rocesses. From the beginning, he
worked out of doors with the point, but indoors with the brush; and
attains perfect skill in washing flat color long before he attains
anything like skill in delineation of form.

29. Here, for instance, is a drawing, when he was twelve or thirteen
years old, of Dover Castle and the Dover Coach; in which the future
love of mystery is exhibited by his studiously showing the way in
which the dust rises about the wheels; and an interest in drunken
sailors, which materially affected his marine studies, shown not less
in the occupants of the hind seat. But what I want you to observe is
that, though the trees, coach, horses, and sailors are drawn as any
schoolboy would draw them, the sky is washed in so smoothly that few
water-color painters of our day would lightly accept a challenge to
match it.

And, therefore, it is, among many other reasons, that I put the brush
into your hands from the first, and try you with a wash in lampblack,
before you enter my working class. But, as regards the composition of
his picture, the drawing is always first with Turner, the color
second.

30. Drawing: that is to say, the expression by gradation of light,
either of form or space. Again I thus give you a statement wholly
adverse to the vulgar opinion of him. You will find that statement
early in the first volume of "Modern Painters," and repeated now
through all my works these twenty-five years, in vain. Nobody will
believe that the main virtue of Turner is in his drawing. I say "the
main virtue of Turner." Splendid though he be as a colorist, he is not
unrivaled in color; nay, in some qualities of color he has been far
surpassed by the Venetians. But no one has ever touched him in
exquisiteness of gradation; and no one in landscape in perfect
rendering of organic form.

31. I showed you in this drawing, at last Lecture, how truly he had
matched the color of the iron-stained rocks in the bed of the Ticino;
and any of you who care for color at all cannot but take more or less
pleasure in the black and greens and warm browns opposed throughout.
But the essential value of the work is not in these. It is, first, in
the expression of enormous scale of mountain and space of air, by
gradations of shade in these colors, whatever they may be; and,
secondly, in the perfect rounding and cleaving of the masses alike of
mountain and stone. I showed you one of the stones themselves, as an
example of uninteresting ou