en he was apprenticed to an architect
to learn architectural drawing, he had to be dismissed after two
periods of probation because of his absolute inability to learn the
theory of perspective or even the elements of geometry. But the time
was not far off when he was to become in his turn Professor of
Perspective at the Royal Academy.

The popular distaste, or unborn taste, for landscape, which had
prevented Gainsborough from following his natural bent, was changing
at last. The end of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a return
to nature in art as well as in poetry. Some artists in the eastern
counties, older than Turner, were already spending their lives in the
not too lucrative painting of landscape. These men took for their
masters the seventeenth-century painters of Holland. Old Crome, so
called to distinguish him from his son, founded his art upon that of
Hobbema, and came so close to him in his early years that it is difficult
to distinguish their pictures. In the works of this 'Norwich School'
the wide horizons of the Dutch artists often occur. But there is a
brighter colour, a fresher green, recalling England rather than
Holland. Turner never felt the influence of the Dutch painters so
strongly as these artists did. Like Gainsborough, and many another
artist before him and since, Turner was to be dominated by the necessity
of making a living. At the end of the century a demand arose for
'Topographical Collections,' of views of places, selected and arranged
according to their neighbourhood. These were not necessarily fine
works of art, but they were required to be faithful records of places.
Topographical paintings, drawings, and prints took the place now
filled by the photograph and the postcard. Turner found employment
enough making water-colour sketches to be engraved for such
topographical publications. But sketches that might be mere hack-work
became under his fingers magically lovely. We may follow him to many
a corner of England, Wales, and Scotland, sketching architecture,
mountain, moor, mists, and lakes. His earliest sketches are rather
stiff and precise. But he developed with rapidity, and soon painted
them in tones of blue and grey, so soft that the stars and the horizons
merge into one lovely indefiniteness. Not till much later is there
a touch of brighter colour in them such as fires the 'Temeraire,' but
in all there is the same spirit of poetry. Turner longed to be a poet,
although he co