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In 1808 Turner set off for Yorkshire, where he had been promised a warm welcome by Walter Fawkes, the owner of Farnley Hall, who may well have helped finance Turner's first Continental trip. Aside from a collection of civil war memorabilia - Fawkes was an ardent Parliamentarian - he also owned a distinguished group of Old Master paintings and modern watercolors. John "Warwick" Smith (cat. nos. 15-16) was well represented and, from 1804, so was Turner himself. This discerning patron became a lifelong friend, and between 1808 and 1825 Turner made visits to Farnley almost every year, enjoying the family life there that he shunned back home with his own mistress and children. Moreover, his relationship with patrons like Fawkes helped to change his relationship to watercolor. Patrons liberated him from needing to make or exhibit watercolors on a speculative commercial basis; the majority of his watercolors were now going straight to private collectors like Fawkes or to publishers for engraving. Whereas the lessons of Paris were primarily played out in the major exhibition landscapes in oils, where Turner explored the full moral potential of landscape scenery, his watercolors tended to be closer to the topographical work of his earlier career, though now given a deeper and more profound significance than he had previously allowed topography to bear.

A good example of this new approach to topography, Ingleborough from Chapel-Le-Dale, was made from sketches taken on a visit to Farnley and acquired by Fawkes. Is The subject is the great mountain of Ingleborough in North Yorkshire seen during a dramatic electrical storm. Turner's sketches of the site had shown figures with umbrellas - the region has never been known for its balmy weather - but there was probably a more high-minded explanation for Turner's stormy landscape. In Ingleborough from Chapel-Le-Dale, for instance, the stormy weather suggests a chain of associations linking back to James Thomson's Seasons (1735), a seminal work of poetry admired throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a staple text for landscape painters. Turner was an avid admirer of it and would have known the passage in "Summer" where Thomson described a sudden summer storm, complete with lightning bolt. Thomson's poem was a celebration of God's creation that blended allegorical content with naturalistic description and treated storms as expressions of the hand of God acting in nature." Turner's inclusion of the figure running for shelter echoes Thomson's lines that describe a man caught in the storm "who to the crouded [sic] cottage hies him fast, / or seeks the shelter of the downward cave." John Ruskin made the perceptive observation that Turner "rarely introduces lightening [sic, striking a building] if the building has not been devoted to religion. The wrath of man may destroy the fortress, but only the wrath of heaven can destroy the temple." By investing a view of Ingleborough with such profound significance, Turner was moving topography away from being "the tame delineation of a given spot" as Henry Fuseli once contemptuously described it. Instead, topography takes on profound concepts: the relationship between man and nature, or human life, culture, religion, and civilization. It was these qualities that led Ruskin to call Turner's work in this vein "Turnerian Topography" noting that "the aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision rather than that of the physical facts." By blending the allegorical and the naturalistic, as in Thomson's poetry, Turner's stormy landscape demands to be taken as high art, a profound exploration of both the natural world and the deeper questions of existence.

Walter Fawkes remained a loyal friend and patron to Turner. In 1817 Turner left England for his first tour of the Continent since 1802 and the first ever entirely alone. It was a trip that would set the pattern for the rest of his career. Like all Turner's touring, he chose a conventional destination: the Rhine, with a detour to see the battlefield of Waterloo. Both Waterloo and the Rhine were highly topical locations, not least because Byron had described both in Canto III of his sensational Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Turner purchased a copy of Charles Campbell's Traveller's Complete Guide through Belgium, Holland, and Germany (1815) before setting out, as well as three sketchbooks of varying sizes in which to make his studies. Andernach belongs to a set of fifty watercolors worked up from the pencil sketches made en route through Germany.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, pp. 105-106, no. 45