Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is one of four colour studies linked by Eric Shanes with varying degrees of certainty to the watercolour of about 1836 showing the castle at Criccieth, near Porthmadog, Gwynedd, on its headland looking overlooking Tremadog Bay to the south (British Museum, London),1 engraved as Crickieth [sic] Castle, North Wales in 1837 for the Picturesque Views in England and Wales (Tate impressions: T04610, T06126). The others are Tate D25161, D25170 and D25293 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 39, 48, 171). Of three pencil sketches of Criccieth in the 1798 North Wales sketchbook (Tate D01378–D01380; Turner Bequest XXXIX 23, 24, 25), D01379 is closest to the finished watercolour, though with considerable differences.

In this ‘basic colour structure’,2 the castle appears to be outlined at the summit of a bright hill to the right, balanced by a dark pyramid of cloud to the left. In the England and Wales watercolour, the pale castle is at the apex of a dark hill in the left, with a bright area of distant hills and sky to the right. Nevertheless, Shanes’s suggestion is persuasive, as the overall form of dark and light triangles above a bright strip (the beach), as well as the general colour masses and some specific cloud shapes, can be read as corresponding quite closely.3

Ian Warrell has suggested the present work as a study for the ambitious watercolour Bamborough Castle (private collection),4 exhibited at the Graphic Society, London, in 1837.5 There are four considerably larger ‘colour beginnings’ linked to it elsewhere in the present catalogue (Tate D25456, D25457, D25506, D36321; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 333, 334, 382, CCCLXV 30), but the forms here, while comparable with those of the last of the four in particular, seem more likely to relate to the Criccieth design, which is on a sheet of similar dimensions.

See also Tate D25176 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 54), which Finberg thought possibly showed Criccieth, but which may be of Conway Castle, the introductions to the present subsection of identified subjects and the overall England and Wales ‘colour beginnings’ grouping to which this work has been assigned.