Michael, in your photo of the 'View to St Pauls across the Island bridge' I see the Weir pub building where, next door, the great painter J M W Turner, when he was 10 in 1784-85, was sent to live with his mother's brother, Mr Joseph Mallard William Marshall, a butcher in Brentford. His house and shop was next to where the the Weir pub is today.I wondered what he thought of his short time in Brentford then, so I went digging.....I found that unlike P B Shelley, who also spent 2 years here and hated the time at the Syon Academy, Turner loved Brentford, which sounded like a lovely country retreat at that time.He attended John White’s Brentford Free School, number 125 The High Street (now the Dew Drop Inn); this was his only formal education. It was in Brentford he expressed an interest in painting.“Turner received his first artistic commission while in Brentford. A friend of his uncle, John Lees, a foreman at the Brentford Distillery, commissioned him to hand-colour a book of engravings, for which Lee paid 2d for each engraving. The copy of this book , Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of England and Wales, by Henry Boswell, with most of the plates hand-tinted by the young Turner, is in Chiswick Local Studies collection.”[Brentford Past, by Gillian Clegg]His earliest known work is a copy of an engraving of Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower, 1787, in Friar Bacon’s Study and Folly Bridge, Oxford (Oxford Almanack, 1780), made when he was twelve; it was at this time that he produced many sketches of churches, abbeys and city streets. A friend remembered Turner declaring that 'if he could begin life again, he would rather be an architect than a painter'.I found this marvellous old book on Google book search: 'The life of J.M.W. Turner, by George Walter Thornbury, 1862' which had these snippets of his fond time in Brentford:“Turner received the elements of instruction at the Brentford Free-school, as day-boarder. It was here his talent first showed itself. In his way to and from that seat of learning, he amused himself by drawing with a piece of chalk on the walls the figures of cocks and hens.”“The school was opposite the Three Pigeons. It contained, when the sickly, pale boy came down to it from London, fifty boys and ten girls.”“…from red roofs and driving blasts of brown smoke (of Covent Garden); from crimson fog-suns and misty slants of sunshine—to a very Promised Land for a boy-artist. The green fields of Paradise to him were the fields round vulgar Putney and lonely, peaceful Twickenham. The birds must have been to him as little flying angels newly transformed, and the air seemed of sapphire brightness and transparency. It was, I know, near twenty years before I, myself a London-born boy, could forget the exquisite delight of my first days in the country and on the Thames side, where tree, bird, sky, river, seemed but as so many voices uniting in one calm, yet unceasing chorus of gratitude and joy to God their Creator.”“Long afterwards old school-fellows of Turner's used to say, that his first attempts at art had been drawings of birds and flowers and trees from the school-room windows.”“Free and happy in the country, he became a landscape-painter—most true, yet most poetic of landscape-painters—bringing back for us a lost Eden by the force of his enchantments.”“…his school-fellows, sympathizing with his taste, often did " his sums" for him while he pursued the bent of his compelling genius. To these early days in the country Turner owed much. The chestnut-avenue at Bushy Park—the terraces of Hampton Palace—the green calm meadows — the reflective cattle—the pouting, scornful swans —the fast-flowing river—the summer elms, so dense and dark and close, yet peopled with chorister birds,— must all, as after-work showed, have reached his young heart, stirred him to poetry, and roused his veneration, his sense of sublimity, and his love for the beautiful. I think that no place breeds so strong a reactionary love for poetry and art as London—the vast, the negative, the miserable, the loathsome, the great, the magnificent. It was probably indelible recollections of these early days that afterwards led Turner to come and live at Twickenham, near his old school. It led him to delight—and this years after—in drawing swans in all attitudes; and it was long before even the flat- roofed stone-pines of Italy could efface the memory of the Bushy elms and the Brentford meadows gilt with flowers and azure with forget me-nots.“To be near Reynolds's old house at Richmond is said to have been one of Turner's chief reasons for building Solus Lodge (my note: he renamed Sandycoombe Lodge, Sandycoombe Road and lived there 1813-126). More probably it arose from his wish to be undisturbed, to study the Thames, and to be near his old schoolboy home at Brentford.”St Paul’s church was not there when Turner was, it was built in 1868. Neither was the canal it opened in 1798, but the River Brent and Thames, The Butts, Syon House, Gunnersbury House, Osterley House, St Lawrence church, Kew Gardens still preserve a lot that he would have known.
Duncan Walker ● 6432d