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

Corfe Castle survived intact until it was systematically slighted in 1646 by Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War.1 As Finberg notes, Turner followed the present drawing in his watercolour of about 1812 (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts),2 engraved in 1814 for the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England3 (see the concordance of the series in the 1811 tour introduction). In the watercolour he added women laying out washing to dry on the hillside and bridge, and a laundry basket on a wall in the left foreground, emphasising the castle’s state of peaceful, picturesque decay. As part of his long, descriptive poem on the West Country, he wrote in such terms in the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook, used on the same tour (Tate D08468; Turner Bequest CXXIII 54a):

The castle keep is seen to the north across the moat and the stone bridge to the gatehouse.4 Turner does not indicate the foreground where he stood to draw, level with the roadway of the bridge; it is now the walled garden of the National Trust tea rooms, immediately beside the passage leading from the Square to the bridge.

Turner entered the Isle of Purbeck southwards from Poole Harbour – see the distant views of Corfe Castle in the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook (Tate D08387, D08391; Turner Bequest CXXIII 14, 16). He seems to have had two campaigns at Corfe, on his way to and from Swanage, effectively at a dead end on the coast to the south-east (folios 12 recto–15 verso; D08818–D08822). His first views were mostly from around the periphery of the village: folios 1 recto, 1 verso, 2 recto, 3 recto, 4 recto, 5 recto, 6 recto, 7 recto and 8 recto (D08807–D08815), together with 9 recto (Turner Bequest CXXV 49, bound and stamped as CXXIV 9; D08940), and the related sketch of Poole Harbour on folio 10 recto (D08817). The view on folio 6 (D08813) seems unfinished and was reworked on a larger scale in the Somerset and North Devon sketchbook (Tate D08954; Turner Bequest CXXVI 8), presumably during the first visit.

On his second approach, passing westwards on the way to sketch East and West Lulworth, beginning at folio 19 recto (D08828), he made a drawing from a considerable distance to the south (folio 16 verso; D08824). Finally, there is a similar close-up view to the present drawing, but from a little to the west, on folio 18 recto (D08827).

A rather conventional view attributed to Turner, of the keep and upper gateway from immediately to the south-east (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),5 has been dated to about 1793 and appears to have been based on an eighteenth-century engraving, ‘Corfe Castle, No.2’.6 There is no definite evidence of an earlier visit to Dorset (see the 1811 tour introduction), although Corfe appears in lists of West Country sites on the flyleaf of the 1798 Dinevor Castle sketchbook (Tate D41434) and in the Dolbadarn sketchbook, in use a year or two later (Tate D02174; Turner Bequest XLVI 119).

Verso:

Blank; four small tears to the edges have been repaired.