Joseph Mallord William Turner

The page contains a sketch, drawn with the page turned upside down, of a town scene with a church at centre and buildings below. Finberg noted it simply as a ‘Street, with church’,1 but the location has been further identified as Lillebonne.2 In this sketch, Turner concentrates on the shape and decorative details of the church tower. These elements correspond to those of the sixteenth-century3 Church of Notre-Dame. (For further information on the church, see under folio 28 recto; D23752.) The area below the church may be a town square and the rounded shapes at lower right, indications of a carriage in the square.

Technical notes:

There is brownish discolouration on this page, from damage likely caused by the 1928 Tate Gallery flood (see the technical notes to the sketchbook’s Introduction), the edge of the staining apparent on the top of the page.