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

Provenance:
...; William George Rawlinson (1840–1928); ?bought 1917 through Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, by Reginald A. Tatton (1857–1926), Cuerden Hall, near Preston; his son, Captain T.A. Tatton, sold at Christie’s, London, 14 December 1928 (11), £140; bought Thomas Agnew & Sons, London; bought by A. Paul Oppé (1878–1957) 1928; by descent to his son Denys Lyonel Tollemache Oppé (1913–1992)

Purchased as part of the Oppé Collection with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund 1996

Engraved:
Engraving by William Byrne, as ‘Wickham [sic], from the Marlow Road’, published 1 July 1803, for Byrne’s Britannia Depicta (Tate impression: T05940)

This watercolour painting presents a distant view from the top of Marlow Hill of the market town of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, with All Saints Parish Church at its centre. The town is partly obscured by trees and there are rolling hills behind it. In the foreground, the scene is framed on either side by silver beech trees with four cows underneath on a winding path that leads down the hill towards the right where there is a building behind which the Dyke, an artificial narrow lake that flows from the River Wye, can be seen. Later buildings and trees lining the Marlow Hill road preclude a comparable view today.

The building at the right of the image has a varied history of usage and ownership beginning in the thirteenth century, when it was the site of a church ‘under the auspices of the Abbess of Godstowe’1 along with nearby All Saints. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, parts of the ecclesiastical buildings were used to create Loakes Manor, which would serve as the seat of the Archdale family until it was sold in 1700 to Henry Petty, 1st Earl of Shelburne. Loakes Manor became Wycombe Abbey when it was purchased by Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington, in 1798; he employed architect James Wyatt (for whom Turner had once elaborated a drawing for exhibition), who rebuilt it in the Gothic style seen today.2 As well as being a banker and politician, Carrington was a slave trader with plantations in Jamaica. After the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, Carrington was compensated for the 268 enslaved people he owned with a payment of £4908 (some £500,000 in today’s terms) owing to the Slave Compensation Act 1837.3 In 1896, Wycombe Abbey was sold by the 3rd Baron, and the current independent girls’ school was established.4

It is not known when Turner visited High Wycombe, or whether he was aware of the associations of the Abbey, and there are no sketches in the Turner Bequest or elsewhere known to have been used as the basis of this watercolour; however, he did visit Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, approximately thirteen miles away, in 1800. He completed two watercolours of the Gothic Rococo Chalfont House now in a private collection,5 for which there are two studies in the Fonthill sketchbook (Tate D02179, D02226; Turner Bequest XLVII 2, 49).

This is the first of the seven Turner designs to be engraved by William Byrne for his Britannia Depicta, in 1803 (T05940); for the others and the project in general, see the Introduction to the present section. As Anne Lyles has observed, it has a “subdued palette characteristic of much of Turner’s work in watercolour at this date, the strong tonal contrasts no doubt intended to aid the engraver in translating the design into black and white.”6 Nevertheless, W.G. Rawlinson, cataloguer of Turner’s prints and once owner of the present work, suggested: ‘The engraving is hard and mechanical, and altogether fails to do justice to it.’7

For the essayist and critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), Turner’s techniques of depicting architecture at a distance ‘imply an idea of space and magnitude, and ... not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy.’8 Much like Turner’s other early topographical watercolours, as characterised by landscape historian John Dixon Hunt, this one relies on

This work also illustrates Turner’s growing ‘disinclination to be thoroughly picturesque’10 through the four cows in the foreground. Cows are a frequent feature in Turner’s oeuvre as they ‘were a source of endless fascination that he observed repeatedly, storing up his impressions of their bulk and their musty colours so that he could at any moment deploy one or a group of them as the occupiers of his pastoral landscapes’11 demonstrated by the Cows sketchbook of about 1799–1801 (Tate; Turner Bequest LXII). However, by depicting four cows, Turner ignored the picturesque convention defined by the Reverend William Gilpin (1724–1804) of ‘the foreground group of three or five (but not two or four) cows, odd numbers of cows and sheep always being preferable’.12

The scholar and collector of English drawings Paul Oppé13 acquired this work from Christie’s auctioneers in January 1928 for £140,14 through the dealers Agnew’s. As already noted, it was previously owned by Turner scholar W.G. Rawlinson,15 and Captain T.A. Tatton, son of the important Turner collector Reginald A. Tatton, whose holdings had included many acquired from Rawlinson’s collection.16

Verso:

Blank; laid down.