Cliveden on Thames

Around 1805 Turner took to the Thames by boat, working his way upriver past Windsor and sketching as he went. Cliveden Reach, near Maidenhead, came with a history he cared about. In the house on the wooded hill above the river, a masque by the poet James Thomson had given the first performance of "Rule, Britannia!" in 1740, staged for the Prince of Wales. By the time Turner came past, that house had burned down, in 1795. He worked the drawings up into this modest canvas and probably hung it in his own London gallery in 1807. That same year Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy, walked through Turner's gallery and told the painter and diarist Joseph Farington that he was disgusted by the "views on the Thames, crude blotches". Whether he meant this very picture is not recorded. It later left Turner's hands and reached the national collection in 1885, bequeathed by Elizabeth Vaughan.