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Rh given that Turner's personal appearance was not of a kind to command much attention or respect. This may have pained his sensitive nature, and led him to seek refuge in the solitude of his painting room. Had he been inclined he had abundant opportunity for social and friendly intercourse with his fellow men, but he gradually came to live more and more in a state of mental isolation. Turner could never make up his mind to visit Farnley again after his old friend's death, and his voice would falter when he spoke of the shores of the Wharfe.

Turner visited Scotland in 1800, and in 1801 or 1802 he made his first tour on the Continent. In the following year, of the seven pictures he exhibited, six were of foreign subjects, among them &ldquo;Bonneville,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon,&rdquo; and the well-known &ldquo;Calais Pier&rdquo; in the National Gallery. The last-named picture, although heavily painted and somewhat opaque in colour, is magnificently composed and full of energy.

In 1802, the year in which Turner became a Royal Academician, he took his father, who still carried on the barber business in Maiden Lane, to live with him. The old man lived in his son's house for nearly thirty years, making himself useful in various ways. It is said that he used to prepare and strain his son's canvases and varnish them when finished, which may explain a saying of Turner's that &ldquo;his father used to begin and finish his pictures for him.&rdquo; He also attended to the gallery in Queen Anne Street, showed in visitors, and took care of the dinner, if he did not himself cook it. Turner was never the same man after his father's death in 1830, living a life of almost complete isolation.

In 1804 Turner made a second tour on the Continent, and in the following year painted the &ldquo;Shipwreck&rdquo; and &ldquo;Fishing Boats in a Squall&rdquo; (in the Ellesmere collection), seemingly in direct rivalry of Vandervelde, in 1806 the &ldquo;Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides&rdquo; (in rivalry of Poussin), and in 1807 the &ldquo;Sun rising through Vapour&rdquo; (in rivalry of Claude). The last two are notable works, especially the &ldquo;Sun.&rdquo; 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 quarrelled 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 &mdash; Turner himself etching

and mezzotinting some of the plates. Each part of the Liber contained five plates, the subjects, divided into &ldquo;historical,&rdquo; &ldquo;pastoral,&rdquo; &ldquo;marine,&rdquo; &c., embracing the whole range of landscape art. Seventy-one plates in all were published (including one as a gift of the artist to his subscribers); ten other plates &mdash; more or less completed &mdash; intended for the fifteenth and sixteenth numbers were never published, the work being stopped for want of encouragement. Absence of method and business habits may account for this. Turner is said to have got up the numbers in his own house with the help of a female servant. The plates, which cost the subscribers only five shillings apiece, were so little esteemed that in the early quarter of the 19th century they were sometimes used for lighting fires. So much has fashion, or public taste, changed since then that a fine proof of a single plate has sold for &pound;210. The merit of the plates is unequal; some &mdash; for example, &ldquo;Solway Moss,&rdquo; &ldquo;Inverary Pier,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hind Head Hill,&rdquo; &ldquo;Ben Arthur,&rdquo; &ldquo;Rizpah,&rdquo; &ldquo;Junction of the Severn and Wye&rdquo; and &ldquo;Peat Bog&rdquo; &mdash; are of great beauty, while a few are comparatively tame and uninteresting. Among the unpublished plates &ldquo;Stonehenge at Daybreak,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Stork and Aqueduct,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Via Mala,&rdquo; &ldquo;Crowhurst,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Moonlight off the Needles&rdquo; take a high place. The Liber shows strong traces of the influence of Cozens and Girtin, and, as a matter of course, of Claude. In most of the designs the predominant feeling is serious; in not a few, gloomy, or even tragic. A good deal has been written about Turner's intention, and the &ldquo;lessons&rdquo; 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. If lessons were intended they might have been better conveyed by words. &ldquo;Silent always with a bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning&rdquo; &mdash; such is Ruskin's explanation; but surely Turner had little reason for either silence or contempt because the public failed to see in landscape art the means of teaching it great moral lessons. The plates of the Liber contain an almost complete epitome of Turner's art. It is supposed that his original intention had been that the Liber should consist of one hundred plates, and drawings for that number exist, but there was no public demand for them. Already in this work are seen strong indications of one of his most remarkable characteristics &mdash; a knowledge of the principles of structure in natural objects; mountains and rocks are drawn, not with topographical 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 treated of at considerable length in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, and Turner is there contrasted with Claude, Poussin, and some of the Dutch masters, greatly to their disadvantage.

After 1797 Turner was little concerned with mere topographical facts: his pictures might be like the places represented or not; much depended on the mental impression produced by the scene. He preferred to deal with the spirit, rather than with the local details of places. 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 &ldquo;Garden of the Hesperides&rdquo; and the python in the &ldquo;Apollo,&rdquo; exhibited 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. It needs but a little comparison to discover how far Turner surpassed all his contemporaries, as well as all who preceded him, in these respects. The imaginative faculty he possessed was of the highest order, and it was further aided by a memory of the most retentive