'Crossing the Brook', Joseph Mallord William Turner

Artwork details

Artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775‑1851)

Title

Crossing the Brook

Date exhibited 1815

MediumOil paint on canvas

Dimensionssupport: 1930 x 1651 mm frame: 2060 x 2350 x 180 mm

Collection

Tate

Acquisition Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Reference

N00497

On display at Tate Britain

Theme: Turner Collection

Room: Turner as a British Artist

Display caption

This painting is the culmination of Turner’s studies of Devon, which he visited in 1811 and 1813. His watercolours and drawings of the area were remarkably fresh and informal. Here, however, he creates a more monumental and self-consciously artful image in the mould of the seventeenth-century classical landscape painter, Claude Lorrain. Even so, contemporaries recognised that the scene was intended to show a particular place: the Tamar valley.

This painting was exhibited in the year of the battle of Waterloo. It would have been hard to avoid the patriotic subtext of such a grandly ambitious depiction of the national landscape.

September 2004