George Turner Crossing the Ford

An original late 19th-century watercolour painting, George Turner, Crossing the Ford.

A delightful pastoral watercolour by George Turner (1841–1910), who is known as 'Derbyshire's John Constable'. Turner's rural subjects are prized for depicting the English countryside before the coming of mechanisation, the motor car and urban expansion.

Many of Turner's landscapes are local to Derbyshire, where the artist lived all his life and was also a working farmer. Here he depicts a horse-drawn cart entering the water—a charming bygone pre-industrial view, evocative in particular of Constable's 1821 'Haywain'—where the crossing of water depended on local knowledge in the absence of major transport routes.

Turner produced an oil painting on a similar subject, 'Fording the Brook', in 1895, which is in the collection of Derby Museum & Art Gallery.

On board.