J.M.W Turner, R.A. (1775-1851) Scarborough Castle

Lot 28. pencil and watercolour - 10 x 15¾ in. (25.4 x 40 cm.) - Estimate: £40,000-60,000

Provenance : E.J. Taylor.
T.A. Tatton.
Mrs. Crabtree.
Wayland Wells Williams and by descent in the family to the present owner.

Literature : A. Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg and London, 1979, p. 335, no. 317.

Expositions : Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Art in New England: English Paintings, Drawings and Prints from Private Collections, 1939, no. 214.
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Special Loan Exhibition of Paintings, Prints and Drawings from New England Collections, not dated, no. 682.
New London, Lyman Allyn Museum, Wayland Wells Williams Collection of English Water Colors, 1943, no. 618.
Toronto, Art Gallery and Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Paintings by J.M.W. Turner, 1946, no. 35.
New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Prospects: An Exhibition of English Landscape Watercolors from English and American Private Collections, 1950, no. 21, lent from the Wayland Wells Williams Collection by Mrs Elizabeth Williams Gastin.
Indianapolis, John Herron Art Museum, Turner in America, 1955, no. 9, illustrated.

Notes : Scarborough, an important strategic site on the coast of Yorkshire between Bridlington and Whitby, was ravaged by the Danes in 1066 and revived under King Henry II in the mid-12th Century. The Castle, on the site of Bronze Age fortifications, is on a headland and is now mainly 12th-Century, with its keep completed by 1158.

This watercolour, listed by Andrew Wilton but not illustrated, is a page from the 'Smaller Fonthill' sketchbook ('smaller' in comparison with the 'Fonthill' sketchbook, the pages of which measure 18 5/8 x 13 in.), seven of the pages of which remain in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain (A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings in the Turner Bequest, 1909, vol. I, pp. 123-4, no. XLVIII): it was in use from 1799 until 1801 and the contents range from Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire to Oxford, Yorkshire, Durham and Scotland (see Finberg, op. cit., and Wilton, op.cit., pp. 335-6, examples illustrated).

Turner visited Scarborough on his way to Scotland in the summer of 1801. This watercolour is one of the boldest of Turner's works up to this time, with its broad, freely applied washes of watercolour and the strong tonal contrasts between the foreground, the dark band of the castle and the slopes on which it rises, and the contre-jour effect of the light sky, silhouetting the delicately drawn drawbridge; the exaggerated contrasts of scale, though not the forms, reflect the influence of Piranesi, whose prints were widely disseminated in Britain by 1800. Here the Picturesque elements in Turner's earlier works have been completely superceded.

Another view of Scarborough Castle, originally from the 'Smaller Fonthill' sketchbook, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Wilton, op. cit, no. 318, illustrated) and there are later watercolours, including the sea, of 1809, 1811, 1818 and about 1825 (Wilton, op. cit, nos. 527-9, 751, illustrated).

Christie's. British Art on Paper. 21 November 2007, 2:30 pm. 8 King Street, St. James's, London