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

This sketch records the view from the outer bailey wall of Scarborough Castle, with the entrance gate to the left and St Mary’s Church hidden behind the wall just left of centre, looking east-south-east to Seamer Beacon on the horizon towards the right. There is a smudge, perhaps pf brown watercolour, at bottom left.

Technical notes:

The folio forms one continuous sheet with D11917; Turner Bequest CL 3. The original sheet has been folded in half and stitched through. This sheet need not necessarily represent the centre-spread of the original sketchbook, but it does indicate something of the original nature of the binding. It is an open question as to how many sheets comprised the original sketchbook, but as a starting point there seems no need to assume any more than sixteen, folded to make thirty-two folios given that there are four spurious folios in the present binding. These are all in the second half of the book as it is now constituted, and misleadingly suggest a total of eighteen original sheets forming a present total of thirty-six folios. A close study of the watermarks, attempting to marry these up through the stitching, taken with internal indications of original pagination, will enable a clearer idea to emerge of the original structure of the sketchbook (see Introduction).

Verso:

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