Catalogue entry
Finberg noted this as an ‘Unfinished version’
1 of the ambitious watercolour
Scarborough Town and Castle: Morning, Boys Catching Crabs exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide) and initially owned by Turner’s Yorkshire friend and patron Walter Fawkes (see the Introduction to the present section),
2 which is on the same scale. The critic and art historian C.L. Hind called it a ‘large, beautiful, and simple sketch’ for that work;
3 Andrew Wilton concurs,
4 while linking a smaller colour study (Tate
D17166; Turner Bequest CXCVI B) to a watercolour of corresponding size,
Scarborough: Boys Crab Fishing of 1809 (Wallace Collection, London),
5 which had been painted for Fawkes’s relative, the amateur artist and collector Sir William Pilkington (1775–1850).
6The two finished works are very similar in composition, with a steep bank shored up with wooden posts on the left acting as a
repoussoir device for the prospect of Scarborough’s bay and castle beyond on the coast of North Yorkshire. Wilton has characterised this study as fundamentally ‘a pale, sandy-gold wash over a large area of paper, expressing the basic idea’ of the exhibited work, with a ‘single hue ... to create and sustain the mood of the whole work’, a principle Turner also began to apply to his oil paintings around this time.
7 Robert Upstone has observed that aside from the introduction of ‘anecdotal details’ of children and women on and beside the beach, Turner ‘follows the tonal patterns and lighting of this study, save for some deepening of the shadows in the left foreground’,
8 while conservator Joyce Townsend has noted that Turner’s ‘early colour beginnings consist of subtle variations on two colours, such as yellow and blue, which overlap to form an optical green, as can be seen in “Scarborough”’.
9The basic composition is outlined in the 1801
Dunbar sketchbook (Tate
D02770–D02771; Turner Bequest LIV 95a–96). David Hill has suggested that the large 1811 variant developed from the Pilkington picture, rather than from the original drawing’.
10 Although Turner drew other aspects of the town and its setting in 1801 and around 1816, the watercolour
Scarborough of 1818 (private collection)
11 is a similar composition, though with more prominent cliffs on the left, while the
Ports of England watercolour
Scarborough, of about 1825 (Tate
D18142; Turner Bequest CCVIII I)
12 focuses in on the castle and its headland from a comparable angle.
13
Matthew Imms
September 2016
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