Joseph Mallord William Turner

Provenance:
...
Henry Vaughan by 1878, and possibly by 1862

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by Turner and William Say, ‘ISIS’, published Turner, 1 January 1819

Turner’s Liber Studiorum composition is based on his painting, traditionally known as The Thames at Weybridge, of circa 1805–6 (Tate, T03872, displayed at Petworth House, West Sussex),1 then in the collection of his patron Lord Egremont – as indicated by the lettering of the published print. Other Liber studies (Tate D08114, D08185; Turner Bequest CXVI M, CXVIII e) relate to Turner’s paintings in the same collection; as do the unpublished prints Narcissus and Echo,2 for which no drawing is known, and (at one remove, from Turner’s painting, Tate N00495,3 based on Egremont’s Claude) Apullia in Search of Appullus4 (see general Liber introduction).

The Weybridge identification of the painting is longstanding, but the composition is based on elements of the landscape some miles to the north-east, along the Thames at Isleworth where Turner lived at Syon Ferry House in 1805.5 Around Oxford, the Thames is locally known as the Isis (derived from an ancient form of its name, ‘Tamesis’), and it may be this resonance of earlier times that Turner wished to impart.6 The painting was informed by drawings in the Studies for Pictures; Isleworth sketchbook (Tate D05494–D05497, D05502, D05531, D05535; Turner Bequest XC 3–6, 9, 29, 31;7 see also D05501, D05503, D05530, D05556; XC 8a, 9a, 30, 42), at least some of which show the view south-west from Kew, with the Dutch House (now Kew Palace) and the new but short-lived castellated palace nearby.8 Other drawings in the book develop idealised, classical waterside compositions, as Turner used ‘Neo-classical building[s] beside the Thames to imply, if not actually to create, an antique landscape.’9

Early Liber commentators stated that the present design showed a ‘Temple of Isis’ in Petworth Park,10 but the eighteenth-century, Ionic open rotunda which Turner drew on a later visit (see 1828 Roman and French sketchbook, Tate D21957, Turner Bequest CCXXXVII 59)11 stands on a wooded hill away from the lake.12 The structure also has affinities with the rotunda at Sion Ferry House, shown in Isleworth, another classicising Liber composition of about the same date (see Tate D08163; Vaughan Bequest CXVIII I) which Turner may have thought of as a pair with Isis.13 The peacock and classical entablature in the foreground are both also present in the Frontispiece of the Liber, issued in 1812 (see etching with wash, Tate D08150; Vaughan Bequest CXVII V). A ‘covert allusion’14 has been suggested to another of Turner’s Thameside subjects, his painting Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, exhibited in 1808 (private collection),15 a scene of demolition, or ‘desolation’ as Turner put it, in a poem addressed to ‘Dear Sister Isis’ (Verse Book, p.11, private collection).16 Andrew Wilton has proposed the influence an additional site, Temple or Regatta Island and the stretch of the river at Henley-on-Thames; but as he points out, the composition (deriving ultimately from Claude Lorrain – see general Liber introduction) ‘moves to a plane rather more remote from the reality of the Thames’ than the Isleworth design.17