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, ?Sark Island ?1832

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Rocky Coastal Terrain, ?Sark Island’ ?1832
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 72 Recto:
Rocky Coastal Terrain, ?Sark Island ?1832
D23657
Turner Bequest CCLII 72
Pencil on white wove paper, 187 x 114 mm
Partial watermark ‘J. JELL | 18’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Carx’ centre right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘72’ top right running vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCLII – 72’ top right running vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
With the sketchbook turned vertically, Turner filled this page with small drawings of the kind of steep and craggy coastal terrain that abounds in the Channel Islands. Turner’s inscription at the centre of the page on the right-hand side may read Creux, locating some or all of these sketches at Sark Island, 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, ?Sark Island ?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-sark-island-r1175149, accessed 14 May 2024.