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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Margate, London and Surrey c.1829-45 > Kent Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner St Nicholas's Church, Sturry, across the Millpond; ?Distant View of Canterbury c.1830

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘St Nicholas's Church, Sturry, across the Millpond; ?Distant View of Canterbury’ c.1830
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 11 Verso:
St Nicholas’s Church, Sturry, across the Millpond; ?Distant View of Canterbury c.1830
D35778
Turner Bequest CCCLXIII 11a
Pencil on white wove paper, 76 x 98 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Mill’ top left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is not, as Finberg conjectured, a view a Sandwich (see under folio 6 recto; D35767),1 but rather of the village of Sturry on the River Great Stour, along the main road to Margate (see under folio 10 verso; D35776) about three miles north-east of Canterbury (see under folio 3 recto; D35761). Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, St Nicholas’s Church is seen to the south-west down Milner Lane from beside a large mill which does not survive by the millpond bridge, with the imposing red-brick Tudor arch over the lane in the middle distance. There is a view in this direction from the church on folios 9 verso–10 recto (D35774–D34775).
The view is disrupted on the left by dark tree trunks and a distant church spire overlapping with the mill, in a continuation of one of the prospect possibly showing Canterbury on folio 12 recto opposite (D35775).

Matthew Imms
September 2016

1
See Finberg 1909, II, p.1177.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘St Nicholas’s Church, Sturry, across the Millpond; ?Distant View of Canterbury c.1830 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2016, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-st-nicholass-church-sturry-across-the-millpond-distant-view-r1183741, accessed 21 November 2024.