Joseph Mallord William Turner

Rye from the Marsh

c.1816–18

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Hastings Sketchbook
Medium
Graphite on paper
Dimensions
Support: 129 x 205 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D10369
Turner Bequest CXXXIX 21 a

Catalogue entry

Drawn with the sketchbook inverted, and continued on folio 22 (D10370), this drawing served as the basis for the watercolour (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff)1 engraved by Edward Goodall in 1824 for Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England. The view is eastwards from the salt-marsh between Rye and Winchelsea. In the watercolour, Turner substantially changed the foreground, bringing in the Royal Military Road connecting the two towns, inventing a flood-surge overwhelming a wooden dam built to protect works to the Royal Military Canal and the River Brede and moving Camber Castle into view on the right.2 He also cut short the view on the left, to exclude the Martello Tower present in D10370. See also rather quicker sketches in the Richmond Hill; Hastings to Margate sketchbook (Tate D10515, D10516; Turner Bequest CXL 54a, 55).
Rye is marked on the sketch map of the South Coast inside the back cover of the sketchbook (D40834).

David Blayney Brown
May 2011

1
Wilton 1979, pp.353–4 no.471.
2
For this ‘entirely imaginative construction’ see Shanes 1981, p.37, and Eric Shanes, Turner in 1066 Country, exhibition catalogue, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Hastings 1998, p.7.

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