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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > London, Oxford and the Home Counties ... > The Burning of the Pantheon, Oxford ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Interior of the Ruined Oxford Street Pantheon 1792

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Interior of the Ruined Oxford Street Pantheon’ 1792
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Interior of the Ruined Oxford Street Pantheon 1792
D00122
Turner Bequest IX B
Pencil, watercolour and pen and brown ink on white laid paper, 247 x 187 mm
Stamped in black ‘IX B’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
For the Pantheon and its destruction by fire see Tate D00121 (Turner Bequest IX A). This is a study for the finished watercolour that Turner executed for Thomas Hardwick, now in a private collection.1 Gage sees in this drawing ‘the first and brilliant signs of a wholly painterly approach to colour’, though note the almost equally adventurous Cottage Interior by Firelight (Tate D00187; Turner Bequest XVII L) of about a year earlier. The rendering of sunlight on brick in this study can be compared with the similar effect in the finished watercolour of the exterior of the ruins (D00121).
There are colour trials on the verso (D41453; Turner Bequest IX Bv).
1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.303 no.28, reproduced.
Technical notes:
The sheet may have been cut along the upper edge.

Andrew Wilton
April 2012

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘The Interior of the Ruined Oxford Street Pantheon 1792 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2012, 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-interior-of-the-ruined-oxford-street-pantheon-r1140044, accessed 24 April 2024.