Turner's Holland

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Turner's exploration of Holland profoundly influenced his art. Starting at the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen, he studied the old masters, particularly seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Sir Joshua Reynolds emphasized that painters should learn from the Dutch School as one would from grammar school. On his first trip abroad in 1802, Turner studied and copied Dutch paintings in the Louvre. After Napoleon's defeat, he toured the new Kingdom of the United Netherlands, which included present-day Belgium. In 1817, he visited the battlefield of Waterloo, leading to the exhibition of his anti-war masterpiece, 'The Field of Waterloo,' the following year. A landscape painter with a passion for the sea, Turner was captivated by Dutch maritime history and shipping. He famously remarked, upon seeing a seascape by Van de Velde, that it inspired him to become a painter. Throughout his travels in Holland during 1817, 1825, 1840, 1841, and 1842, he created over six hundred sketches. This publication features Dutch Turner scholar Fred Bachrach's examination of twenty-three of Turner's Dutch-influenced oil paintings, discussing their significance and the political motivations behind his subject choices, while also connecting sketches to the paintings and the old masters.