Joseph Mallord William Turner

London from Greenwich Park

exhibited 1809

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In Tate Britain

JMW Turner

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 902 × 1200 mm
frame: 1285 × 1584 × 155 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: N00483

Display caption

London was the largest, busiest city in the world at the time Turner painted this picture. He exhibited it in 1809, accompanied by his own poetry, which described a hectic, oppressive city – a ‘world of care’ beneath a ‘murky veil’ of cloud, relieved only by the ‘gleams of hope’ offered by its architecture. In Turner’s painting, Greenwich Hospital is framed by the surrounding trees, while the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral towers above the distant city.

Gallery label, November 2022

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Catalogue entry

97. [N00483] London Exh. 1809

THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON (483)
Canvas, 35 1/2 × 47 1/2 (90 × 120)
Inscribed ‘1809’ and ‘JMW Turner RA PP [?]’ lower left centre. (Plate 565)

Coll. Walter Fawkes by 1811; returned to the artist by exchange (Thornbury) at an unknown date; Turner Bequest 1856 (13, ‘Greenwich Hospital’ 4'0" × 3'0"), transferred to the Tate Gallery 1910.

Exh. Turner's gallery 1809 (16); Tate Gallery 1931 (45); Liverpool 1933 (24); R.A. 1974–5 (152, repr.); Leningrad and Moscow 1975–6 (13, repr.); Hague 1978–9 (ix, repr. in colour); Paris 1983–4 (25, repr.); Birmingham 1984.

Engr. By Charles Turner for the Liber Studiorum, R. 26, and published 1 January 1811 as ‘In the possession of Walter Fawkes, Esq, of Farnley’. The preliminary pen and sepia drawing, CXVII-D, repr. Finberg 1924, p. 102; the etching and engraving repr. pp. 102–3.

Lit. Ruskin 1857 (1903–12, xiii, pp. 119–20); Thornbury 1862, i, p. 293; 1877, p. 429; Armstrong 1902, p. 222; Finberg 1910, pp. 63, 80; 1924, p. 103; Davies 1946, p. 185; Finberg 1961, pp. 471 no. 143; Rothenstein and Butlin 1964, pp. 26–7, pl. 40; Lindsay 1966, p. 240; Hawes 1982, p. 102.

Exhibited in Turner's gallery in 1809 with the following verses:

Where burthen'd Thames reflects the crowded sail,
Commercial care and busy toil prevail,
Whose murky veil, aspiring to the skies,
Obscures thy beauty, and thy form denies,
Save where thy spires pierce the doubtful air,
As gleams of hope amidst a world of care.

The signature is inscribed in brown; the date, to the left and slightly higher, more carefully in black, perhaps on the picture's return to Turner; it is painted on a distinctly thinner area of paint. The letters ‘PP’, of which traces seem to remain at the end of the signature, would stand for Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, a post to which Turner was elected in December 1807. Unevenly discoloured retouchings in the sky were removed in 1973; in particular the heavy plume of smoke rising just to the right of the right-hand dome of Greenwich Hospital was found not to be original.

There is a preliminary drawing for the whole composition, CXX-N (repr. Finberg 1910, pl. 30), and also some related studies of deer on XCV-43/44. There is a variant of the composition, in pen and sepia wash, in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, that seems to have been prepared for the Liber Studiorum engraving but not used (see Hartley 1984, pp. 38–43, no. 30, repr.).

Published in:
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984