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

With the page turned horizontally, this may be a view south-west along Faversham Creek in north Kent, looking past boats drawn up on the foreshore and the ribs of one under construction or repair to the spire of St Mary of Charity’s Church in the town. Although the scene is relatively generic, and the buildings along the east bank of the creek today are mostly later, features of the slender spire correspond with those of the distinctive open stonework tracery of the Gothic ‘crown’ structure added to the church’s medieval tower in 1794–7.1 If so, the small disk to its left would indicate the afternoon sun.

Faversham, about nine miles west-north-west of Canterbury along the old course of the Roman Watling Street below the North Downs, was a significant port in its medieval heyday, at the end of a creek meandering through marshland to the mudflats of the Swale channel around the Isle of Sheppey on the south side of the Thames Estuary.2 Whitstable (and the nearby coast), the subject of a few subsequent pages as foliated (see under folio 251 recto; D19338), is about seven miles to the north-north-east.

Whitstable, along with Dover, Deal and Folkestone (the other Kent localities sketched extensively in this book, as discussed in its Introduction), was one of the last subjects engraved for the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England project. Assuming that the present identification is correct, it is possible that Turner briefly considered including Faversham too, or he was perhaps simply passing through to or from the coast and noted the setting out of interest on what would be his only recorded visit of the town. The slighter views on the recto and folio 250 recto opposite (D19334, D19336) may show the church from the surrounding countryside.

As foliated, these pages mark the beginning of the long sequence of coastal Kent studies occupying the remainder of the sketchbook, following on from views at Boulogne (see under folio 241 verso; D19319) which mark the end of the substantial central section of views made on Turner’s 1825 Continental tour, as set out in the Introductions to this book and the tour as a whole; how the two strands of subject matter relate to each other is somewhat unclear.