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'I have fortunately met with a good-tempered, funny, little, elderly gentleman, who will probably be my travelling companion throughout the journey. He is continually popping his head out of the window to sketch whatever strikes his fancy, and became quite angry because the conductor would not wait for him whilst he took a sunrise view of Macerata.' Young Englishman travelling with Turner between Rome and Bologna, 1829

Rome, from the Vatican, exhibited 1820 © Tate, London 2002

Unlike fellow landscape painter John Constable, Turner travelled frequently and far afield in search of material. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had established a pattern of working and travelling that was to continue throughout most of his working life: touring, sketching and collecting information in the summer, and then returning home to work up finished pictures during the winter.

His earliest tours were within Britain; during the 1790s he visited the north of England, as well as Wales and Scotland. These gave him an appetite for mountains, waterfalls and the grander forms of nature, though it was not until he was twenty-seven that his was able to make his first trip outside Britain. This journey, one of the great turning points in his career, was made possible by a brief lull in the war between Britain and France. Turner went to Switzerland and Savoy to experience the grandeur of the Alps, and on the way back he visited Paris, to study works of art in the Louvre.

The second vitally important travel experience came for Turner much later: it was not until 1819, when he was forty-four, and at the height of his powers as a painter, that he made his first trip to Italy. The Napoleonic wars had ended, and Turner was finally able to see not only the historical monuments and works of art with which Rome was filled, but also the light and scenery of the landscape which had so inspired his hero, the seventeenth-century landscape painter, Claude Lorrain. Turner worked furiously, filling twenty-three sketchbooks with drawings and notes.

The end of the war also brought more opportunities for travel to a wider public, fuelling a new boom in publishing through increased demand for guide books and souvenir illustrations of celebrated sites. Turner's work for print publishers expanded greatly, producing watercolours to guide engravers for series of printed views of the rivers and ports of England and his celebrated Picturesque Views in England and Wales, 1825-39.

Turner's second visit to Italy, in 1828, saw him working in oils rather than on paper; he even held a small exhibition of recent work in his studio in Rome, though a contemporary reported that it was 'much visited, ridiculed and hooted'. He continued to travel across Europe in the 1830s, despite his age (he was now in his late fifties / early sixties) and minimal knowledge of European languages. In particular, the city of Venice became a recurring theme of his late work, in oils and watercolours, many of which were made during a stay in 1840. In his late sixties he combined holidays with working trips in Switzerland. It was not until he was seventy, in 1845, that declining health finally put a stop to his travels.