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

In these cursory sketches Turner records a church at the uppermost register and below, a distant view of a town taken from the surrounding countryside. Whilst Finberg suggests that these sketches may have been taken at Orford, this cataloguer proposes that the church bears more resemblance to St Peter and St Paul’s at Aldeburgh, a town a few kilometres north of Orford on the Suffolk North Sea coast (see Tate D18267; Turner Bequest CCIX 56a).1 The landscape sketch below the jotting of the church may indeed depict Orford from a distance: the squat tower rendered in profile at the far right could be Orford Castle (see Tate D18305; Turner Bequest CCIX 87).

The artist has annotated the landscape sketch with inscriptions. Though these notes are almost entirely illegible, ‘Sud[...]’ | [...] [?Hall]’ may have been inscribed. Turner could be referring to Sudbourne here, a village which lies just to the north west of Orford. This was location of Sudbourne Hall, a country house designed by James Wyatt in 1784 for the first Marquis of Hertford.2 Though demolished in the twentieth century, Turner, in these rather scrawled annotations, could be referring to this historic property in short-hand.

Verso:

Blank.