Walton Bridges
J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851) · About 1806
A warm evening on the River Thames west of London. Cattle stand in the shallows, a boat is being poled across the river, and in the middle distance a pair of bridges spans the water at Walton on Thames. The sun is low, the sky is a soft haze of gold and pink, and the whole scene has the calm of a summer day coming to an end. Turner was about thirty when he painted it, already a member of the Royal Academy and already famous for storms and shipwrecks. Here he shows the other side of his talent: a landscape of peace, painted in the tradition of the Dutch masters and of Claude Lorrain but observed directly on the river.
Turner had taken a house at Isleworth and spent the summers of 1805 and 1806 sketching from a boat on the Thames, and this picture grew out of that work. Look at the freedom of the painting in the water, where reflections are laid in with loose horizontal strokes, and at the way the bridges are dissolved in light rather than drawn as architecture. The cattle and figures give scale, and the great tree at the left frames the view in the classical manner. The colours are surprisingly delicate: pale greens, ochres and blues rather than the fiery oranges of his later years. Notice how the light seems to come from within the sky itself.
The painting was bought through the Felton Bequest in 1920 and was one of the first major Turners to enter an Australian collection. It matters because it shows the artist at a turning point, moving from topographical views to landscapes about light and air, the path that led eventually to the near abstract canvases of his old age. The bridges at Walton were rebuilt several times and Turner painted them more than once, but this is the fullest version. The memorable detail is the small boat in the centre, whose pole makes a single vertical line in a picture that is otherwise all horizontals.
Did You Know? Turner made the studies for this picture from a small boat on the Thames during the summers of 1805 and 1806.
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