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

For the drawings in this sketchbook made around Walton Bridges see mainly note to folio 4 (D05849). While most, including 4, are associated with the picture of a downstream view, Walton Bridges perhaps exhibited at Turner’s Gallery in 1806 and certainly bought by Sir John Leicester in 1807 (the Loyd Collection),1 the present example served for the upstream version with the same title perhaps shown in the same Gallery the following year and bought by the Earl of Essex (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).2 As Hill observes, the shafts of light in the sky, noted here in bursts of pen lines, were developed in the painting. They indicate a time near noon with the sun high in the sky. Also already present in the drawing are the figures and sheep that would occupy its foreground.