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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Buckfast Abbey and the Dart Valley 1814

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 23 Recto:
Buckfast Abbey and the Dart Valley 1814
D09855
Turner Bequest CXXXIV 57
Pencil on white wove paper with gilt edges, 179 x 254 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘57’ bottom right (very faint)
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXXXIV – 57’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s viewpoint is the hillside east of Holy Trinity Church, Buckfastleigh, looking north up the River Dart to Buckfast and the east side of Dartmoor beyond. Eric Shanes has identified this sketch as the basis for the watercolour Buckfastleigh Abbey, Devonshire of about 1826 (Exeter City Museums and Art Gallery),1 engraved in 1828 for the series Picturesque Views in England and Wales.2
Remains of the ruined medieval Cistercian abbey – known as Buckfast, rather than Buckfastleigh – had by this time been partly incorporated into Samuel Berry’s castellated late eighteenth-century Gothic mansion, seen here just to the right of centre. In turn this was integrated with the cloisters on the south-west side of a substantial new neo-Gothic Benedictine abbey church in the early twentieth century,3 while the open spaces recorded by Turner to the left of the river are now largely occupied by industrial buildings.
Shanes notes: ‘Turner probably visited the house in 1814, on a third West Country tour we unfortunately know little about.’4 For the likely dating of this sketchbook, see the Introduction; and for further views around Buckfastleigh and Buckfast Abbey see under folio 22 recto (D09844; Turner Bequest CXXXIV 48).
1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.393 no.800, reproduced.
2
Shanes 1979, p.156.
3
See Nikolaus Pevsner, South Devon, The Buildings of England, Harmondsworth 1952, pp.68–9.
4
Eric Shanes, Turner’s England 1810–38, London 1990, p.177.
Verso:
Blank

Matthew Imms
July 2014

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Buckfast Abbey and the Dart Valley 1814 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-buckfast-abbey-and-the-dart-valley-r1147379, accessed 28 March 2024.