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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Northern France 1832 > Guernsey Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Rocky Coastal Terrain, Channel Islands ?1832

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Rocky Coastal Terrain, Channel Islands’ ?1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 70 Recto:
Rocky Coastal Terrain, Channel Islands ?1832
D23653
Turner Bequest CCLII 70
Pencil on white wove paper, 114 x 187 mm
Partial watermark ‘J. JELL | 18’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘70’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCLII – 70’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner filled this page with multiple sketched passages of the kind of steep and craggy coastal terrain that abounds in the Channel Islands. The scenes in the bottom half of this page are inverted in relation to the sketchbook as foliated. Sark Island, whose coast is one of subjects of particular study in this sketchbook, was described around the same time as ‘beset with numerous sunken as well as lofty rocks, apparently severed from the main land by some terrible convulsion of nature, and separated from it by narrow channels’.1

John Chu
April 2014

1
J.T. Cochrane, A Guide to the Island of Guernsey, St Peter Port 1826, p.139.

How to cite

John Chu, ‘Rocky Coastal Terrain, Channel Islands ?1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 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-rocky-coastal-terrain-channel-islands-r1175145, accessed 25 April 2024.