Landscape with Lake and Fallen Tree

Around 1800 Turner was 25 and had just been elected an associate of the Royal Academy at 24, the earliest age the rules allowed. He was also working his way through the painters he admired, one at a time, and this canvas belongs to his Richard Wilson stretch. Wilson was the Welshman who had brought an Italian kind of light back to British hills, and Turner had toured Wales with a sketchbook in 1798 and 1799. The still lake and the broken tree lying in the foreground are furniture straight out of that tradition. The picture was still in his studio when he died in 1851, and it came to the nation with the rest of the bequest, roughly 300 oil paintings and some 30,000 works on paper that had never left the house.