Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Interior of the Ruined Oxford Street Pantheon

1792

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
The Burning of the Pantheon, Oxford Street
Medium
Watercolour on paper
Dimensions
Support: 247 × 187 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D00122
Turner Bequest IX B

Catalogue entry

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

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