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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > The Second Meuse-Moselle Tour 1839 > First Mossel and Oxford Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner View of Oxford 1839

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘View of Oxford’ 1839
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 7 Verso:
View of Oxford 1839
D28304
Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 7 a
Pencil on white wove drawing paper, 140 x 235 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Rendered swiftly with loose and fluid line, this landscape sketch shows Oxford taken from a vantage point on either Headington Hill or the Abingdon Road. Turner has summarily jotted in one identifiable landmark at centre: the dome of Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera (1737–49). The spire of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin and the Gothic twin towers of Hawksmoor’s All Souls College are suggested in shorthand, by single vertical strokes of the pencil.
For similar views of Oxford in this sketchbook see Tate D28324, D28325, D28340, D28345, D28347–D28349; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIX 17a, 18, 25a, 28, 29–30. It may also be helpful to compare the present drawing with both A View of Oxford from the South Side of Heddington Hill, 1803–4 (Ashmolean Musem, Oxford) and A View of Oxford from the Abingdon Road, 1811–2, exhibited 1812 (currently untraced).1

Alice Rylance-Watson
August 2013

1
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.334 no.302 and Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, p.78 no.125 (plate 112) respectively.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘View of Oxford 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-view-of-oxford-r1150585, accessed 25 April 2024.