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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Scotland 1818-20 > Bass Rock and Edinburgh Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Rocks off the Coast of Dunbar 1818

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Rocks off the Coast of Dunbar’ 1818
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 22 Verso:
Rocks off the Coast of Dunbar 1818
D13362
Turner Bequest CLXV 22a
Pencil on white laid paper, 99 x 159 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Hough Head | Round’ top centre and ‘Long Steeple’ top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Rather than ‘Islands off the coast’ as Finberg suggests,1 this sketch shows rocks just off the coast of Dunbar near Long Craigs. ‘Long steeple’ is labelled on some maps of the area and although there does not seem to be a ‘Hough Head’, as Finberg reads it, there is a Wallace Head, just to the west of Long Steeple, and ‘Round’, could simple describe the shape or a particular rock rather than name it. The following page, folio 23, shows more of such rocks (D13363; CLXV 23).

Thomas Ardill
October 2007

1
Finberg 1909, I, p.479, CLXV 22a.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Rocks off the Coast of Dunbar 1818 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 2007, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-rocks-off-the-coast-of-dunbar-r1131904, accessed 25 April 2024.