What was the purpose of J.M.W. Turner’s Liber Studiorum series?

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J.M.W. Turner: The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838 — J.M.W. Turner *The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838*, oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, 1839; in the National Gallery, London.

The Liber Studiorum was a major project initiated by J.M.W. Turner in 1807, inspired in part by the Liber veritatis of the 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain.1

The primary purpose of the series was to document the vast variety and range of landscape art. Turner intended to showcase different styles of landscape composition, which he categorized into several distinct genres:1

Historical
Architectural
Mountainous
Pastoral
Marine1

To achieve this, Turner utilized subjects from his own existing paintings and watercolors. Although he employed various engravers, he maintained strict control over the project, supervising every stage of production, etching many of the plates himself, and creating numerous preparatory drawings. While originally envisioned as a collection of 100 plates, the project was abandoned in 1819 after 71 plates had been issued.1