Joseph Mallord William Turner

The River Thames and Shillingford Bridge from the West, Benson Church in the Distance

1805

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Thames, from Reading to Walton Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 258 × 367 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D05934
Turner Bequest XCV 30

Catalogue entry

A right-hand page from the sketchbook, this is one of two views of the bridge at Shillingford from the book, in which Turner looked in opposite directions up and down the Thames; see also Tate D05944; Turner Bequest XCV 40. The present view looks eastwards, towards the wooden bridge (built in 1784 to replace a ferry and itself now replaced by a stone bridge) and the village of Benson in the right distance. The building closer on the right is the inn that is now the Shillingford Bridge Hotel while at the left end of the bridge is a toll house. Turner’s inscription notes the cornfields in the valley. Hill surmises that Shillingford was an evening stop and that this was the second of Turner’s drawings of it, made towards the end of the day.1 It is rather less detailed than the eastwards view, D05944.
1
Hill 1993, p.111
Verso:
Blank.

David Blayney Brown
February 2009

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