1799
Pencil and watercolour on paper

Although Turner subsequently proclaimed the Scottish landscape a more suitable vehicle of the Sublime, his trips to Wales in the 1790s laid the foundations for a continuing fascination with mountainous scenery. This sketch is one of a group of large sheets of paper seemingly worked directly from nature during Turner’s 1799 tour of North Wales.

Despite the difficulties of working in the open, it is possible to see here a careful balance between the space of sky and land. Clouds appear to mirror mountains, filling the top half of the paper, and stretching the composition upwards. The image is thereby constructed as a series of horizontal planes building up to the ethereal sphere of the sky. The expansive nature created by this ordering of the scenery is deeply rooted in ideas of the Sublime, and the mind’s potential to transcend immediate stimuli. The crammed surface of the work, with its folds and protrusions, strikes the eye as a vision of immensity. This experimentation with the affective possibilities of the painted surface was integral to Turner’s later development of a style increasingly remote from figurative painting.