As pontes de Walton

In 1805 Turner took a house by the river at Isleworth, west of London, and spent that summer and the next working up and down the Thames, some of it from a boat. Walton Bridges was one of the places he stopped. The crossing he shows is the newer one, two spans of brick and stone that had replaced the old wooden bridge Canaletto painted on the same spot about 50 years earlier. Turner gives most of the canvas to the sky and sets sheep and their keepers along the bank below, so the bridge itself ends up as one incident in a pastoral river scene rather than the subject of a view. He seems to have shown it at his own gallery in Queen Anne Street rather than at the Academy, and the Earl of Essex bought it in 1807 for his house in Hertfordshire.