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

With the page turned horizontally, this is a detailed sketch of a river meandering through a wooded landscape with a small house on the right–hand side.

Owing to its similarities to a study in the 1814 Devon Rivers, No.1 sketchbook entitled ‘Eastcott Bridge on the River Tamar’ (Tate D09590; CXXXII 100), Turner scholar Eric Shanes speculates that Turner ‘may conceivably have drawn the detailed river scene that appears on folio 3 of the Review at Portsmouth sketchbook’1 at the same location ‘possibly near Eastcott Wood, on the River Tamar between Boyton and North Tamerton’ where ‘he may have indulged in a few hours fishing’.2

This also suggests that this sketchbook may have initially been used as a continuation of the Devon Rivers, No.1 sketchbook which, in a similar vein, is comprised of ‘drawings made in the summer of 1814, sites in the north–west of Devon, on the western fringes of the county edging into Cornwall, and down the Tamar Valley towards Plymouth’ as noted by Matthew Imms in his Introduction to the other sketchbook in the present section.

For other views along the Tamar Valley in this sketchbook, see folios 3 to 16 (D09989–D10002).

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