‘Where gentle Thames his winding water leads'

Huon Mallalieu reflects on the influence of the Thames on the work of Turner and other artists and writers of his time

- Huon Mallalieu

ONE of the first decisions made by the Bank of England’s Banknote Characters Advisory Committee after it was joined by the historian and curator Sandy Nairne was to put J. M. W. Turner on the new £20 note that is to be launched tomorrow. The reverse of the banknote shows the painter’s youthful self-portrait in front of The Fighting Temeraire being tugged along the Thames Estuary to her final berth, one of his and the public’s favourites of his works. It was doubly fitting that Mr Nairne should have been involved in the choice, for not only is he a former director of the National Portrait Gallery, but he has come up with a line in praise of the River Thames that deserves to stand with the famous quotations by Spenser, Morris and John Burns: ‘A curving spine for the history and landscapes of England,’ he wrote in a blog.

The river could be said to have had the same importance in Turner’s life, from his birth in Covent Garden a couple of hundred yards from it in 1775, to his death in 1851, only feet above the riverbank at Chelsea. At various times, he lived beside it—at Brentford, Isleworth, Hammersmith and Twickenham—and he owned the Ship and Bladebone public house at Wapping. He saw the Thames not only with the eye of a painter, but with that of a sailor and of a fisherman.