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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > Architectural and Other Subjects c.1797 ... > Smaller Fonthill Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Buildings Seen beyond Water, with Storm Clouds Above ?1799

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Buildings Seen beyond Water, with Storm Clouds Above’ ?1799
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Buildings Seen beyond Water, with Storm Clouds Above ?1799
D02238
Turner Bequest XLVIII 3
Pencil and wash on white wove paper, 265 x 411 mm
Watermark ‘J Whatman 1794’
Stamped in black ‘XLVIII – 3’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg recorded that this sheet was ‘damaged in flood Jany 28 | stains right across’.1 He described the principal building seen on the horizon here as a ‘Castle on distant promontory’. It may belong to the artist’s tour to Scotland in 1801. The pencil drawing and the inchoate washes suggesting a stormy sky may not be related.
1
A.J. Finberg (died 1939), undated MS note in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.123.
Technical notes:
The sheet is stained and dirty, and folded down the centre.
Verso:
Blank; inscribed in pencil by ?Edwin Fagg ‘[?Coventry Castle] EF’ and ‘3 in corner EF’. Fagg was Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum at the time of the Tate flood in 1928.

Andrew Wilton
May 2013

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Buildings Seen beyond Water, with Storm Clouds Above ?1799 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, May 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-buildings-seen-beyond-water-with-storm-clouds-above-r1180260, accessed 16 April 2024.