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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Spring Tour of Northern France 1845 > Boulogne Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Two Windmills by the Sea, ?near Boulogne 1845

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Two Windmills by the Sea, ?near Boulogne’ 1845
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 16 Verso:
Two Windmills by the Sea, ?near Boulogne 1845
D35421
Turner Bequest CCCLVIII 17
Pencil and watercolour on white wove paper, 230 x 326 mm
Blind stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards centre top
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With its two coastal windmills, this scene closely resembles folio 15 verso (D35420; Turner Bequest CCCLVIII 16a). This time however the drawing of the windmills has remained without watercolour enhancement, giving the sketch quite a different initial impact. Instead, gaily coloured washes have been used to describe broad stretches of the landscape, from a fresh green and light ochre foreground to a cool blue headland in the distance.
Turner’s interest in the pictorial possibilities of windmills – a subject that he particularly associated with Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) – dated at least as far back as about 1808. For more on this subject, see the entry for a windmill drawing in the Windmill and Lock sketchbook of around that date (Tate D08055; Turner Bequest CXIV 72a).
This drawing is inverted in relation to the sketchbook’s foliation. The blank recto is inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘17’ and stamped in black ‘CCCLVIII 17’ the at bottom right (see Technical notes); it bears small patches of watercolour transference from folio 15 verso opposite (D35420; Turner Bequest CCCLVIII 16a).
Technical notes:
Turner worked on this sketchbook from two directions, with each sequence of drawings inverted in relation to the other. The first sequence in the present foliation appears mainly on the recto of each leaf, and the second mainly on the verso. After the volume entered the national collection John Ruskin numbered the each folio on the bottom right of each recto in a single sequence, irrespective of the side of the page upon which the drawing appeared. As a consequence, on many of the sketches in the second half of the book (including this one), Ruskin’s red ink number and the subsequent stamped Turner Bequest number appear on the other side of the leaf, and inverted in relation to the direction of the drawing. Finberg added a further complication by deviating from his earlier convention of adding the suffix ‘a’ to the page number in such cases to signify a verso.1

John Chu
November 2013

1
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.1168.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Two Windmills by the Sea, ?near Boulogne 1845 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-two-windmills-by-the-sea-near-boulogne-r1173521, accessed 17 July 2024.