Topographies

In 1819, with casual fluency and topographical integrity, the mature J.M.W. Turner rendered the Roman Campagna in watercolor, as above.

Twenty years earlier, still a striving youth, Turner had worked up a far tighter series of church interiors, careful gouaches executed in a small notebook with square-ish pages, some of them photographed below.

These pleasing relics are preserved at the Tate Galley in London where they were deposited at the time of the artist's death, early in Queen Victoria's reign.