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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Meuse-Mosel, Luxembourg and Northern ... > Rivers Meuse and Moselle Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Calais Harbour and Three Seagulls 1824

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Calais Harbour and Three Seagulls’ 1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 10 Recto:
Calais Harbour and Three Seagulls 1824
D19570
Turner Bequest CCXVI 10
Pencil on white wove paper, 118 x 78 mm
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘10’ top right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVI–10’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
These swiftly rendered sketches depict the port of Calais, with moored boats, a section of harbour wall and a tower. The artist docked there on 11 August 1824. Turner’s suggestion of a sphere atop the tower almost certainly indicates that this is the Colonne Louis XVIII, a monument situated on the promenade overlooking the mouth of the harbour erected in honour of the French king’s return from exile after the fall of Napoleon. Writing of the Colonne in the 1830s, one commentator described it as a ‘plain shaft and capital surmounted with a gilt ball’, the ‘first stone of which was laid on 25 August, 1815’.1 The arched gateway directly below the royal column is pictured again on Tate D19578; Turner Bequest CCXVI 14.
The artist has also sketched three seagulls, capturing these rather mean looking birds as they rest and patrol the harbour for food.

Alice Rylance-Watson
February 2014

1
Thomas Byerley, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Volume XXXI, London 1838, p.404.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘Calais Harbour and Three Seagulls 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 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-calais-harbour-and-three-seagulls-r1174358, accessed 27 April 2024.