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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Sandycombe Lodge c.1808-12 > Sandycombe and Yorkshire Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Sackville College, East Grinstead, with the Tower of St Swithun's Church under Construction c.1810

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Sackville College, East Grinstead, with the Tower of St Swithun's Church under Construction’ c.1810
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Sackville College, East Grinstead, with the Tower of St Swithun’s Church under Construction circa 1810
D08970
Turner Bequest CXXVII 6
Pencil on white wove paper, 126 x 202 mm
Part watermark ‘H Sa | 18’
Inscribed by Turner ‘cloths’ above clothes line above and right of centre, ‘w’ on building towards bottom left, and ‘x’ twice on building above centre, below church tower
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘6’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXXVII 6’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The gables and chimneys of the seventeenth-century Sackville College almshouses, East Grinstead are seen on the right, looking east from Old Road, with Swithun’s Church on the skyline beyond. The houses in front of the college do not survive. Turner appears to show the church tower under construction; the main work was supposedly undertaken in 1811 or 1812,1 so this and the other Sussex views in this sketchbook, assigned to about 1810 (see the Introduction), may instead date from a little later.
1
See ‘The Church’, The Parish of St. Swithun with St. Luke’s and St. Barnabas’, East Grinstead, accessed 13 January 2012, http://www.swithun.webeden.co.uk/#/our-history/4540436457.
Technical notes:
This page is a face of one of the loose bifolio sheets which form the majority of the so-called Sandycombe and Yorkshire sketchbook, along with a few single leaves. The sheets were not bound, but folded inside each other in a sequence which is not entirely recoverable (see the sketchbook’s Introduction for a suggested order). When unfolded, this page is continuous with the verso of D08972 (CXXVII 7); the measurements given above are for the present work alone.

Matthew Imms
January 2012

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Sackville College, East Grinstead, with the Tower of St Swithun’s Church under Construction c.1810 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2012, 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/joseph-mallord-william-turner-sackville-college-east-grinstead-with-the-tower-of-st-r1134681, accessed 10 May 2024.