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

This swiftly executed sketch gives us a first-hand insight into the vicissitudes of chartered travel in 1824. From a roadside vantage point Turner records a diligence, probably the one in which he was passenger, being ‘dug out of a ditch’ on the journey from ‘Ghent to Bruges’. The coach teeters at an oblique angle, half sunken into a muddy ditch. Two figures attempt to haul the vehicle out of the narrow channel: one of the men uses a long shovel-like tool to lever the wheel free.

Turner’s inscription, heretofore, has historically been transcribed as ‘Dug out of a ditch between Ghent and Brussels’.1 All scholars seem to have followed Alexander Finberg’s original transcription which names the capital city as the terminus of the diligence shown in Turner’s sketch.2 The transcription, however, quite clearly reads ‘Bruges’ rather than ‘Brussels’.

Bad luck struck Turner’s diligence again, when he undertook a return journey from Italy in 1828. The artist’s coach was caught in a snowstorm and ‘zizd into a ditch’, as he describes it in a letter.3 The accident was clearly worth immortalising, as Turner produced a highly finished watercolour of the event in 1829 which shows a group of passengers forced to huddle together over an open fire on a murky and bitterly cold night.4 He pictures himself in the scene, close to the fire with his back turned to the viewer. The broken-down coach is pictured behind the passengers, lit by a pearly moon. Fixed in the ditch at an extreme diagonal, the coach is shown being heaved upright by means of a thin rope held tightly by a group of men in tug o’war formation.