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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country and Yorkshire 1814-17 > Devon Rivers, No.2 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Exeter: St Sidwell's Church and the Cathedral from Pennsylvania 1814

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Exeter: St Sidwell's Church and the Cathedral from Pennsylvania’ 1814
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 65 Verso:
Exeter: St Sidwell’s Church and the Cathedral from Pennsylvania 1814
D09755
Turner Bequest CXXXIII 65a
Pencil on white wove paper, 110 x 178 mm
Part watermark ‘ows | 12’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘x too high’ top centre, relating to ‘x’ on hill to left of centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exeter is seen from the vicinity of Pennsylvania Road, looking south with St Sidwell’s Church (bombed in 1942 and rebuilt in a modern style without a tower on Sidwell Street)1 towards the left and the low towers at the central crossing of Exeter Cathedral aligned towards the right, with the Exe Estuary and hills towards Newton Abbot beyond respectively. Exeter, from Pennsylvania, a vignette lithograph of about 1835 by George Rowe (Westcountry Studies Library, Exeter) shows the same view. The once rural prospect is now obscured by later development and rebuilding after bombing. There is a similar sketch, focusing on the buildings in a little more detail, on folio 66 recto opposite (D09756).
Turner had made various views of the cathedral and city in 1811, in the Corfe to Dartmouth sketchbook (Tate D08842, D08844, D08846, D08848; Turner Bequest CXXIV 30, 31, 32, 33).

Matthew Imms
July 2014

1
See David Cornforth, ‘St Sidwell’s Church, Sidwell Street’, Exeter Memories, accessed 17 November 2011, http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_churches/st_sidwells.php.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Exeter: St Sidwell’s Church and the Cathedral from Pennsylvania 1814 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-exeter-st-sidwells-church-and-the-cathedral-from-r1147306, accessed 20 April 2024.