Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning

In the spring of 1826 several of Turner's pictures at the Royal Academy exhibition in Somerset House glowed with the same warm yellow, and the critic of The British Press lost patience. Boats or buildings, water or watermen, houses or horses, he wrote, all is yellow, nothing but yellow. This canvas was one of them. It shows The Limes, the riverside house of William Moffatt at Mortlake, then a quiet place on the Thames near Kew, west of London, with its terrace running along the water under a row of tall trees in the first light of a summer day. Moffatt had asked Turner for two views of his property. The second, painted a year later, is an evening scene looking out from the house in the opposite direction. The pair went separate ways long ago. This one was sold in 1909 by the Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon to Henry Clay Frick, and Mellon went on to buy the evening picture in 1920, which is why it hangs today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.