Sunrise over the Sea, perhaps at Margate

This well-preserved work is an exceptional example of the boldly expressive watercolours Turner made in his final years. Previously dated to the later 1820s, it is here associated by Ian Warrell for the first time with sheets of one of the ‘roll’ sketchbooks that were broken up and dispersed after Turner’s death. Turner deployed these light-weight books on many of his later travels in the early 1840s, notably in Germany, Venice and the celebrated final tours of Switzerland. In this instance, the dismantled book can be placed in the sequence of sketchbooks used during the summer of 1845, overlapping in its focus on cloudy skies over the sea with the contents of the ‘Channel’ sketchbook at the Yale Center for British Art, and several of those in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain.

Turner in 1845

The year 1845 proved to be a momentous one for Turner, who turned seventy that April. Despite the continuing derision that the oil paintings he submitted to the annual Royal Academy exhibitions attracted, he remained as productive as ever, sending four more views of Venice and the first pair of his quartet of canvases exploring the whaling industry. Yet this would be the last year in which any of his new works would find buyers at the exhibition (see note 1).
A sense that all was not as well as usual can be detected in a disagreement that developed between Turner and his patron Elhanan Bicknell (1788-1861), who bought one of the whaling scenes (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). By September, Bicknell grumbled that he was dissatisfied with the altered appearance of his picture, attributing this to what he believed to be Turner’s use of watercolour on the surface. But the underlying problem is more likely to have been his lead white pigment, layered on megilp, which discoloured as it dried (J.H. Townsend, How Turner Painted. Materials & Techniques, London 2019, pp.144-5). Meanwhile, Turner’s relations with the two potential buyers of Venetian pictures became muddled, and he subsequently accidently mixed up the letters he had written each of them.
More successfully, this was also the moment that the London-based American artist, Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859) undertook negotiations with Turner for the acquisition of the painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven) by the New York collector James Lenox (1800-80); this additionally entailed the delicate issue of exploring the possibility of a pendant by Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867). Another important concern this year was the process of producing a commercially available engraving of The Fighting Temeraire tugged to its last Berth, 1838 (National Gallery, London), a picture Turner referred to as his ‘Darling’, which rumbled on into the autumn.
Back in May, while the exhibition was still on the Academy’s walls, its President, the portraitist Sir Martin Archer Shee (1769-1850), had announced his resignation because of ill health, leading Turner to be appointed as Deputy President of the Academy (in spite of public criticism that he was too ill-bred). While he no doubt welcomed the distinction the role conferred, the administrative duties encroached on his time just at a moment when he was struggling to maintain his own well-being. He had, in fact, left London as the annual exhibition opened, telling friends ‘I have been so unwell that I was obliged to go away from Town to revival by a little change of fresh air’ (J. Gage (ed.), Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner, Oxford, 1980, p.206, no.282, letter to John James Ruskin, 15 May 1845).
Typically, he did not reveal where he had been, but Turner’s sketchbooks indicate that he escaped to Margate, his favourite seaside resort at the eastern end of Kent. And from there he made the first of two jaunts this year to the northern coast of France. In May he was based to the south of Calais, exploring the cliffs between Ambleteuse and Boulogne (fig. 1). Suitably refreshed by June, he expressed his intention of setting out for Venice yet again; but that was not to be. Instead he returned to France in September, as the summer waned, for another restorative break, staying on that occasion at Dieppe and Le Tréport. While there he was invited to join the French king, Louis-Philippe, at the Château d’Eu, following a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (see I. Warrell, Turner’s Sketchbooks, London, 2014, pp. 214-232).

Margate and the Isle of Thanet

Turner ‘knew the colours of the clouds over the sea, from the Bay of Naples to the Hebrides, and being once asked where, in Europe, were to be seen the loveliest skies, answered instantly, “In the Isle of Thanet”.’ (E.T. Cook and A.Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin, vol.XXVII, p. 164).
Turner’s earliest connection with Margate can be traced back to the 1780s, when he was barely a teenager. In his recent biography, Eric Shanes proposed that Turner’s parents placed him there in response to fears for his health at a time when his young associates were contracting tuberculosis (E. Shanes, Young Mr Turner. The First Forty Years. 1775-1815, New Haven and London, 2016, pp.10-13). Situated about 65 miles to the east of London, Margate was compact and rural in outlook, chiefly connected to the outside world via its harbour. The Isle of Thanet, of which it forms part, along with the towns of Ramsgate and Broadstairs, was previously separated from the rest of Kent by the Wantsum Channel that passed through Pegwell Bay, to the north of Sandwich, and emerged on the northern side of the peninsula just east of Reculver.
Travellers passing by boat from London towards continental Europe invariably stopped at Margate; and the port’s significance grew in the 1830s once the innovation of steamboats permitted a relatively quick and increasingly reliable excursion from the capital. It was in the early 1830s that Turner revisited Margate while researching scenes for his Picturesque Views in England and Wales, and he found the place substantially expanded with new public buildings and terraces stretching into the surrounding countryside.
Thereafter he became a regular visitor, discovering lodgings looking out across the sandy beach to the new wooden structure known as Jarvis’s Landing Place, which had been erected to the east of the stone walls of the main harbour in order to permit passengers to disembark when low tide prevented the steamboats entering that anchorage (see note 2). Turner was captivated by this outlook, monitoring the comings and goings of the people outside his window, as well as the constantly changing cyclorama of clouds massing and dissolving over the sea. His visits to Margate resulted in a mass of quick sketches, vivid colour studies, and experimental trials of ideas for oil paintings, so that it ranks with Rome, Farnley, Petworth, Venice or Lake Lucerne and the Rigi as one of the special places in his creative life.
Over time he became increasingly close to his landlady, the twice-widowed Sophia Caroline Booth (1798-1875). It was this irregular relationship (according to the morality of mid-Victorian Britain) that has, in the past, caused the work Turner produced in Margate to be undervalued, and in some cases seems to have induced doubts about its authenticity (see note 3). Recently, however, the opening of the Turner Contemporary gallery, more-or-less on the site of Mrs Booth’s cottage, and the presentation there of examples of the Margate paintings and watercolours has helped to address the previous neglect.

Sketching the Sky

As we have seen already, Turner retreated to Margate in the summer of 1845. One of the sketchbooks documenting his visit there is the small pocket-sized ‘Channel’ sketchbook, one of only a handful of still intact volumes outside the Tate collection (see A. Wilton, ‘A Rediscovered Turner Sketchbook’, in Turner Studies, winter 1986, vol.6, no.2, pp. 9-23). The distinctive tower of Droit House, which stands at the landward end of the stone pier, occurs several times throughout the book, but especially among the sequence of pencil sketches at the beginning. A couple of pages are (unusually for Turner) dated: ‘June 9’ (f.3, fig. 4); and July 24 (f.14 verso, fig. 5). In the first of these the moon is defined merely as a curved dash, correctly recording what was indeed its waxing crescent form on the 9 June 1845 (see https://www.moongiant.com/phase/6/9/1845). As in earlier sketchbooks, Turner attempted to transcribe the declining progress of the sun, as it sank towards the horizon and appeared to melt into the sea (as well as the process in reverse). He noted as quickly as possible in words any significant alterations in the surrounding colours. But elsewhere in the book he devoted more time to vivid watercolour impressions of some of the effects he had witnessed, occasionally evoking a sense of the passage of time from sheet to sheet.
Some of these small, yet powerful images resemble the Sunrise watercolour under consideration here in their use of watered-down ground tones, over which he added the highlights in undiluted colours representing the clouds and the area of brightly illuminated sky in immediate proximity to the sun.
Comparable effects can be found in one of the roll sketchbooks used slightly earlier in the summer, during Turner’s stay at Ambleteuse (Turner Bequest CCCLVIII; Tate). Once again, for some reason, Turner annotated several pages with the date, which this time was 12 May (ff.2, 3, 5), pinpointing the period in which that book was in use. Two pages utilise much the same palette range deployed here to record what may be the rising sun (given the southern prospect along the coast), intermingling scarlet and blue above washes of organic-egg yellow (ff.9, 10 (fig. 1)).
It is notable that the cloud formation on f.10 (fig. 1) is somewhat similar to the present work, as if the larger sheet records the clouds dispersing a minute or two after the instant recorded here. Their undulating forms appear to be cirrocumulus, often a feature of a ‘mackerel sky’. Although Turner had deliberately set out to fill a sketchbook with sky studies around 1819, he had never made the kind of systematic study of clouds that was undertaken by John Constable around the same period (see note 4). But he may nevertheless have been alert to Luke Howard’s new categorization of cloud types, which offered useful guidance for landscape artists when recreating weather effects.
While Turner’s transcriptions of clouds perhaps lack either scientific rigour or photographic exactitude, it is clear that he remained always alert to the nuances of aerial effects and atmospheric changes, as is well attested in his countless studies of the view across Lake Lucerne to the peak of the Rigi (see The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, 1842, Tate Britain; sold at Christie’s, London, 5 June 2006, lot 53). He has posthumously often been celebrated for his depictions of sunset light, but in recent years many of the works Ruskin and others had identified as that time of day have been retitled as sunrises. Indeed, Turner confessed to a young admirer ‘when you are all fast asleep, I am watching effects of sunrise far more beautiful [than the sunsets people associated with him]; and then, you see, the light does not fail, and you can paint them’ (M. Lloyd, ‘A Memoir of J.M.W. Turner, R.A.’, (1880), Turner Studies, summer 1984, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 22).
It was this kind of dedicated approach to the observation of changing light that anticipates Claude Monet’s method of painting successive canvases, working on each within a limited time frame during the course of a day (fig. 9). Furthermore, both artists were especially drawn to the special character of dawn and twilight.
The watercolours Turner produced on both of his trips to Northern France in 1845 are characterised by this unquenchable thirst for dramatic conjunctions of cloud and light, whether set against bold sunshine, or stormier skies. Habitually secretive about the focus of his travels, Turner was only prepared to admit to artist colleagues that the object of his ‘summer months along the coast of Normandy [in 1845 was] looking out for storms and shipwrecks’ (R. & S.Redgrave, A Century of British Painters, (1866), Oxford reprint 1947, p. 253). Just over twenty years after Turner was inspired by this area a new generation, led by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, sought to capture the same wide expanses of the Channel shores, their limitless skies rising up to towering clouds.

Towards the Infinite

‘…This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me…’: Mark Rothko (1903-70), on seeing the 1966 retrospective of Turner’s paintings and watercolours at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Quoted in B.Venning, Turner. Art & Ideas, London and New York, 2003, p. 314), fig. 10.
Turner’s later work has sometimes been considered essentially fatalistic, a quality that perhaps stems from his fascination with shipwrecks or scenes of cataclysm. Similarly, the fragments of poetry he composed, under the title the ‘Fallacies of Hope’, as a means of amplifying the titles of his exhibited works, further contributed to the idea of his gloomy outlook. Andrew Wilton has argued we should appreciate that much of Turner’s work is couched in the aesthetic principles of the sublime, and that he evolved his own associative type of image which permitted the viewer to experience ‘the most exalted sense of sublimity’ even when the subject did not obviously suggest this kind of emotion (A. Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, London 1980, p. 100 ff). In addition to his experimental processes and inventive image-making, this may be among the reasons Turner’s art has continued to chime with so many artists and photographers, right up to the present day.

Reconstituting a Sketchbook

In 1909 A.J. Finberg published his Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, in which he outlined the contents of the nearly 300 sketchbooks in the collection. Since 1979, when Andrew Wilton produced his still invaluable catalogue of works outside the Tate collection, it has become increasingly evident that many of the watercolours and colour studies were formerly sheets from Turner sketchbooks that had been broken up after his death. These can frequently be traced back, by inference if not always with complete documentation, to Mrs Booth, or her son Daniel John Pound. It was by this means that collectors, such as John Ruskin (1819-1900), Lewis Barned Mozley (1831-1909) and Hannah Cooper, had acquired fine watercolour sketches from Turner’s later travels by the early 1860s. Similarly the important collections of John Edward Taylor (1830-1905) and Henry Vaughan (1809-99), now in the galleries of Manchester, Dublin and Edinburgh, were soon afterwards founded on works of the same kind, ultimately from the same source.
The present watercolour has previously been thought to have been part of a sketchbook owned by Ruskin, much of which was dispersed in a sale at Christie’s on 15 April 1869 (E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, 1904, vol. XIII, pp.569-572; E. Yardley, ‘A Margate Sketchbook Re-Assembled?’, Turner Studies, winter 1984, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 53-55). It was assumed to have been lot 17, which was titled ‘Sunrise off Margate’, and was bought by W.R. Cassels for 19 guineas. However, the rest of the studies in the sketchbook were painted on brownish paper (as confirmed by Walter Armstrong’s note on the work acquired by Casels in 1902 - W. Armstrong, Turner, London 1902, p. 266, as Sunrise off Margate, Circa 1840, 7 x 11. Sketch on brownish paper, ex W.R. Cassels, Esq. Chr 1869, Ruskin). So, although the dimensions are similar to those of this sheet, and the sketchbook from which it comes, lot 17 would have been similar to the Margate studies now in the Courtauld Gallery (J. Selbourne, ibid).
In fact this watercolour can be linked with several other sheets of Royal Quarto wove off-white watercolour drawing paper, several of which carry a Whatman watermark of 1818 (for Turner’s use of Whatman papers in this period, see P. Bower, Turner’s Later Papers. A Study of the Manufacture, Selection and Use of his Drawing Papers 1820-1851, 1999, pp. 74-76, and 80). Roll sketchbooks measuring roughly 9 x 11 ½ inches (23 x 29.2 cms) were among the formats Turner adopted on several of his final tours of Switzerland in the 1840s, but sheets with the 1818 watermark are comparatively rare. Generally the books were bound to Turner’s specifications, with up to twenty-four pages in each.
So far it has proved possible to identify at least twelve (possibly thirteen) watercolours painted on sheets that can be grouped as part of this broken-up sketchbook (see checklist below). The book may have been broken up perhaps as early as 1861, when the Ruskin family account book indicates the significant payment of £1600 for ‘Turner Drawings’, in advance of the gifts Ruskin made to the museums of Oxford and Cambridge that year (For the contents of Ruskin’s gifts to Oxford and Cambridge, see E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, 1904, vol. XIII, pp. 557-560). More certainly, in his catalogue of the collection at Oxford, Luke Herrmann noted that in June 1863 Ruskin invited Frederic (late Lord) Leighton to come and see works by Reynolds and Turner, including ‘a couple of mackerel’ (L. Herrmann, Ruskin and Turner. A study of Ruskin as a collector of Turner, based on his gifts to the University of Oxford, 1968, p. 97, no. 80). These are likely to have been nos.12 and 13 in the following checklist, the first of which has the 1818 watermark, fig. 13.
Other early acquisitions of sheets from the book were made by Taylor (nos.1, 3 (fig. 12) and 4 (fig. 11)) and Vaughan (no.9, fig. 15). Otherwise the history of most sheets is vague or unknown until the start of the twentieth century, when items appear with dealers such as Palser, the Shepherd Brothers, or the Fine Art Society. One possibility might be that they had also been in Ruskin’s collection and were sold after his death in 1900.
Most of the images feature a horizon on, or a little above the mid-point of the sheet. In many instances the lower half is left featureless, as if we are looking over the sea or an expanse of sands. Occasionally there are dark forms that could be harbour walls, boats, or figures. But more often the space is filled by reflections of the brilliant effects in the sky. A notable exception to this pattern is the one or two studies of mackerel already mentioned, which are similar to various other images of fish, on grey or blue paper, caught in Margate and prepared for dinner by Mrs Booth once Turner had finished recording them (Wilton, 1979, ibid, p.468, nos.1399-1404).
A sheet in the Fitzwilliam Museum (no.8, fig. 14) is dated ‘12 Sept / 45’, and its image suggests a steep cliff that resembles some of those on the French coast, or the celebrated Shakespeare Cliff to the west of Dover harbour. The latter seems most likely if taken in conjunction with a letter from the painter David Roberts, which records Turner’s presence at Dover on 18 September, where he had been frustrated from crossing the Channel for at least the previous two days because of hurricane winds (Quoted in H.Guiterman, ‘ “The Great Painter”: Roberts on Turner’, Turner Studies, summer 1989, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 3). This might reasonably suggest that the disbound book was used in Margate and perhaps once he got to France too, alongside the range of other books now widely associated with the second trip (see the discussions of Turner’s spring and autumn tours by John Chu and Matthew Imms on the Tate online catalogue of the Turner Bequest). Alternatively, as noted above, the similarities in the colours deployed in this Sunrise watercolour could also suggest that the dating span stretches back to the earlier visit to Ambleteuse in May.
Even within this batch of stunningly atmospheric works, this evocation of Sunrise stands out as a notable example of Turner’s work in watercolour. The richness and variety of its warm colours give it the same kind of wall power as many of the oil paintings of the same period. For example, the Spectator’s description of the views of Venice exhibited in 1845 could just as aptly be applied here, noting how Turner’s pictures arrest ‘the sight and hold it spell-bound with their magical effects of light and colour: the watery floor and aerial sky meet at the horizon in a gorgeous mass of orange and golden tints’ (The Spectator, 10 May 1845, p.450). Whether the Sunrise scene records the outlook from Margate or from the Northern coast of France ultimately does not matter because Turner touches on something much bigger and more timeless in an image of this kind. Somehow he manages to make us see the remarkable essence of the moment he has managed to capture.

Walter Brandt (1902-1978)

Walter Brandt was one of the most prolific and discerning collectors of British Watercolours in the latter half of the 20^th Century. The son of Ludwig and Lili, and brother of the photographer Bill Brandt, he was born in Hamburg in 1902. The family came to London in the 1920s, and in 1923 Walter entered the family firm of William Brandt & Son & Co., an international trading agency based in the City. It was during the second world war, his wife and children living in Cornwall, that Walter began collecting. His first interest was modern British art, and he purchased works by artists including John Piper and Henry Moore. However his collecting habits moved on to focus on works by British artists born before 1800, a criteria he stuck to fairly rigorously, with a few slight exceptions. Brandt was unusual amongst watercolour collectors of the time in that he never bought bundles of drawings, and so each individual sheet in the collection was specifically chosen, resulting in a collection of unusual and remarkable quality. The present drawing is a typical purchase: in exceptional condition, with interesting provenance, it provides a wonderful example of a late Turner watercolour, and an aesthetic link to the Modern British Art which began his collecting journey.

Note 1 - M. Butlin and E. Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, New Haven and London, 1984 (revised edition), see nos. 414-419 (noted nos. 416 and 417 should be read in conjunction with nos. 421 and 422, with which they have been confused, as discussed in I. Warrell, Turner and Venice, 2003, pp. 239-249. The whaling picture have been discussed extensively in recent publications on Turner, most rewardingly in A. Hokanson, Turner’s Whaling Pictures, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016, and J. Edwards (ed), Turner and the Whale, Oxford 2017.
Note 2 - See J. Selbourne, ‘Sand, Sea and Sky: Margate and Ruskin’, in Paths to Fame. Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld Gallery, Kendal 2008, pp.132-149; and I. Warrell, ‘From Cold Harbour, Margate, to the White House: New Light on One of Ruskin’s Turners’, Turner Society News, Spring 2019, no.131, pp.4-14.
Note 3 - For example, the cache of late oil studies, presented to the National Gallery of Wales in Cardiff by the Davies sisters, were the subject of an episode of the BBC’s Fake or Fortune, first aired 20/23 September 2012.
Note 4 - See E. Morris (ed.), Constable’s Clouds. Paintings and Cloud Studies by John Constable, Over Wallop 2000. Turner’s ‘Skies’ sketchbook (TB CLVIII, Tate) is discussed in I. Warrell, Turner’s Sketchbooks, 2014, pp.100-103, and D. Brown, J.M.W. Turner: The ‘Skies’ sketchbook, 2016.


Sheets from the On the Sands Sketchbook

1 - Sun over Water [Not in Wilton], 21.4 x 26.8 cm; the sheet cut down on all four sides, Private collection (Sotheby’s, 4 July 2012, lot 198, Sunset over Water)
2 - Sunrise [W784, as Sunrise off Margate, c.1825-30], 22.8 x 29.4 cm, the present watercolour
3 - Sun over Wet Sand [W1415, as c.1840-5], 22.9 x 29.2 cm, Whitworth Art Institute, Manchester (D.7.1912), fig. 12
4 - Sunset [W1414, as c.1840-5], 22.2 x 29.8 cm, Manchester City Art Gallery (MCAG 1920.594), fig. 11
5 - Moon rising over the Sea [not in Wilton], 22.8 x 29.2 cm, Private collection, New York
6 - Clouds over Sand [W1419, as c.1845-50], 22.8 x 29.5 cm, 1818 Whatman watermark, Private collection
7 - Study of Sky and Shore [W1422, as c.1845-50], 22.8 x.29.5 cm, Private collection
8 - Storm Cloud over a river; possibly Shakespeare Cliff, Dover [W1427, as 1845-50], 23.3 x 28.6 cm, Inscribed, ‘Sept 12 / 45’, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (PD115-1950), fig. 14
9 - A Shower over Water, traditionally called Lake Lucerne [W1475, as Lake Lucerne ?1841], 22.5 x 28.9 cm, 1818 Whatman watermark, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (2422), fig. 15
10 - Storm at Sea, 21.9 x 29 cm, Tate (D35855; TB CCCLXIV 18)
11 - Wreckers on the Shore [W1407, as Wreckers (?) Yarmouth, c.1840], 22.4 x 28.9 cm, Private collection
12 - Study of Three Mackerel [W1399, as c.1835-40], 22.4 x 28.7 cm, 1818 Whatman watermark, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (WA.RS.ED.182), fig. 13
?13 - Study of Three Mackerel [Not in Wilton], Untraced, but formerly in the collection of Ruskin’s publisher George Allen; with an annotation in ink by Ruskin