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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Würzburg, Rhine and Ostend Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Coast at Ostend, with ?Fort Napoleon; the Lighthouse and Town in the Distance, Possibly from the Old East Pier 1840

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Coast at Ostend, with ?Fort Napoleon; the Lighthouse and Town in the Distance, Possibly from the Old East Pier’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 6 Recto:
The Coast at Ostend, with ?Fort Napoleon; the Lighthouse and Town in the Distance, Possibly from the Old East Pier 1840
D30470
Turner Bequest CCCIII 6
Pencil on flecked pale blue laid paper, 104 x 170 mm
Partial watermark (countermark): indecipherable maker’s name
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Sea’ towards centre right, ‘1’ bottom centre, ‘2’ towards top right, and ‘[...]’ top left
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘6’ bottom left, descending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCCIII – 6’ bottom left, descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The two numbered drawings were made with the page turned horizontally. The upper one likely shows the early nineteenth-century Fort Napoleon, just north-east of Ostend, overlooking the sea to its right.
The town itself is shown in the distance in the wider view below. Turner exhibited a seascape of Ostend at the Royal Academy in 1844 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich),1 showing sailing boats in blustery weather at the mouth of the channel to the harbour, as if looking inland from the end of the eastern pier, with its western counterpart in the middle distance; this rapid sketch, with the slender lighthouse at the landward end of the converging lines perhaps indicating the pier’s deck, may be the source of that composition. Compare also the skyline of a moonlit watercolour seascape now known as A Steamer off Ostend (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).2
For numerous nearby views on adjacent pages, marking the end of Turner’s 1840 tour, see under folio 1 recto (D30460).3

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.254–5 no.407, pl.412 (colour).
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.469 no.1409, as ‘Yarmouth Roads’, reproduced.
3
See also Powell 1995, pp.72, 82 note 71, 246.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Coast at Ostend, with ?Fort Napoleon; the Lighthouse and Town in the Distance, Possibly from the Old East Pier 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-coast-at-ostend-with-fort-napoleon-the-lighthouse-and-r1196230, accessed 05 July 2024.