Castelo de Kilgarren, Pembrokeshire

Turner was 23 when he rode through South Wales in the summer of 1798. War with France had shut British travellers out of the Continent since 1793, and the fashionable tour had swung inland, towards the Wye, Snowdonia and ruins like Cilgerran, which sits on a wooded gorge above the river Teifi. He worked the castle up into an oil and sent it to the Royal Academy in 1799 as Kilgarren Castle on the Twyvey, hazy sunrise, previous to a sultry day. The Academy had just begun letting exhibitors print lines of verse and long descriptions beside their titles, and Turner took to the new freedom immediately, naming the hour and the weather ahead of the building. That November he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy at 24, the youngest age the rules allowed.