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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > Brighton and Copies from Wilson 1796-7 > Wilson Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Church, with a Rainbow 1796-7

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Church, with a Rainbow’ 1796-7
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 24 Verso:
A Church, with a Rainbow 1796–7
D01165
Turner Bequest XXXVII 48
Watercolour and gouache on blue laid wrapping paper prepared with a red-brown wash, 113 x 93 mm
Stamped in black ‘XXXVII – 48’ top right, upside down
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The composition, inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, continues across folio 25 recto opposite (D01166; Turner Bequest XXXVII 49). The church here, which appears to be of eighteenth-century design, may be St Mary’s Lewisham, Kent, now a suburb of south-east London. It was designed by J. Gibson and built 1774–7. Finberg proposed that the church is St Luke’s, Charlton, a brick building of about 1630 on the brow of a steep hill above the Thames, north of Lewisham. The topography of the drawing does not seem to correspond convincingly to this identification.

Andrew Wilton
September 2012

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘A Church, with a Rainbow 1796–7 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2012, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-church-with-a-rainbow-r1149857, accessed 26 April 2024.