1776–1832

John Crome, Mousehold Heath, Norwich  c.1818–20

Mousehold Heath was a well–known stretch of common land that rose above the city of Norwich. Crome’s painting emphasises its expanse and lack of cultivation. Wild flowers grow, cattle roam freely and the rolling hills seem unending. Yet, the heath’s recent history had been turbulent. Much of the British countryside was being transformed by the enclosure of common lands and the ploughing of heath to boost agricultural return. By 1814 the bulk of Mousehold Heath was closed off. This wholesale change in land use impacted the rural poor the most as they lost a place to farm and pasture their animals.

Gallery label, October 2019

John Singleton Copley, The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January 1781  1783

France invaded Jersey on 5 January 1781. A young commander, Major Peirson, organised a successful counter-attack. Peirson was actually killed shortly before the battle, but Copley shows him at the centre of this scene, dying at the moment of British victory. The Black man to his left, firing back at the French forces represents Peirson’s servant, whose name was not recorded. He was sometimes referred to as ‘Pompey’. There is no historical evidence that ‘Pompey’ was present at the battle. Contemporary critics argue that Copley included him to suggest the loyalty of the British colonies to Britain.

Gallery label, August 2019

John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs William Godwin)  c.1790–1

Wollstonecraft was a ground-breaking feminist. This portrait shows her looking directly towards us, temporarily distracted from her studies. Such a pose would more typically be used for a male sitter. Women would normally be presented as more passive, often gazing away from the viewer. The painting dates to around the time she published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). This argued against the idea that women were naturally inferior to men and emphasised the importance of education.

Gallery label, October 2019

Henry Fuseli, Titania and Bottom  c.1790

This grand painting shows a scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595-6. King and queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, argue over who has care of a human child. To distract Titania, the fairy Puck casts a spell. This makes Titania fall in love with a human called Bottom, whose head has been changed to a donkey. One fairy, Moth, holds his finger to his lips as attendants take the child away. Henry Fuseli’s picture was one of the stars of the famous Shakespeare Gallery in London, opened by publisher John Boydell in 1789.

Gallery label, October 2020

Samuel Palmer, Coming from Evening Church  1830

Palmer painted this while living in Shoreham in Kent (1826–33). He regarded Shoreham as an ideal landscape, a rural paradise touched by a divine presence. Palmer was inspired by William Blake’s illustrations (1821) to Ambrose Philips’s imitation of Virgil’s First Eclogue and could have been describing his own work when he wrote of the Blake engravings: ‘They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitist pitch of intense poetry . . . There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul’.

Gallery label, February 2016

Thomas Sword Good, A Man Reading  exhibited 1827

Good was born in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He lived there for almost his entire career and first exhibited in London in 1824. He specialized in small highly finished oil paintings which usually showed one or two figures, often seated, in interiors. Like many genre painters, Good portrayed friends or professional models but introduced studio props and contrived incidents as a means of creating narrative interest. Rather as Wilkie had done in his 'Newsmongers' of 1821, shown nearby, Good was attracted to the theme of people reading a newspaper. During the early nineteenth century, especially during the Napoleonic Wars, the market for newspapers grew rapidly as public interest in current affairs developed.

Gallery label, September 2004

Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Deer and Deer Hounds in a Mountain Torrent (‘The Hunted Stag’)  ?1832, exhibited 1833

Landseer portrays the stag as a noble beast even in its last moments. The stag defiantly tries to fight off the deerhounds, retreating to a fierce stream. The violence of the scene and the turbulent landscape intensify a sense of struggle. Landseer was famous for the emotion and narrative he gave to his subjects. Here he presents hunting as a dramatic contest between humanity and nature. In such pictures of the wild beauty of Scotland, he contributed to a romantic vision of the Highlands.

Gallery label, May 2021

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Field of Waterloo  exhibited 1818

The Battle of Waterloo on 16 June 1815 saw Britain and Prussia defeat France, ending the Napoleonic Wars. Turner visited the site in 1817. He filled a sketchbook with drawings, took notes from guides, and read Byron’s verses on Waterloo, adapting them for his picture. Pictures of battles were expected to be patriotic. Turner neither celebrates victory nor takes the British side. Instead he shows war’s tragic consequences for all its victims. Alongside the painting, Turner displayed a line from Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describing ‘friend, foe, in one red burial blent’.

Gallery label, November 2022

Sir Thomas Lawrence, Philip Sansom  c.1805–10

The sitter is Philip Sansom an affluent merchant based in the City of London who had also been a leading figure in the successful political campaign against the slave trade within the British Empire. It was probably painted in the last decade of the sitter’s life. Like many successful merchants Sansom maintained a base in London and a large house outside the metropolis. From 1795 to 1815 (so including the period this portrait was created) Sansom lived at the grand Leytonstone House in Leytonstone, then a rural area particularly favoured by wealthy merchants because of its relative proximity to the City.

Gallery label, February 2016

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fall of Anarchy (?)  c.1833–4

This unfinished painting probably depicts the climactic episode in Shelley’s poem The Masque of Anarchy, written in immediate response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. It was not published until 1832, when the Reform Act became law. Shelley imagines Anarchy – one of the oppressors of the people along with Hypocrisy, Murder and Fraud – as a skeleton mounted on a white horse. Turner’s depiction perhaps corresponds to the moment in the poem when a mysterious light-filled mist awakens thoughts of resistance in the people. Anarchy falls dead from his horse, which tramples his murderous followers to dust, freeing the world of tyranny.

Gallery label, November 2022

William Etty, Hero, Having Thrown herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies on his Body  exhibited 1829

The story of the two young lovers Hero and Leander is one enduring love. It has been a recurring subject in art and literature since classical times. The annual feast devoted to Venus, goddess of love, brought all the youth of the Asian town of Abydos- including Leander- to Venus’s temple in Sestos. Here Leander saw the perfectly beautiful priestess Hero: they fell in love. To conceal this from Hero’s parents and her female attendant Leander promised that, come what may, he would swim across the Hellespont from Abydos to Sestos ( in Europe) every night so they could make love; to guide him safely Hero would place a burning torch on the top of the tower where she lived. Leander would swim back home before sunrise. The distance across the water between the two towns was about one mile. Today it is called the Dardanelles and divides Asian and European Turkey.

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Chairing the Member  1828

John Gibson, Hylas Surprised by the Naiades  1827–?36, exhibited 1837

John Gibson was one of the most widely-regarded neoclassical sculptors in Europe. In this statue group he depicts the moment in Greek myth when Hylas, the boy companion of Hercules, was abducted by water-nymphs who were entranced by his beauty. Hylas is simultaneously admired and restrained by the two Naiades. Gibson’s treatment of the scene draws on many classical sources, and the marble is inscribed (in Greek) with the words ‘Beautiful Hylas’. The statue was bought by Robert Vernon, a successful businessman and patron of the arts, and subsequently given to the nation.

Gallery label, February 2016

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows  exhibited 1831

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, which Constable began painting in 1830, shows the cathedral from the north-west, looking across the River Nadder from a point near a footbridge known as the Long Bridge. A team of three horses pulls a cart across the river from the left; cattle graze in the meadows in the right distance; and the centre foreground is occupied by a black and white sheepdog whose intent gaze is turned inwards towards the cathedral as if to direct the viewer towards the building or the storm that sweeps over it. The spire pierces a sky full of billowing clouds; a dark rain cloud hangs directly above and a streak of lightning flashes over the roof; but a magnificent rainbow arches over all, promising that the storm will pass. While the tall trees in the middle distance on the left are shaken by a squally breeze, the river’s surface is already glassy and smooth, reflecting the varied sky. Fresh raindrops glint and sparkle on the brambles in the foreground. Throughout much of the canvas, the paint is handled with a febrile, sometimes even frenzied excitement, especially in the foreground undergrowth, the trembling trees and the Gothic architecture of the cathedral. Laid on with brush and palette knife, the paint ranges from thick and three-dimensional in the brambles, to thin and almost translucent in the rainbow. The picture was exhibited by Constable at the Royal Academy in 1831 but never found a buyer. The painting remained in the artist’s studio – where he continued to retouch it – until his death in 1837.

John Simpson, Head of a Man, probably Ira Frederick Aldridge  exhibited 1827

This painting depicts the actor Ira Aldridge (1807-1867). Aldridge was born in New York, USA. He joined an African American theatre troupe in the early 1820s. In 1824 he travelled to Britain in the hope his talents would be better appreciated. Aldridge enjoyed huge success in Europe. He was the first African American actor to play the title role in William Shakespeare’s Othello. He was painted several times in the early stages of his career. It is unclear whether he was working as a model or sitting for artists to promote his own public image.

Gallery label, July 2019

John Linnell, Kensington Gravel Pits  1811–2

John Linnell was a pioneer of the new observational landscape painting of the early 19th century. By 1811, he was sharing a house with the painter William Mulready at Kensington Gravel Pits, near the Bayswater Road. Linnell and Mulready sat down ‘before any common object’ and tried ‘to imitate it minutely’. Linnell studied the gravel workings in a series of carefully observed watercolours completed out of doors. This picture, with its careful observation of the surface textures of the ground, brilliant lighting and vivid sky, was developed from the watercolours.

Gallery label, October 2013

attributed to John Downman, Sir Ralph Abercromby (?) and Companion  ?c.1795–1800

Emma Soyer (née Jones), Two Children with a Book  1831

J.W. Chandler, William Godwin  1798

William Godwin, Dissenter and political philosopher, was born in 1756. His interest in radical politics was sparked off during the 1770s by the debate which surrounded the American War of Independence. The Government believed that the colonists should be subject to the Constitution; supporters of the rebels felt that far bigger issues of justice and liberty were at stake. Godwin settled in London in 1783 when he first met the artist James Barry (see nos.16-18), a radical who seems to have known Blake by the mid-1780s. Godwin was among those London radicals who hoped that the French Revolution of 1789 would stimulate parliamentary reform in Britain. 'Liberty', he wrote, 'leaves nothing to be admired but talents and virtue.'

Gallery label, July 1994

Ruth Ewan, We could have been anything that we wanted to be (red version)  2011

Ruth Ewan’s decimal clock divides each day into ten hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds. Historically, the re-ordering of time is an expression of revolutionary optimism. Ewan refers to the attempt to recalibrate the day along decimal lines during the French Revolution. On 5 October 1793, the decimal French Republican Calendar became the official calendar of France. During the Paris Commune in 1871, the clocks were shot at to symbolically put an end to the time of rulers. For Ewan, time marks a place without defining an object. It is a space in which normal society can be subverted.

Gallery label, August 2020

Philip James De Loutherbourg, The Grand Attack on Valenciennes by the Combined Armies under the Command of HRH Duke of York  1794

Sir David Wilkie, Newsmongers  1821, exhibited 1821

Wilkie was a friend of Turner, and the most original of a group of artists who popularised narrative scenes of everyday life. Wilkie studied seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but added freshly-observed gestures and expression, and chose topical subjects. These were sometimes based on contemporary history, but he also painted familiar life.

This picture of a baker distracted from his hot roast and pie was shown at the Royal Academy in 1821. It was conceived as a humbler counterpart to the news-reading theme of Wilkie's masterpiece, Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Despatch, which is now at Apsley House.

Gallery label, September 2004