The studies of mountain-form and Italian design, in the year before, had given him a greater interest in the "Liber Studiorum," Turner's early book of Essays in Composition.

He found there that use of the pure line, about which he has since said so much, together with a thoughtfully devised scheme of light-and-shade in mezzotint, devoted to the treatment of landscape in the same spirit as that in which the Italian masters treated figure-subjects in their pen-and-bistre studies.

And just as he had imitated the Rogers vignettes in his boyhood, now in his youth he tried to emulate the fine abstract flow and searching expressiveness of the etched line, and the studied breadth of shade, by using the quill-pen with washes.

At first he kept pretty closely to monochrome.

His object was form, and his special talent was for draughtsmanship rather than for colour.