In 1800 or 1801 Turner made a tour through the Highlands of Scotland. The immediate results were slightly disappointing, but the experience gained undoubtedly contributed to the effectiveness of the work done during the first visit to Switzerland, made in 1802. In the Scotch sketches Turner had hit upon a method of working that enabled him to cover a great deal of ground in a short space of time, and which had the additional advantage of exercising his memory, and of making his sketches from nature more like the first draughts of his finished pictures than like so many unfused notes or memoranda. All the more promising scenes he met with were sketched slightly in chalk upon large sheets of paper prepared with a wash of light brown. These sketches were seldom carried far before the actual scenes, but as soon after as was convenient--possibly at the inn in the evening--these skeletons were filled up from the artist’s retentive memory and ever-ready invention. In this way he was able to fortify himself against the multiplicity of nature’s irrelevant facts, and to find a ready form of expression for the reaction of his own mind upon the sights of nature. Colour was very little used in the Scotch sketches, all the larger drawings--numbering, I think, between forty and fifty--being worked entirely in black and white. But a considerable number of the Swiss drawings are coloured, though, I believe, none of them directly from nature. Turner’s procedure in the case of these drawings appears to have been practically the same as with the Scotch series, but after the skeleton sketch from nature had been elaborated with pencil and white and black chalk, colour was sometimes resorted to, less as a record of facts [Illustration: _PLATE XV_ CASSIOBURY: NORTH WEST VIEW FRENCH. ABOUT 1800.] [Illustration: _PLATE XVI_ BLAIR’S HUT ON THE MONTANVERT AND MER DE GLACE WATER COLOUR. 1802] of local colour, than as an additional instrument of expression of the subjective mood. Among the drawings elaborated in this way are the sketches upon which several of the Farnley drawings (the large ‘Mer de Glace, Chamounix,’ ‘Falls of the Reichenbach,’ ‘Pass of St. Gothard,’ ‘Blair’s Hut, Mer de Glace,’[13] etc.), were based. In some cases the finished works are less impressive than the first sketches, which are almost overpowering in their concentrated vehemence and gloomy majesty. But we must beware of regarding these as simple sketches from nature. They are more strictly studies for pictures than sketches from nature, and it is hardly too much to say that they owe more of their energetic emotional appeal to the Wilson tradition, which Turner had by this time thoroughly assimilated, than to the immediate inspiration of nature. CHAPTER IV THE SEA-PAINTER--1802-1809