Vista de Clapham Common

Clapham Common around 1800 was open ground at the southern edge of London, still grazed, and Turner went out to it with a wooden panel not much larger than a sheet of writing paper. He was in his mid-20s and was elected a full Royal Academician in 1802. Panels like this one were never meant for exhibition and stayed in the studio. In those same years the houses around the common belonged to a circle of evangelical reformers, William Wilberforce among them, who lived at Clapham from 1797 and ran from there the campaign that abolished the British slave trade in 1807. None of that shows in the painting, which is a plain view of the common. It reached the nation in 1856 with the Turner Bequest, alongside about 300 other oils and some 30,000 works on paper from the same studio.