William Turner of Oxford

KT488

Signed and inscribed on the old backing board attached to reverse: View of Shipton on Charwell [sic]-Evening.\W. Turner./Oxfd., watercolour over traces of pencil

25.6 x 41 cm.; 10 x 16 inches

Provenance

W/S Fine Art Ltd., ‘Watercolours and Drawings’, June 2005, no. 47;

Private collection U.K. until 2021

This view shows the manor house and part of the estate of the artist’s uncle, William Turner, and the church of Holy Cross, amongst the trees to the right of the house. The artist built the church, in fourteenth -century style, at the expense of his uncle. It is thus an intensely personal work in which the artist depicts his home and the only building he designed.

William Turner Senior had supported the artistic training of his nephew after his father died. In 1804 he bought the estate of Shipton-on-Cherwell with its manor house and park, as seen in the present watercolour. In 1809 the young artist recorded his address as Shipton (Martin Hardie, ‘William Turner of Oxford’, The Old Water-Colour Society’s Club, IX, 1932, p. 2).

Turner first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807 and in January 1808 he became the youngest associate of the Society of Painters in Water Colours and was elected a full member in November of that year.

The church, which seems to be Turner of Oxford’s only architectural work, dates from 1831. The artist was buried there at his death in 1862 and in 1896 a screen was erected in his memory.

Some of the artist’s most celebrated watercolours are of water lilies on the River Cherwell, and from 1835 he sent a number to the exhibitions at the Society of Painters in Water Colours. The earliest of these, now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art (B1981.24), shows the church at Shipton-on-Cherwell in the trees in the distance, a focal point of the composition.