Turner on Tour Exhibition Catalogue

Accompanies the exhibition at the National Gallery, London, 3 November 2022–19 February 2023

Almost every summer for over 50 years, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) travelled around the UK and Europe, sketching countless sources of inspiration as he went. His surviving sketchbooks – almost 300 in total – illustrate how these journeys fired his imagination and were used to develop his oil paintings, watercolours and engraving designs.

Following trips to France and Germany in the early 1820s, during which he filled many sketchbooks, Turner portrayed the busy harbours of Dieppe and Cologne in two boundary-pushing paintings, Harbour of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile and Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening.

The two masterpieces were acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914 and have remained in The Frick Collection, New York, ever since. Turner on Tour marks the return of these paintings to the UK for the first time in over a century and explores the much-loved British painter’s reputation as a travelling artist, his lifelong fascination with ports and harbours, and his radical approach to colour, light and brushwork.

Authors

Christine Riding is the Jacob Rothschild Head of the Curatorial Department and Curator of British Paintings at the National Gallery, London.

Thomas Ardill is Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London.

Aimee Ng is Curator at The Frick Collection, New York.