Congratulations to JMW Turner for being the face of British visual arts on the new £20 note. The list of nominations was incredibly extensive including over 29,000 visual artists. The short list of five were Turner, filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, painter William Hogarth, and designer Josiah Wedgwood. The new note should go into circulation in 2020. (I can hear Ruskin’s cheers from here!)
If you have seen the film Mr. Turner you might have noticed some familiar paintings. In one of the final scenes he is at the 1851 Royal Academy Exhibition and grunts at Millais’s Woodman’s Daughter and Mariana and Brown’s Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.
Also in the extras of the DVD there is a sequence filmed at Wentworth Woodhouse where the cast are rehearsing a scene to represent a Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House. Timothy Spall is shown in front of Turner paintings and to his left is James Collinson’s Mother and Child by a Stile – Isle of Wight. This was painted in 1849 when Collinson and William Michael Rossetti spent the summer at the Isle of Wight. It is his most Pre-Raphaelite landscape.
