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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner ?Syon Reach, Looking Upstream towards Isleworth Church in the Distance on the Right 1805

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
?Syon Reach, Looking Upstream towards Isleworth Church in the Distance on the Right 1805
D05937
Turner Bequest XCV 33
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 258 x 361 mm
Stamped in black ‘XCV 33’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is a left-hand page from the sketchbook. Hill compares the subject to a watercolour of another probable Thames scene (Manchester Art Gallery).1 The church tower in the right distance looks like All Saints’, Isleworth. Contesting Wilkinson’s opinion that this composition ‘with its odd intervals and uneasy horizon’ is perhaps ‘out of the first rank’, Hill considers that Turner ‘attains a condition almost of transcendence’ in manifesting ‘his retirement from society’ and depicting ‘Nature, as it were, unrobed’.2
1
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.346 no.412.
2
Hill 1993, p.45.
Verso:
Blank

David Blayney Brown
February 2009

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘?Syon Reach, Looking Upstream towards Isleworth Church in the Distance on the Right 1805 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 2009, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-syon-reach-looking-upstream-towards-isleworth-church-in-the-r1129969, accessed 20 September 2024.