Joseph Mallord William Turner

Engraved:
Etching and mezzotint by J.M.W. Turner and Charles Turner, ‘PEMBURY MILL, KENT.’, published Charles Turner, 10 June 1808

Pembury lies in Kent, just to the east of Royal Tunbridge Wells. Two Turner watercolours of about 1795–6, Pembury Mill, near Tunbridge Wells (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)1 and A Watermill (British Museum, London), ² show the same basic façade but with many differences in the incidental details of building and setting; despite the title of the first, there is no direct relationship between them and the present Liber Studiorum design. The British Museum version contains elements including what may be an integral dovecote to the left of an open door, a framework of beams with weatherboards and herringbone brickwork, and a cart loaded with bags of flour, which all appear – in an entirely different arrangement – in the Liber design. There are dozens of drawings and watercolours of watermills in the Turner Bequest dating from before the present work, of which some show similar cross-braced wheels (for example Tate D00859, D00870, D01285; Turner Bequest XXXII C, N; XXXVIII 33); Turner may have used his accumulated knowledge to condense the various elements of a typical mill into an imaginative configuration.

Ruskin noted the composition as a ‘study of flour-mill life, as essential to all other life, given in the extreme of its simplicity’;3 and Stopford Brook saw the combination of the flour and the vine around the doorway as ‘the idyll of the fruits of the earth – “With corn and wine have I sustained thee.”’4 However, Rawlinson felt more prosaically that the design had ‘a cramped look.’5 The balance between the ‘Pastoral’ and commercial spheres is maintained in the division between the natural elements on the left and the activities on the right,6 within a fundamentally grid-like framework. It has been suggested that Turner may have been influenced by the interior-exterior scenes of Joseph Wright of Derby, with their strong lighting focused on the products of industrial labour (in Wright’s case, iron); Paul Sandby’s 1776 etching and aquatint The Iron Forge between Dolgelli and Barmouth in Merioneth Shire (with its waterwheel, and figures in a bright doorway) could also have been known to Turner.7