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Four Turner views shown together for first time

Katy Prickett
BBC News, Norfolk
Norfolk Museums Service JMW Turner Walton Bridges, c1806, oil on canvas, showing a figurative landscape with a herd of cows, some drinking in water, others on the shore, boats and people in the middle distance and beyond a double-span bridge, trees and a cloudy and light blue skyNorfolk Museums Service
One of the four Walton Bridges paintings (in about 1806) was acquired by Norfolk Museum Service with a £2.1m National Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 2019

Four paintings of a double-span bridge over the River Thames by British artist JMW Turner, including one rarely seen in public, are to be exhibited together for the first time.

Turner (1775-1851) often painted the same view during his long career and he was particularly drawn to the bridges at Walton, Surrey, following his move to Isleworth, in the early 1800s.

The pictures will be part of a Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery exhibition exploring artists' approach to landscape from the 17th Century until today.

Curator Dr Francesca Vanke said the show was inspired by the "myriad ways Turner could make one place have all those different atmospheres".

Private collection/Sotheby's JMW Turner Landscape with Walton Bridges, mid 1840s, oil on canvas, showing a misty golden landscape with two trees in the foreground and to the side and a double-span bridge picked out in the middle distance and blue grey sky above Private collection/Sotheby's
Another was painted about 40 years later, with a completely different atmosphere, is in a private collection and rarely seen in public

"[It] got me thinking that every time we see a landscape we see something different.

"One person may see their ancestral home, another may think if I chop down those trees I can build a house, it's all about the same place but depending on who we are, so many things affect our gaze," she said.

The exhibition features seven oil paintings and nine other works by Turner, alongside landscapes by more than 40 artists.

It will trace the evolution of landscape art before and after the pivotal figure.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London Canaletto 's A View of Walton Bridge oil on canvas, showing a complex wooden structure with three spans over the river, and people on the foreground shore, with boats on the river and a house and trees on the far bankDulwich Picture Gallery, London
Canaletto's View of Walton Bridge (1754) shows a complex wooden structure, later replaced by the elegant stone arches that inspired Turner

They include paintings from artists who influenced Turner such as Canaletto, contemporaries such as John Constable and those he influenced such as John Ruskin.

Works from the 20th Century include a Paul Nash landscape, recently acquired by Norfolk Museum Service, showing broken trees from the battlefields of World War One, while contemporary artists include Ibrahim Mahama, Frances Kearney and Emma Stibbons, who followed Turner's route in the Alps in 1802.

Norfolk Museums Service Paul Nash's Void of War, 1918, Lithograph on paper, a cream and brown stylized scene, with brown tree trunks, broken at the top, a cream walkway across a muddy ground and cream puddles beneath a cream slightly streaked skyNorfolk Museums Service
Paul Nash's Void of War (1918) was "a metaphor for the senseless destruction" he saw during World War One, said Dr Vanke

Dr Vanke said: "She stood in the same places he stood and noticed that some of the glaciers are not there now, they've melted due to climate change.

"People used to see mountains as symbols of permanence and strength, but as Emma says they're actually fragile."

Murray Edwards College/Emma Stibbon Emma Stibbon's Ice Cloud, Antarctica, 2019. Print on paper, showing a black jagged rock emerging out of deep white snow against a white backgroundMurray Edwards College/Emma Stibbon
Emma Stibbon's Ice Cloud, Antarctica (2019) reflects her fascination with the landscape of the polar regions

The exhibition kickstarts celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth in 1775.

At its heart is the 1805/06 version of Walton Bridges acquired by Norfolk Museums Service in 2019 following a successful fundraising campaign - the first oil painting by Turner to entre a public collection in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

Since its acquisition, it has been displayed at Colchester Castle, Lynn Museum, Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, and Time and Tide Museum, Yarmouth.

  • JMW Turner and changing visions of landscape opens on 19 October

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