View of Richmond Hill and Bridge

Turner showed this view in 1808 in his own gallery, a private room he had built onto his London house so he need not depend on the Royal Academy to hang him. The subject is the Thames at Richmond, then a few miles outside London, with the stone arches of Richmond Bridge and the wooded rise of Richmond Hill behind. He floods the scene in warm golden light and fills the foreground with grazing sheep and a bathing woman, so a spot beside a busy town reads as open country. This bend of the river clearly held him: within a few years he built himself a house nearby at Twickenham. Richmond Bridge, finished in 1777, still carries traffic over the Thames and remains the oldest surviving bridge on the river within London.