On Turner's 1826 journey through Brittany and up the River Loire, he filled several sketchbooks with hasty impressions of famous chateaux. Many of his sketches are identified and reproduced here for the first time, together with all of the justly celebrated watercolors that Turner produced to be engraved in 1833. 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.