Ilam Rock, Dovedale, Derbyshire 

This watercolor of Ilam Rock, Dovedale, Derbyshire, was made by J.M.W. Turner, an artist who, throughout his life, relentlessly questioned the social and institutional conventions of the British art world. Here, Turner portrays the sublime power of nature at a time when the Industrial Revolution was changing the British landscape and how people related to it. The light and airy watercolor technique gives a sense of immediacy, but also, perhaps, of nature's ephemerality in the face of modernity. England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a rise in landscape painting driven, in part, by a growing sense of national identity, as well as a newly wealthy merchant class keen to display their status through art collecting. To fully understand Turner, scholars rely on a wealth of sources: exhibition reviews, sales records, personal letters, and the records of institutions like the Royal Academy, where he was a sometimes fractious member. Only by understanding the complex web of social, economic, and institutional forces that shaped Turner's world can we truly appreciate the radical nature of his art.