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

Drawn inversely relative to the foliation, this panorama of Oxford is continued from the folio opposite (Tate D28333; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 21a). The view is taken from the west of the city at the village of North Hinksey. This part of the prospect encompasses All Souls College, St Mary’s Church, and the Radcliffe Camera.

Turner has also made a small jotting of the Radcliffe Observatory, the astronomical observatory of the University of Oxford from 1773 to 1934.1 The Observer’s House was built to the designs of the architect Henry Keene (1726–1776) with the remaining building constructed under James Wyatt (1746–1813).2 The latter based his designs for the observatory on the Tower of the Winds, an octagonal marble clock tower on the Agora in Athens.3 The ornament which crowns the building (represented in the present drawing as a simple circle) is a celestial globe by the English sculptor John Charles Felix Rossi (1762–1839) modelled on the Farnese Atlas.4