How JMW Turner helped shape the modern holiday map of Europe

Telegraph

23-04-2025

Many things influence our decisions about where in the world we want to travel. The enthusiasm of friends, evocative writing, the romance of childhood memories, a simple urge for some sunshine, a random promotion by a cheap airline.
But surely, in the our contemporary world, it is the power of images which prevails. Whether on this website, on Instagram or Facebook, in ads or promotions, a stunning or alluring photograph can be more than enough to seduce us into a booking or at least into exploring our options.
But what about the early of days of leisure travel, two or more centuries ago? Then the only way of visualising the wonders of the world was through paintings and prints. In fact, you could make an argument for Canaletto being the first artist to develop a successful business on the back of tourism. His sunny alluring prospects of Venice were, on a more epic scale, the first postcards.
The vast majority of his works were commissioned by the Grand Tourists of the 18th century, young aristocrats who travelled to Italy for a year or two, to complete their classical education – and to have some fun in the bordellos and casinos of Venice. Canaletto provided a suitably tasteful record of this most beautiful of cities that they could hang on the walls of their stately homes and his canvases were shipped back to Britain in their dozens. Canaletto profited further from his reputation, visiting England repeatedly between 1746-56, mostly to depict scenic views of the Thames between Greenwich and Eton.
As for the more exotic destinations which were also coming to public attention during the age of exploration and discovery, Captain Cook always travelled with an official artist on board his ships so, as the Admiralty put it, 'to give a more perfect idea [of the destinations] than can be formed from written descriptions only'.
The most famous was William Hodges, who accompanied Cook's second voyage to the Pacific between 1772-75. He depicted many landscapes in the South Sea Islands and New Zealand, often sketching on location in the open air.
But most important to the history of modern tourism was JMW Turner, who was born exactly 250 years ago, just as Hodges was returning from the Pacific. Turner was an inveterate traveller who followed in the footsteps of the aristocratic Grand Tourists, but with an entirely different mindset
The son of a Covent Garden barber and wig-maker, and without any family money behind him, he had to develop a strong commercial instinct in order to to make a living from his art. He also seems to have enjoyed a natural wanderlust, and took advantage of the growing network of steam packets which were making it both quicker and more reliable to cross the Channel and then to travel up and down the Rhine.
His earliest travels were hindered by the fallout from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. But he was a brave adventurer and – in 1802, as a 27 year old – was among the first from Britain to head to the Continent when the Peace of Amiens created a brief window in hostilities. With his sketch book and paintbrush in hand, he crossed over to France and headed deep into the Swiss Alps, as far as the dramatic Devil's Bridge which crosses Schöllenen Gorge, a gateway to the St Gotthard Pass.
You couldn't call Turner a documentary artist. He put a strong emphasis on the grandeur of landscapes and his taste for the dramatic was ideally suited to spectacular peaks of the Alps. It was also in line with the zeitgeist of the time – inspired by Wordsworth's enthusiasm for the 'sublime' appeal of the natural world – and it played well with the art-buying public. This was an era when travel was quickly becoming affordable for more people than just the aristocracy and a new breed of wealthy, middle-class sightseers was also hungry for paintings and prints of Europe's most scenic beauty spots.
Turner would spend his summers on the road, filling his sketchbooks with watercolours of his favourite views. In winter, back in his London studio, he would work them up into paintings and – another string to his commercial bow – as prints.
He travelled around Britain too – especially between 1827-38, when he was working on a huge series of Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of England and Wales, an invaluable record of what were then considered the country's most appreciated and desirable beauty spots. The prints were marketed either individually or in sets, like a visual bucket list for travellers on staycations in the early decades of the 19th century.
That bucket list also extended through the Low Countries, the Rhineland and many parts of Italy, especially Venice. As part of those travels, Turner enjoyed some of the earliest river cruises, sketching the highlights as he chugged gently not only up the Rhine, but also the Loire and the Seine.
Prints from these sketches were marketed as 'Turner's Annual Tour' and released in time for Christmas – an ideal present for the would-be traveller. As such, they were a direct vision of the future of leisure travel and the way it would soon be marketed by tour operators and travel agents. Indeed, you could see them as an anticipation of Instagram, but without the selfies.
The connection with tour operators soon proved to be even more direct. Of all the destinations he explored on the Continent, it was the Alps which seem to have inspired him most. He visited Switzerland again several times during the 1830s and 1840s and some of his most famous images of the time were his watercolours capturing the many moods of the Rigi mountain overlooking Lake Lucerne.
He sketched and painted its great pyramidal bulk more than 30 times and was partly responsible for popularising both Lucerne and the mountain itself with British travellers. When Thomas Cook ran its first package tour to Switzerland in 1863 (12 years after Turner's death), the highlight of the trip was an ascent of the Rigi to watch the sunrise. And when Queen Victoria spent a month by the lake in the summer of 1868 its status as one of the leading tourist attractions in Europe was cemented for decades to come. She even made it up to the top of the Rigi, partly by sedan chair, partly riding side-saddle on a pony.
Turner certainly knew what would please his buyers, but great artist as he was, he did not limit himself to agreeable prospects of the sort that Canaletto had churned out. There was also grit to his work – subtle political references and social critiques which, today, we might even call reportage.
In an apparently idyllic moonlit scene in Venice made in 1840, for example, lurks the silhouette of an Austrian soldier, rifle on his shoulder standing by his sentry box outside the Doge's Palace. It's a direct reminder that this was a city under occupation.
He was also one of the first battlefield tourists, visiting Waterloo in 1817 – just two years after the defeat of Napoleon – and employed a veteran to give him a proper a guided tour. The result was an apocalyptic painting emphasising the horror of the battle. Not an obvious inspiration for would be tourists, you might think. But then again, maybe it is. Maybe it is one of the first examples of the power of travel, of how actually visiting a place can change the way we understand and feel about history.
Turner also used landscapes to make reference to political battlegrounds. Ten years after he visited Waterloo, he was in Wiltshire. In a pleasing prospect of the Downs looking towards Salisbury cathedral, he included the ancient earthworks of Old Sarum in the foreground. This was a clear reference to the political controversies of the time.
Old Sarum was the most notorious of the Rotten Boroughs – parliamentary constituencies with tiny electorates (in this case 11 men) which were entitled to return MPs to Westminster, and which were soon to be swept away by the Great Reform Act of 1832. (Ironically the bill had been vehemently opposed by the great victor at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington). The age of leisure travel may have been just beginning, but there was nothing new about political corruption.
The essentials
The best place to see Turner's work is Tate Britain, which has by far the biggest collection of his work. The National Gallery also has some of his most famous paintings and Turner House, where he lived in Twickenham and which is now a museum, is holding an anniversary exhibition, Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts, from April 23-October 26. For hotel recommendations in Lucerne see here.