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1804, with as many as thirty works on display. Further annual exhibitions were held there regularly until 1810, and then more spasmodically over the following decade. (During the entire period, however, Turner went on showing works in the Royal Academy simultaneously.)

      By early 1805 Turner began residing for parts of the year outside London proper, first at Sion Ferry House in Isleworth, west of London, and then, by the autumn of the following year, nearby at Hammersmith. While living in Isleworth he had a boat built for use as a floating studio upon the Thames, and painted a number of oil sketches in the open air. Although the sketches are very vivacious and prefigure Impressionism, Turner set no store on them and never exhibited them. In 1811 he began building a small villa in Twickenham, also to the west of London. At first he called the property Solus Lodge; later he renamed it Sandycombe Lodge. He designed the house himself and it still survives, although it has been somewhat altered down the years. Between 1802 and 1811 Turner did little touring, being extremely busy producing works for his own gallery and for the Academy, as well as innumerable watercolours on commission. His clientele continued to expand and came to include some of the leading collectors of the day such as Sir John Leicester (later Lord de Tabley) and Walter Fawkes. The latter was a bluff, no-nonsense and very liberal-minded Yorkshireman whose grand country seat, Farnley Hall, near Leeds, Turner began visiting around 1808. Fawkes was perhaps the closest friend Turner ever had amongst his patrons, and the painter went on regularly visiting Farnley until the mid-1820s, becoming very much a part of the Fawkes family and having a room reserved solely for his use.

      In 1806 Turner embarked upon a major set of engravings, for which he drew the preliminary etchings himself. This was the Liber Studiorum or “Book of Studies”. Its title not only emulates that of the Claude-Earlom Liber Veritatis, but it was mainly created in the identical medium of mezzotint. Originally there were to have been 100 prints in the Liber Studiorum. However, by 1819 only seventy-one of the engravings had been published and the project petered out, although drawings for all the remaining designs were created and proofs of some of the final twenty-nine prints were pulled. Turner was clearly inspired by his own close study of the Claude-Earlom model to offer his Liber Studiorum as a similar teaching aid for others. In theory this was financially canny, given that at the time there was still a dearth of art schools in Britain and therefore a real need for “teach yourself” publications beyond the major cities. To further his didactic aims, Turner broke the subjects of the Liber Studiorum down into categories, namely Architectural, Marine, Mountainous, Historical, Pastoral and Elevated Pastoral. He employed the last classification to differentiate the pastoralism based on classical myths, such as may be found in the works of Claude and Poussin, from the ruddy and muddy farmyard type to be seen in Lowlands painting and/or mundane reality.

      At the very end of 1807 Turner took yet another step that was to have enormously beneficial results for his art: he volunteered for the position of Royal Academy Professor of Perspective. In order to do the job he embarked upon a rigorous study programme. This involved reading or re-reading more than seventy books on the science of perspective, and on art and aesthetics. The majority of treatises in the latter two categories subscribe in some degree or other to the Theory of Poetic Painting. The first annual set of six lectures was given in January 1811. Turner went on delivering the lectures spasmodically until 1828 (although he did not resign the professorship until 1838), and the manuscripts of his talks are now in the British Library. They make it clear that the painter did not limit himself to an analysis of perspective. Instead he surveyed a much wider range of subjects. His audiences were mystified, for naturally they wanted to learn about perspective. What they received instead were the Turnerian versions of Reynolds' Discourses. (For example, the final lecture in the sequence of talks was a survey of the way Old Master painters had often used landscapes as backgrounds in their pictures.) Yet if the exercise was rather a waste of time for the painter’s audiences, it was far from so for Turner himself. The reading for the lectures concentrated his mind wonderfully regarding his identification with the Theory of Poetic Painting, and it especially fired up his idealism, as can be seen in many works created after 1811.

      The discovery or rediscovery of the potency of idealising ideas on art was not the only stimulus Turner fortuitously received at this time. Also in 1811 he developed a new appreciation of the expressive power of black-and-white line-engraved reproduction of his works. (In this process an original image such as a painting or drawing is reproduced through its design being etched and cut into a metal plate; the colouristic and tonal qualities of the original are projected monochromatically by means of varying thicknesses and concentrations of line.) Turner had made watercolours to be copied as line-engravings ever since the early 1790s but in 1811 he was astounded by the degree of tonal beauty and expressiveness attained by one of his engravers, John Pye, in a print reproducing the oil painting Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, which is discussed below. Pye’s success made Turner highly receptive to the notion of having more of his works reproduced in the same way. Obviously because word of this increased amenability quickly spread, not long afterwards the painter was commissioned by two other line-engravers and print publishers, the brothers William Bernard Cooke and George Cooke, to make a large set of watercolours depicting the scenery of the southern coast of England for subsequent line-engraving. The “Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast” project was only completed in the mid-1820s and it led Turner to deploy enormous ingenuity in expressing the essentials of place, those underlying social, cultural, historical and economic factors that had once governed life there or continued to do so. (For examples of ‘southern Coast” series watercolours, see Weymouth, Dorsetshire of 1811, Rye, Sussex of around 1823 and Boscastle, Cornwall of around 1824 below.) In time Turner would create several hundreds of watercolours for similar schemes, and in a large number of them he would similarly elaborate the truths of place with profound inventiveness.

      J. M. W. Turner, The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius restored, RA 1816, oil on canvas, 116.8 × 177.8 cm, Private Collection, New York, U. S. A.

      J. M. W. Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffalle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia, RA 1820, oil on canvas, 177 × 335.5 cm, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U. K.

      In 1812 Turner exhibited an unusually important picture at the Royal Academy, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (reproduced below). The subject had intrigued the painter ever since the late 1790s when he had copied a representation of Hannibal looking down into Italy by J. R. Cozens, a work that is unfortunately now lost. Yet the immediate inspiration for a painting on that subject only came to Turner late in the summer of 1810 when he was staying at Farnley Hall. One day he was witnessed by Fawkes' son, Hawksworth Fawkes, standing at the doorway of the house and looking out over Wharfedale; as the latter recalled, Turner shouted:

      “Hawkey! Hawkey! Come here! come here! Look at this thunder-storm. Isn’t it grand? – Isn’t it wonderful? – Isn’t it sublime?” All this time he was making notes of its form and colour on the back of a letter. I proposed some better drawing-block, but he said it did very well. He was absorbed – he was entranced. There was the storm rolling and sweeping and shafting out its lightning over the Yorkshire hills. Presently the storm passed, and he finished. “There! Hawkey,” said he. “In two years you will see this again, and call it ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’.”

      This story vividly indicates not only the force of Turner’s inner eye but also his precise aesthetic leanings, for his immediate placing of a sublime natural effect at the service of an epic historical subject is profoundly poetical – clearly the vastness of nature was not an end in itself for Turner, but merely a starting point. And the artist’s adherence to the Theory of Poetic Painting is further proven by the method he employed to develop Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, for he synthesised the image exactly in the manner that Reynolds had recommended, in this case by marrying the Yorkshire storm to a Swiss alpine vista seen in 1802.

      Turner equally made a helpful verbal debut with Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps. Although the painter had been appending lines of verse to the titles of his pictures in the exhibition catalogues since 1798, and some of them were probably of his own devising, in 1812 and for the very first

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