Joseph Mallord William Turner

This colour sketch of the Château d’Arques is one of several works depicting Dieppe and its environs first documented by John Ruskin. As A.J. Finberg noted in his 1909 inventory of the Turner Bequest, Ruskin grouped this work together with twenty other ‘slight coloured sketches, chiefly from Dieppe’. ¹ A note which was once appended to this parcel of works reveals that Ruskin held them in low regard, judging that they had been executed ‘in some careless or sickly state of mind’. ² More recently, the sheet has been identified as a preparatory work towards one of several abortive attempts to put the material gathered on the 1826 tour of Northern France to use in the late 1820s,3 although the subject was not fully worked up and engraved until the 1834–6 Scott’s Prose Works publication; see entry for Tate impression T04762.

Verso:

Inscribed in pencil with the note ‘E’ in the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet.