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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > French Tour 1821 > Paris, Seine and Dieppe Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Abbeville: St Vulfrans; Buildings on a Hill 1821

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Abbeville: St Vulfrans; Buildings on a Hill’ 1821
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 37 Verso:
Abbeville: St Vulfrans; Buildings on a Hill 1821
D18582
Turner Bequest CCXI 37a
Pencil on white wove paper, 189 x 113 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner passed through Abbeville while travelling from Dieppe to Calais, and seems to have had time to make only one small, though carefully composed sketch of the magnificent gothic Church of St Vulfran as seen from La Rue Saint-Vulfran. Ian Warrell has noted that the northern town had become popular with British topographical artists around this time. In fact it would be tempting to read this sketch as a thumbnail copy of a watercolour or engraving, but there is no reason to suspect that Turner did not drawn the view from the motif as he paused briefly at the town.
In 1824 he made a more prolonged visit to the Abbeville and made many more sketches of the streets and church in the Rivers Meuse and Moselle sketchbook, 1824 (for example Tate D19929; Turner Bequest CCXVI 189a). He also painted a watercolour of Abbeville (private collection)1 for an engraved illustration to Water Scott’s collected Prose Works (Tate T04994).
The drawing of a landscape with two hills drawn with the sketchbook turned to the right has not been identified.

Thomas Ardill
March 2013

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, no.1133.

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Abbeville: St Vulfrans; Buildings on a Hill 1821 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-abbeville-st-vulfrans-buildings-on-a-hill-r1146276, accessed 24 April 2024.