Turner travelled quite extensively throughout his career. From the Swiss Alps to the Rhine to Paris, he traversed a lot of ground in his time, almost always with a sketchbook in hand. Britain’s hostilities with France, and then the outbreak of the French Revolution, precluded travel to the continent for much of his early life. This caused Turner, as it caused other British artists, to turn inward and begin to explore their country in a way they had not done so before. Up until this point, British art and culture had held up Continental art and artists as the ideal. Turner travelled and sketched throughout around London and later the rest of the British Isle as a young man in the late 18th century.
The end of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon afforded an opening up of the continent once again (for a period at least) to British artists. The signing of the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 temporarily ceased hostilities between Britain and France. British artists flooded into Paris. Although Turner did make his way to Paris in 1802, he initially passed through the city fairly quickly. He had his sights set on the Swiss Alps. They constituted uncharted territory for British artists and he could hardly contain his enthusiasm to witness their majesty with his own eyes, and to capture them on canvas. On the return leg of his return journey he did make a longer stop in Paris. It was at this time that he availed himself of the opportunity take in the artistic bounty on offer at the Louvre for the first time.
It wasn’t long before political hostilities between France and Britain once again closed off the continent to Britain and its artists. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Turner made his next trip to the continent to tour the battlefield at Waterloo and explore the Rhine in 1817.
It was his next trip the following year, however, that would mark a turning point in his career. He would visit Italy for the first time. Explore the Story Map below to follow his path on his first trip this historic Mediterannean landscape.
Although he would later become better known for so marvelously capturing the dreamy atmosphere and light of Venice, at the time of his first trip to Italy in 1819 he had his sights set firmly on Rome. It was Rome after all that was the heart of classical art; it was the finale of the Grand Tour; and it was the place where his artistic idol Claude Lorrain had worked much of his career, two centuries earlier.
On this first trip, Turner spent the bulk of his time in Rome. While there he worked at a steady clip, producing a large number of sketches. He would make quick pencil sketches in the open air. By his own estimate, this would afford him the opportunity to make as many as 15 times as many sketches as he could make if he were to complete color sketches on site. He would hold the rest of the details of the scene in memory and finish the color sketches and watercolors in his lodgings in the evening.
For much of Turner's life until this time, Rome loomed large in his thoughts. It took up a large part of his ‘cognitive map’. He had previously given little thought to Venice. It was little more than an afterthought when he decided to stop off there for a few days before journeying on to the Eternal City. Moving forward, however, Rome would gradually diminish as a focus of his work.
During the latter years of his career it was Venice, rather than Rome, that would become a more frequent theme of his work. Although the sum total of time he spent in Venice in his lifetime amounted to not more than a month, it would come to take up an outsized place in his thoughts and work. Venice loomed large in his mind. The way he began to think about and represent light began to evolve during his career. Perhaps the shimmering, diffuse light of Venice helped him shift his perspective.
The diagrams below represent the proportion of works in the dataset that depict Rome and Venice. The total number of works in the set slightly favor Rome and the first half of his career is weighted heavily towards that city. After 1829 (the year of the death of his father) the theme of Venice becomes the dominant theme of his work. Not only does he produce a large number of sketches and watercolors of Venice but a number of his large oils are of that city.