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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > East Sussex c.1806-20 > Hastings Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Oxford; Architectural Details of the Queen's College 1809

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Oxford; Architectural Details of the Queen's College’ 1809
Folio 48 Recto:
Oxford; Architectural Details of the Queen’s College 1809
D07668
Turner Bequest CXI 48
Pencil on white wove paper, 88 x 110 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ’39 feet | 52 feet 6 | 28’ top left and ‘7 Steps’ near cornice, top right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘48’ top left, inverted
Stamped in black ‘CXI 48’ top left, inverted
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch, drawn with the sketchbook inverted, shows the top and pediment and a window of one of the two Baroque side wings of Queen’s College facing on the High Street. See the verso and folio 49 (D07669, D07670) for more details of Queen’s.
See notes to folio 43 verso (D07659) for Oxford views in this sketchbook and their relationship to Turner’s picture View of the High-Street, Oxford painted for James Wyatt (Loyd Collection; on loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).1 Although in the end Turner cut his view off just short of Queen’s he seems to have been uncertain whether to include it or perhaps make it the starting point of a companion picture looking down the High to Magdalen Bridge. On 9 December 1809, before visiting Oxford, he had written to Wyatt that ‘you have not said or hinted at a second view, and therefore it is not of so great a consequence of taking in the corner of Queen’s Coll.’.2 The following April, there was still the possibility that Wyatt might ‘try the other end of the High St.’.3 In fact, Wyatt opted for a View of Oxford from the Abingdon Road (private collection)4 which was engraved in 1818; see notes to D07667.

David Blayney Brown
April 2011

1
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.73–4 no.102 (pl.109).
2
Turner to James Wyatt, 9 December 1809, in John Gage ed., Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner with an Early Diary and a Memoir by George Jones, Oxford 1980, p.38.
3
Turner to James Wyatt, postmarked 6 April 1810, in ibid., p.43.
4
Butlin and Joll 1984, p.88 no.125 (pl.130).

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Oxford; Architectural Details of the Queen’s College 1809’, catalogue entry, April 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/oxford-architectural-details-of-the-queens-college-r1131155, accessed 01 April 2026.