England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent's Birthday

The party was real. On 12 August 1817 Lady Cardigan gave a fete on Richmond Hill for the Prince Regent's birthday, and Turner built this enormous canvas around it, 180 centimetres high and more than three metres wide, the largest picture he had painted. He knew the ground better than any other painter in London. His own small house, Sandycombe Lodge, stood just across the Thames at Twickenham, near where the river bends past Petersham Meadows in the middle distance. He showed the picture at the Royal Academy in 1819, the year he finally set off for Italy at 44, and it came to the nation with the rest of his studio in the Turner Bequest of 1856.