Author Description

Turner is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest painters of sky, light and water. His mastery of all these is amply demonstrated in his many depictions of three of the great rivers of northern Europe, the Rhine, Meuse and Mosel, which exerted such an important influence on the Romantic imagination with their towering rocks, gaunt ruins and mighty citadels. Cecilia Powell has studied Turner's most important tours of these rivers in detail and here traces his. Abiding fascination with their scenery. The gravity of the earliest Rhine drawings in the exhibition, painted as Europe was still recovering from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, gradually gives way to a lighter and brighter mood, culminating in the freely drawn and vaporous late colour studies of the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein presiding over the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel. Turner's visits to the Meuse and the Mosel inspired him to paint over a hundred. Delightful gouaches on blue paper which have remained largely unseen since his death. These works are here presented to the public for the first time, newly identified and dated and in the sequences which Turner himself intended. This volume provides a complete catalogue raisonne of these drawings, not all of which can be exhibited (works included are given exhibition numbers, while those not displayed are listed without numbers at the appropriate places in the. Topographical sequences). The series can now at last take its rightful place as yet another example of Turner's extraordinary genius.