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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Liber Studiorum notes c.1807-19 > Liber Notes (2) Sketchbook [Finberg CLIV ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Trees and Buildings beside a River: ?Syon House on the Thames c.1808-18

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Trees and Buildings beside a River: ?Syon House on the Thames’ c.1808-18
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 56 Verso:
Trees and Buildings beside a River: ?Syon House on the Thames c.1808–18
D12199
Turner Bequest CLIV a 55a
Pencil on white wove paper, 89 x 112 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, the building (or buildings) in the distance is possibly Syon House, the Duke of Northumberland’s seat on the leafy west bank of the River Thames at Brentford, just north of Isleworth, where Turner lived at Syon Ferry House in 1805.1 Studies of the mansion from around that time include two watercolours (Tate D04163, D08269; Turner Bequest LXX L, CXXI M) and views in the Studies for Pictures: Isleworth sketchbook (Tate D05501, D05507, D05543, D05602; Turner Bequest XC 8a, 12, 35, 72a), the Hesperides (1) sketchbook (Tate D05784; Turner Bequest XCIII 11) and the Wey, Guildford sketchbook (Tate D06195; Turner Bequest XCVIII 11). A slight view in the later Finance sketchbook (Tate D08349; Turner Bequest CXXII 41a) may also show it.
Other drawings in the present book were made at Richmond, just across the Thames (see the Introduction).

Matthew Imms
September 2013

1
See David Hill, Turner on the Thames: River Journeys in the Year 1805, New Haven and London 1993.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Trees and Buildings beside a River: ?Syon House on the Thames c.1808–18 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-trees-and-buildings-beside-a-river-syon-house-on-the-thames-r1147616, accessed 19 April 2024.