Joseph Mallord William Turner

It has been observed that Turner’s increasingly inaccurate depictions of Scarborough, North Yorkshire with a ‘sheer cliff’, for example the watercolour Scarborough Town and Castle: Morning, Boys Catching Crabs, exhibited in 1811 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide),1 has caused various other Turner Bequest drawings to be identified as Scarborough, leading to a tentative earlier identification of the drawings in the present sketchbook (see also D09010, D09011; CXXVII 32, 33) as Dover subjects instead.2 It is suggested here that they show Hastings, Sussex (compare for example the view in the Hastings sketchbook (Tate D10371; Turner Bequest CXXXIX 22a); there are various firmly identified Sussex views in the present book, as noted in the Introduction.

Technical notes:

This is one of a few single leaves which, with a greater number of loose bifolio sheets, constitute the so-called Sandycombe and Yorkshire sketchbook. The folded sheets were not bound, but placed inside each other in a sequence which is not entirely recoverable (see the sketchbook’s Introduction for a suggested order).

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