On Turner's journey through Brittany and up the River Loire, he filled several sketchbooks with impressions of famous Loire chateaux, such as Amboise, Blois, Chambord and Saumur. Many of his sketches are identified and reproduced in this volume, together with all of the celebrated watercolours that Turner produced to be engraved in 1833. Several of these were later owned by John Ruskin, and the text examines the influence Turner's drawings had on Ruskin and his followers. Turner was at the forefront of an invasion of the Loire region by artists, most of whom were British, as is plain from illustrated examples by contemporaries such as Samuel Prout, William Callow and Clarkson Stanfield, as well as views by French artists like Delacroix.