Joseph Mallord William Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner stands among the defining figures of British Romantic landscape painting, celebrated for the luminous atmospheric effects he drew from watercolour and from the careful layering of translucent washes. The single sheet held here belongs to the earliest phase of that practice, worked in watercolour over graphite and dated by the Met to 1790. Its subject, Dark Prison (Carcere Oscura), turns to architecture and shadow rather than open landscape, hinting at the dramatic interiors that would occupy him later. The collection preserves this one example of his graphic work from that year, offering a compact glimpse of a young artist already alert to light, gloom and structural drama.
1 works in the collection · All public domain (CC0)
