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

C.F. Bell was the first to identify this subject as Brimham Rocks in his annotations to a copy of Finberg’s Inventory, now kept in Tate’s Library.1 Turner records the view south from outside Brimham House, built in 1792 by the estate’s owner Lord Grantley. Brimham Rocks is one of the most extensive areas of curiously eroded gritstone in Britain, and has been a popular resort since perhaps the seventeenth century. It is now in the care of the National Trust. Many of the stone outcrops have been given names. Those to the left in Turner’s sketch are the ‘Druid’s Castle Rocks’ and ‘The Eagle’; ‘The Dog’s Head’ stands obviously to the right and in the middle distance can be seen ‘The Sphinx’. On-site it will be noticed that Turner has adopted a quite synthetic approach to recording the detail before him. He compresses an angle of view of about ninety degrees into the space of his page, and elides certain passages and conflates others to achieve this. Even allowing for some alteration in the forms of the rocks over two hundred years, it is clear, too, that Turner is interested more in characteristic, rather than exactly particular details. Brimham Rocks are about twelve miles north of Farnley Hall, the home of Turner’s Yorkshire patron Walter Fawkes, but perhaps only six from Hall Beck Gill, the locality of previous sketches from this sketchbook (folio 7; D09023), and would have been an easy excursion on horseback. It is perhaps not insignificant that Turner’s view here looks directly towards Farnley.

Verso:

Blank, except for traces of watercolour, probably made when painting a watercolour from folio 10 (D09026).