Netley Castle, Hampshire

?1832

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

License this image

In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: Guernsey Sketchbook
Medium: Graphite on paper
Dimensions: Support: 114 x 187 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D23540
Turner Bequest CCLII 10 a

Catalogue entry

Turner filled this page with multiple sketches of Netley Castle, Hampshire.1 Two descriptions of this Tudor fortress’s crenellated tower feature in the centre of the page, while an arched gateway, strengthened by diagonal corner buttresses, is sketched twice amidst dense woodland in the top left- and bottom right-hand corners. The castle recurs on folio 29 recto (D23574; Turner Bequest CCLII 29). Seen here without its subsequent nineteenth-century additions, Netley is about five miles south-east of Southampton which offered a regular steam packet service to the Channel Islands whose coasts and towns are the subject of extensive study in this sketchbook.2

John Chu
April 2014

Adrian Pettifer, English Castles: A Guide by Counties, Woodbridge 1995, p.86.

J.T. Cochrane, A Guide to the Island of Guernsey, St Peter Port 1826, p.47.

Read full Catalogue entry