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

There are four miscellaneous seaside sketches here, with a small boat in rough seas beneath slanting rain at the top, with a two-masted sailing ship or a steamer with a mans an a tall smokestack beyond; next comes an isolated study of a small boat in calmer conditions. Third is a steamer off a crowded jetty, perhaps at the seaward end of Jarvis’s Landing Place off the Great Beach at Margate, and lastly a variation with the low sun reflected in the rippling sea.

See under Tate D34337 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIII 36a) for closely related works in this Margate subsection and elsewhere.

Technical notes:

The partial watermark ‘mlett’ on the related works listed below likely indicates the Devon papermaker Edward Norish Tremlett, operating at various mills around Exeter between 1831 and 1856, in partnership with Dewdney between 1831 and 1833, and Charles Harris between 1833 and 1851.1

Finberg somewhat misleadingly described Tate D34337–D34341 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIII 36a–e) as ‘Five sheets from a sketch book ... on blue paper’.2 In fact they are on two matching bifolio unstitched sheets of white paper, presumably once folded within one another, with notches at the head and foot of the fold. The present work and D34337 (a) are on the left and right of one face (with the horizontal dimension given above encompassing them both), with D34338 (b) on the back of (a); the back of this half is blank. D34339 (c) is on the right-hand side of one face of the second sheet, the left-hand side having been largely torn away, with D34340 (d) on its verso.