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

These three detailed views were taken at the thriving port of Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. Turner depicts the South Quay there, with its parade of merchants’ houses, storehouses, halls, taverns, customs offices, and eighteenth-century residences. The lowermost prospect, which was rendered with the sketchbook turned upside down, shows a drawbridge crossing the River Yare. John Henry Druery, author of The Historical and Topographical Notices of Great Yarmouth (1826), writes that the wooden drawbridge was erected in 1785 to replace its medieval original. The ‘middle arch’, Druery writes, ‘is raised by the mechanical power of four cast-iron wheels, at the extremities of which chains are attached, and a hand rope’.1

Further sketches of the quay are found on Tate D18194–D18196, D18202, D18204; Turner Bequest CCIX 20–21, 24, 25. Turner’s sketches of Yarmouth are associated with designs for both the England and Wales (Tate impression T04547) and East Coast engraving schemes, though the latter design, housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was unpublished.2