Le lac Buttermere, avec une partie de Cromackwater, Cumberland, une averse

Turner made the drawings for this on his first tour of the north of England, in 1797. He was 22, and the war with France had shut the continent to English travellers, so the Lake District was getting the attention Italy and the Alps would have had. He worked the sketches up into this canvas for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1798, the first year the Academy allowed exhibitors to print lines of poetry beside their titles in the catalogue. Turner took the chance at once and quoted James Thomson on the rainbow, from a long poem about the seasons that every educated visitor would have known. The bow he painted is white rather than coloured, and it stands in a position no real rainbow could take.