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

The sketches are inverted relative to the foliation. Turner has drawn a series of linear profiles of cliff coastal land-masses with distant spired and fort-like structures suggested in a number of them. Some of the drawings appear to have been numbered in pencil: the first and second sketches at the top of the page are inscribed with a number ‘1’, the third with a number ‘2’, the fourth with a number ‘3’. The numbers may have been inserted to correspond to certain sections of each drawing, given that the sketch inscribed with a number ‘2’ continues onto the opposite page folio 7 recto (D35346) and is marked with a number ‘1’ at what appears to be the headland of the cliff. The drawing inscribed with a number ‘3’ also extends onto the opposite page into a bold pencil outline of the profile of a section of coastline topography.

There appear also to be pencil inscriptions, perhaps of place names, located at the centre of the page moving towards the bottom. The last of these inscriptions could be ‘Hythe’. The bottom drawing seems to be a fort-like structure, the facets of which appear to have been inscribed with numbers, although these markings may also constitute the quick and abbreviated rendering of surface detail by Turner.

Technical notes:

The outside long edge is irregular and slightly crumpled; it is probably the edge of the larger sheet of which this was originally part.