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

With the page turned horizontally, the main view is southwards along Deal’s steep shingle beach,1 with what seems by Turner’s scrawled note to be a two-masted fishing boat drawn up in the foreground and the masts of others higher up, near what is now the Timeball Tower Museum, set back a little from the seafront off Victoria Parade, where the adjacent buildings are later. Before the timeball mechanism was established to assist accurate navigation in 1855, between 1821 and 1831 there was a semaphore mast for anti-smuggling operations, on the site of a Napoleonic-era shutter telegraph.2

There is a similar view in the Kent sketchbook of about 1830 (Tate D35764–D35765; Turner Bequest CCCLXIII 4a–5). The tower is seen from the other direction on the verso and folio 278 recto (D19390–D13391). For other views of Deal on adjacent pages and elsewhere, see under folio 273 recto (D19382), and see the sketchbook’s Introduction for discussion of its many shipping and figure subjects.