J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

These hurriedly executed and rather scrappy jottings of a cloudy sky and landscape with tower mark the beginning of Turner’s passage away from the Rhine valley towards Liège in Belgium. Cecilia Powell writes that the artist took a diligence over land to reach the Belgian city, the bumpy journey and fast pace of travel accounting for the scribbly, disjointed nature of his drawings (see, for example, Tate D19846–D19869; Turner Bequest CCXVI 148–157a).1 Turner’s inscriptions here are difficult to read, and sometimes illegible. They appear to be comments on the colour and tone of sky: the ‘Cold Clouds’, for example, and the ‘very Cold Light’.