JMW Turner Painting Goes On Display For First Time Since 1833

A Turner painting of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire has gone on public display for the first time in nearly 200 years.

The watercolour is being shown at the town’s local museum, as part of a scheme to encourage people back to small museums and heritage sites.

Other objects going on display around the UK include a 160-million-year-old crocodile, a rare Bronze Age sword and the original Jolly Fisherman painting.

The exhibitions have all been supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

It awarded Wiltshire’s Athelstan Museum a £380,900 grant to help it buy Turner’s painting of Malmesbury Abbey, which had been in private hands for the last 40 years.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was inspired by the 12th-Century abbey ruins on his first visit to Malmesbury in 1791 when he was just 16. He painted the watercolour over his pencil sketch in 1827 when he returned to the area, aged 52.

The painting shows Malmesbury Abbey from the north on a summer morning, the foreground flooded with light and cattle warming themselves in the early sun.