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

Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook 1811
D08362–D08806, D40902–D40906, D41520, D41521
Turner Bequest CXXIII 1–250

Corfe to Dartmouth sketchbook 1811
D08807–D08822, D08824, D08826–D08842, D08844, D08846, D08848–D08863, D08940, D40821, D41522
Turner Bequest CXXIV 1–48

Ivy Bridge to Penzance sketchbook 1811
D08865–D08939, D40815–D40817
Turner Bequest CXXV 1–48

Cornwall and Devon sketchbook 1811
D08941–D08942; D41275–D41296, D41299–D41373
Turner Bequest CXXV a 1–78

Stonehenge sketchbook 1811
D41374–D41388
Turner Bequest CXXV b 1–15

Somerset and North Devon sketchbook 1811
D08945–D08964, D40294–D40295, D41531
Turner Bequest CXXVI 1–18

Turner undertook an extensive tour of the region popularly known as the West Country of England in the summer of 1811. In a diary entry for 14 May 1812, Joseph Farington recorded a visit to the annual one-man exhibition at his fellow Royal Academician’s private London gallery in Queen Anne Street West:

Farington’s own tour of many of the same places in the autumn of 18102 perhaps prompted his conversation with Turner’s father as he viewed six oil paintings of Devon and Cornwall subjects, listed below along with the sketches on which they were based:

Turner had visited the counties Farington notes, as well as sites in Buckinghamshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Except for an apparently isolated visit to Dunster Castle in Somerset in the late 1790s, when he might possibly have gone a little further west to meet his father’s North Devon relatives,9 he seems not to have ventured previously beyond Wiltshire and Bristol. Some sites to the south-west had been listed on the flyleaf of the 1798 Dinevor Castle sketchbook (Tate D41434) and in the Dolbadarn sketchbook, in use a little later (Tate D02174, D02175; Turner Bequest XLVI 119 and 119a), and on 6 April 1805 he had written to his Wiltshire patron Sir Richard Colt Hoare about fulfilling an ongoing commission: ‘perhaps I may be able before I go to Devonshire, but even then I fear the Summer will be far advanced.’10 However, there is no further evidence of such a trip at that time.

There must have been some prior notice of Turner’s 1811 tour. His subsequent friend and executor, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, then a seventeen-year-old Royal Academy student and a native of Plymouth, wrote to his father there in July: ‘What he [Turner] wants is to go on board some large ship, and I daresay George [Eastlake’s brother] will be very happy to take him on board the Salvadore, and perhaps into the Dockyard, &c. He is the first landscape painter now in the world ... I hope all at Plymouth will be attentive to him’.11 Eastlake would be one of Turner’s companions during his 1813 visit to Devon, covered in a separate section of the present catalogue.

Turner’s main focus was a thorough survey of key sites along the coast. The paintings shown at his gallery were really by-products of his topographical research for watercolours commissioned by W.B. Cooke for a proposed series of engraved Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England (see below for an outline of the project and list of the compositions).12 As well as quoting Farington’s diary, Finberg established the widest possible time-frame for the tour by noting Turner’s presence at a Royal Academy Council meeting on Thursday 11 July and his absence the following week (16 July), his next attendance being on Monday 7 October at ‘the first Council meeting of the season’.13 Further evidence of the route appears in Turner’s own extensive list of numbered banknotes at the back of the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook, annotated with the places at which they were spent or broken14 (see the entries for Tate D40905, D40906; verso of Turner Bequest CXXIII 253 and inside back cover), and brief accounts from the very beginning of the tour in the same book (Tate D08362; Turner Bequest CXXIII 1).

Combining entries from these documentary sources with the main subjects he had identified in his 1909 Inventory of the Turner Bequest, Finberg was able to draw up an itinerary,15 with which a selection of further sites (many of which he also recognised) is incorporated here:

Finberg also listed Basingstoke, Hampshire, at the start of the tour, but the relevant sketches fall towards the end of the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook, suggesting that they were drawn on the way back.

Farington’s route by mail coach to Salisbury on the early stages of his 1810 West Country trip, recorded in his notebook-diary, may have been Turner’s too: ‘Staines | Bagshot | Hartford Bridge [Hartfordbridge] | Basingstoke | Overton | Andover’.16 Taking Salisbury as the start and end of the main tour, Turner’s journey comprised a continuous clockwise circuit of very roughly six hundred miles. He was said to have made brief visits to his Devon-born father’s relatives on opposite sides of the county at Exeter and Barnstaple,17 but apart from Farington’s diary and Eastlake’s letter there are no independent contemporary documents relating to his West Country activities in 1811, unlike the extensive reports of his return visit to Devon in 1813. Turner probably also went there again in 1814, and these trips are dealt with in a separate section of the present catalogue. Focusing as he did on Continental tours from 1817 onwards, he seems never to have returned to the region, but his sketches provided source material for many years to come.

Six sketchbooks were used on the 1811 tour, only three of which are of conventional construction. Devonshire Coast, No.1 (Turner Bequest CXXIII) is actually a copy of Samuel Coltman’s British Itinerary, a small printed book of distances between places with interleaved blank pages. It was used continually except along the far western and northern coasts of Cornwall, sometimes supplemented by more detailed studies of the same sites in the larger sketchbooks. Corfe to Dartmouth (Turner Bequest CXXIV) and Ivy Bridge to Penzance (Turner Bequest CXXV), two similar, conventional sketchbooks, record Dorset, South Devon and the south coast of Cornwall as far as St Michael’s Mount. Cornwall and Devon (Turner Bequest CXXV a) covers the far west of Cornwall and the northern coast of these counties as far as Combe Martin; it appears to have been a sheaf of loose sheets, bound comparatively recently. Somerset and North Devon (Turner Bequest CXXVI), broken up at an unknown date, ranges from Ilfracombe in Devon to Dunster in Somerset. Finally, Stonehenge (CXXV b), originally another bundle of loose sheets, records the ancient Wiltshire monument in detail, along with Cheddar Gorge, encountered in Somerset earlier on the homeward leg.

The Vale of Heathfield sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest CXXXVII), named after one of its Sussex subjects, was in use over a few years before and after 1811, and includes notes from a guidebook on Dorset and Devon sites which Turner visited that year (Tate D10206, D40864; Turner Bequest CXXXVII 1 and inside the front cover). It may, as Finberg notes, have ‘formed part of Turner’s baggage on his “Southern Coast” tour’,18 and includes views of Christchurch and Lulworth Cove, visited in 1811 and recorded at that time in other sketchbooks, as well as of sites associated with the 1813 stay in Devon, but it is grouped with other Sussex material in the present catalogue.

There have been various detailed accounts of the commissioning and execution of the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England project by W.B. Cooke and his associates, in collaboration with publishers John Murray and the Arches, particularly in terms of Turner’s watercolours and the engravings made from them.19 Initially he was asked to provide twenty-four designs, but his contribution eventually ran to forty. As indicated below, some were based on later sketches.

It is a moot point as to quite when Turner composed the extensive descriptive and narrative verses relating to the West Country, which he proposed to publish as an accompaniment to his Southern Coast designs, in the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest CXXIII). The issue is discussed in the introduction to that book.

The engravings were issued between 1814 and 1826 and subsequently as a book, published by John and Arthur Arch and others as Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England, from Drawings Made Principally by J.M.W. Turner, R.A. and Engraved by W.B. Cooke, George Cooke, and Other Eminent Engravers (London 1826). A copy with volumes I and II bound as one is held in the Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, and separately accessioned plates in the Tate Collection are noted below.

The West Country designs are listed below as numbered and titled in the 1826 edition, which presents the overall series in sequence, following the coast clockwise from Whitstable in Kent to Watchet in Somerset – that is, from the Thames Estuary via the South Coast to the Bristol Channel. Details of the source watercolours are given, as are references to the most directly relevant pencil sketches. Turner often made other drawings at the same sites, which are cross-referenced in individual catalogue entries. The smaller engravings after other artists, of which there are impressions in the Tate Collection, are listed in sequence; Turner also drew some of these places.

One of the unengraved watercolours related to the series by Andrew Wilton appears to be a view of the Isle of Wight from Christchurch, Dorset (then in Hampshire), the first coastal site on the 1811 tour: Coast Scene, with White Cliffs and Boats, ?circa 1815–20 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven).28 Sketches: D08403, D08411 (Turner Bequest CXXIII 22, 27).

Wilton also lists an untraced watercolour of about 1820, Plymouth Harbour: Towing in French Prizes, as a related subject.37 A long-unrecorded watercolour of Babbacombe Bay from near Teignmouth (private collection) has been dated to about 1811 and related to the Southern Coast by Eric Shanes;38 Babbacombe is mentioned in Turner’s poetry in the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook (Tate D08670; Turner Bequest CXXIII 161a), and there appears to be a small, related sketch in the same book (Tate D08491; Turner Bequest CXXIII 64a), together with another view of the same coastline (Tate D08498; Turner Bequest CXXIII 68).

Turner’s Southern Coast subjects from counties further east, for which many of the watercolour designs are traced, were engraved as follows: Bexhill (1817),53 Margate (1824),54 Rye (1824),55 Ramsgate (1824),56 Hythe (1824),57 Portsmouth (1825),58 Brighton (1825),59 Folkestone (1826),60 Deal (1826),61 Dover (1826),62 Whitstable (1826);63 further related but unengraved subjects listed by Wilton are Dover,64 Rye65 and Margate.66

There are numerous other West Country watercolours, mostly associated with engraving projects, which are sometimes based on later drawings. They are grouped here for convenience:

The Rivers of Devon, 1815–23:67

The following work was not engraved for the series, but has been linked to it:73

Marine Views, 1824–5:75

The following work was not engraved for the series, but has been linked to it:77

The Rivers of England, 1823–7:79

The Ports of England, 1826–8; and The Harbours of England, 185684

Little Liber, c.1820–589

Picturesque Views in England and Wales, 1827–3891

The watercolour vignette of The Bellerophon, Plymouth Sound was made in about 1833 as an illustration to Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon (private collection; engraved 1835: Tate T04982, T06270).107 It depicts Napoleon after his 1815 surrender as a tiny, distant figure on board HMS Bellerophon, surrounded by sight-seers in small boats, but with no land showing.

Apart from Crossing the Brook, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815 (Tate N00497)108 and based on sketches made on the 1813 tour discussed elsewhere in this catalogue, only two further West Country oil paintings are known, from much later in Turner’s career. Of these, The Prince of Orange, William III, Embarked from Holland, and Landed at Torbay, November 4th, 1688, after a Stormy Passage, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832 (Tate N00369)109 is a historical piece with contemporary political resonances, but, as with the Bellerophon vignette, the setting is at sea. However, St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),110 is related to 1811 studies, being based on the Southern Coast design (1826 edition, pl.68) listed above.