Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by Turner and William Say, ‘Martello Towers, near Bexhill, Sussex’, published Turner, [?1] June 1811

Turner’s Liber Studiorum design shows the East Sussex coast at Galley Hill,1 just east of Bexhill, looking towards Pevensey Bay in the distance; William of Normandy had landed nearby prior to the Battle of Hastings and the last successful invasion of England in 1066. The South and East Coasts were now fortified by round Martello towers with look-out positions and gun emplacements, built between 1805 and 1812 against the imminent threat of Napoleon’s forces.2 Stopford Brooke considered the patriotic significance of the design: ‘It is in [the] guardianship of England that the sentiment of the subject lies, and the central tower, all in light, fixes our feeling on this thought. But the storm above defends England also, nor is the great chalk cliff without its aspect of defiance.’3 He also described the way in which Turner concentrated attention on the subject, as the ‘two swift-riding men enliven the road, and serve to insist on the dip of the ground, and to lengthen out the road to the eye. Lastly, the group of boy, woman, and child dimly repeat, and certainly lift into the air the centre of the composition, the Martello Tower and its companion.’4

As Gillian Forrester has demonstrated, the Napoleonic Wars and the military and domestic British response are alluded to in various Liber compositions, ⁵ including Winchelsea, Sussex, with its modern soldiers and medieval defences (for drawing see Tate D08145; Turner Bequest CXVII Q), and Crowhurst. In the latter, probably dating from after the end of the wars in 1815, the distant view of the coast – the same stretch as depicted in the present drawing – is obscured, but Turner’s original sketch and a related watercolour show a closely-spaced row of Martello towers (see catalogue entry for Tate D08172; Vaughan Bequest CXVIII R).

A slight pencil and chalk sketch of the Sussex coast in the Hurstmonceux and Pevensey sketchbook of about the mid 1800s (Tate D05628; Turner Bequest XCI 11) has been suggested as a possible source,6 although the towers do not appear – unless one is under construction in the middle distance. A substantial canvas, completely reworked in about 1830 and now depicting Figures in a Building (Tate N05496)7 originally showed the same Martello towers and landscape as the Liber composition (though without figures), as a very clear x-radiograph image has revealed.8 The status of the canvas, apparently dating from about the same time as the Liber drawing, is unclear;9 as Forrester notes, no other large-scale studies purely for the purpose of developing an image for the Liber are known, and Turner may have contemplated a finished, exhibitable painting ‘in a burst of patriotic fervour’.10