The Trout Stream

Between 1802 and 1817 Turner did not cross the Channel. The war with Napoleon had closed the Continent to British travellers, so the tours that fed his pictures went to Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland instead, and to the country houses of his patrons. A fellow artist who watched him on one of those trips in 1808 complained that he was occupied in fishing rather than painting. Turner fished all his life, and what he painted the next year was a stretch of the River Dee in north Wales with anglers working the water and weather coming down over the hills behind them. He did not send it to the Royal Academy. It hung in his own gallery on Queen Anne Street, where the Earl of Essex bought it for his park at Cassiobury in Hertfordshire.