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

With the sketchbook turned vertically, Turner worked two cursory drawings of figures gathered in a small room or nook onto this page. If this implies a modest interior, the tall hats and wide poke bonnets of the figures suggest a well-to-do company. At the bottom of the page is a view of distant jagged cliffs of a kind typical of Sark Island which were the subject of extensive study in this part of the volume. Sark could not accommodate tourists in ‘regular lodging houses or inns’, although ‘the stranger’ to these parts was assured that they would ‘find good reception under the humble roof of a Serk [sic] cottage’.1