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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Tour to the Alps 1836 > Val d'Aosta Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Three Sketches: Stratford-upon-Avon; Notre Dame de La Gorge; A Town in an Alpine Valley 1833 and 1836

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Three Sketches: Stratford-upon-Avon; Notre Dame de La Gorge; A Town in an Alpine Valley’ 1833 and 1836
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 88 Verso:
Three Sketches: Stratford-upon-Avon; Notre Dame de La Gorge; A Town in an Alpine Valley 1833 and 1836
D29205
Turner Bequest CCXCIII 88a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 190 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil, ‘N D .....’ and ‘ R....[?]’, ‘Arv[?]’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page contains three sketches:
i. (main sketch, left, drawn inverted in relation to main numbered sequence of subjects in the sketchbook) Stratford-upon-Avon, looking down the river, with the Toll House, continued to the right from the opposite page (D29206; Turner Bequest CCXCIII 89). See Introduction to the sketchbook for the presence of a small run of sketches at Stratford dating from 1833, as well as the majority of subjects from 1836 including the following.
ii. (right, drawn with the page upright) Notre Dame de la Gorge, looking up the Col du Bonhomme route towards the Aiguille de Roselette. Inscribed below right, ‘N D .....’ and ‘ R....[?]’. A similar view appears in a watercolour (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).1
iii. A hasty sketch of a town among high mountains, a river and a bridge in the foreground, inscribed lower right ‘Arv[?]’.

David Hill
June 2010

1
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg 1979, p.473 no 1449, as ‘Couvent du Bonhomme, Chamonix’.

How to cite

David Hill, ‘Three Sketches: Stratford-upon-Avon; Notre Dame de La Gorge; A Town in an Alpine Valley 1833 and 1836 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-three-sketches-stratford-upon-avon-notre-dame-de-la-gorge-a-r1144753, accessed 25 April 2024.