Image of Joseph Turner’s “Mortlake Terrace,” courtesy the National Gallery of Art

Written by Aleid Ford, who is profiling 365 masterworks at the National Gallery of Art this year for her project Art 2010, which appears on her website Head for Art.

Last week the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize were announced. The award celebrates developments in contemporary art, designed to commend ‘a British artist under 50 for an outstanding presentation of their work in the 12 months preceding.’ The prize was named after the Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851), since he’d wanted to set up an award for young artists, and since his work was controversial in its day (as was his determination to lift the landscape genre into higher echelons of art). Turner was the most original, imaginative figure in the history of English landscape painting and it’s his Mortlake Terrace (1827) at the NGA we’re looking at today.

Turner had a precocious talent, traveled widely in the the UK and Europe on art tours and had a huge output due to rapid work approach. His style varied over the years: from accurate topographical watercolors in his early career to serene classical landscapes after visiting Italy, his most Romantic paintings captured the power of nature, with free and expressive handling. This painting has him mid-career, and shows a smart London suburb on the Thames. It’s one of two views commissioned by the owner of the town house that sat on this terrace (the companion picture is in the Frick Collection in New York). This painting reverses that view, looking west at sunset.

All the details pile into that distinct and delicious ‘end-of-a-summer’s-day’ feel, and a lovely listlessness comes in with Turner’s tiny observations. See the abandoned ladder leaning against the lime tree in the left foreground. The toys scattered freely across the ground in the middle grounds (there’s a doll on the red chair and a hoop looped onto the stone ledge to the right). An open portfolio of pictures has been left to flutter by the figures watching the Lord Mayor’s ceremonial barge.