Joseph Mallord William Turner

The view is westwards from a quay at East Cowes (since much redeveloped) towards Cowes across the mouth of the River Medina, with St Mary’s Church, designed by Turner’s Isle of Wight architect host John Nash1 on the skyline and Cowes Castle roughly indicated on the shore at the centre. Compare the more precise pencil drawing in the contemporary Cowes Regatta and Windsor and Cowes, Isle of Wight sketchbooks (Tate D18028, D20662; Turner Bequest CCVII 21, CCXXVI 40a); see also Tate D24865 (Turner Bequest CCLX 29). The harbour scene here is loosely comparable with that in the watercolour Cowes, Isle of Wight (private collection),2 engraved in 1830 for the Picturesque Views in England and Wales (Tate impressions: T04556, T06086, T06087).

Although exhibited in the nineteenth century as an English subject, like several others in the present subsection this drawing was categorised in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory in one of the sections of works on blue paper ‘mostly connected with “French Rivers”’.3

Technical notes:

There are signs of water damage where the ink has run within a regular area at the centre, apparently indicating that the edges of the sheet were protected by a mount at the time of the 1928 flood at the Tate Gallery.

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in red ink ?by John Ruskin ‘535’ bottom left and in pencil ‘cclx 29’ bottom right.