Dover Castle from the Sea: Turner's 1822 Watercolour for Marine Views

The picture

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston catalogues the work as Dover Castle from the Sea, for Marine Views, and dates it 1822. It is a large sheet for a watercolour, 40.5 by 60 centimetres, worked in transparent and opaque colour on paper, and it is signed and dated J.M.W. Turner 1822 at the lower right.

Catalogue record — Holding institution

Artist	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Date	1822
Medium	Transparent and opaque watercolour on paper
Dimensions	Sheet: 40.5 x 60 cm (15 15/16 x 23 5/8 in.)
Collection	Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Accession number	23.513

The view looks in from the Channel towards the harbour piers, with Dover Castle standing above the centre on the crest of the white cliffs. Fishing boats labour in a stiff wind and a broken sea, while a steamboat trailing a long ribbon of smoke makes its way in towards the harbour.

Marine Views

The engraver and publisher W.B. Cooke had worked with Turner for years, most notably on the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England. In the early 1820s a plan for a new series of Marine Views led Turner to make large sea subjects between 1822 and 1824, on a scale to match his earlier Eddystone Lighthouse design.

The project never got far. Only a small number of its subjects were engraved, and relations between Turner and Cooke soured before ending in 1827. Eric Shanes proposed Dover Castle as one of the watercolours associated with the scheme, and Cooke showed it in his London gallery in January 1823, catalogued as drawn in December 1822.

The colour study at Tate

A large preparatory colour study for the design survives in the Turner Bequest at Tate, on Whatman paper watermarked 1822. It is loosely laid in over light pencil, and Thomas Ardill has described its rich blue sky, pale yellow cliffs and boats, and a greenish sea made by toning the blue down with yellow.

Comparing the two shows how the design was tightened. In the study the lugger in the foreground sits roughly in the middle. In the finished watercolour it moves to about a third of the way in from the left, which opens space for a lively group of Channel craft at the right and lets the eye rise to the castle.

Provenance

The museum records the watercolour as lent anonymously to the Cooke exhibition in 1823. By 1857 it belonged to John Stuart Hippisley, who lent it to the Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester that year. It then passed through several London collections and sales, including the Leech sale at Christie's in 1887, where Agnew bought it.

It crossed the Atlantic in the later nineteenth century. Samuel Putnam Avery of New York had it by 1900 and offered it to the Boston museum. It later belonged to Clara Bertram Kimball of Boston, passed to her husband David P. Kimball, and came to the museum in 1923 under his bequest in her memory.

Where to see it

The watercolour is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession number 23.513, and the museum currently lists it as not on view. Like most large watercolours it is shown only for limited periods. It travelled to New York in 2017 for the exhibition Turner's Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages Through Time at the Frick Collection.