“Subject:  Non sapere maximum est malum.

    “Non sapere est grave; sed, cum dura epigrammata oportet
     Scribere, tunc sentis praecipue esse malum.”

In Switzerland and Italy, during the autumn of 1835, he had made a great many drawings, carefully outlined in pencil or pen on gray paper, and sparsely touched with body colour, in direct imitation of the Prout lithographs.  Prout’s original coloured sketches he had seen, no doubt, in the exhibition; but he does not seem to have thought of imitating them, for his work in this kind was all intended to be for illustration and not for framing.  The “Italy” vignettes likewise, with all their inspiration, suggested to him only pen-etching; he was hardly conscious that somewhere there existed the tiny, coloured pictures that Turner had made for the engraver.  Still, now that he could draw really well, his father, who painted in water-colours himself, complied with the demand for better teaching than Runciman’s, went straight to the President of the Old Water-Colour Society, and engaged him for the usual course of half a dozen lessons at a guinea a piece.  Copley Fielding could draw mountains as nobody else but Turner could, in water-colour; he had enough mystery and poetry to interest the younger Ruskin, and enough resemblance to ordinary views of Nature to please the elder.  So they both went to Newman Street to his painting-room, and John worked through the course, and a few extra lessons, but, after all, found Fielding’s art was not what he wanted.  Some sketches exist, showing the influence of the spongy style; but his characteristic way of work remained for him to devise for himself.

At the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1836 Turner showed the first striking examples of his later style in “Juliet and her Nurse,” “Mercury and Argus,” and “Rome from Mount Aventine.”  The strange idealism, the unusualness, the mystery, of these pictures, united with evidence of intense significance and subtle observation, appealed to young Ruskin as it appealed to few other spectators.  Public opinion regretted this change in its old favourite, the draughtsman of Oxford colleges, the painter of shipwrecks and castles.  And Blackwood’s Magazine, which the Ruskins, as Edinburgh people and admirers of Christopher North, read with respect, spoke about Turner, in a review of the picture-season, with that freedom of speech which Scotch reviewers claim as a heritage from the days of Jeffrey.  Young Ruskin at once dashed off an answer.

The critic had found that Turner was “out of nature”; Ruskin tried to show that the pictures were full of facts, but treated with poetical license.  The critic pronounced Turner’s colour bad, his execution neglected, and his chiaroscuro childish; in answer to which Ruskin explained that Turner’s reasoned system was to represent light and shade by the contrast of warm and cold colour, rather than by the opposition of white and black which other painters used.  He denied that his execution was other than his aims necessitated, and maintained that the critic had no right to force his cut-and-dried academic rules of composition on a great genius; at the same time admitting that: