High Street, Oxford

James Wyatt made frames and sold prints at 115 High Street in Oxford, and in 1809 he commissioned Turner to record the view from near his own shop so he could sell engravings of it. Turner talked him into an oil painting as well, for 100 guineas, and worked on it through the winter of 1809 and 1810.

Their letters survive, which makes this one of the best documented pictures Turner ever produced. Wyatt kept writing to him about the buildings and the figures, and Turner wrote back about the architecture and where the light should fall. The spire of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin rises over the roofline, and gowned academics stand about in the road.

It is usually called the only finished oil painting of a street he ever made. Wyatt hung it in his shop, it went to the Royal Academy in 1812, and the Ashmolean bought it in 2016 after a public appeal, having shown it on loan since 1997.