Through the eyes of a tourist

In the summer of 1811 the 37-year-old Turner packed his sketchbooks, paints and fishing rod and headed west for his first tour of Devon and Cornwall. The purpose of his trip — from Poole in Dorset around Land’s End and back along the Bristol Channel to Watchet in Somerset — was to gather material for a series of Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England to be published as engravings by the Cooke brothers. On the bone-rattling roads of the day the tour will have taken eight weeks, but Turner was an enthusiastic traveller, ‘capable of roughing it in any mode the occasion might demand’, according to one local travelling companion. With his visual memory, feeling for atmosphere and eye for detail, he had the natural instincts of a travel writer — and in fact he planned to accompany the published engravings with lines of his own poetry composed en route.