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

The Gothic Revival Eridge Castle, the seat of the Earl of Abergavenny, stood just east of Eridge Green, south of Tunbridge Wells, from 1787 until in the 1930s; a new house stands on the site, owned by the earl’s descendents.1 There is a similar view in the Vale of Heathfield sketchbook (Tate D10230, D10231; Turner Bequest CXXXVII 14a–15), presumably made on the same occasion, which was the direct source of a watercolour of about 1816 (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester).2 There is a more distant prospect from the same direction on D08991 (CXXVII 19a) and another sketch of the neighbourhood on D08989 (CXXVII 18a).

As David Blayney Brown notes under D10230 and in the Vale of Heathfield Introduction, Lord Abergavenny was a friend of Turner’s Sussex patron John Fuller, for whom he began work in 1810, the date to which the Sussex views in the present sketchbook are tentatively assigned.

Technical notes:

This page is a face of one of the loose bifolio sheets which form the majority of the so-called Sandycombe and Yorkshire sketchbook, along with a few single leaves. The sheets were not bound, but folded inside each other in a sequence which is not entirely recoverable (see the sketchbook’s Introduction for a suggested order). When unfolded, this page is continuous with D08975 (CXXVII 9); the measurements given above are for the present work alone.