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

Eric Shanes identifies this view as of Dunster Castle, Somerset, comparing it to a pencil drawing of the view north to the Bristol Channel in the 1811 Somerset and North Devon sketchbook (Tate D08953; Turner Bequest CXXVI 7) and suggesting that it is an undeveloped study for Turner’s Picturesque View in England and Wales.1 The form of the hill on the left here is longer and more rectangular than the slope occupied by the castle in the corresponding part of the drawing, but the general relationship of it to the sea and the valley in the foreground is similar.

David Hill has described the status of Shanes’s identification as ‘not proven or positively dubious’.2 Shanes’s identification a similar ‘colour beginning’ composition (Tate D25216; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 94), perhaps made ‘during the same session of work’, as a view of nearby Porlock,3 has since been convincingly displaced by Ian Warrell’s identification of it as a view of Rouen from the north, comparing it with precise 1820s pencil and ink drawings;4 the subject of the present study is likely to remain unproven.

See also the introductions to the present subsection of identified but unrealised subjects and the overall England and Wales ‘colour beginnings’ grouping to which this work has been assigned.

Technical notes:
There are colour tests at the bottom left and possibly at the bottom right.

Verso:
Blank save for inscriptions: inscribed ?by Turner ‘[?S...] R[...]’ bottom right, upside down; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCLXIV – 360’ towards bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘CCCLXIV 360.’, ’13 ½ x 19 1/8’ and ‘wm 1833’ towards bottom right; inscribed in pencil ‘36’ bottom right. There are isolated strokes or splashes of red and blue towards the top right, and an adventitious diagonal stroke of blue pencil above the centre.