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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Scotland 1831 > Sound of Mull (?) No. 1 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Sketches of the Sound of Kerrera 1831

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Sketches of the Sound of Kerrera’ 1831 (Inside front cover of sketchbook)
Inside front cover of sketchbook
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Inside Front Cover:
Sketches of the Sound of Kerrera 1831
D41019
Pen and ink and pencil on white wove paper, 153 x 91 mm
Inscribed at the top of the page:
In pencil by an unknown hand ‘RBL | NJ /87 | [?] 9 | 22 | 2’
In brown ink by Henry Trimmer ‘N 191.. The book contains | 10 leaves many Drawn in Pencil | on both sides – | [signed] H.S. Trimmer’
Signed in brown ink by Charles Turner ‘C. Turner’
Signed in pencil by Charles Lock Eastlake ‘C.L.E.’
Signed in pencil by John Prescott Knight ‘JPK’
Blindstamped with the Turner Bequest stamp upper centre
Inscribed in pencil by A.J. Finberg ‘CCLXXIV’ top left
Stamped in brown ‘CCLXXIV’ top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Across the inside front cover and folio 1 (D20936) of this sketchbook is a series of six sketches of coastlines. David Wallace-Hadrill and Janet Carolan have written that these sketches were made immediately after Turner left Oban pier on a steamboat bound for Skye.1 The views look south down the Sound of Kerrera from near Oban Bay, with the Gallanach Cliffs on the left and the island of Kerrera on the right.
At the very top of the current page, obscured by the executors’ endorsements, is a sketch of the outline of distant hills, perhaps those on the island of Mull. The Gallanach Cliffs are depicted in the next three sketches, with the sketch at the bottom of the page perhaps depicting the cliffs again with Carding Mill.
Turner continued to sketch from the deck of the boat as it moved away from Oban and made its way across the Firth of Lorn to the Sound of Mull; his journey can be followed (roughly in order) through the pages of this sketchbook.

Thomas Ardill
February 2010

1
David Wallace–Hadrill and Janet Carolan, ‘Turner on the Isle of Skye 1831’, [circa 1991], Tate catalogue files, [folio 3].

How to cite

Thomas Ardill, ‘Sketches of the Sound of Kerrera 1831 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 2010, 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-sketches-of-the-sound-of-kerrera-r1135309, accessed 23 April 2024.