Château d’Arques, near Dieppe, c.1826-27 |
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 © The Fitzwilliam Museum Click on the image to view catalogue entry and access to a larger image |
Watercolour
with touching out on paper 170 x 245 mm Given by John Ruskin, 1861 no.570 Ruskin intended this ‘fast sketch’ to demonstrate Turner’s ‘pure mode of using watercolours’. The identification of the location of this drawing has troubled Turner scholars since it entered the collection in 1861. It has been associated both with a series of views of English rivers which Turner painted in the 1820s, and with landscapes of the Scottish lowlands, painted in the beginning of the 1830s. |
| The recent, convincing, identification of the scene as the Château d’Arques, near Dieppe in Northern France, is based on a comparison with a pencil drawing in the Tate Gallery (?1826, TB. CCXXIV), which depicts the castle from the east. Another watercolour in the collection, bequeathed by T.W. Bacon in 1950 (PD. 112-1950), was probably worked up from sketches made on the same tour. Twelve others are in the Tate Gallery. Some or all of them may have been painted with the intention of publishing a series of views of the Channel Coast, as a sequel to his Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast, published in collaboration with W.B Cooke, 1826, although no such series came to fruition. | |
