J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Thames sketchbooks c.1804-14 > Thames, from Reading to Walton ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The River Thames and Shillingford Bridge from the East, with Dorchester Abbey in the Distance to the Right; Wittenham Clumps above the Hotel to the Left 1805

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The River Thames and Shillingford Bridge from the East, with Dorchester Abbey in the Distance to the Right; Wittenham Clumps above the Hotel to the Left’ 1805
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The River Thames and Shillingford Bridge from the East, with Dorchester Abbey in the Distance to the Right; Wittenham Clumps above the Hotel to the Left 1805
D05944
Turner Bequest XCV 40
Pencil on white wove paper, 259 x 370 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘40’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘XCV 40’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is a right-hand page from the sketchbook, and one of two drawings from it depicting Shillingford Bridge from opposite directions; the eastward view is Tate D05934; Turner Bequest XCV 30. As Hill observes, staining and marking of the paper suggests that the two were originally adjacent with the present leaf coming first. It is the more detailed, as ‘time-consuming as any made on this tour’.1 It looks west to the wooden bridge built in 1786, with the inn now the Shillingford Bridge Hotel on the left and behind it the Sinodun Hills and Wittenham Clumps, and Dorchester Abbey in the middle distance on the right. Shillingford seems to have been an evening stop on Turner’s tour and the view looks into the evening sun, seen low in the sky above the inn in the north-west, confirming midsummer, as Hill notes.2
1
Hill 1993, p.111.
2
Ibid., p.171.
Verso:
Blank. Laid down.

David Blayney Brown
February 2009

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘The River Thames and Shillingford Bridge from the East, with Dorchester Abbey in the Distance to the Right; Wittenham Clumps above the Hotel to the Left 1805 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 2009, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-river-thames-and-shillingford-bridge-from-the-east-with-r1129977, accessed 26 April 2024.