Dudley from the South-East

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.2

For other views of Dudley see under folio 23 recto (D22016).