Joseph Mallord William Turner

This sequence of at least three sketches record the perennial comings and goings of boats and figures at work processing a catch and at leisure by the sea, perhaps on the Great Beach at Margate. See under Tate D34337 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIII 36a) for closely related works in this Margate subsection and elsewhere.

Technical notes:

The partial watermark ‘mlett’ likely indicates the Devon papermaker Edward Norish Tremlett, operating at various mills around Exeter between 1831 and 1856, in partnership with Dewdney between 1831 and 1833, and Charles Harris between 1833 and 1851.1

Finberg somewhat misleadingly described Tate D34337–D34341 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIII 36a–e) as ‘Five sheets from a sketch book ... on blue paper’.2 In fact they are on two matching bifolio unstitched sheets of white paper, presumably once folded within one another, with notches at the head and foot of the fold. D34341 (e) and D34337 (a) are on the left and right of one face, with D34338 (b) on the back of (a); the present work is on the right-hand side of one face of the second sheet, the left-hand side having been largely torn away, with D34340 (d) on its verso. The horizontal given above dimension includes the stub of the other half, the actual dimension of this intact section being approximately 75 mm.