News from Turner’s House & the Friends of Turner’s House

We aim to celebrate J.M.W. Turner’s artistic achievement through encouraging visitors to discover the house he designed and built, and the Thames landscape which inspired him. Through conserving and interpreting Turner’s House, we aim to build a deeper engagement with Turner as an artist.

 

 

Message from the Chair

In 2019 Turner’s House will continue its new life as a small historic house of great significance. Since opening to the public in July 2017, we have welcomed 9,000 visitors to Sandycombe Lodge, and run many educational events with schools and colleges, workshops, walks and talks.

We are very pleased to announce that Ricky Pound will be our House Director for 2019, after his excellent work in an interim role last autumn.

Our generous financial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund will now taper down, and we must explore new ways of ensuring that this wonderfully restored building, with its rich narratives drawn from the life and work of J.M.W. Turner, has a sustainable future.  We will shortly launch our Supporters’ Circle and hope to welcome some of you to join.

I will soon step down as Turner’s House Trust’s chair, after 15 years involvement with this wonderful project, and look forward to introducing my successor to all our supporters.  If you, or anyone you know, are interested in taking on the role of THT’s chair, please go to our websitehttps://turnershouse.org/about-us/ to find out what it will entail.  I can assure you that there are rarely dull moments!

Catherine Parry-Wingfield
Chair, Turner’s House Trust

 

Message from the House Director

I am delighted to have another year as Director of Turner’s House. and look forward to the continued promotion of the house as a monument of national importance. As we go forward 2020 will see J.M.W. Turner appear on the new £20 note, an indication of the importance of Turner in public memory and his towering significance in European art.2019 also will also see Turner’s House first post conservation exhibition that will show J.M.W, Turner as a book illustrator for Sir Walter Scott’s  Poetical Works and Life of Napoleon  Bonaparte. The exhibition brochure will be included in the admission price. More details below! We will also be joined in 2019 by a new part time Heritage Assistant. More news on the successful applicant next newsletter!

Ricky Pound,
House Director

 

 

Turner’s House Trust are pleased to announce their first post-conservation exhibition!

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) first collaborated in 1818 on the Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (pub.1819-1826) while the artist was still living at his Twickenham villa, Sandycombe Lodge. It signalled the beginning of a formidable partnership between Britain’s most famous artist and the internationally-celebrated author of Ivanhoe and Waverley.

This exhibition, the first to be staged at Turner’s newly-restored home, focusses on their last collaboration before Sir Walter’s death – the illustrations to his Poetical Works – and Turner’s next commission, the designs for the author’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. The exhibition will lead the visitor on a time-travelling journey through the wild north of England, the contested Border country and the awesome grandeur of the Western Highlands on the trail of the individual landscapes, antiquities, folk tales and ballads that inspired Scott’s poetry, before turning to more recent history, to the warmer climes of France, Italy and the sublime Alps – witnesses to Bonaparte’s dazzling rise from promising child cadet, to general, emperor and the most powerful man in Europe.

 

 

 

 

January 25, 2019