Newark Abbey

In 1805, the year of Trafalgar, Turner spent weeks on the Thames and its tributaries in a small boat, sketching as he went. One of those side rivers was the Wey in Surrey, turned into a working navigation back in 1653, with locks, mills and barges. Beside it stood the ruins of Newark Priory, a house of Augustinian canons closed down under Henry VIII in 1538. A painter of the previous generation would have made the ruin the subject. Turner pushed it into the distance as a pale grey shape and gave the picture to the working river: old willows, a lock, moored barges under an evening sky streaked with cream and pink. On the nearest barge a small fire glows where the bargemen are cooking supper. He showed the canvas in his own London gallery, and Sir John Leicester, a Cheshire baronet who collected living British painters, bought it for 200 guineas.