?Hastings, with Figures and Horses on the Beach and a Rainbow over the Sea

c.1810

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: Sandycombe and Yorkshire Sketchbook
Medium: Pen and ink on paper
Dimensions: Support: 126 x 201 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D09013
Turner Bequest CXXVII 34

Catalogue entry

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.

Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.528 no.360, pl.122 (colour).

Hill, Warburton, Tussey and others 1980, p.16.

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).

Verso:

Blank

Matthew Imms
January 2012

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