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5. England 1805-15
149 - The Forest of Bere

The identification with the Petworth picture, which has also been called, among other things, ‘Evening: the Drinking Pool', is made certain by the description in The Review of Publications of Art, probably by John Landseer. The Examiner for 8 May 1808 confirms that ‘At Mr Turner's private Gallery the Forest of Bere has been bought by the Earl of Egremont'. The picture shows men barking chestnut branches for caulking and tanning, an important activity on Lord Egremont's estate.

The picture, like many at Petworth, has alas, suffered from injudicious cleaning in the past, so it is particularly interesting to note that the Review of Publications described this picture as 'rich, golden-toned' and said that it glowed with a warmer sun than any other picture in the room: yet it is not the tropical heat that Mr. Turner has here painted but the milder radiance of a warm English summer's evening'. It concluded by claiming that ‘The pride of Cuyp . . . would be humbled, we conceive, by a too near approach to this picture of Turner'. It is interesting to find a contemporary review appreciating the new feeling for light that was already apparent in ‘Sun rising through Vapour’ of the previous year (National Gallery, London, 479).

The painting, despite its debt to Gainsborough and Dutch landscape painters, also shows a return to Turner's interest in atmosphere and light that had characterised such works of the later 1790s as 'Buttermere Lake'. One is probably justified in seeing this 'return to nature' as the result of a new campaign of painting in oils out-of-doors, resulting in the two groups of Thames sketches, large and small. Turner would have passed through the Forest of Bere, a few miles north of Havant, on his way to Portsmouth in October 1807 to see the arrival of the Danish ships captured at the Battle of Copenhagen (the subject of the large painting first exhibited, unfinished, at Turner's gallery also in 1808; Tate Gallery 481). There is a drawing related to the white horse in the 'River' sketchbook, probably also done in 1807 (T.B.XCVI-45v).



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