Turner visited the north of England as a young man in 1797. This watercolour is based on a sketch made during this tour. Its Northumberland leg included Warkworth, Bamburgh and Lindisfarne as well as Dunstanburgh, just north of Craster. This dramatic view of Dunstanburgh Castle demonstrates the generally darker colour palette Turner used in his early career.

Turner’s travels on the continent allowed him to expand his range of landscape subject matter. This watercolour drawing on blue paper shows the Belgian city of Dinant from the north-west. Turner based his composition on a pencil sketch made during his second tour of the rivers Meuse and Mosel in 1839. He intended the view for a ‘Rivers of Europe’ print series, but only the drawings of the Loire and the Seine were actually published. These earlier French views also include Turner’s most extensive exploration of steamboats.

According to the family of Turner’s friend and patron, Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall, Turner made this watercolour at Farnley after being asked to draw a Royal Navy ‘ship of the line.’ The warship depicted is a ‘first rate’ ship with over 110 guns. Temeraire, by contrast, was a ‘second rate’ ship with 90-98, plus lighter guns. Turner’s watercolour emphasises the warship’s size and demonstrates the depth of his knowledge given that the drawing was an act of memory made at a moment’s notice.

In 1823, Turner received his only royal commission: a painting commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar. He made two oil sketches in preparation for his enormous, finished canvas, which is now in the National Maritime Museum. This first sketch focuses on the ships’ positions, with Victory, British naval commander Horatio Nelson’s flagship, front and centre. Temeraire’s position is unclear here but can be glimpsed on the right of Turner’s finished composition.

In his second sketch, we see how Turner has developed the scene. Rather than focusing our attention on the death of Nelson on board the Victory, Turner emphasises the drowning figures in the sea. In this way, his painting laments the horrors and loss of life faced by ordinary seamen in the battle rather than glorifying it.

This oil sketch is by the Sunderland-born Clarkson Stanfield. He made it in preparation for his larger view of the battle for the United Services Club in Pall Mall. Stanfield had been a sailor, and painted theatre scenery before becoming one of the leading marine painters of his day (second only, perhaps, to Turner, whom he admired and was friendly with).

In the painting, Temeraire is the furthest left of the three ships in the centre. Lashed to Temeraire with a mast lying across the deck and almost central in the image is the French ship Redoubtable. From the other side, Temeraire is firing at the approaching ship, Fougueux. Victory is seen centre-right.

The Temeraire is depicted on its final journey to be scrapped. It is towed by a steam tug along the Thames from Sheerness in Kent to Rotherhithe in south-east London. The old ship appears ghostlike and the setting sun signals the end of the heroic age of sail which is juxtaposed by the fiery smoke produced by the newer technology of the steamboat. It took around two days to move the ship, using two paddle-wheel steam tugs named Samson and London, both of which had been built in Tyneside.

Built from the wood of over 5000 oaks, the Temeraire had played a significant part in the victorious Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but by 1820 had been decommissioned. Turner's depiction of the ship's final journey is largely an imagined account.

This model is a representation of a tug built on the Tyne in 1833. The Tyne-built tug boats hired to tow Temeraire, London and Samson, were larger and more powerful, but the model gives a useful idea of how they would have looked. If you compare the model to the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire, you can see how Turner employed artistic licence by placing his tugboat’s funnel in an impossible position.

This model was probably only made due to the mythology that surrounds The Fighting Temeraire. There is a persistent tradition that Monarch towed Temeraire on its final journey, but no contemporary evidence seems to support it.

A note Turner made on the back of this painting suggests it is a ‘first sketch’ for The Fighting Temeraire. The ship itself is barely visible, the vessel on the right being the Nore lightship, which warned passing ships about a sandbank at the mouth of the Thames. Only the presence of the steam tug on the left makes it possible to imagine this canvas as a first idea for the finished painting.

Peace – Burial at Sea has much in common with The Fighting Temeraire. Both are examples of Turner’s late exhibited paintings; both subjects include a combination of steam and sail power; and both are imagined compositions displayed by the artist alongside texts explicitly linking them to real contemporary events. In the case of Peace, the event was the funeral of Turner’s friend and artistic contemporary, David Wilkie, on board the steamship Oriental. The intense black of the sails was criticised when Turner exhibited the painting. Fitting for a funeral, dramatic black is also seen elsewhere in the canvas, and perhaps echoes the coal fuelling the steamship.

In this unfinished canvas, Turner evoked the smoky atmosphere and murkiness of the Thames during the 1830s. The river was polluted with sewage and the spoils of industry. One of Turner’s contemporaries, the northeast-born artist John Martin (also an important figure within the Laing’s collection) proposed a plan to divert sewage from the Thames. This never came to fruition, but Turner served on a commission investigating the scheme, so must also have taken an interest in the poor state of the river.

Carmichael, a celebrated Newcastle marine artist, shared Turner’s interest in capturing the industrial aspects of the region’s landscape. This grand and sweeping view of the Tyne from the Newcastle side includes a steam paddle tug – considerably smaller than the ones hired to tow the Temeraire a few years later - towing a brig towards the mouth of the Tyne. A group of sailors is rigging the ship by the riverbank. The figures in the foreground enjoy some leisure time as the busy river stretches out before them, the city’s historic landmarks visible in the distance.

Lowry is celebrated for his industrial subjects. The setting of this scene is not known, though it is possible that it is inspired by the northeast, as Lowry passed through the area regularly in the 1930s on his way to visit Berwick-upon-Tweed. The distinctive form of a winding-gear for coal can be seen on the right. Like Turner, Lowry seems to revel in the depiction of dark smoke and the industry of the river. Both artists employed a significant degree of imagination when recreating the industrial landscapes they had experienced.

Prunella Clough was interested in forgotten aspects of the urban landscape. Her subjects include spoil heaps and abandoned pits. This painting of a mining landscape feels forlorn and shadowy, the texture of the paint surface signalling the rockiness of the scene. She has said of her work: ‘the kind of landscape I am dealing with… demands something tougher and more brutal in terms of pictorial response.’

Monument depicts an abandoned coal distribution tower on the Northumberland coast. Kippin has noted that coalmining was, ‘basically an unsafe industry,’ in which, ‘many, many people lost their lives or were injured.’ He goes on to say: ‘But it’s also viewed nostalgically… it’s something which, understandably, communities were built around.’