Joseph Mallord William Turner

Folkestone; Fishing Boats off the Shore

c.1816–19

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Richmond Hill; Hastings to Margate Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 155 × 95 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D10477
Turner Bequest CXL 35 a

Catalogue entry

This quick outline is the origin of the watercolour (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut)1 engraved by Joseph Horsbrough in 1831 for Picturesque Views in England and Wales. The view is up the Channel coast past Folkestone harbour towards Dover. In the foreground of the watercolour, Turner added coastguards supervising the uprooting of tubs of contraband that smugglers have buried in the sand.2

David Blayney Brown
July 2011

1
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.396 no.826.
2
For the smugglers’ practice of ‘sinking and creeping’ see Shanes 1979, p.34.

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