work of the brilliant young topographical draughtsman. CHAPTER II THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAUGHTSMAN--1793-1796