CHAPTER 6 - The Urban Scene

Summary

THE URBAN COMMON

In the early years of the nineteenth century, J.M.W. Turner took himself once more to the southern outskirts of London at Clapham, where he took a view of the common there. Until the early eighteenth century, Clapham Common was seen as ‘little more than a morass’; in the 1760s it was drained but it was never enclosed by parliamentary act. As such, and even as late as 1830, the common was described as ‘quite a wild place’. Turner's painting, View on Clapham Common (c.1800–1805, Fig. 29), visually articulates this opinion. As with his sketches of Blackheath, the free painterly style and technique that Turner applied to View on Clapham Common is suggestive of the more precarious, marginal nature of this common as a rough, uncultivated expanse of land, with a pond in the foreground where a group of men are fishing, albeit in what appears to be an unusually animated manner.

In contrast, a c.1780 print of Clapham Common entitled View of Clapham from Clapham Common presents a very different picture of a calm, pastoral scene that is nonetheless becoming suburban in its nature. The print shows the eighteenth-century church of St Mary, along with some new residential development in a typical Georgian villa style. A path wavers across the common in the left foreground, blocked partly by a solitary grazing cow, while what appears to be a newer, straighter path cuts through over a hedgerow leading towards a group of what seem to be farm buildings.