London from Greenwich Park

Turner showed this view in 1809 and, as he often did, printed his own lines of verse beside it, complaining of the murky veil that hung over the city. He stands high on Greenwich hill, with deer grazing in the royal park in the foreground and the Queen's House just below. Then, far off, London itself, St Paul's and the church spires pushing up through a brown haze. That haze is coal smoke. London was burning sea-coal by the shipload and growing fast, and Turner, who genuinely loved the sight of the expanding capital, still could not paint it without noticing what all that trade was doing to the air. The clean royal park and the smoke-stained city share the one canvas.