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

With agile handling, here Turner has drawn a series of seven diminutive views, five produced with the sketchbook turned upside down and two with the book orientated horizontally. Previously catalogued as showing ‘Various views’ by Finberg, this sheet probably shows several scenes on the canals near the North Sea coast in West Flanders. Turner may have taken the sketches as he made his way from Ostend to Dunkirk toward the end of his tour. Visible in the drawings are figures attending small rowing boats on the waterways, windmills and distant towns, and even a tiny scene depicting locals ‘dragging timber out of [a] canal’.

Finberg’s entry for this page of sketches includes a note on its early cataloguing history. He states that John Ruskin had first catalogued this page and its verso: (Tate D19910; Turner Bequest CCXVI 179a) as representing: ‘seven subjects from Andernach on the Rhine, showing stormy sunsets and drifts of cloud, all completely designed’.1 Finberg contests Ruskin’s description, though, writing that he is ‘not convinced that the views are at Andernach. The scenery suggests rather that of a Belgian canal than the Rhine’.2