Painted
in 1808 the picture shows Pope's Villa the residence of Alexander
Pope (1688-1744) and the distress he felt at the destruction of
Pope’s villa. The villa, on the banks of the River Thames
at Twickenham, had been commissioned by Pope in 1719 using the
proceeds from his translation of Homer’s Iliad, and he lived
in it for a quarter of a century. Lady Howe, who owned the villa
in the early nineteenth century, was so bothered by the tourists
and admirers who still came to see it and its grounds that she
had it demolished, for which act of vandalism she was widely reviled
as ‘Queen of the Goths’. Turner’s outrage at
the apparent disregard for the legacy of Pope’s memory is
expressed in lines he wrote while working on the painting:
“O Lost to honor and the sense of shame
Can Britain so forget Pope’s well-earnd fame
To desolation doom the poet’s fane
The pride of T[wickenham’s] bower and silver Thame…”
Unfortunately
the news came through on February 10th 2009, that the export ban
on the painting has been lifted, and therefore the painting can
go to America.
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/30364/britain-oks-export-of-turner-painting/
|
