Miller, who republished them in 1854, in a volume called “Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views, sixty years since.” These drawings mark his first tour to Wales, on which he set forth on a pony lent by Mr. Narraway. The first public results of this tour were the drawing of Chepstow in “Walker’s Magazine” for November, 1794, and three drawings in the Royal Academy for that year. By the next year’s engravings and pictures we trace him to “Nottingham,” “Bridgnorth,” “Matlock,” “Birmingham,” “Cambridge,” “Lincoln,” “Wrexham,” “Peterborough,” and “Shrewsbury,” and by those of 1796 and 1797 to “Chester,” “Neath,” “Tunbridge,” “Bath,” “Staines,” “Wallingford,” “Windsor,” “Ely,” “Flint,” “Hampton Court, Herefordshire,” “Salisbury,” “Wolverhampton,” “Llandilo,” “The Isle of Wight,” “Llandaff,” “Waltham,” and “Ewenny (Glamorgan),” not including drawings of places he had been to before.

His furthest point north was Lincoln, his farthest west (in England) Bristol. The only parts in which he reached the coast were in Wales and the Isle of Wight. Lancashire and the Lakes, Yorkshire and its waterfalls, were yet to come, and nearly all coast scenery, except that of Kent.

The drawings for the Magazines were not remarkable for any poetry or originality of treatment perceptible in the engravings, the cathedrals being generally taken from an unpicturesque point of view, more with the object of showing their length and size than their beauty, to which he appears to have been somewhat insensible always; they show a great love of bridges and anglers—there is scarcely one without a bridge, and some have two; a desire to tell as much about the place as possible by the introduction of figures; they show his habit of taking his scenes from a distance, generally from very high ground, and his delight in putting as much in a small space as possible, and his power of drawing masses of houses, as in the Birmingham and the Chester.

The result of these tours may be said to have been the perfection of his technical skill, the partial displacement of traditional notions of composition, and the storing of his memory with infinite effects of nature. It was as good and thorough discipline in the study of nature, as his former life had been in the study of art, and though his visit to Yorkshire in the next year (1797) seemed necessary to bring thoroughly to the surface all the knowledge and power he had acquired, it was not without present fruit. Rather of necessity than choice, we may observe, he confined his powers mainly to the drawing of views of places supposed to be of interest to the subscribers of the Magazines, but his individual inclinations in the choice of subject, and his tendency to purer landscape and sea-view, showed themselves now and then. First in his drawing of The Pantheon, the Morning after the Fire, exhibited in 1792; next in 1793, in his View on the River Avon, near St. Vincent’s Rocks, Bristol, and the Rising Squall, Hot Wells,[17] from the same place; then in 1794, Second Fall of the River Monach, Devil’s Bridge; in 1795, View near the Devil’s Bridge, Cardiganshire, with the River Ryddol; in 1796, Fishermen at Sea; and in 1797, Fishermen coming Ashore at Sunset, previous to a Gale, and Moonlight: a study in Milbank,[18] now in the National Gallery.

That his genius was perceptible even in these early days is evident from the notice taken in a contemporary review of his drawings in 1794, when he was nineteen.