Joseph Mallord William Turner

Here, Turner is looking west from near the summit of Round Hill, about six miles north-west of Walter Fawkes’s seat Farnley Hall, with the northern escarpment of Skipton Moor at the far left, and panning right across Barden Moor on the centre skyline to Earl’s Seat at the right. The drawing served as the basis of a watercolour of Grouse Shooting, Beamsley Beacon (Wallace Collection, London)1 painted for Sir William Pilkington of Stanley Chevet, near Wakefield. Oddly, the summit of Beamsley Beacon proper is just cropped outside the left edge of the field of view. The watercolour follows all the specific topographical detail and the general conception of figures, horses and dogs on the moors and a ‘Black pool’, but the contingent detail is comprehensively reworked in the finished composition. The watercolour is traditionally considered to be a pair to another watercolour painted for Pilkington, Woodcock Shooting on the Chevin (also Wallace Collection),2 which is dated 1813, but any connection does not necessarily make them contemporary.

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