Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is a right-hand page from the sketchbook, and one of two drawings from it depicting Shillingford Bridge from opposite directions; the eastward view is Tate D05934; Turner Bequest XCV 30. As Hill observes, staining and marking of the paper suggests that the two were originally adjacent with the present leaf coming first. It is the more detailed, as ‘time-consuming as any made on this tour’.1 It looks west to the wooden bridge built in 1786, with the inn now the Shillingford Bridge Hotel on the left and behind it the Sinodun Hills and Wittenham Clumps, and Dorchester Abbey in the middle distance on the right. Shillingford seems to have been an evening stop on Turner’s tour and the view looks into the evening sun, seen low in the sky above the inn in the north-west, confirming midsummer, as Hill notes.2

Verso:

Blank. Laid down.