Landscape with Water

Turner often bought his canvases from Thomas Brown, a London colourman, and the form of Brown's stamp on the back of this one seems only to have come into use around 1839. That small mark is part of why the Tate dates the painting to the early 1840s, when Turner was in his mid-sixties. The composition looks much older. The Tate relates it to a large watercolour of Tivoli, the hill town outside Rome, that he showed at the Royal Academy in 1818. There the river Aniene lies still beneath the Temple of the Sibyl before plunging over a waterfall, and the white blaze at the centre here is read as sunlight on that water. After his death the list of his studio pictures called this one simply a lake scene, and it was matched to that entry only in 1946, by a chalk number on the back. It is unfinished and was never exhibited in his lifetime.