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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Margate, London and Surrey c.1829-45 > Kent Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Seafront at Deal with the Semaphore Tower c.1830

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Seafront at Deal with the Semaphore Tower’ c.1830
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 4 Verso:
The Seafront at Deal with the Semaphore Tower c.1830
D35764
Turner Bequest CCCLXIII 4a
Pencil on white wove paper, 76 x 98 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing is inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation. It shows what is now the Timeball Tower Museum,1 set back a little from Deal’s seafront off Victoria Parade. Before the timeball mechanism was established to assist accurate navigation in 1855, between 1821 and 1831 there was a semaphore mast, as apparently shown by Turner, used for anti-smuggling operations, on the site of a Napoleonic-era shutter telegraph.2 There is another view in the 1825 Holland sketchbook (Tate D19389; Turner Bequest CCXIV 277).
The view is continued a little on folio 5 recto opposite (D35765). For other views of Deal see under the recto (D35763).

Matthew Imms
September 2016

1
See Deal Timeball Tower, accessed 15 February 2016, http://www.dealtimeball.co.uk/.
2
See ‘Places of Interests: Deal Timeball Tower’, What’s On In Deal, accessed 15 February 2016, http://www.deal-kent.co.uk/places-of-interests/deal-timeball-tower.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Seafront at Deal with the Semaphore Tower c.1830 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2016, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-seafront-at-deal-with-the-semaphore-tower-r1183727, accessed 19 April 2024.