Joseph Mallord William Turner R.A. 1775-1851

John Ruskin;

C.Robert Rudolf

This lively plein air sketch captures the sea and evening sky off Margate. A red sunset appears like a gash in the sky and is softly reflected in the grey-blue water below. In the foreground the skeleton of a vessel appears grounded on a sandy bank and in the distance looms the hazy shape of Margate Harbour wall.

The dimensions of the sheet are consistent with the roll sketchbooks used in the later years of Turner’s life. He used at least five of these sketchbooks on his last tour to the Continent when he visited Dieppe, Eu and Treport in September 1845, and other similar sketchbooks were used during that year at Margate, Folkestone and elsewhere on the south coast. Such sketchbooks in the Turner Bequest are the Ambleteuse and Wimereux Book (TB CCCLVII), the Boulogne Book (TB CCCLX) and the Dieppe and Kent Sketchbook (TB CCCLXI). The present watercolour, however, is closest to the drawings in a sketchbook entitled Ideas of Folkestone (CCCLVI) which contains a large number of views taken on the English coast.

Although the looseness of handling is similar to those in Turner’s Ideas of Folkestone sketchbook, it would appear, however, that it belongs to another group of drawings from this period (see Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W.Turner, nos. 1411-29) which were made at Margate (Finberg’s Life of J.M.W.Turner, 1939, p.418, indicates that Turner continued to visit Margate until the late 1840s). A number of these drawings also depict shipwrecks (see nos. 1425 & 1426) and a few are similarly inscribed along the bottom edges (see nos.1411, 1412, 1424, 1425, 1426). The majority are close in size and colouring to the present watercolour and they are all drawn with a similar lightness of touch. Futhermore, the provenance of these drawings demonstrates a link with the present watercolour and they appear to emanate either from Mrs Booth, or from Ruskin, who, no doubt, like Charles Stokes, acquired them through Mrs Booth. Turner regularly visited Mrs Booth at Margate in the 1830s and 1840s and she later became his housekeeper at Queen Anne's Street. These late watercolours seem to have been regarded as legitimate plunder by those who had access to Turner’s studio after his death and many subsequently entered the collections of J.E.Taylor and Sir Hickman Bacon