Joseph Mallord William Turner

Totnes, on the River Dart

c.1824

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: ‘Rivers of England’ Watercolours
Medium: Graphite and watercolour on paper
Dimensions: Support: 161 × 230 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D18135
Turner Bequest CCVIII B

Display caption

In the early 1820s Turner began several engraving projects, each intended to illuminate a particular area, or aspect
of the British countryside. The most successful prints were for a sequence
of views called the Rivers of England. These were skilfully reproduced as black and white images through the printing process known as mezzotint.

This view of Totnes in Devon was one
of the last to be issued. It shows the challenges faced by Turner's engravers. All the watercolours in this series recreate subtle atmospheric effects, building up the forms in the image through tiny touches of colour.

Gallery label, August 2004

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Catalogue entry

Here Turner depicts the market town of Totnes at the head of the estuary of the River Dart in Devon. A local hoy laden with cargo drifts towards a mooring site on the outskirts of the town on the left, while seabirds and waders congregate at a bank on the right. The water is rendered with a mirror-like sheen, clusters of rich green foliage forming vivid and shimmering reflections within it. Turner has used a multiplicity of colours applied in layered stipples and hatches, blended and diffused seamlessly, to produce the lustrous surface of the water. The estuary is represented as an Arcadian vision, a place of harmony and abundance.

Beyond the water the faint, minutely rendered outline of the tower of St Mary’s Church is visible, framed by gently sloping hills. Atop the hill to the left is the curtain wall and shell keep of Totnes Castle, built in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds.1 The castle fell into ruin in the following century. The town is painted with muted, pale tones to suggest recession but this also serves to heighten the warmth and vibrancy of the pigments used in the foreground and middle distance.

Of this view, Turner’s biographer William Monkhouse writes, ‘nothing can be more purely English...[it is a]...‘picture of placid beauty in which there is no straining effect, no mannerism’. The level of Turner’s mimesis is such that Monkhouse writes: ‘there is nothing to remind you of the artist’ in the drawing; it is only until the viewer finds the ‘touches of red in the fore of the river...that you discern him at last, and find that you are looking not at nature but “a Turner”’.2

The River Dart also features in other of Turner’s Rivers of England watercolours: Dartmouth, on the River Dart and Dartmouth Castle, on the River Dart (Tate D18136, D18137; Turner Bequest CCVIII C, D). For other, earlier sketches of Totnes see Turner’s 1811 sketchbooks: Devonshire Coast, No.1 (Tate D08541, D08542, D08625; Turner Bequest CXXIII 91, 91a, 136) and Corfe to Dartmouth (Tate D08854, D08855; Turner Bequest CXXIV39, 40).

Bryant 1996, p.50, reproduced p.51.

Monkhouse 1929, p.87.

Alice Rylance-Watson
March 2013

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