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

Turner filled much of this page with sketches of the kind of steep and craggy coastal terrain that abounds in the Channel Islands. The jagged cliffs and reefs sketched onto the bottom half of the 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