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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Thames, London and South of England 1821 ... > Windsor and St Anne's Hill Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Windsor Castle across the River Thames from the Brocas Meadows c.1827

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Windsor Castle across the River Thames from the Brocas Meadows’ c.1827
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 2 Recto:
Windsor Castle across the River Thames from the Brocas Meadows c.1827
D20559
Turner Bequest CCXXV 2
Pencil on white wove paper, 116 x 222 mm
Stamped in black ‘CCXXV – 2’ bottom right
Part watermark ‘Whatman | rkey Mills | 1819’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s viewpoint is the Brocas meadows on the north side of the River Thames, looking south-east across to Windsor Castle. There is a slight continuation to the right below the main view, showing the tower and prominent pinnacles of St John the Baptist’s Church, built only a few years before in 1820–2 to replace a sprawling medieval church on the same site.1 The sketch is one of a sequence with folio 1 recto (D20558), the verso of this leaf and folio 3 recto (D20559–D20561). For later changes to the landscape, see under D20558, and for similar drawings in the Windsor and Cowes, Isle of Wight sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest CCXXVI), see the Introduction to the present book.
Eric Shanes has noted this drawing among those listed above in relation to the watercolour Windsor Castle of about 1828–9 (British Museum, London),2 engraved in 1831 for Turner’s Picturesque Views in England and Wales (Tate impressions: T05086, T06093); all show similar but not identical permutations of the castle, river and trees in the subsequent design. This is the only sketch mentioned in that connection by Andrew Wilton, while Kim Sloan mentions both this and the verso (D20560).3
1
See ‘Windsor Parish Church’, The Royal Windsor Website, accessed 5 March 2014, http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/parishchurch/parishchrch.html.
2
Wilton 1979, p.397 no.829, reproduced, as c.1829; Shanes 1979, p.34 no.40, as c.1827–9; Sloan 1998, p.98 no.30, reproduced in colour p.[99], as c.1828–9.
3
See Wilton 1979, p.397, and Sloan 1998, p.98.
Technical notes:
As in most other cases in this sketchbook, John Ruskin’s customary red ink page number is not immediately apparent adjacent to the later stamp.

Matthew Imms
August 2014

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Windsor Castle across the River Thames from the Brocas Meadows c.1827 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-windsor-castle-across-the-river-thames-from-the-brocas-r1172967, accessed 24 April 2024.