View from the Terrace of a Villa at Niton, Isle of Wight, from Sketches by a Lady

In 1797 a young woman named Julia Bennet took drawing lessons from Turner, then a painter in his early twenties. Nearly 30 years later she was Lady Gordon, the wife of an army general, with a villa at Niton near the southern tip of the Isle of Wight, and she sketched the view from its steps in watercolour. Turner worked her sketches up into this oil and showed it at the Royal Academy in 1826, under a title that credits them to an unnamed lady. The garden he painted follows the fashion of those years for terraces and stone urns in the Italian manner. By July 1826 he was telling the architect John Soane in a letter that the picture already belonged to Lady Gordon. Her family kept it for a century, until a sale at Christie's in London in 1926, and it came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1993 with the bequest of the Massachusetts collector William A. Coolidge.