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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > North of England 1797-1801 > North of England Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Warkworth: Looking towards the Castle across the River Coquet, with the Bridge at the Right 1797

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Warkworth: Looking towards the Castle across the River Coquet, with the Bridge at the Right’ 1797
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 43 Recto:
Warkworth: Looking towards the Castle across the River Coquet, with the Bridge at the Right 1797
D00948
Turner Bequest XXXIV 41
Pencil on white wove paper, 210 x 270 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘X’ on building towards centre left
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘41’ bottom left, descending vertically
Stamped in black ‘XXXIV 41’ bottom left, descending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In Nikolaus Pevsner’s judgment Warkworth with ‘its bridge, its bridge-tower, then Bridge Street at an angle joining the main street, up a hill to the towering, sharply cut block of the keep, is one of the most exciting sequences of views one can have in England.’1 With the page turned horizontally, Turner crams this series of architectural events into a single composition by standing below the bridge and looking past its series of arches to the town and castle, with its late fourteenth-century central donjon, ‘one of the rare cases where the military engineer happened to be a great architect’.2 Other drawings of Warkworth castle are on folios 40 recto, 41 recto and 42 recto (D00945–D00947; Turner Bequest XXXIV 38, 39, 40).
1
Nikolaus Pevsner, Ian Richmond and others, Northumberland, The Buildings of England, revised ed., New Haven and London 2002, p.611.
2
Ibid., p.617.
Verso:
Blank; stamped in brown ink with Turner Bequest monogram.

Andrew Wilton
January 2013

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Warkworth: Looking towards the Castle across the River Coquet, with the Bridge at the Right 1797 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2013, 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-warkworth-looking-towards-the-castle-across-the-river-coquet-r1150104, accessed 20 September 2024.