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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > North of England 1797-1801 > Watercolours and Drawings Related to the ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Beverley: Interior of the Minster, with the Percy Tomb 1797-8

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Beverley: Interior of the Minster, with the Percy Tomb’ 1797-8
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Beverley: Interior of the Minster, with the Percy Tomb 1797–8
D01108
Turner Bequest XXXVI N
Pencil on white wove paper, 206 x 267 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘[?S Porch]’ top right and ‘B’ in the drawing, towards bottom left
Stamped in black ‘XXXVI N’ bottom left
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s drawing here shows the interior of Beverley Minster with the choir seen from the north-east lesser transept. Visible between piers is the elaborate Gothic stonework of the mid-fourteenth-century tomb that Henry, Lord Percy of Alnwick built, probably to commemorate his wife Eleanor, in the North Choir aisle, adjoining the Percy Screen in the Choir; the tomb is described by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most splendid of all British Dec[orated] Funerary monuments’.1 Lady Eleanor Percy died in 1328, and the tomb cannot be earlier than 1339. Other drawings of Beverley are in the North of England sketchbook (Tate D00989, D01002; Turner Bequest XXXIV 79, 91), and on the verso of this sheet (D40253).
1
Nikolaus Pevsner, Yorkshire: York and the East Riding, The Buildings of England, Harmondsworth 1972, p.175.
Technical notes:
The sheet has been folded vertically down the centre. It is one of a sequence of sixteen Yorkshire and other subjects included in the present subsection which were executed on uniform sheets of paper, as discussed and listed in the Introduction.

Andrew Wilton
January 2013

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Beverley: Interior of the Minster, with the Percy Tomb 1797–8 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-beverley-interior-of-the-minster-with-the-percy-tomb-r1150279, accessed 21 November 2024.