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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Isle of Wight 1827 > The House and Grounds at East Cowes ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner East Cowes Castle: North Lodge, with the House to the South and the Medina Valley Below 1827

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘East Cowes Castle: North Lodge, with the House to the South and the Medina Valley Below’ 1827
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
East Cowes Castle: North Lodge, with the House to the South and the Medina Valley Below 1827
D20822
Turner Bequest CCXXVII a 19
Chalk and ink on blue wove paper, 150 x 195 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Inscribed in red ink ‘19’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXXVII(a) 19’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The building in the foreground is North Lodge, the rustic cottage-style gatehouse at the entrance to the East Cowes Castle estate. Designed and built by Turner’s Isle of Wight host John Nash between 1798 and 1802, it survives in slightly modified form at the junction of Old Road and Millfield Avenue.1 Down the wooded drive the highest tower of the main house is seen to the south, with the valley of the River Medina to the right. Compare two views from along the drive (Tate D20810, D20811; Turner Bequest CCXXVII a 7, 8).
This is among dozens of blue paper studies made in and around East Cowes Castle, presumably in the course of a single visit. For more on the various aspects of the house (demolished in about 1950), and its lost grounds as depicted by Turner, see the Introduction to this subsection.
1
See ‘North Lodge, East Cowes’, British Listed Buildings, accessed 11 November 29015, http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-420267-north-lodge-east-cowes, and photograph in Michael Mansbridge, John Nash: A Complete Catalogue, Oxford 1991, p.87, captioned as ‘South Lodge’ (sic).
Technical notes:
Although not immediately apparent except in the slight blotting towards the right, losses were sustained in the 1928 Tate Gallery flood, when ink was offset to a sheet laid over this one during the recovery process (Tate D40524).
Verso:
Blank; there is very slight ink offsetting, presumably from another drawing in this East Cowes sequence.

Matthew Imms
November 2015

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘East Cowes Castle: North Lodge, with the House to the South and the Medina Valley Below 1827 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-east-cowes-castle-north-lodge-with-the-house-to-the-south-r1182684, accessed 26 April 2024.