his notice of "Turner and his
Works," suggests that John Robert Cozens had paved the way for both
Girtin and Turner in striking out a broad effect of light and shade.
"The early pictures of Turner," he observes, "possess the breadth, but
are destitute of the brilliant power of light and colour afterwards
pervading his works, and ultimately carried to the greatest extreme in
his last pictures. Breadth of light seems to have been latterly his
chief aim, supported by the contrast of hot and cold colour; two of his
unfinished pictures exemplified the principle; they were divided into
large masses of blue where the water or sky was to come and the other
portions laid out in broad orange yellow, falling into delicate brown
where the trees and landscapes were to be placed. This preparation,
while it secured the greatest breadth, would have shone through the
other colours when finished, giving the luminous quality observable in
his pictures. In many instances his works sent for exhibition to the
British Institution had little more than this brilliant foundation,
which was worked into detail and completed in the varnishing days,
Turner being the first in the morning and the last to leave; his
certainty in the command over his colour, and the dexterity in his
handling, seemed to convert in a few hours 'an unsubstantial pageant'
into a finished landscape. These _ad captandum_ effects, however, are
not what his fame will depend on for perpetuity; his finest pictures are
the production of great study in their composition, careful and repeated
painting in the detail, and

[Illustration: PLATE XLVII.--J. M. W. TURNER

CROSSING THE BROOK

_National Gallery of British Art, London_]

a natural arrangement of the colour and breadth of the chiaroscuro."

Whether or not we agree with all of Burnet's opinions, we shall be more
likely to learn the truth about Turner from prosaic contemporaries of
his earlier years than from all the rhapsodies of later days. How
significant, when stripped of its amusing circumstances, is the simple
fact related thus by Leslie:--"In 1839, when Constable exhibited his
_Opening of Waterloo Bridge_, it was placed in one of the small rooms
next to a sea-piece by Turner--a grey picture, beautiful and true, but
with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's picture seemed as
if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times
while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorati