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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Normandy ?1829 > Tancarville and Lillebonne Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Sailing Ship and the Banks of the River Seine ?1829

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Sailing Ship and the Banks of the River Seine’ ?1829
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 64 Verso:
A Sailing Ship and the Banks of the River Seine ?1829
D23825
Turner Bequest CCLIII 64a
Pencil on pale cream laid paper, 107 x 156 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The page contains a sketch, drawn horizontally, of a sailing ship on the water with high hills behind. Finberg called it simply ‘River banks’,1 but the location has been further specified as a view of the Seine between Le Havre and Rouen.2 Preceding drawings in the sketchbook are of Jumièges, the following of river views, and then the town of Duclair, consistent with Turner travelling eastwards upriver and indicating that this sketch can be specified further to a view from the Seine between Jumièges and Duclair.
Art historian Ian Warrell notes that this formed the preliminary sketch3 for Turner’s later watercolour, The Banks of the Seine near Jumièges and Duclair, Normandy, c.1832 (Tate D24739; Turner Bequest CCLIX 174). Turner captures the elegant shapes of the sailing vessel in a few lines.

Caroline South
May 2017

1
Finberg 1909, II, p.770.
2
?Ian Warrell, ‘Turner on the Seine: Topographical Index’, c.1999, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain (printout in copy of Warrell 1999), p.5.
3
Warrell 1999, p.271 no.98.

How to cite

Caroline South, ‘A Sailing Ship and the Banks of the River Seine ?1829 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-sailing-ship-and-the-banks-of-the-river-seine-r1195731, accessed 25 April 2024.