Turner distilled his ideas about landscape In "Liber Studiorum" (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece published between 1807 and 1819. To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolor drawings, then etched outlines onto copper plates. Professional engravers usually developed the tone under Turner's direction, and Dunkarton here added mezzotint to describe an untamed vista in Surrey, forty miles southwest of London. A steep, shadowed hill with a gallows at its summit anchors the composition as light breaks through clouds in the sky, and smoke rises below. A coach rounds the hill's lower slope at right, and a shepherd rests near his flock in the foreground. The letter "M" in the upper margin indicates Turner's category of Mountainous landscape.
Credit: Gift of Edwin De T. Bechtel, 1951