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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Würzburg, Rhine and Ostend Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Coastal Views at Ostend, with a Sailing Boat, the Lighthouse, and Distant Spires 1840

Image 1 of 2
  • Enhanced image
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Coastal Views at Ostend, with a Sailing Boat, the Lighthouse, and Distant Spires’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 20 Verso:
Coastal Views at Ostend, with a Sailing Boat, the Lighthouse, and Distant Spires 1840
D30495
Turner Bequest CCCIII 19a
Pencil on flecked pale blue laid paper, 104 x 170 mm
Partial watermark: Tree of Liberty
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The two drawings here were made with the page turned horizontally, one above the other. The upper is centred on the slender lighthouse (since replaced) near the entrance to Ostend’s harbour channel. Below, a sailing boat is shown manoeuvring off the foreshore, with spires and windmills outlined beyond.
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll have suggested this page and a few others ‘contain features which have some connection’ with the oil seascape Ostend Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich),1 ‘although they are in so summary a shorthand style that it is difficult to be certain of a direct relationship.’2 See folio 6 recto (D30470) for one possible source. For numerous other Ostend views on adjacent pages, marking the end of Turner’s 1840 tour, see under folio 1 recto (D30460).

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Butlin and Joll 1984, pp.254–5 no.407, pl.412 (colour).
2
Ibid., p.255.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Coastal Views at Ostend, with a Sailing Boat, the Lighthouse, and Distant Spires 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-coastal-views-at-ostend-with-a-sailing-boat-the-lighthouse-r1196253, accessed 23 September 2024.