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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > East Anglia, Sussex and Yorkshire 1824 > Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner ?St Mary's Church, Happisburgh c.1824

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘?St Mary's Church, Happisburgh’ c.1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 37 Recto:
?St Mary’s Church, Happisburgh c.1824
D18228
Turner Bequest CCIX 37
Pencil on white wove paper, 115 x 118 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This previously unidentified sketch probably shows St Mary’s Church at Happisburgh, a village on the northeast Norfolk coast. Built on Norman foundations, the church was demolished and reconstructed in the fifteenth century.1 To this day the tower of St Mary’s is an important landmark to mariners warning of the position of treacherous sandbanks nearby. Turner has drawn details of the stone tracery decorating one of the windows at top right and on the opposite side of the leaf, details of some moulding. See also Tate D18229–D18233; Turner Bequest CCIX 37a–39a).
Turner produced a vignette design of Happisburgh, entitled Hasboro Sands (Happisburgh is pronounced ‘Haysborough’), for the East Coast publication, though it was never engraved (see general introduction).2

Alice Rylance-Watson
January 2015

1
‘St Mary’s Church, Happisburgh Village, accessed 13 April 2015, http://www.happisburgh.org/church
2
Andrew Wilton, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work, Fribourg 1979, p.405 no.898.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘?St Mary’s Church, Happisburgh c.1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-st-marys-church-happisburgh-r1181110, accessed 14 May 2024.