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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > East Sussex c.1806-20 > Hints River Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Study for a Marine Picture: ?'Entrance of the Meuse' c.1815-18

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Study for a Marine Picture: ?'Entrance of the Meuse'’ c.1815-18
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Verso:
Study for a Marine Picture: ?‘Entrance of the Meuse’ circa 1815–18
D10591
Turner Bequest CXLI 3a
Pencil on white wove paper, 88 x 114 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘W’ within image, right of centre and ?‘Light’ bottom left
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg was the first to suggest a possible connection with the picture Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, Going to Pieces... (Tate N00501)1 exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819 and Butlin and Joll note it as a ‘related sketch’ together with more closely connected drawings in the Farnley sketchbook (Tate D12096, D12098; Turner Bequest CLIII 89a, 90a). Certainly there are similarly choppy sea and cloudy sky, but the relationship is not close and the rowing boat in the foreground faces in the opposite direction. At best this can only be an alternative idea for the composition. There is no reason to think Turner took this sketchbook with him to Holland in 1817, although the other Dutch subject to emerge from the trip, Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut)2 is included in a list of works on folio 35 verso (D10646) and the calm marines sketched folios 4 and 7 (D10592, D10595) might also be related in general terms.

David Blayney Brown
July 2011

1
Butlin and Joll 1984, pp.93–4 no.139 (pl.123).
2
Ibid., pp.91–3 no.137 (pl.122).

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Study for a Marine Picture: ?‘Entrance of the Meuse’ c.1815–18 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-study-for-a-marine-picture-entrance-of-the-meuse-r1131644, accessed 22 November 2024.