J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Turner inscribed this sheet ‘4 vig [taken to mean vignettes] for the East Coast’ and it can therefore be quite firmly connected to his work on an incomplete print project known as ‘Picturesque Views on the East Coast of England’, although it did not result in a finished watercolour or print for the scheme. For more information about this project, see the Introduction to this section.

The study’s specific subject matter has only just come to light, thanks to a new identification by Matthew Imms.1 In 1909 the Turner Bequest’s first cataloguer, A.J. Finberg, described this sheet as showing ‘a monument’, and in 1993 Jan Piggott published it as ‘Church on a quay’.2 Imms, however, suggested the sketch shows the Water Gate at Tilbury Fort on the Thames Estuary in Essex. The seventeenth-century fort was designed to protect London’s seaward approach, and remained defensively important in Turner’s day; while few sketches of it appear to survive in the Turner Bequest (the fort can, however, be glimpsed in Tate D06432; Turner Bequest XCIX 44), it is a location Turner must have sailed past many times. It is easy to imagine that a building with such strong naval connotations would have appealed to Turner as a subject for the ‘East Coast’ series. Tilbury is also recorded as the subject of a now unknown painting, which was apparently in Turner’s studio in 1810 (see the entry for Tate D09121; Turner Bequest CXXIX 45).

Turner made full use of the blue paper support, contrasting the background colour against the opaque white gouache used to represent the building, and the warmer palette employed to indicate the background and water, in which the water gate is seen reflected.

Technical notes:

There is a spot of foxing on the upper part of the sheet.

Verso:

Blank, save for inscription in pencil: ‘AB 23 P / o’.