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 could hardly write a correct sentence even in prose.  But he was a poet in his outlook upon life; he seldom painted a scene exactly as he saw it, but transfused it by an imaginative touch into what on rare occasions, with perfect conjuncture of mist and weather, it might possibly become.  He gave extra height to church spires, or made precipices steeper than they were, thus to render the impression of the place more explicit than by strict copying of the facts.  Yet he could be minutely accurate in his rendering of all effects of sky, cloud, and atmosphere when he chose.

Other landscape painters have generally succeeded best with some particular aspect of nature, and have confined themselves to that.  Cuyp excelled in painting the golden haze of sunshine, and Constable in effects of storm and rain.  But Turner attempted all.  Sunset, sunrise, moonlight, morning, sea, storm, sunshine:  the whole pageantry of the sky.  He never made a repetition of the golden hazes of Cuyp, who in his particular field stands alone; but it was a small field compared with that of Turner, who held the mirror up to Nature in her every mood.

Later in life, Turner travelled in France, Germany, and Italy.  In Venice his eyes were gladdened by the gorgeous colours above her lagoons.  Henceforth he makes his pictures blaze with hues scarcely dared by painter before.  But so great was his previous mastery of the paler shades, that a few touches of brilliant colour could set his whole canvas aflame.  Even in the ‘Temeraire,’ the sunset occupies less than half the picture.  The cold colours of night have already fallen on the ship, and there remains but a touch of red from the smoke of the tug.