Scene in Southern France

Scene in Southern France, painted around 1813, reflects Turner's experience of the French Mediterranean landscape gained on his 1802 journey through France, which introduced him to a quality of southern light quite different from the atmospheric conditions of northern Europe. The dry clarity of Mediterranean France, the ochre and terracotta of the built landscape, the cypresses and olive trees of the south — all were registered in his sketch books and processed into studio paintings over the following years. The 1802 French journey had been his only direct experience of Mediterranean light before his first Italian visit in 1819, and the southern French subjects of the intervening decade show him working with remembered impressions rather than fresh observation. The relatively warm and clear palette of these southern French paintings contrasts with the more atmospheric northern subjects of the same period, documenting how Turner understood that different geographies required different chromatic solutions.

Turner renders the southern landscape with warm, luminous tonalities, using the increased intensity of Mediterranean light to push his palette toward the brilliant effects of his later work.