J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

This ink sketch shows a castle on a hill. Several bridges and towers can be made out amongst the loosely sketched-in town below. In the left foreground is a small group of figures.

In his 1909 Inventory of the Turner Bequest, A.J. Finberg included this drawing among a sequence of drawings on blue paper, which he described as ‘mostly connected with the “French Rivers” series’ (see the Introduction to this section for an overview of the details and relevance of Finberg’s classification of these works).1 He suggested the view might be of Tancarville,2 a subject which appears throughout a sketchbook associated with Turner’s travels in Normandy around 1829 (see Tate D23787; Turner Bequest CCLIII 45a, in the ?1829 Tancarville and Lillebonne sketchbook, for a potential corresponding example), and with which the artist was certainly occupied on his tour of the Seine in the early 1830s.

Two watercolour views from the latter occasion appear to include two round towers similar in stature to those included at the centre of this composition, though the loose and impressionistic treatment of the subject in the later drawings prevents any direct formal comparisons (see D24595 and D24721; CCLIX 30, 156). There remain, however, a few anomalies in the arrangement of the ruins at Tancarville and their apparent depiction here, which mean the identification remains tentative, although a credible alternative subject has not yet come to light.

Verso:

Presumed blank; laid down on later sheet of white wove paper (presumably from when the drawing was mounted for earlier display or conservation purposes), which has since been roughly trimmed to the same dimensions.