The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"

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, etched outlines onto copper plates, then usually employed professional engravers to develop tone. Here we see his preliminary work on a plate that Charles Turner later completed in mezzotint. Meadows surround a a ruined castle on a rocky hill, and the foreground is enlivened by a boy piping near a herd of cows.

Credit: Gift of Theodore De Witt, 1917