Joseph Mallord William Turner

A West Country Harbour with Shipping and a Tower on the Coast Beyond

1811

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

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Not on display

Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Devonshire Coast, No.1 Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 75 × 117 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D08544
Turner Bequest CXXIII 92 a

Catalogue entry

What appears to be a tower with three window apertures stands below rocky cliffs beyond which a coastline stretches into the distance. In the foreground are other buildings and the masts of ships. The subject remains unidentified, and does not, for example, appear to be Kingswear Castle on the Dart Estuary, as shown on folio 3 recto (D08366) and elsewhere, as that building is further from the coast itself relative to the one shown here.
Technical notes:
There is a prominent diagonal fold towards the lower left, apparently a production fault occurring between the printing of the text on the recto (D08543) and the binding of the leaf – part of the text is obscured but the edges are trimmed flush.

Matthew Imms
June 2011

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