Turner’s adventures across Britain and continental Europe were a significant source of inspiration for his landscape paintings. Although he preferred to paint indoors in his studio, the line drawings, sketches and watercolours he produced en plein air constituted a fount of stored memories. They were used as notes for imaginative compositions, becoming scenic elements in the final constructed image.
Turner often intertwined past events or mythological tales in his landscapes. One example is The Devil’s Bridge and Schöllenen Gorge, a sketch made by Turner during his travels in the Swiss Alps in 1802. The
original bridge was destroyed during battles between French and Russian troops in 1799.Turner used the rebuilt bridge to visualise the battle scene, adding imagined depictions of small soldiers and pack-mules, dotted
across the chasmic gorge.These help the viewer to perceive the grand scale of the landscape as Turner would have experienced it.
That same year Turner also visited Grenoble. His views and memories of the city, and the bridge across the Isère River, became combined in four colour studies made for a finished watercolour around 1824. The series
illustrates Turner’s painterly process, step by step, from the earliest of the watercolours with its indistinct and dissolved colours,to the last,in which details clearly emerge, saturated with colour.
Turner’s methods of evolving exhibition pictures can be seen in oil sketches of Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus and The Parting of Hero and Leander. These combined memories of Mediterranean scenery, pictures
by Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, and his reading of classical literature in translation.