Duly noted painters3/30/2023 They spent the next week making excursions to local beauty spots, despite almost constant heavy rain. A few days later he set off with his hosts. Turner left London for Farnley on 12 July 1816. The commission, it seems, was to be wide-ranging the book was to be issued in parts, commencing with Richmondshire and incorporating large areas on the other side of the Pennines in what had become Lancashire. The artist was a regular visitor to Yorkshire one of his patrons, Walter Fawkes, invited the artist every year to his estate Farnley Hall. A committee of select local gentlemen was formed to advise on the subjects to be tackled by the great Turner. In tune with the times, Whitaker's Yorkshire was to be more than a history, it was also to be a poetic response to the landscape. Within a few years, Turner could command a much higher rate. His fee for the first watercolours delivered for picturesque views of the southern coast of England was a respectable £7.10s, which later rose to 10 guineas. They also brought his work to wider audiences, and allowed him to celebrate different parts of the British Isles. In fact, after 1811, Turner became so impressed with the quality of contemporary engraving, that he undertook an increasing number of publishing projects. However, Turner's new-found status did not mean that he was going to put mere 'map-work' – as fellow Academician, Henry Fuseli, called it – behind him. It made his position as the country's leading landscape painter unassailable. This was followed by his appointment as the Academy's Professor of Perspective. By 1807, he began publication of his Liber Studiorum, a survey of different types and styles of landscape art illustrated by his own work. Since then, the artist had come a long way.Įlected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 at 24, the youngest permissible age, Turner became an Academician in 1802. The earliest of these, The History of Whalley, published in 1800, which also happened to be the first such volume for which the young Turner drew the plates. Dr Thomas Dunham Whitaker, vicar of Whalley in Lancashire, who already had a string of scholarly histories to his credit. Seven volumes were planned apart from Turner's landscape views, the buildings were to be drawn by John Buckler, besides images of tombstones, inscriptions, and other documents. Farington's own History of the River Thames, illustrated entirely with hand-coloured aquatints, had been a notably lavish example, while the antiquary John Britton had an entire stable of draughtsmen and painters busy on projects.īut none of these had engaged the scale of capital investment that the publisher Longman committed to The General History of the County of York. The recent wars with France fuelled a hunger for images of Britain. Since the appearance of Thomas Hearne's Antiquities of Great Britain in the 1770s, watercolour painting and antiquarian publishing had advanced hand-in-hand. Yet it was reported that Turner originally asked 40 guineas. Three thousand guineas – 25 guineas for each watercolour – was a colossal sum. He proposed to set off very soon for Yorkshire to collect other subjects." Many of the subjects required, he said, he had now in his possession. The news was already the talk of the London art world then on, as they were filing into a banquet at the Mansion House, the veteran painter Joseph Farington came alongside Turner to check the details for himself, which he duly noted in his diary: "Turner told me that he had made an engagement to make 120 drawings, views of various kinds in Yorkshire, for a History of Yorkshire, for which he was to have 3,000 guineas.
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