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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1787-1801 Student and master > Wales and Isle of Wight 1795-1800 > South Wales Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West 1795

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West’ 1795
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 66 Verso:
Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West 1795
D00623
Turner Bequest XXVI 68v
Pencil on white wove paper, 203 x 264 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘all alike’ against a study of one of the tower pinnacles, ‘3’ on crenellation of tower and ‘D Saxon’ against a detail of a window
The view of the cathedral obtained from College Green, in which Turner has contrived to include the very tall mid-fifteenth-century tower (69 metres or 225 feet). He evidently had no time to make more detailed drawings of this important building, which surprisingly does not feature elsewhere in his output, though a plate from the so-called ‘Little Liber Studiorum’, mezzotinted by Turner himself in the 1820s, has been thought, probably erroneously, to show the tower of the cathedral at a distance (see the entry for Tate D25430; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 307).1
The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.

Andrew Wilton
April 2012

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.390 no.778, reproduced.

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Gloucester: The Cathedral from the South-West 1795 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 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-gloucester-the-cathedral-from-the-south-west-r1140948, accessed 18 April 2024.