I have just returned from a few days in the Loire Valley where I stayed with friends who run a wonderful and highly recommendable French holiday gite. The Loire Valley is World renown for its wine and historical architecture – most notably the extravagant castles, but it also has an impressionist connection. The above painting is of the castle at Saumur, painted from the left bank of the Loire River by William Turner, a British Romantic painter whose work is often regarded as a forerunner to French Impressionism.

The view today of Saumur from the left bank of the Loire River Turner painted in the late 1820s.

William Turner is widely credited with having raised the profile of ‘landscape painting’ to rival the so-called ‘history painting. He was both fascinated and preoccupied with light, and although well-known for his oil paintings (above), he is also considered one of the greatest British watercolour landscape artists (see below). Not surprisingly he became known of as the ‘painter of light’. Equally unsurprising then is the fact that Turner was greatly admired by Claude Monet and the other French impressionist painters, also concerned with the effects of light on a subject, as well as painting ‘en plein air’ (in the open).

A watercolour by William Turner of Saumur from the right bank of the Loire River (Tate Collection).

There is some discussion and debate about the exact date of these paintings. We know Turner travelled from Nantes to Orleans along the Loire River in 1826. And it was the sketches he made on that journey that formed the basis of the paintings reproduced here (and others). The watercolour appeared in ‘Turner’s Annual Tour – the Loire’, which was published in 1833. It is, however, generally accepted that the paintings were finished before 1830.

An oil by Turner from the right bank of the Loire River.