Joseph Mallord William Turner

Provenance:
...
Purchased from Henry Dawe by Charles Stokes by 1848, 15 guineas
Bequeathed by Stokes to Hannah Cooper, 1853
...
Henry Vaughan by 1878

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by Turner and Henry Dawe, untitled, published Turner, 1 January 1819

The topographical source of Turner’s classicised Liber Studiorum design was recognised by Rawlinson in the second edition of his Liber catalogue;1 his visual identification has subsequently been confirmed by the examination of Turner’s own Liber lists (see below). The composition had previously been speculatively linked to two riverside sites a few miles further up the Thames – Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, the 1807 demolition of which had been painted by Turner,2 and David Garrick’s octagonal Ionic ‘temple’ in honour of Shakespeare, at Hampton, which still stands.3 Stopford Brooke noted: ‘Part of the sentiment of the plate is that which has collected for many generations round the Thames near London – the sentiment, if we may call it so, of contented opulence, of settled life, of unravished quiet. ... Wealth speaks from every part of the landscape.’4

The composition had a particular, albeit unpublicised, significance for the artist. It shows the domed, Ionic boathouse-pavilion by Robert Mylne, built or completed in 18035 at the corner of the Duke of Northumberland’s Syon Park estate to the west of London, looking up the Thames to the riverfront at Isleworth; Turner moved here temporarily two years later, renting Syon Ferry House (later demolished) between the boathouse, sometimes called the Alcove, and the church.6 The tree and low walls to the left of the pavilion appear to be those depicted in Turner’s sketches of the slipway in front of Ferry House, the corner of which may itself also be represented,7 and building beyond has been identified as the ‘London Apprentice’ public house.8

As Edward Croft-Murray has noted, Turner may have deliberately adapted the appearance of the rotunda to evoke the famous circular Temple of the Sibyl (or Vesta) at Tivoli,9 silently omitting the flanking wings of the Isleworth building, which he had recorded in two of a series of semi-idealised studies in the 1805 Wey, Guildford sketchbook (Tate D06195–D06198; Turner Bequest XCVIII 11–14), and in a watercolour study in the Hesperides (1) sketchbook (Tate D05784; Turner Bequest XCIII 11). Similar riverside rotundas appear in slight drawings in the Thames, from Reading to Walton sketchbook (Tate D05915; Turner Bequest XCV 11) and the Studies for Pictures, Isleworth sketchbook (Tate D05494; Turner Bequest XC 3, ff.), where there are also views of Ferry House and the pavilion from the opposite bank (D05528, D05602; XC 27, 72a), and an apparent variation on the pavilion (D05574; XC 53).