Raby Castle, the Seat of the Earl of Darlington

In August 1817 Turner crossed to the Continent for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars had ended, visiting the battlefield of Waterloo and sketching along the Rhine. That autumn he went north to County Durham, to Raby Castle, the seat of William Harry Vane, the third Earl of Darlington, who had commissioned a portrait of his house. The earl was a passionate fox-hunter who kept two packs of hounds and rode out with them on alternate days, so the hunt went into the picture. The castle sits small in the middle distance under a vast, broken sky, while hounds stream across the foreground and red-coated riders gallop over the slope on the right. When the canvas hung at the Royal Academy in 1818, it also showed a mounted huntsman up front. One critic called it a “detestable fox-hunting scene”, and Turner later painted that rider out.