The nature of our subject-matter--The difference between sketches and finished works--The character of our subject-matter, as embryonic forms of artistic expression, prescribes the method of study we must adopt--Our method is broadly chronological--But to follow Turner’s work year by year in detail would carry us beyond the limits of our present undertaking--I have, therefore, broken up Turner’s career into eight stages or phases of development. The object of the following pages is to re-study the character of Turner’s art in the light of his sketch-books and drawings from nature. During Turner’s lifetime his rooted objection to part with any of his sketches, studies, or notes often formed the subject of ill-natured comment. Yet we owe it to this peculiarity that the drawings and sketches included in the Turner Bequest at the National Gallery comprise practically the whole of the great landscape painter’s work done direct from nature. The collection is, therefore, of very great psychological interest. It shows clearly upon what basis of immediately presentative elements the airy splendour of Turner’s richly imaginative art was built: and amongst the twenty odd thousand sheets of drawings in all stages of elaboration, the embryonic forms of most of the painter’s masterpieces can be easily traced. A careful examination of the drawings shows that Turner’s objection to part with his sketches and notes was not the outcome of a blind and deeply ingrained passion for accumulation, but that it was the necessary result of the painter’s clearly defined conception of the radical difference between the raw material of the painter’s art, and its fully articulated products--the difference between mere sketches and studies and fugitive memoranda, and the fully elaborated works of art to which such preliminaries are subservient, but with which they should never be confused. From Turner’s point of view the properly finished pictures were all that the public had a right to see or possess; the notes and studies were meant only for his own eye. Even in his later years, when he consented to exhibit what he expressly called a ‘record’ of a scene he had witnessed, he grumbled when it was admired and treated as a picture, although in this case the ‘record’ was not a hurried memorandum, but a fully elaborated attempt ‘to show what such a scene was like.’[1]