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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country and Yorkshire 1814-17 > Devon Rivers, No.1 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Fore Street, Okehampton, with St James's Chapel 1814

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Fore Street, Okehampton, with St James's Chapel’ 1814
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 54 Recto:
Fore Street, Okehampton, with St James’s Chapel 1814
D09537
Turner Bequest CXXXII 54
Pencil on white wove paper, 90 x 152 mm
Part watermark ‘Iv’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Newcombe | Cooper | and Sadler’ top centre, and ‘[?Angel] White H’ top right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘54’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXXXII – 54’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The tower of St James’s Chapel is seen from the bridge (since rebuilt) on the East Okement River in the centre of Okehampton, looking south-west along Fore Street. All the buildings in the foreground are recorded in more detail in a sketch showing the riverbank from below the north side of the bridge in the Devonshire Rivers, No. 3, and Wharfedale sketchbook (Tate D09821; CXXXIV 29), perhaps used on the same occasion. Only the church tower remains immediately recognisable.
The White Hart Hotel, indicated by Turner’s note as ‘White H’, still stands further down the street on the left. Finberg reads the preceding word ‘Argylle’, but it appears to be ‘Angel’, perhaps the name of another inn, while a John Newcombe is recorded as a cooper and tanner in the town in the early 1820s.1 For other views of Okehampton, see under folio 43 recto (D09526).
1
See Sandra Harris, ‘Index to The Book of Okehampton: Portrait of an Ancient Market Town by Roy and Ursula Radford, Halsgrove Press (2002)’, GENUKI, accessed 3 November 2011, http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/DEV/Okehampton/OkehamptonBook.html.
Verso:
Blank

Matthew Imms
June 2014

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Fore Street, Okehampton, with St James’s Chapel 1814 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-fore-street-okehampton-with-st-jamess-chapel-r1147083, accessed 26 April 2024.