Catalogue entry
Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, Dudley Castle is seen across open ground from the south-east, with the outline of the tower of St Edmund’s Church below it towards the left and the spire of St Thomas’s very lightly indicated at the extreme left beyond a conical chimney. Modern developments make the viewpoint difficult to establish, but a sense of the view is possible from around Watsons Green Road and Wolverton Road on Kates Hill, overlooking Dudley’s Southern Bypass. There are similar views on folio 63 verso opposite (
D22094; Turner Bequest CCXXXVIII 61a) and on subsequent pages.
Frank Milner notes that this drawing and those on folio 65 recto (
D22097; Turner Bequest CCXXXVIII 63) show that Turner ‘while sketching on the spot did not conceive Dudley as an industrial subject’, but used a ‘rural Claudian formula’ with a ‘centralised promontory ... above a valley with lollipop-like trees balancing to left and right’
1 to evoke the idealised manner of Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), whom Turner so admired and so often emulated.
2For other views of Dudley see under folio 23 recto (
D22016).
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