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Lot Essay
‘No pen can alone do justice to the merits of Turner’s picture of the dilapidation of Pope’s Villa. To be enjoyed and judged of by the public, it should either be seen, or the powers of the most accomplished landscape-engraver, should aid and lighten the task of the reviewer’ (J. Landseer, op. cit., p. 159).
This was the reaction of Turner’s contemporary and fellow artist, the engraver John Landseer, on viewing this painting at Turner’s Gallery on Harley Street in 1808. The painting held deeply personal significance for Turner, representing his need for escapism and tranquillity at this time, his passion for this area of the Thames so near to where he lived and his devotion to the legacy of one of its most famous residents, the celebrated English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). It demonstrates Turner’s debt to the most highly venerated of landscape painters, Claude Lorrain, as well as his ambitions to develop his own individual style and, in the process, to elevate the status of landscape painting within the artistic establishment. On leaving the 1808 exhibition, Thomas Lawrence, future President of the Royal Academy, acknowledged that Turner was 'indisputably the first landscape painter in Europe’ (cited in M. Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, New Haven and London, 2005, p. 328). This painting is perhaps the first work that Turner signed with the addition of 'PP' to his usual signature, following his election in 1807 as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. It was owned by two of the most renowned British collectors of the early nineteenth century, Sir John Leicester and James Morrison, who were not only friends of the artist, but had the means and taste to buy only the very best, and has only appeared on the market twice in the past two hundred years.
Turner opened his own Gallery on Harley Street in 1804 in order to improve his commercial prospects and also create an exhibition space that would enable him to indulge his passion for landscape painting. It was views of the Thames that he considered instrumental in capturing an audience and, more importantly, patrons. In 1805, Turner leased Sion Ferry House at Isleworth, followed by a larger house at Hammersmith in 1806. He spent the next five years sketching and painting the Thames and its environs out of doors, directly from nature. He navigated the course of the river in a small boat, using it from which to draw, paint and even on occasion indulge in his other passion, fishing. Turner's studies for the stretch of the river around Pope's Villa at Twickenham are preserved in his River Sketchbook (Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, XCVI) (fig. 1).
The viewpoint for this painting is taken from the Middlesex bank of the river, looking up the Thames towards Twickenham, probably from the riverbank beside or within the grounds of Strawberry Hill. Turner had recently purchased a plot of land to the righthand side of this view near Marble Hill and was to build an Italianate villa there called Sandycombe Lodge. By moving here Turner was seeking peace and refuge from the industry, commerce and activities of the town and the news and chaos surrounding the continuation of the Napoleonic Wars.
At first-sight the painting appears to be an idyllic house-portrait, but in fact it captures a surviving memorial to one of the greatest English men of letters in the process of being destroyed. A gifted translator and renowned satirist of the Enlightenment era, Pope (fig. 2) had lived at Twickenham for twenty-five years from 1719, in a Palladian villa designed by James Gibbs (1682-1754). The gardens were laid out by Pope himself in a style that was to have an impact on English design for the next century. Pope had opened the grounds to the public and the place became something of a shrine following his death in 1744; such was Pope's fame that even sixty years later his villa remained popular with visitors and tourists. It was the irritation caused by these devotees that prompted Baroness Howe of Langar (1762-1835), who acquired the property in 1807, to undertake a demolition of the site. The house, which had been altered in the 1750s by Sir William Stanhope, who had removed the loggia and added wings, was completely destroyed save for the underground grotto. She also stripped the grounds of all the characteristic features placed there by Pope.
Turner was outraged by the destruction of the Villa and the apparent disregard for the legacy of Pope's memory. Whilst developing the composition for this painting, he lamented on the event in some draft poetry in his River Sketchbook (Turner Bequest XCVI, ff. 71v-72r):
O Lost to honor and the sense of shame
Can Britain so forget Pope's well earnd fame
To desolation doom the poet's fane
The Pride of T[wickenham's] bower and silver Thame....
Hark the rude hammer
Harsh steel the sawn rafter Breaks
Down from the rood the massy [beams] give way
Rent [from] the wall, and let in the day....
No more I'll wear the lily on my brow
But sooty weeds now Popes fair fane is low.
A longer ode entitled 'On the demolition of Pope's Villa at Twickenham’ appears in Turner’s Verse Book of 1808. The destruction of the Villa continued to play on Turner’s mind and features in various unpublished verses over the following years.
The Thames already resonated with rich historical associations, having been eulogized by poets throughout the eighteenth century. For some of his earlier exhibits, Turner supplemented the titles of his paintings in the Royal Academy catalogues with extracts from literature, frequently selecting James Thomson (who lived in Richmond between 1736 and 1748) as his poet of choice, which culminated in the large-scale Thomson's Aeolian Harp, exhibited at Turner's Gallery the following year in 1809 (National Gallery, London). Turner’s poems about the destruction of Pope’s Villa and their relation to this painting remained deeply personal and private. The painting was exhibited without verse; however, the nostalgia for Pope was clearly understood by his contemporaries: 'at the sight of this picture who but will be induced to pause, and reflect on the celebrity and the superlative merits of Pope? Who but will recollect that the landscape which has caught the eye and called forth the talents of Turner, has resounded to his lyre?’ (J. Landseer, op. cit., p. 158).
Despite his evident anger at the loss of this important cultural relic, Turner’s painting of the subject is calmly commemorative, intended to ‘celebrate genius rather than to deplore vandalism’ (A. Wilton, Painting and Poetry, exhibition catalogue, London, 1990, p. 129). The Villa takes center stage, its solid geometric forms reflected in the still waters of the River Thames. Its state is not immediately apparent; however, on closer inspection, you can see that the roof and windows have already been removed and some scaffolding erected on the riverfront. The foreground is enlivened with figures and sheep. Identified at the time as country laborers who had been employed during the day on razing the Villa, the men to the left are seemingly engaged in anxious debate over the future of the capital of a pilaster, ornamental frame-work and fragments of cornice, relics of Pope's house towards which one of them gestures. They are watched by a humbly-dressed girl who, leaning tenderly on the shoulder of a shepherd, listens earnestly to what is being said. Undisturbed by the events taking place, sheep graze and doze in the evening sun, whilst at the righthand side a fisherman strains to listen in on the discussion, as his partner gathers in the fishing nets and eel baskets.
Pope's Villa at Twickenham and the other Thames views exhibited in 1808 are clearly imbued with the golden light, meandering river and wistful mood of Claude's 'arcadian idyll'. Turner was conscious of the prevailing view among leading connoisseurs that Claude was the most coveted of landscape painters (fig. 3). The drawings for his Liber Studiorum clearly emulate Claude's earlier landscape drawings for his Liber Veritatis and illustrate Turner’s fascination with the artist’s work. Turner had been so impressed by the subtle realization of light in Claude's paintings that he professed them: 'beyond the power of imitation’ (A.J. Finberg, op. cit., p. 59). However, Turner arguably surpasses Claude technically through his innovative abandonment of the traditional method of building up an image on a dark ground, by instead preparing this canvas using white priming. This process of developing an image was more closely aligned with painting in watercolor on a luminous surface, and it enabled Turner to represent even the most subtle and graduated atmospheric effects, as visible in this painting. This approach also set him apart from earlier British landscape painters of Thames views, such as Richard Wilson, Samuel Scott, William Marlow and Paul Sandby, prompting Landseer to declare that 'no landscape-painter has ever before so successfully caught the living lustre of Nature herself’ (op. cit., p. 152).
John Landseer devoted more than three pages of his Review of Turner’s 1808 exhibition to an analysis of the merits of Pope's Villa at Twickenham. He clearly understood that Turner mourned the loss of respect for artistic heritage caused by the tide of modernization. He recognized that Turner had 'painted not merely a portrait of this very interesting reach of the Thames, but all that a poet would think and feel on beholding the favourite retreat of so great a poet as Pope, sinking under the hand of modern improvement’ (ibid., p. 156). He continued, 'in the scene before us, the Thames flows on as it has ever flowed, with silent majesty, while the mutable and multifarious works which human hands have erected on its banks, have mournfully succeeded each other; and not even the taste, and the genius, and the reputation of Pope, could retard the operations of Time, the irksomeness of satiety, and the consequent desire of change’ (ibid.). This painting was clearly the highlight of the exhibition, since Landseer only briefly comments on the other exhibits, the Union of the Thames and Isis, The Thames at Eton, Richmond Hill and Bridge and the remaining Thames subjects.
Landseer’s appeal that ‘the powers of the most accomplished landscape-engraver, should aid and lighten the task of the reviewer’ (ibid., p. 159) was answered in 1811 when the painting was engraved, greatly to Turner's satisfaction, by John Pye (fig. 4). Turner's prints were comparatively few in number in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but the small plate executed for him by Pye illustrating Pope's Villa at Twickenham had a very important influence on the development of landscape engraving. John Britton, the enterprising publisher, specifically requested an engraving of Pope's Villa for his Fine Arts of the English School (1811). In the illustrations to this and other similar antiquarian and topographical works, Britton achieved a standard of execution higher than that current in English books of its class. On seeing the reproduction of his painting, Turner exclaimed in the most enthusiastic terms, 'This will do! You can see the lights; had I known that there was a man who could do that, I would have had it done before' (cited in W.G. Rawlinson, op. cit., 1878, p. xxvi).
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
The painting was acquired directly from Turner in 1808 by John Fleming Leicester, 1st Baron de Tabley (fig. 5), who has been heralded as ‘the greatest patron of the national school of paintings that our island has ever possessed’ (S. Wittingham, ‘A Most Liberal Patron: Sir John Flemming Leicester, 1st Baron de Tabley, 1796-1827’, in Turner Studies, VI, no. 2, 1986, p. 31), and whose collection of contemporary British painting is described by Andrew Wilton as being of ‘great importance in defining the achievements of the national school of art at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Painting and Poetry, exhibition catalogue, 1990, p. 129). Sir John Fleming Leicester was born at Tabley House, Cheshire, the eldest surviving son of Sir Peter Leicester, 4th Bt. (1732-1770) and his wife, Catherine (d. 1786). In 1810, he married the granddaughter of the architect Sir William Chambers, Georgiana Maria Cottin (1794-1859). Encouraged by William Paulet Carey (1759-1839), an Irish artist turned propagandist for modern British art and editor of the Literary Gazette, Leicester began buying British paintings in 1789. His first purchase from Turner was a watercolor of a Storm, in 1792 for 25 guineas, and he would subsequently collect ten of his works (see S. Wittingham, op. cit., p. 28). Leicester's patronage of British art was highly public spirited and in 1805 he acquired the lease of 24 Hill Street, Mayfair, which was converted into a public gallery by 1818. In 1808, he had also converted three rooms at Tabley into another picture gallery, the same year that he purchased Pope's Villa at Twickenham.
Pope's Villa was to hang alongside his other Turners in London: Kilgarren Castle (1799; The National Trust, Wordsworth House); The Shipwreck (1805; Tate Britain, London); A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron (1807; Tate Britain, London) and Sun rising through vapour; fishermen cleaning and selling fish (National Gallery, London). Following his acquisition of Pope's Villa at Twickenham, Leicester invited Turner to stay at Tabley House. He commissioned Turner to paint two views of Tabley House, one of which was to hang in London (now University of Manchester) and one of which was to hang at Tabley (The National Trust, Petworth House).
In 1823, Leicester offered to sell his collection to the nation to create a 'National Gallery for British Art’, but following a refusal by the Prime Minister he subsequently sought the support of others and founded the Manchester Institution. Following Leicester's death in 1827, part of his collection, including Pope's Villa at Twickenham, was sold.
The painting was purchased by the outstanding collector James Morrison. The son of an innkeeper, Morrison had begun to work as a shopman for a firm of wholesale haberdashers in 1809, and in 1814 married his employer's daughter. The turnover of Todd & Co., of which he took over the sole direction, increased dramatically. He also invested in many other business enterprises and his acumen in such spheres was shown by his success in cornering the market in black crêpe at the time of the death of George III's widow, Queen Charlotte, in 1821. Morrison also had a strong sense of social responsibility and was elected M.P. for St Ives in Cornwall. In 1831 he was elected M.P. for Ipswich and by 1840 M.P. for Inverness, a seat he represented until his retirement in 1847.
His interest in the arts owed much to his friendship with the architect John Papworth, who was to remodel Morrison's four houses in turn: Balham Hill, No. 95 Upper Harley Street, Fonthill, and, not least, Basildon, a fine Georgian mansion built by John Carr in 1767 for Sir Francis Sykes. Morrison became a friend of David Wilkie and Charles Lock Eastlake, and later the partner of the dealer William Buchanan. Turner became a close friend of Morrison and stayed with him at Basildon Park.
When the German art historian Gustav Waagen visited Basildon (fig. 6), Turner’s Pope’s Villa hung in the Octagon, the great room designed by Carr, whose scheme for its decoration was never completed and which at length was fitted up as a picture room by Papworth with an Italianate ceiling and wall coverings of purple velvet. Morrison’s collection also boasted Turner's large Thomson's Aeolian Harp (City Art Gallery, Manchester), Constable’s The Lock (sold Christie’s, London, 3 July 2012, lot 37, £22.4m) and other modern English pictures, including Hogarth's Punch Club, landscapes by Richard Wilson and Wilkie's Confessional, which Morrison ordered when in Rome in 1827. Many of Morrison's Dutch pictures, including works by Paulus Potter, Karel du Jardin, Aert van der Neer, Meindert Hobbema and Ostade, were in the Oak Room, while the School Room held Greuze's chalk study for the head of the father in La Bénédiction (Louvre, Paris). Other Old Masters remained in Morrison's London house, notably Claude's Adoration of the Golden Calf (City Art Gallery, Manchester), Poussin's Triumph of Pan (National Gallery, London) and Rembrandt's Hendrickje Stoffels (National Gallery, London).
After James Morrison's death in 1857, Basildon Park with its contents was inherited by his eldest son, Charles, and on Charles' death without issue in 1909 it passed to James' youngest son, Walter. Walter Morrison settled his property on his nephew, Colonel James Archibald Morrison (1873-1934), who sold Basildon Park in 1929. The collection was then inherited by the descendants of his daughter, Mary, who became the wife of Major John Dent-Brocklehurst of Sudeley Castle.
This was the reaction of Turner’s contemporary and fellow artist, the engraver John Landseer, on viewing this painting at Turner’s Gallery on Harley Street in 1808. The painting held deeply personal significance for Turner, representing his need for escapism and tranquillity at this time, his passion for this area of the Thames so near to where he lived and his devotion to the legacy of one of its most famous residents, the celebrated English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). It demonstrates Turner’s debt to the most highly venerated of landscape painters, Claude Lorrain, as well as his ambitions to develop his own individual style and, in the process, to elevate the status of landscape painting within the artistic establishment. On leaving the 1808 exhibition, Thomas Lawrence, future President of the Royal Academy, acknowledged that Turner was 'indisputably the first landscape painter in Europe’ (cited in M. Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, New Haven and London, 2005, p. 328). This painting is perhaps the first work that Turner signed with the addition of 'PP' to his usual signature, following his election in 1807 as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. It was owned by two of the most renowned British collectors of the early nineteenth century, Sir John Leicester and James Morrison, who were not only friends of the artist, but had the means and taste to buy only the very best, and has only appeared on the market twice in the past two hundred years.
Turner opened his own Gallery on Harley Street in 1804 in order to improve his commercial prospects and also create an exhibition space that would enable him to indulge his passion for landscape painting. It was views of the Thames that he considered instrumental in capturing an audience and, more importantly, patrons. In 1805, Turner leased Sion Ferry House at Isleworth, followed by a larger house at Hammersmith in 1806. He spent the next five years sketching and painting the Thames and its environs out of doors, directly from nature. He navigated the course of the river in a small boat, using it from which to draw, paint and even on occasion indulge in his other passion, fishing. Turner's studies for the stretch of the river around Pope's Villa at Twickenham are preserved in his River Sketchbook (Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, XCVI) (fig. 1).
The viewpoint for this painting is taken from the Middlesex bank of the river, looking up the Thames towards Twickenham, probably from the riverbank beside or within the grounds of Strawberry Hill. Turner had recently purchased a plot of land to the righthand side of this view near Marble Hill and was to build an Italianate villa there called Sandycombe Lodge. By moving here Turner was seeking peace and refuge from the industry, commerce and activities of the town and the news and chaos surrounding the continuation of the Napoleonic Wars.
At first-sight the painting appears to be an idyllic house-portrait, but in fact it captures a surviving memorial to one of the greatest English men of letters in the process of being destroyed. A gifted translator and renowned satirist of the Enlightenment era, Pope (fig. 2) had lived at Twickenham for twenty-five years from 1719, in a Palladian villa designed by James Gibbs (1682-1754). The gardens were laid out by Pope himself in a style that was to have an impact on English design for the next century. Pope had opened the grounds to the public and the place became something of a shrine following his death in 1744; such was Pope's fame that even sixty years later his villa remained popular with visitors and tourists. It was the irritation caused by these devotees that prompted Baroness Howe of Langar (1762-1835), who acquired the property in 1807, to undertake a demolition of the site. The house, which had been altered in the 1750s by Sir William Stanhope, who had removed the loggia and added wings, was completely destroyed save for the underground grotto. She also stripped the grounds of all the characteristic features placed there by Pope.
Turner was outraged by the destruction of the Villa and the apparent disregard for the legacy of Pope's memory. Whilst developing the composition for this painting, he lamented on the event in some draft poetry in his River Sketchbook (Turner Bequest XCVI, ff. 71v-72r):
O Lost to honor and the sense of shame
Can Britain so forget Pope's well earnd fame
To desolation doom the poet's fane
The Pride of T[wickenham's] bower and silver Thame....
Hark the rude hammer
Harsh steel the sawn rafter Breaks
Down from the rood the massy [beams] give way
Rent [from] the wall, and let in the day....
No more I'll wear the lily on my brow
But sooty weeds now Popes fair fane is low.
A longer ode entitled 'On the demolition of Pope's Villa at Twickenham’ appears in Turner’s Verse Book of 1808. The destruction of the Villa continued to play on Turner’s mind and features in various unpublished verses over the following years.
The Thames already resonated with rich historical associations, having been eulogized by poets throughout the eighteenth century. For some of his earlier exhibits, Turner supplemented the titles of his paintings in the Royal Academy catalogues with extracts from literature, frequently selecting James Thomson (who lived in Richmond between 1736 and 1748) as his poet of choice, which culminated in the large-scale Thomson's Aeolian Harp, exhibited at Turner's Gallery the following year in 1809 (National Gallery, London). Turner’s poems about the destruction of Pope’s Villa and their relation to this painting remained deeply personal and private. The painting was exhibited without verse; however, the nostalgia for Pope was clearly understood by his contemporaries: 'at the sight of this picture who but will be induced to pause, and reflect on the celebrity and the superlative merits of Pope? Who but will recollect that the landscape which has caught the eye and called forth the talents of Turner, has resounded to his lyre?’ (J. Landseer, op. cit., p. 158).
Despite his evident anger at the loss of this important cultural relic, Turner’s painting of the subject is calmly commemorative, intended to ‘celebrate genius rather than to deplore vandalism’ (A. Wilton, Painting and Poetry, exhibition catalogue, London, 1990, p. 129). The Villa takes center stage, its solid geometric forms reflected in the still waters of the River Thames. Its state is not immediately apparent; however, on closer inspection, you can see that the roof and windows have already been removed and some scaffolding erected on the riverfront. The foreground is enlivened with figures and sheep. Identified at the time as country laborers who had been employed during the day on razing the Villa, the men to the left are seemingly engaged in anxious debate over the future of the capital of a pilaster, ornamental frame-work and fragments of cornice, relics of Pope's house towards which one of them gestures. They are watched by a humbly-dressed girl who, leaning tenderly on the shoulder of a shepherd, listens earnestly to what is being said. Undisturbed by the events taking place, sheep graze and doze in the evening sun, whilst at the righthand side a fisherman strains to listen in on the discussion, as his partner gathers in the fishing nets and eel baskets.
Pope's Villa at Twickenham and the other Thames views exhibited in 1808 are clearly imbued with the golden light, meandering river and wistful mood of Claude's 'arcadian idyll'. Turner was conscious of the prevailing view among leading connoisseurs that Claude was the most coveted of landscape painters (fig. 3). The drawings for his Liber Studiorum clearly emulate Claude's earlier landscape drawings for his Liber Veritatis and illustrate Turner’s fascination with the artist’s work. Turner had been so impressed by the subtle realization of light in Claude's paintings that he professed them: 'beyond the power of imitation’ (A.J. Finberg, op. cit., p. 59). However, Turner arguably surpasses Claude technically through his innovative abandonment of the traditional method of building up an image on a dark ground, by instead preparing this canvas using white priming. This process of developing an image was more closely aligned with painting in watercolor on a luminous surface, and it enabled Turner to represent even the most subtle and graduated atmospheric effects, as visible in this painting. This approach also set him apart from earlier British landscape painters of Thames views, such as Richard Wilson, Samuel Scott, William Marlow and Paul Sandby, prompting Landseer to declare that 'no landscape-painter has ever before so successfully caught the living lustre of Nature herself’ (op. cit., p. 152).
John Landseer devoted more than three pages of his Review of Turner’s 1808 exhibition to an analysis of the merits of Pope's Villa at Twickenham. He clearly understood that Turner mourned the loss of respect for artistic heritage caused by the tide of modernization. He recognized that Turner had 'painted not merely a portrait of this very interesting reach of the Thames, but all that a poet would think and feel on beholding the favourite retreat of so great a poet as Pope, sinking under the hand of modern improvement’ (ibid., p. 156). He continued, 'in the scene before us, the Thames flows on as it has ever flowed, with silent majesty, while the mutable and multifarious works which human hands have erected on its banks, have mournfully succeeded each other; and not even the taste, and the genius, and the reputation of Pope, could retard the operations of Time, the irksomeness of satiety, and the consequent desire of change’ (ibid.). This painting was clearly the highlight of the exhibition, since Landseer only briefly comments on the other exhibits, the Union of the Thames and Isis, The Thames at Eton, Richmond Hill and Bridge and the remaining Thames subjects.
Landseer’s appeal that ‘the powers of the most accomplished landscape-engraver, should aid and lighten the task of the reviewer’ (ibid., p. 159) was answered in 1811 when the painting was engraved, greatly to Turner's satisfaction, by John Pye (fig. 4). Turner's prints were comparatively few in number in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but the small plate executed for him by Pye illustrating Pope's Villa at Twickenham had a very important influence on the development of landscape engraving. John Britton, the enterprising publisher, specifically requested an engraving of Pope's Villa for his Fine Arts of the English School (1811). In the illustrations to this and other similar antiquarian and topographical works, Britton achieved a standard of execution higher than that current in English books of its class. On seeing the reproduction of his painting, Turner exclaimed in the most enthusiastic terms, 'This will do! You can see the lights; had I known that there was a man who could do that, I would have had it done before' (cited in W.G. Rawlinson, op. cit., 1878, p. xxvi).
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
The painting was acquired directly from Turner in 1808 by John Fleming Leicester, 1st Baron de Tabley (fig. 5), who has been heralded as ‘the greatest patron of the national school of paintings that our island has ever possessed’ (S. Wittingham, ‘A Most Liberal Patron: Sir John Flemming Leicester, 1st Baron de Tabley, 1796-1827’, in Turner Studies, VI, no. 2, 1986, p. 31), and whose collection of contemporary British painting is described by Andrew Wilton as being of ‘great importance in defining the achievements of the national school of art at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Painting and Poetry, exhibition catalogue, 1990, p. 129). Sir John Fleming Leicester was born at Tabley House, Cheshire, the eldest surviving son of Sir Peter Leicester, 4th Bt. (1732-1770) and his wife, Catherine (d. 1786). In 1810, he married the granddaughter of the architect Sir William Chambers, Georgiana Maria Cottin (1794-1859). Encouraged by William Paulet Carey (1759-1839), an Irish artist turned propagandist for modern British art and editor of the Literary Gazette, Leicester began buying British paintings in 1789. His first purchase from Turner was a watercolor of a Storm, in 1792 for 25 guineas, and he would subsequently collect ten of his works (see S. Wittingham, op. cit., p. 28). Leicester's patronage of British art was highly public spirited and in 1805 he acquired the lease of 24 Hill Street, Mayfair, which was converted into a public gallery by 1818. In 1808, he had also converted three rooms at Tabley into another picture gallery, the same year that he purchased Pope's Villa at Twickenham.
Pope's Villa was to hang alongside his other Turners in London: Kilgarren Castle (1799; The National Trust, Wordsworth House); The Shipwreck (1805; Tate Britain, London); A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron (1807; Tate Britain, London) and Sun rising through vapour; fishermen cleaning and selling fish (National Gallery, London). Following his acquisition of Pope's Villa at Twickenham, Leicester invited Turner to stay at Tabley House. He commissioned Turner to paint two views of Tabley House, one of which was to hang in London (now University of Manchester) and one of which was to hang at Tabley (The National Trust, Petworth House).
In 1823, Leicester offered to sell his collection to the nation to create a 'National Gallery for British Art’, but following a refusal by the Prime Minister he subsequently sought the support of others and founded the Manchester Institution. Following Leicester's death in 1827, part of his collection, including Pope's Villa at Twickenham, was sold.
The painting was purchased by the outstanding collector James Morrison. The son of an innkeeper, Morrison had begun to work as a shopman for a firm of wholesale haberdashers in 1809, and in 1814 married his employer's daughter. The turnover of Todd & Co., of which he took over the sole direction, increased dramatically. He also invested in many other business enterprises and his acumen in such spheres was shown by his success in cornering the market in black crêpe at the time of the death of George III's widow, Queen Charlotte, in 1821. Morrison also had a strong sense of social responsibility and was elected M.P. for St Ives in Cornwall. In 1831 he was elected M.P. for Ipswich and by 1840 M.P. for Inverness, a seat he represented until his retirement in 1847.
His interest in the arts owed much to his friendship with the architect John Papworth, who was to remodel Morrison's four houses in turn: Balham Hill, No. 95 Upper Harley Street, Fonthill, and, not least, Basildon, a fine Georgian mansion built by John Carr in 1767 for Sir Francis Sykes. Morrison became a friend of David Wilkie and Charles Lock Eastlake, and later the partner of the dealer William Buchanan. Turner became a close friend of Morrison and stayed with him at Basildon Park.
When the German art historian Gustav Waagen visited Basildon (fig. 6), Turner’s Pope’s Villa hung in the Octagon, the great room designed by Carr, whose scheme for its decoration was never completed and which at length was fitted up as a picture room by Papworth with an Italianate ceiling and wall coverings of purple velvet. Morrison’s collection also boasted Turner's large Thomson's Aeolian Harp (City Art Gallery, Manchester), Constable’s The Lock (sold Christie’s, London, 3 July 2012, lot 37, £22.4m) and other modern English pictures, including Hogarth's Punch Club, landscapes by Richard Wilson and Wilkie's Confessional, which Morrison ordered when in Rome in 1827. Many of Morrison's Dutch pictures, including works by Paulus Potter, Karel du Jardin, Aert van der Neer, Meindert Hobbema and Ostade, were in the Oak Room, while the School Room held Greuze's chalk study for the head of the father in La Bénédiction (Louvre, Paris). Other Old Masters remained in Morrison's London house, notably Claude's Adoration of the Golden Calf (City Art Gallery, Manchester), Poussin's Triumph of Pan (National Gallery, London) and Rembrandt's Hendrickje Stoffels (National Gallery, London).
After James Morrison's death in 1857, Basildon Park with its contents was inherited by his eldest son, Charles, and on Charles' death without issue in 1909 it passed to James' youngest son, Walter. Walter Morrison settled his property on his nephew, Colonel James Archibald Morrison (1873-1934), who sold Basildon Park in 1929. The collection was then inherited by the descendants of his daughter, Mary, who became the wife of Major John Dent-Brocklehurst of Sudeley Castle.