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

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, Dudley Castle is seen across open ground from the south-east, with the outline of the tower of St Edmund’s Church below it towards the left, and a separate study of the spire of St Thomas’s, further to the left from this viewpoint, below. Modern developments make the viewpoint difficult to establish, but a sense of the view is possible from around Watsons Green Road and Wolverton Road on Kates Hill, overlooking Dudley’s Southern Bypass. There is a tiny thumbnail reprise of the composition framed by pencil lines at the bottom left.

Frank Milner notes that these drawings and that on folio 64 recto (D22095; Turner Bequest CCXXXVIII 62) show that Turner ‘while sketching on the spot did not conceive Dudley as an industrial subject’, but used a ‘rural Claudian formula’ with a ‘centralised promontory ... above a valley with lollipop-like trees balancing to left and right’1 to evoke the idealised manner of Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), whom Turner so admired and so often emulated.2

For other views of Dudley see under folio 23 recto (D22016).