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

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, the subject is continued on folio 95 recto opposite (D02604). The view is to the south–west from a point close to the water, or possibly from a vessel in the River Tyne; Turner evidently did not cross to the Gateshead side, where he would have had access to panoramic views from the heights. While St Nicholas, in the centre of this view, is a preponderantly late–medieval church, with a famously idiosyncratic belfry and corona of flying buttresses, the spire to its right is that of All Saints, a church completed to the designs of David Stephenson as recently as 1796 and a notable landmark, influenced by St Martin’s–in–the–Fields, London. Turner has recorded the details of its classical architecture with some care.

He was to make another drawing of the town from somewhat farther downstream in the Scotch Antiquities sketchbook of 1818 (Tate D13588; Turner Bequest CLXVII 2), to which he referred when making his grandiose watercolour design of about 1823 (Tate D18144; Turner Bequest CCVIII K)1 for the Rivers of England engraving published in that year (Tate impressions: T04791–T04793, T04917). Probably in 1831, he finally recorded the view from Gateshead in the Worcester and Shrewsbury sketchbook (Tate D22164, D22165; Turner Bequest CCXXXIX 8a, 9).