Turner's Holland

Turner's Holland explores Turner's tours through Holland and the influence they had on his art. Turner attended the Royal Academy Schools from the age of fourteen where he studied old masters including seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's president, declared that 'painters should go to the Dutch School to learn the art of painting as they would go to grammar school to learn languages'. On his first trip abroad, in 1802, Turner studied and copied Dutch painting in the Louvre. Following Napoleon's defeat, his first tour to the Continent was to the new Kingdom of the United Netherlands, which included modern-day Belgium. In 1817 he visited the battlefield of Waterloo and a year later exhibited the anti-war masterpiece, 'The Field of Waterloo'. A landscape painter who loved the sea, Turner was also fascinated by Dutch shipping, fishing, and maritime history. When shown a print of a seascape by the eminent Dutch artist Van de Velde, he is said to have whispered, 'That made me a painter'. He made over six hundred sketches during his various travels in Holland in 1817, 1825, 1840, 1841 and 1842. In this publication, the Dutch Turner scholar and cultural historian Fred Bachrach examines twenty-three of Turner's Dutch-inspirited oil paintings, explaining their significance and suggesting the reasons, sometimes political, behind Turner's selection of particular subjects. He also related sketches to the paintings and examines their relationship to the Dutch old masters.