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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Studies of Sunset over the Sea, Perhaps at Margate c.1831-45

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Studies of Sunset over the Sea, Perhaps at Margate c.1831–45
D34337
Turner Bequest CCCXLIII 36a
Pencil on white laid paper, 171 x 154 mm
Partial watermark ‘mlett
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘[?29 ... | ?Golden ...]’ above centre
Inscribed in red ink ‘(a)’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCXLIII – 36 (a)’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
In chronological sequence down the sheet, there are at least three successive, typically summary studies of the sun approaching the horizon over the sea, with scrawled notes which may include a date. The viewpoint, as with other rapid sketches on similar sheets in this subsection, was perhaps the Great Beach at Margate.
In the ‘Coastal Scenes and Shipping c.1820–45’ section of this catalogue, John Chu has addressed a number of figure and shipping studies with little if anything by way of topographical context (Tate D34780, D34782, D34784, D34786–D34790; Turner Bequest CCCXLIV 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 322v, 323, 323v) on similarly folded pieces of the same paper (see the technical notes concerning Tate D34337–D34341 below). It is possible that all these sheets were folded together directly, or were at least prepared at the same time, along with Tate D34493–D34495 and the single sheet D34582–D34585 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIV 132, 133, 134, 190, 190v, 191, 191v) in the present subsection, amounting to eight sheets in all.
Technical notes:
The partial watermark ‘mlett’ likely indicates the Devon papermaker Edward Norish Tremlett, operating at various mills around Exeter between 1831 and 1856, in partnership with Dewdney between 1831 and 1833, and Charles Harris between 1833 and 1851.1
Finberg somewhat misleadingly described Tate D34337–D34341 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIII 36a–e) as ‘Five sheets from a sketch book ... on blue paper’.2 In fact they are on two matching bifolio unstitched sheets of white paper, presumably once folded within one another, with notches at the head and foot of the fold. D34341 (e) and the present work (a) are on the left and right of one face (with the horizontal dimension given above encompassing them both), with D34338 (b) on the back this one; D34339 (c) is on the right-hand side of one face of the second sheet, the left-hand side having been largely torn away, with D34340 (d) on its verso.

Matthew Imms
August 2016

1
See ‘Exeter Working Papers in British Book Trade History; 7: The Devon paper trades: a biographical dictionary: Exeter’, Exeter Working Papers in Book History, accessed 4 May 2016, http://bookhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/devon-paper-trades-exeter.html.
2
Finberg 1909, II, p.1108.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Studies of Sunset over the Sea, Perhaps at Margate c.1831–45 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 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-studies-of-sunset-over-the-sea-perhaps-at-margate-r1183894, accessed 29 March 2024.