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

With the page turned horizontally, there are five separate sketches here, all presumably drawn at Dordrecht where Turner arrived on 10 September 1817 and spent a day and a half. The largest, filling the upper left half of the page, is of a small four-wheeled vehicle, identified by A.G.H. Bachrach as a ‘farmer’s cart’,1 with unrelated written notes on costume above it.

Beneath are ‘ferry boats’ and, within a drawn outline just left of lower centre, a tiny sketch of a dark storm cloud. The cloud has the same menacing shape as that looming over the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht in a sketch on folio 84 recto (D13156; Turner Bequest CLXII 85) and massing over the town and Oude Haven crowded with shipping in the two sketches on the right of the present page.

The upper sketch there shows thin cloud approaching, and in the lower sketch the sky has darkened and, judging by the barges, a strong wind has risen. Clearly Turner is recording the progress of a single storm, perhaps reminded of pictures by the Dordrecht master Aelbert Cuyp (1620‒1691), The Maas at Dordrecht in a Storm (National Gallery, London) and Thunderstorm at Dordrecht (Fondation E.G. Bührle Collection, Zurich), then in British collections. Cuyp is certainly in his mind as he calls one of the boats as a ‘small Cuyp schuyt’ before describing smoky blue clouds, a ray of sunlight breaking through them and the green and yellow colours of the water.

There is no compositional connection between these sketches and Turner’s painting Dort or Dordrecht. The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam becalmed (1818; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut).2 However, the water is the ‘oily yellow green’ Turner describes here, and, as noted by Malcolm Cormack,3 the distant Grote Kerk is lit by a ray of sunshine.