In 1804 Turner made a second tour on the Continent, and in the following year painted the "Ship wreck" and "Fishing Boats in a Squall" (in the Ellesmere collec tion), seemingly in direct rivalry of Vandervelde, in 1806 the "Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides" (in rivalry of Poussin), and in 1807 the "Sun rising through Vapour" (in rivalry of Claude). The last two are notable works, especially the "Sun." In after years it was one of the works he left to the nation, on the special condition of its being hung beside the Claudes in the National Gallery. In this same year (1807) Turner commenced his most serious rivalry. Possibly it arose out of a desire to break down Claude worship—the then prevailing fashion—and to show the public that there was a living artist not unworthy of taking rank beside him. That the Liber studiorum was suggested by the Liber veritatis of Claude, and was intended as a direct challenge to that master, is beyond doubt. There is, however, a certain degree of unfairness to Claude in the way in which the challenge was given. Claude made drawings in brown of his pictures as they left the easel, not for publication, but merely to serve as private memoranda. Turner's Liber drawings had no such purpose, but were intended as a direct appeal to the public to judge between the two artists. The first of the Liber drawings was made in the autumn of 1806, the others at intervals till about 1815. They are of the same size as the plates and carefully finished in sepia. He left over fifty of these to the National Gallery. The issue of the Liber began in 1807 and continued at irregular intervals till 1819, when it stopped at the fourteenth number. Turner had resolved to manage the publishing business himself, but in this he was not very successful. He soon quar relled with his engraver, F. C. Lewis, on the ground that he had raised his charges from five guineas a plate to eight. He then employed Charles Turner, who agreed to do fifty plates at the latter sum, but, after finishing twenty, he too wished to raise his price, and, as a matter of course, this led to another quarrel. Reynolds, Dunkarton, Lupton, Say, Dawe and other engravers were afterwards employed—Turner himself etching and mezzo tinting some of the plates.
Each part of the Liber contained five plates, the subjects, divided into "historical," "pastoral," "marine," etc., embracing the whole range of landscape art. Seventy-one plates in all out of one hundred were published (including one as a gift of the artist to his subscribers) ; ten other plates—more or less completed— intended for the fifteenth and sixteenth numbers were never pub - lished, the work being stopped for want of encouragement. The merit of the plates is unequal; some—for example, "Solway Moss," "Inverary Pier," "Hind Head Hill," "Ben Arthur," "Riz pah," "Junction of the Severn and Wye" and "Peat Bog"—are of great beauty, while a few are comparatively tame and uninterest ing. Among the unpublished plates "Stonehenge at Daybreak," "The Stork and Aqueduct," "The Via Mala," "Crowhurst," and "Moonlight off the Needles" take a high place. The Liber shows strong traces of the influence of Cozens and Girtin, and, as a matter of course, of Claude. A good deal has been written about Turner's intention, and the "lessons" of the Liber studiorum. Probably his only intention in the beginning was to show what he could do, to display his art, to rival Claude, perhaps to educate public taste, and at the same time make money. Already in this work are seen strong indications of one of his most remarkable characteristics—a knowledge of the principles of structure in natural objects; mountains and rocks are drawn, not with topo graphical accuracy, but with what appears like an intuitive feeling for geological formation ; and trees have also the same expression of life and growth in the drawing of stems and branches. This instinctive feeling in Turner for the principles of organic structure is described in the fourth volume of Modern Painters.
A curious example of the reasonableness accompanying his exercise of the imaginative faculty is to be found in his creations of creatures he had never seen, as, for example, the dragon in the "Garden of the Hesperides" and the python in the "Apollo," ex hibited in 1811. Both these monsters are imagined with such
vividness and reality, and the sense of power and movement is so completely expressed, that the spectator never once thinks of them as otherwise than representations of actual facts in natural history. He was further aided by a memory of the most retentive kind. A good illustration of this may be seen at Farnley Hall in a draw ing of a "Man-of-War taking in Stores." Some one, who had never seen a first-rate, expressed a wish to know what it looked like. Turner took a blank sheet of paper, outlined the ship, and finished the drawing in three hours.
From 1813 till 1826, in addition to his Harley Street residence, Turner had a country house at Twickenham. He kept a boat on the river, also a pony and gig, in which he used to drive about the neighbouring country on sketching expeditions. The pony, for which Turner had a great love, appears in his well-known "Frosty Morning" in the National Gallery. In 1813 Turner commenced the series of drawings, forty in number, for Cooke's Southern Coast. This work was not completed till 1826. The price he at first received for these drawings was 17, los. each, afterwards raised to 113, 2S. 6d.
"Crossing the Brook" appeared in the Academy of 1815. It marks the transition from his earlier style to that of his maturity.
It represents a piece of Devonshire scenery, a view on the river Tamar. In design and execution this work is founded upon Claude. The colour scheme is limited to greys and quiet greens for the earth and pale blues for the sky. It is a sober but very admirable picture, full of diffused daylight. "Dido Building Carthage" also belongs to this period. It hangs beside the Claudes in the National Gallery. Towering masses of Claudesque architec ture piled up on either side, porticoes, vestibules, and stone pines, with the sun in a yellow sky, show the Carthage imagined.
In 1818 Turner was in Scotland making draw ings for the Provincial Antiquities, for which Sir Walter Scott supplied the letterpress, and in 1819 he visited Italy for the first time. From this time his works became remarkable for their colour. Hitherto he had painted in browns, greys and blues, using red and yellow sparingly. He had gradually been advancing from the sober grey colouring of Vandervelde and Ruysdael to the mel low and richer tones of Claude. His works now begin to show a heightened scale of colour, gradually increasing in richness and splendour and reaching its culminating point in such works as "Ulysses," "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," "The Golden Bough," and "The Fighting Temeraire." All these works belong to the middle period of Turner's art (1829-1839), when his powers were entirely developed. Much of his most beautiful work at this period is to be found in his water-colour drawings : those executed for Whitaker's History of Richmondshire (1819-1821), for Cooke's Southern Coast (1814-26), for The Rivers of England (1824), for England and Wales (1829-38), Provincial Antiquities (1826), Roger's Italy (1830), Scott's Works
and The Rivers of France (1833-35) are in many instances of the greatest beauty. One of the great services Turner rendered to the art of Eng land was the education of a whole school of engravers. His best qualities as a teacher came from the union of strength and deli cacy in his work; subtle and delicate tonality was almost a new element for the engraver to deal with, but with Turner's teaching and careful supervision his engravers by degrees mastered it more or less successfully, and something like a new development of the art of engraving was the result. No better proof can be found of the advance made than by comparing the work of the landscape engravers of the pre-Turnerian period with the work of Miller, Goodall, Willmore, Cooke, Wallis, Lupton, C. Turner, Brandard, Cousen, and others who worked under his guidance. The art of steel engraving reached its highest development in England at this time. Roger's Italy (183o) and his Poems (1834) contain perhaps the most beautiful and delicate of the many engravings executed after Turner's drawings. They are vignettes, a form of art which Turner understood well. "The Alps at Daybreak," "Columbus Discovering Land," and "Datur Hora Quieti" are superb.