Petworth Park: Tillington Church and Lord Egremont's Dining Room

A painting shaped by a room

The canvas is much wider than it is tall, which is not a compositional preference but a fitting. Turner produced four landscapes of this unusual shape to sit in the panelling of the Carved Room at Petworth House, above the doors, and the proportions were dictated by the space they had to occupy.

Catalogue record — Tate collection dataset (CC0)

Artist	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Date	1828
Medium	Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions	support: 600 x 1457 mm frame: 930 x 1707 x 155 mm
Collection	Tate, London
Accession number	N00559
Credit line	Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Working to a fixed shape forced decisions. With almost no vertical room he could not use the framing masses that organise most of his landscapes, so the composition runs sideways instead: a low sun near the centre, ground falling away left and right, and interest distributed along the horizontal rather than stacked in depth.

Lord Egremont

George Wyndham, the third Earl of Egremont, was among the most important patrons of Turner's whole middle career. He bought pictures, commissioned others, and let artists stay at Petworth for extended periods with an informality quite unusual for the period, which clearly suited a painter who disliked being managed by anyone.

Turner worked at Petworth repeatedly through the late 1820s and 1830s, and the body of work he made there is distinctive: loose, light-filled interiors and park views, much of it never exhibited. The house gave him a subject, a studio and an audience of one who did not require him to explain himself.

The park and the sun

The view looks west across the park Capability Brown had laid out, with the tower of Tillington church breaking the skyline near the setting sun. Deer graze in the middle distance, and in the foreground a group of dogs bound towards the viewer, which is the only rapid movement in an otherwise still picture.

Cricketers appear in one of the companion panels, and taken together the four give an unusually relaxed account of an English estate in the late 1820s. There is no weather event, no catastrophe and no classical apparatus anywhere in the set, which makes them an outlier in his exhibited output.

What he made there

The Petworth work divides into what was exhibited and what was not. The park panels were made for the house; the interiors, done rapidly in gouache on blue paper, were private studies of rooms and the people in them, and they were unknown outside the studio until the Bequest opened.

The version at Petworth

A closely related version of this composition remains at Petworth House itself, in the Carved Room, while the canvas described here is at Tate. The relationship between the two has been studied at length, and the short answer is that Turner worked the subject more than once for the same wall.

Where to see it

This painting is at Tate in London as part of the Bequest. Petworth House, now in the care of the National Trust, retains its own Turners in the rooms they were made for, which is a rare thing: the paintings can be seen in the light and the position the painter was working to.