Turner to Monet Turner looks to Claude Lorrain, the great
artistic model of seventeenth-century Classical landscape
painting, for his composition of Crossing the brook. Devices
include framing trees to left and right, while Turner also uses
light to lead the eye through a curving central valley until it
meets a limpid white sky, which dissipates upwards into palest
blue. Dark planes intersect in the foreground across the front
of the water, down through the foliage and tunnel path on the
right. A spotlight picks out three figures who ford the brook:
one girl has waded across, then looks back to her dog in
midstream. The animal helps by carrying her basket, while
another young woman prepares on the far bank by removing her
shoes and tucking up her dress. Further along the valley are an
aqueduct and large waterwheel. We are not in the Roman campagna,
however, but rather in an equivocal English Arcadia. The brook
leads into the River Tamar, which divides Devon from Cornwall,
while the arches belong to Calstock B