Turner's rivers of Europe

by Cecilia Powell

Turner is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest painters of sky, light and water. His mastery of all these is amply demonstrated in his many depictions of three of the great rivers of northern Europe, the Rhine, Meuse and Mosel, which exerted such an important influence on the Romantic imagination with their towering rocks, gaunt ruins and mighty citadels. Cecilia Powell has studied Turner's most important tours of these rivers in detail and here traces his. Abiding fascination with their scenery. The gravity of the earliest Rhine drawings in the exhibition, painted as Europe was still recovering from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, gradually gives way to a lighter and brighter mood, culminating in the freely drawn and vaporous late colour studies of the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein presiding over the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel. Turner's visits to the Meuse and the Mosel inspired him to paint over a hundred. Delightful gouaches on blue paper which have remained