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

This view is continued directly to the right from folio 3 verso opposite (D19406), where cottages and boats are shown in the foreground above the beach south-west of the entrance to Dover Harbour. The present page focuses on Dover Castle1 to the north-east, with an unusually amount of careful hatching, suggesting strong morning light from the right and conveying both the varied forms of the fortress complex and the contours of the rugged slopes below.

Set within the cliff towards the right are the outward indications of the extensive network of tunnels beneath the castle, with the two lower arches supporting a platform known as the Casemates Balcony, which is accessible to visitors today (a ‘casemate’ being a vaulted or fortified position). See also Tate D19358, D19361 and D19373 in the contemporary Holland sketchbook (Turner Bequest CCXIV 261, 262a, 278a).

The closely spaced wooden struts of the lost pier south of the harbour entrance are shown below towards the right. The diagonal line just above it at the edge of the page is a cable supporting one of the masts at the seaward end of the pier; it is reprised in the almost direct continuation to the right on folio 5 recto (D19409), where the rest of the pier is shown below the profile of the cliffs towards the South Foreland beyond. Turner may have temporarily pulled this page back to place the edge along the gutter of the other to enable the rest of the scene to be shown on the same scale, thus forming a three-page panorama.

See also the variant of the present central section on folio 7 recto (D19413) from slightly further to the right, where afternoon light from the left is carefully shown instead. Tate D19374 (Turner Bequest CCXIV 269), a view from a similar angle in the contemporary Holland sketchbook, also equates to most of the present page, and again shows the castle and its setting with similar morning shadows. Compare the effect in the watercolour Dover (Tate D18154; Turner Bequest CCVIII U),2 engraved in 1827 for the Ports of England (Tate impressions: T04828–T04829), where the right-hand half of the background corresponds with what is shown here.

The overall three-page view corresponds with Tate D19346 (Turner Bequest CCXIV 255) in the Holland book. For other Dover views in this sketchbook and elsewhere, see under folio 1 recto (D19401).