Joseph Mallord William Turner

Cliffs near Folkestone

c.1821–2

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: Folkestone Sketchbook
Medium: Graphite on paper
Dimensions: Support: 113 × 187 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D17230
Turner Bequest CXCVIII 14 a

Catalogue entry

This simple pencil outline of cliffs looks across to Folkestone, as observed by Finberg.1 The shaded silhouette of a tall building on the right is likely to represent Folkestone’s main parish Church of St Mary and St Eanswythe, which features in many of Turner’s studies of the area.

There are further, more definitive, studies of the church elsewhere in this sketchbook, and several tenuous ones as well. For a list of these, as well as an indication of Turner’s renderings of the church elsewhere in his oeuvre, see the entry for folio 17 verso (D17235).

At the top of the page are two, simple, curved lines. These meet, intersecting slightly, in a way that suggests a hilly prospect, although there are no distinguishing features from which to hang a topographical reading of the brief doodle.

Maud Whatley
January 2016

Finberg 1909, I, p.604.

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