In a letter from Andrew Caldwell to Bishop Percy, dated 14th June 1802, Turner is spoken of 'as beating Loutherbourg and every other artist all to nothing.'
It was not difficult for Turner to beat Van de Velde and de Loutherbourg all to nothing. We think so now, they thought so then, if Andrew Caldwell expressed the general opinion.
'A new artist has started up--one Turner. He had before exhibited stained drawings, but now paints landscapes in oil, beats Loutherbourg and every other artist all to nothing. A painter of my acquaintance and a good judge declares his painting is magic; that it is worth every landscape painter's while to make a pilgrimage to see and study his works. Loutherbourg, he used to think of so highly, appears now mediocre.'
But even in those days of rivalry with the so-called classical painters, Turner was already beginning to see for himself, and to express what his eyes saw. The 'View on Clapham Common,' probably painted in 1802, merely a study of sward and trees with men angling, is personal and all himself, although Ruskin thought that 'the somewhat affected rolling and loading of the colour in the sky is founded altogether on Morland.'
To me it is like a brief personal and sincere utterance at a political meeting where the speakers are all trying to say the effective thing in the effective manner. Even such a doughty critic as Meier Graefe recognises in this simple little picture a 'sincere surrender to the object.'
At the Tate Gallery we may see Turner, painted by himself, in the year that he took that walk on Clapham Common, a watchful, introspective face as of a soul trying to see through the veil, the eyes estimating and observant, the lips betokening something sensual, the other part of Turner.
Of the pictures Turner sent to the Royal Academy of 1803, including a 'Holy Family' (he tried everything in turn), one work dominates the group--the great, dark, studio-made 'Calais Pier,' which Turner, never afraid of a long title, called 'Calais Pier with French Poissards preparing for Sea, an English Packet arriving.' Neither Turner nor anybody else ever saw such a scene in Nature, and one wonders what Turner thought of this ambition of his youth years later when he painted the pearly visions of the 'Yachting' and 'Whalers' series, or such an attempt to express the marriage of light and water as 'Sunrise with a Sea Monster.'