What You Will!

At the Royal Academy's summer exhibition of 1822, in Somerset House on the Strand, the crowds went to one picture above all, David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, and a rail had to be put up to hold them back. Turner sent just one work that year, and it was this small canvas, about half a metre across. Its title is the second half of the name of Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Its manner is borrowed from Antoine Watteau, the French painter of the early 1700s whose fêtes galantes showed elegant couples idling in parks, a rare kind of subject for Turner. Women in pink and white silk gather by a pedestal carrying a bust, others lounge on the grass, and pale marble statues stand under golden, autumnal trees. The sculptor Francis Chantrey, a friend of Turner's, bought it.