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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Spring Tour of Northern France 1845 > Boulogne Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Tour de Croy at Wimereux, with a Rocky Shore 1845

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Tour de Croy at Wimereux, with a Rocky Shore’ 1845
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 3 Recto:
The Tour de Croy at Wimereux, with a Rocky Shore 1845
D35406
Turner Bequest CCCLVIII 4
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 230 x 328 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘4’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCLVIII 4’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page features a sketch taken amidst the profusion of ‘picturesque’ boulders that littered the coast at Wimereux.1 The view looks south down the shoreline past the village out to the eighteenth-century Tour de Croy.2 The rocky reef upon which this vestige of the Seven Years’ War was built is represented by cursory zigzags, revealing that the pencil drawing was taken at low tide. Further indicative of this phenomenon are gradations of ochre and green alternating washes to simulate the effect sandbanks beneath shallow waters.
Compare the view on folio 11 recto (D35414; Turner Bequest CCCLVIII 12).
1
J. Brunet, New Guide to Boulogne-sur-Mer, 3rd ed., Boulogne 1840, p.131.
2
Pierre-André Wimet, ‘Un vestige boulonnais de la Guerre de Sept ans – La tour de Croy, à Wimereux’, Bulletin de la Commission Départementale des Monuments Historiques du Pas-de-Calais, vol.6, no.1, 1935, pp.418–22.
Recto:
Blank, except for slight transference of blue watercolour at far right from folio 4 recto opposite (D35407; Turner Bequest CCCLVIII 5).

John Chu
November 2013

How to cite

John Chu, ‘The Tour de Croy at Wimereux, with a Rocky Shore 1845 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-tour-de-croy-at-wimereux-with-a-rocky-shore-r1173507, accessed 17 July 2024.