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

This sketch appears inverted in relation to the current numbering of the pages of the sketchbook. It records a view from an eminence looking down onto the apex of a large river oxbow. A view of the same site on folio 105 verso (D09184) seems to have been made first and represents a more straightforwardly scopic approach from a viewpoint slightly further left; Finberg suggests that it might represent a site near Farnley Hall. However, the sketch is not obviously of the character of a Yorkshire landscape, and may, rather, represent a view in the south-west of England which Turner visited in 1811 and 1813. Since there is a connection between this sketchbook (see folio 52 recto, D09129) and the painting of Crossing the Brook (Tate N00497),1 perhaps these sketches could be views on the River Tamar near Calstock, where the scenery is rather like this and is said to have informed the painting.2 The sketch is drawn in a very soft pencil, now quite badly rubbed to the right of the composition, and offset onto folio 105 recto (D09183), opposite.