Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower, Oxford

Copied from the engraving by Edward Rooker after Michael Angelo Rooker (1743/6–1801) of the ‘North West View of Friar Bacon’s Study’, Oxford Almanack, 1780 (a wash drawing of the subject is in the Ashmolean Museum, attributed to Rooker.1 Another watercolour copy of the print, not catalogued by Finberg, has been with the Turner Bequest for some years (Turner Bequest Add I A). It is inscribed verso, beneath a backing sheet ‘Friar Bacon’s Study at Oxford by Maria Clarke’. The octagonal tower gatehouse at the southern end of the bridge, associated by tradition with the thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon, was demolished in 1779. Drawings of Folly Bridge dating from about 1797 are Tate D01879 and D02360 (Turner Bequest XLIV C and L S).

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in a modern hand ‘Turner Unmounted Vol. 92’; in another hand ‘No. 14’; stamped in brown ink with Turner Bequest monogram, and with Inventory number.