'Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West', Joseph Mallord William Turner

Artwork details

Artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775‑1851)

Title

Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West

From South Wales Sketchbook

Turner Bequest XXVI

Date 1795

MediumGraphite on paper

Dimensionssupport: 203 x 264 mm

Collection

Tate

Acquisition Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Reference

D00623

Turner Bequest XXVI 68 v

View this artwork by appointment, at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms

Turner's sketchbooks

View this artwork in the South Wales Sketchbook

Catalogue entry

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Folio 66 Verso:

Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West 1795

D00623
Turner Bequest XXVI 68v

Pencil on white wove paper, 203 x 264 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘all alike’ against a study of one of the tower pinnacles, ‘3’ on crenellation of tower and ‘D Saxon’ against a detail of a window

References

The view of the cathedral obtained from College Green, in which Turner has contrived to include the very tall mid-fifteenth-century tower (69 metres or 225 feet). He evidently had no time to make more detailed drawings of this important building, which surprisingly does not feature elsewhere in his output, though a plate from the so-called ‘Little Liber Studiorum’, mezzotinted by Turner himself in the 1820s, has been thought, probably erroneously, to show the tower of the cathedral at a distance (see the entry for Tate D25430; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 307).1

The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.

Andrew Wilton
April 2012

Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.390 no.778, reproduced.

Read this catalogue entry in full

This catalogue entry is part of: David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, December 2012.