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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country 1811 > Cornwall and Devon Sketchbook [pseudo ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Tintagel Church from the Island, with Gull Rock Beyond 1811

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Tintagel Church from the Island, with Gull Rock Beyond’ 1811
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 9 Recto:
Tintagel Church from the Island, with Gull Rock Beyond 1811
D41284
Turner Bequest CXXV a 9
Pencil on white wove paper, 138 x 215 mm
Inscribed by C.F. Bell in pencil ‘9.’ top right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXXV.A – 9’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The medieval cliff-top church of St Materiana’s, Tintagel, with Gull Rock to the south, is viewed from above Tintagel Head on the Island peninsula. The rocks on the right are in the immediate foreground high above the sea, although their spatial relationship with the coast in the middle distance on the left is deceptive owing to the lack of shading or colour.
As discussed in the introduction, the pages of this ‘sketchbook’ appear to have originally been loose sheets, and are not recorded in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory of the Bequest, although he subsequently noted the subject as ‘Rocky coast with church on cliff’ in a manuscript listing,1 while C.F. Bell mistakenly described it in his own notes as ‘Mounts Bay and St Michael’s Mount’,2 presumably thinking of the ‘island’ in the distance as the Mount, which is indeed shown on folios 7 recto and 8 recto (D41282, D41283). Figures usually corresponding to Finberg’s MS catalogue page numbers, which differ from Bell’s sequence, are inscribed on the verso of most sheets.
As Bell’s definite and indefinite identifications were used to sequence the sketchbook as bound, other Tintagel views are scattered through it on the rectos of folios 32 (under which the history of the site is discussed), 33, 34, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 62, 75 and 78 (D41308–D41310, D41333–D41335, D41338, D41340, D41344, D41357, D41360).
1
A.J. Finberg, MS addenda, [circa 1928–39], tipped into a copy of his A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, vol.I, opposite p.356, as CXXV(a) 49.
2
C.F. Bell, MS addenda, [after 1928], tipped into a copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, vol.I, p.356A, as CXXVa 9.
Technical notes:
The sheet is slightly wrinkled, possibly as a result of exposure to damp.
Verso:
Blank, save for inscriptions: inscribed by C.F. Bell in pencil ‘Mounts Bay, Cornwall’ bottom left; inscribed by Edwin Fagg in pencil ‘150 | 49’ bottom right. There are glue stains at the corners of the sheet.

Matthew Imms
July 2011

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Tintagel Church from the Island, with Gull Rock Beyond 1811 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-tintagel-church-from-the-island-with-gull-rock-beyond-r1137432, accessed 21 November 2024.