London: Autumnal Morning

Turner exhibited this classically composed view of London in the Council Room at the Royal Academy in 1801. It was one of four watercolours he displayed there that year. For each of these he had selected the largest sheets of commercially available drawing paper to ensure they easily commanded attention from a distance, even on the densely hung walls. In crafting the supplementary part of his title for this work – ‘Autumnal Morning’ – Turner placed the emphasis on temporal effects of time and season, rather than on the specifics of London’s topography, relegating its misty and indistinct details to the distance. Aside from the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the towers of Westminster Abbey, it is difficult to identify many other landmarks that would help pinpoint the prospect from which the view is seen (something that has puzzled collectors and scholars over the years).
By encouraging viewers to concentrate on the work’s elegiac autumnal qualities Turner was actually setting up a link with another of his exhibits that year, the watercolor of St Donat’s Castle in South Wales, which was subtitled ‘Summer Evening’ (Private collection; Wilton, 1979, op. cit., p.331, no. 279). He had already created pairs of pictures that adopted the traditional model of contrasting atmospheric effects, or times of day, which can be traced back to Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5-1682), whose works remained the principal inspiration for landscape artists. Furthermore, just a year earlier, he had celebrated William Beckford’s estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire in a set of five watercolours that sequentially charted the course of a day, from dawn to dusk (see I. Warrell, Turner’s Wessex, London, 2015, pp. 88-105).
The watercolours of London and St Donat’s complement each other both in terms of their compositions and the effects they reproduce. For example, the cool morning haze here becomes a warm afterglow in the Welsh scene. And both are essentially contemplative and pastoral in mood. There is indeed a timeless quality to the present work that is enhanced by the Italianate character of the buildings on the right. These might seem more likely to be at home in the Roman Campagna than on the outskirts of the British capital. Summing up the impact that all of these features produced, the scholar Eric Shanes proposed in his recent biography that in this work ‘Turner took another large step towards realising his ambition to create ideal landscapes’ (Shanes, 2016, op. cit., p. 204).
This is an important point, because Turner then adhered to the idea of composing pictures through the process of observation of the natural world, followed by an imaginative refinement of the individual parts studied into a satisfying whole. In this instance, the underlying composition for London: Autumnal Morning can be detected in a pen and watercolour sketch in the Tate collection (TB CXIX T; Tate, D08207). This makes it clear that the towers and spires of London were not part of Turner’s initial concept for the image. Stripped back to the simple repoussoir of trees on the left, the eye is drawn in the centre of the sketch down towards buildings bordering a river that seems to widen towards open water on the right. This also induces an echo of the large watercolour of Caernarvon Castle that Turner had exhibited a year earlier (TB LXX M; Tate, D04164), and with it the possibility that the original inspiration for the London composition might be Welsh. Exploring that connection further, there is a pencil sketch made above Caernarvon which has some of the same elements, though in that case the peaks of Snowdonia sit across the horizon (TB XLV 19a; Tate, D01937).
The grandeur of Wales and its history were very much in Turner’s mind between 1798 and the early 1800s, most obviously because of his extensive travels in the principality in these years, but also, just as significantly, as a result of his admiration for the work of Richard Wilson (1714-1782), his great predecessor in the field of landscape painting. Wilson’s numerous views of specific or idealised Italian scenery are the likely prototype for the buildings in London: Autumnal Morning. Similarly, the view of St Donat’s Castle builds on Wilson’s injection of Claudean ideals onto Welsh soil, conflating a prosaic pencil outline of the castle with a transcendent watercolour study of an indeterminate landscape setting (TB XLI 22 and TB XXXVIII 90; Tate, D01653 and D01344).
In his 1979 catalogue, Andrew Wilton wisely cautioned that the provenance of London: Autumnal Morning was possibly muddled. It is here slightly revised to edit out names that are now more obviously redundant. Nevertheless, it is clear that the watercolour was cherished in several important collections during the later 19th and in the 20th Century, notably those of Charles Huth, a member of a wealthy banking family, and Ralph Brocklebank, for whom it was one of his treasures, celebrated in the privately printed account of the collection in 1904. Back at the start of its history, however, there remains some uncertainty about its precise origins and the sequence of owners until the later 1850s.
To complicate matters, a second smaller version, perhaps by Turner himself, was also in circulation around the later 19th Century: measuring 23 x 32 ½ inches, it is known to have belonged to a Miss Bell by 1891, and can then be traced to the New York firm of Scott & Fowles around the time of the First World War.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.