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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Farnley Hall and Yorkshire c.1808-24 > Farnley Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Study for a Sea-Piece, Related to 'Entrance of the Meuse...' 1818

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Study for a Sea-Piece, Related to 'Entrance of the Meuse...'’ 1818
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 41 Recto:
Study for a Sea-Piece, Related to ‘Entrance of the Meuse...’ 1818
D12047
Turner Bequest CLIII 41
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 185 mm
Watermarked ‘AL[LEE] | 18[13]’
Inscribed ?by John Ruskin in red ink ‘41’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CLIII 41’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch is one of three in this sketchbook (with D12096, D12098; Turner Bequest CLIII 89a, 90a) in which Turner rehearses ideas for a sea-piece composed of small boats in the foreground attending a larger ship heeling over in the middle distance. The concept materialised in the large painting Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, Going to Pieces; Brill Church Bearing S.E. by S., Masensluys E. by S. (Tate N00501)1 exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819. The other two sketches approach the final composition more closely, but one detail from the present sketch, the small boat to the left running before a strong wind blowing right to left, found a place in the painting.
Turner might have begun thinking about a Dutch seapiece while he was at Farnley Hall in autumn 1818. His Dutch river subject, Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut),2 exhibited at the Academy that spring, was newly installed over the chimneypiece in the drawing room at Farnley3, and perhaps the artist’s patron and host at Farnley, Walter Fawkes, was considering a commission for a companion marine. Entrance to the Meuse is similar in size to the Dort, but in the event the second picture was unsold and remained with Turner. One or other of these pictures could be the subject of a note about framing inside the front cover of the present sketchbook (D40716).
1
Butlin and Joll 1984, pp.105–6 no.139 (pl.143).
2
Ibid., pp.102–4 no.137 (pl.140).
3
See the watercolour of the Drawing Room at Farnley Hall (private collection); The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.368 no.592.
Verso:
Blank

David Hill
June 2009

How to cite

David Hill, ‘Study for a Sea-Piece, Related to ‘Entrance of the Meuse...’ 1818 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2009, 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-study-for-a-sea-piece-related-to-entrance-of-the-meuse-r1146680, accessed 25 July 2025.