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 > Brighton and Arundel Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Columbus, with a 'Whale Smack' Alongside c.1824

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Columbus, with a 'Whale Smack' Alongside’ c.1824
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 63 Verso:
The Columbus, with a ‘Whale Smack’ Alongside c.1824
D18407
Turner Bequest CCX 57a
Pencil on white wove paper, 75 x 118 mm
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Whale Smack’ bottom centre, ‘Columbus’ far right towards top
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Here Turner has produced a study of the four-masted barque The Columbus, which arrived off the south coast of England at the end of October 1824.1 She launched from the Isle of Orleans, Quebec, in July of that year, laden with over six thousand tons of timber bound for London. Having sprung a leak earlier in her voyage, she was hauled with the help of a fleet of pilots and steam tugs to Blackwall Reach in the East End of London. Turner pictures her moored at Blackwall in the present drawing with a ‘Whale Smack’ docked below, diminutive in relation to the freighter.2 The Columbus is depicted elsewhere in this sketchbook on Tate D18392, D18406, D18408; Turner Bequest CCX 49, 57, 58.

Alice Rylance-Watson
February 2015

1
See catalogue entry for ‘The Columbus Captn Wm McKellar. As She Appears opposite the Folley House, Blackwall Reach’, Royal Museums Greenwich, accessed 24 February 2015, http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/102536.html and Ian Warrell, Turner’s Sketchbooks, London 2014, p.128.
2
Warrell 2014, p.128.

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Columbus, with a ‘Whale Smack’ Alongside c.1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 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-the-columbus-with-a-whale-smack-alongside-r1181294, accessed 23 September 2024.