Joseph Mallord William Turner

East Cowes Castle from the South-East, with the Mouth of the River Medina and Cowes Beyond, Perhaps at Sunset

1827

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
The House and Grounds at East Cowes Castle
Medium
Chalk, pen and ink and graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 139 × 190 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D20823
Turner Bequest CCXXVII a 20

Catalogue entry

Finberg ignored the immediate topography, somewhat poetically dubbing the subject ‘The sun setting over the Solent’,1 apparently associating the view with another made further from East Cowes Castle, which he called ‘Moonrise’2 (Tate D20824; Turner Bequest CCXXVII a 21). In fact the Solent is only just indicated here by a brief horizon line; streaks of white above the skyline of Cowes on the left might indicate the last glow of dusk, but it hardly constitutes a classic Turnerian sunset effect. Similar views are noted under D20804 (CCXXVII a 1).
This is among dozens of blue paper studies made in and around East Cowes Castle, presumably in the course of a single visit. For more on the various aspects of the house (demolished in about 1950), and its lost grounds as depicted by Turner, see the Introduction to this subsection.
1
Finberg 1909, I, p.701.
2
Ibid.
Verso:
Blank

Matthew Imms
November 2015

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