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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country and Yorkshire 1814-17 > Devonshire Rivers, No.3, and Wharfedale ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Calstock Church, with Cotehele House and Prospect Tower above the River Tamar Beyond 1814

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Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 42 Recto:
Calstock Church, with Cotehele House and Prospect Tower above the River Tamar Beyond 1814
D09836
Turner Bequest CXXXIV 41
Pencil on white wove paper with gilt edges, 179 x 254 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘ditto’ bottom right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘41’ bottom right (very faint)
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CXXXIV – 41’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg implied by the sequence of his listing as numbered in the 1909 Inventory that Turner’s ‘ditto’ referred to a drawing inscribed ‘Calstock’ at the corresponding point on the previous folio;1 however, the pages have since been rebound in a different order (see the Introduction) and the ‘Calstock’ view (D09835; Turner Bequest CXXXIV 40) is now on folio 66 recto. Turner’s ‘ditto’ does indeed appear to refer back to that view, as the common subject seems to be St Andrew’s Parish Church, high on the ridge north of Calstock, in this case with Cotehele House and the nearby Prospect Tower down the Tamar Valley in the distance to the west. In D09835, the church tower is shown with a view north up the Tamar towards Gunnislake. Trees and hedges now preclude clear sightlines in the area.
There is a view in the direction of Cotehele House from Calstock itself in the contemporary Devon Rivers, No.1 sketchbook (Tate D09656; Turner Bequest CXXXII 141); compare also a drawing in the Vale of Heathfield sketchbook (Tate D10265; Turner Bequest CXXXVII 43a), probably used in 1813. The numerous sketches up and down this stretch of the Tamar relate in varying degrees to the development of the major painting Crossing the Brook (Tate N00497),2 which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815, where Calstock Church appears in the distance beyond Gunnislake.

Matthew Imms
July 2014

1
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.I, p.381.
2
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.93–4 no.130, pl.123 (colour).

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Calstock Church, with Cotehele House and Prospect Tower above the River Tamar Beyond 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-calstock-church-with-cotehele-house-and-prospect-tower-above-r1147400, accessed 16 April 2024.