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 the Marches 1792-4 > Drawings and Watercolours Connected with ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Men with a Cart and Horses on the Shore, with Boats in Choppy Water Beyond 1792-3

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Men with a Cart and Horses on the Shore, with Boats in Choppy Water Beyond’ 1792-3
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Men with a Cart and Horses on the Shore, with Boats in Choppy Water Beyond 1792–3
D00397
Turner Bequest XXIII W
Pencil on white wove paper, 213 x 272 mm
Watermark ‘J WHATMAN’
Inscribed in red ink ‘XXIII W’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘XXIII W’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner is engaged here with the development of a complex foreground group for use in a coastal subject conceived on an ambitious scale. Some of the small watercolours of coastal subjects executed in 1792–3 (Tate D00391, D00392, D00396; Turner Bequest XXIII Q, R, V) make use of the groups drawn here and in Tate D00398 (Turner Bequest XXIII X). No finished watercolour making use of the staffage as laid out here is known. Turner returned to the idea of the cart-horse rearing and being calmed by a carter for his large oil painting of 1806, Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (Boston Museum of Fine Arts).1
The verso is D40054.

Andrew Wilton
April 2012

1
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.48–9 no.61, pl.72 (colour).

How to cite

Andrew Wilton, ‘Men with a Cart and Horses on the Shore, with Boats in Choppy Water Beyond 1792–3 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-men-with-a-cart-and-horses-on-the-shore-with-boats-in-choppy-r1141150, accessed 24 April 2024.