A Beech Wood with Gypsies seated in the Distance

Around 1800 the young Turner had just become an Associate of the Royal Academy. He was in his mid-twenties, ambitious, and landscape was still treated as a lesser branch of painting, ranked below grand scenes from history and myth. This small panel, barely the size of a book, is one answer to that. The beech trees take up almost the whole picture. The travellers of the title are seated so far back that you have to hunt for them among the trunks, tiny and easy to miss. Turner usually built his landscapes in the studio from pencil notes and memory rather than painting outdoors, which makes this close, quiet study of a single stand of trees feel unusually private. It has a companion piece showing figures gathered round a campfire in the same kind of wood.