Morgen in den Coniston Fells, Cumberland

Turner had toured the Lake District in 1797 and come back with the shape of Coniston Old Man, the mountain rising through the mist here. When he showed this at the Royal Academy in 1798, he did something he had never done before: he printed lines of poetry beside it in the catalogue, four lines from Milton's Paradise Lost about mists and exhalations rising at dawn. It was the first year the Academy allowed such quotations, and Turner, then 23, seized on it. From then on he kept pairing his pictures with verse. The light breaking over the wet crags and the low cloud is really the whole subject, worked up from sketches he had made on the spot the year before.