An artist on home ground

Even the cows are in the same place. Two hundred years after Turner stood on this very spot and sketched the ruins of Bolton Abbey, the view has hardly changed.

Up here, between Ilkley and Skipton, the wooded slopes still slope woodily, the River Wharfe still meanders, stepping stones still stretch across it... and a herd of cows still graze where Turner put them. The only major change, if you walk down into the view, is the ice cream kiosk now perched near the riverbank.

If it was here in 1808, Turner chose to ignore it.

In a curious way (which we'll come to), the kiosk sums up the importance of Turner's huge output of landscapes, which is celebrated in new Turner Trails through Yorkshire. Devised by Welcome to Yorkshire, the county's tourism agency, the project pinpoints 70 sites –buildings and landscapes – that inspired the artist over his many visits.

They range over country and coast, from Richmond and Whitby Abbey in the north to Conisbrough Castle and Rotherham Minster in the south, from Scarborough and Beverley Minster in the east to great swathes of the Dales in the west – coves, caves, crags, tarns, scars and falls.

Drawing on Turner's 100-or-so Yorkshire watercolours and 1,000 sketches, they will feature interpretation boards, then-and-now comparisons, audio trails and self-guided walks in and around York, Wakefield, Pickering, Knaresborough, Skipton, Sutton Bank... you name it, Turner probably painted it.

All told, in his travels through Britain and Europe he turned out 30,000 sketches, 2,000 watercolours and about 700 oil paintings.

"He was very industrious, working every day from first light to last, from morn till night," says David Hill, academic consultant to the trails project, which is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. "On one tour he did 550 sketches in three weeks, and covered the same number of miles. On his first visit to Bolton Abbey in 1797, he was on his way back to York from Skipton and stopped at an inn at Bolton Bridge for the horses to be changed. He literally ran up to the abbey – a mile – to get a quick sketch."

Hill, Harewood Professor of Fine Art at Leeds University, is a leading authority on Turner and has written nine books on him, the most recent concentrating on his work in and around Leeds. He is now taking me "Turnering" (his word), exploring the artist's landscapes with irrepressible enthusiam. He has brought copies of three of Turner's watercolours of Bolton Abbey and a lifetime's knowledge of the artist.

"This is a very Turnerish journey," he says as we drive north west from Leeds. "He would have arrived in the city by stagecoach, a two-day journey from London that you can now do in two hours. Every day of travel for Turner has become an hour now. Once on the moors he only covered 11 miles in nine hours; the horse was up to its flanks in mud. He would have come up the old Otley Road to Farnley, which is just over on the right round this bend..."

A kestrel hovers and, nestling in the trees, Farnley Hall – Elizabethan-plus-Georgian – comes into view, shimmering in a soft golden light that Turner himself would have been proud of. Farnley was the home of Walter Fawkes, his friend and patron. As Arthur Mee's King's England noted 70 years ago, it was the artist's second home for 17 years. "He would stand by the window or walk on the terraces for hours together, watching the changing sky and the light and shade in the valley," Mee wrote. "It was after gazing on this scene that he painted his picture of Hannibal crossing the Alps."

Fawkes's hospitality didn't, however, dilute Turner's keen business sense. "Fawkes bought over 200 of his watercolours and a dozen oil paintings," says Hill. "He spent thousands and thousands of pounds, but at one time Turner noted Fawkes owed him 3,000 – and he was charging him interest on it!"

Turner liked Yorkshire. "He wasn't very comfortable in company; he wasn't a very sociable animal, a bit of a misanthrope in some ways, but he could relax and be himself in Yorkshire. He didn't feel under any great artistic pressure and said the landscape of Yorkshire 'first opened to him the labour and love of his life'." Ruskin said that of all Turner's pictures, his Yorkshire ones "had the most heart

in them".

The artist was 22 when he first came to Yorkshire, a London hairdresser's son lured north by the enthusiasm of the Lascelles family (of Harewood House) for his work. Twenty years later, he was so well-established that he landed a 3,000 guinea commission to illustrate a history of Yorkshire, and embarked on a two-month Grand Tour of the county.

One of the 400 or so sketches he produced on this tour was the basis of one of the Bolton Abbey watercolour reproductions which David Hill has brought along. Painted in 1825, nine years after he sketched it, it's one of Hill's very favourite Turners.

Where the earlier picture (the one with the cows) is comparatively conventional in its composition, documenting the scene and emphasising its picturesqueness, the later one is almost eccentric. The focus is an angler sitting on the banks of the Wharfe, probably tying a fly. Newly caught fish spill out of his basket, the rocks loom grandly on the right and there's a sense of contented security in the most sublime setting. But where's Bolton Abbey? Only its east end edges in on the left, a sliver of stone peeping round the edge of the frame.

With us is Yorkshire Post photographer Bruce Rollinson. He sizes up the picture, strides up and down the river bank looking for Turner's likely viewpoint, shakes his head a lot, and reckons the artist radically compacted the broad view to get everything he wanted in one picture. It would need an extreme wide-angle lens to capture the full panorama, he says.

Yes, says Hill, Turner compressed it, slid that bit of landscape behind the trees, edited out that space, assimilated the view's different aspects. "This was a relatively well-worn subject when he came here," he says. "He wanted to do something personal and idiosyncratic and convey his enjoyment of the place. He calculatedly cut out the abbey. Enjoyment wasn't necessarily in the building. It could have been the fishing, the weather, sitting on the sun-warmed stones, the physical engagement with the place. The picture is about his own immersion in the landscape."

"Turner can open your eyes to the world in a way that no-one else can. He dedicated his life to looking at things as freshly as he could."

He was, says Hill, fascinated by "the phenomena of Nature... Nature itself became his main topic"; he conveys "the excitement of being there".

The "there" might be Scarborough harbour bristling with masts and the castle outline bathed in morning light. "Nothing is so perfectly calm as Turner's calmness," wrote Ruskin of the picture, "and I know very few better examples of this calmness... an infinitude of peace."

Or the "there" might be Whitby

Abbey, painted before its tower collapsed, with fishermen hauling nets into their boats. Or smoke-swathed Leeds in 1816, with its factory chimneys and toiling labourers in one of the first canvases of an industrial landscape. Or Richmond glowing on a sunny day, its streets straggling uphill to the castle. They all follow Ruskin's view that "the aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts."

Such pictures are reckoned to have changed popular perception of Yorkshire landscapes, which had long been thought of as desolate. Turner made them places of beauty, full of clouds and light and atmosphere. "He established the idea of 'heritage'," says David Hill. "The pictures were engraved and published over the 19th century and what they do is create an expectation of what a place will be like, so sites were "managed" to look like the pictures. It became a major conservation issue."

So important did Turner's legacy become that campaigners

successfully got a railway line rerouted at Aysgarth Falls, near Hawes, so that the familiar view he depicted would not be spoiled.

His pictures lured the crowds, creating a market for what might now be called tourist infrastructure. Hence, if you like, the ice cream kiosk at Bolton Abbey.

For details of the trails see www.yorkshire.com/turner.

YP MAG 26/6/10