- Museum number
- 1958,0712.391
- Description
-
Malvern Priory, gatehouse; gatehouse with bushes growing around, a log in the foreground. c.1793
Graphite
- Production date
- 1793 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 205 millimetres
-
Width: 263 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
- Sloan 1998
Turner's first signed and dated drawings, made in 1787, are of architectural subjects, and two years later he was working with Thomas Malton junior (1748-1804), a specialist in watercolours and prints of architectural views. By 1792 Turner had begun making summer tours to sketch landscape as well as the buildings within it, and had already developed his own distinctive drawing style, clearly evident in the drawings reproduced in Sloan 1998.
In 1921 A.J. Finberg, who had catalogued the Turner Bequest for the National Gallery, where it was then housed, published a booklet about a group of early pencil drawings not in Turner's bequest to the nation. Some of the drawings made by the 18-year-old artist on his important summer tour of 1793 to Hereford, Great Malvern, Tewkesbury and Tintern (see 1958,0712.400) were still in the Turner Bequest (TB xii and xiii), but most of them had belonged to Charles Stokes, an early collector of Turner's works, who became his stockbroker from the 1830s and later one of his executors. He died in 1853 and left his collections to his niece, who over the years kept some and sold or exchanged others.¹ When Finberg published four, then in a private collection, the importance of the large group of early drawings which came from the Stokes collection became known to all serious Turner scholars and collectors.
R.W. Lloyd managed to acquire all four drawings that Finberg published as well as five others (see Sloan 1998, Appendix 1), including 1958,0712.391 and 1958,0712.401. Turner had made several drawings of Great Malvern Priory, Worcestershire, especially of the porch, tower, and gatehouse - all that remains of the original monastery - and exhibited a finished watercolour of the porch at the Royal Academy the following spring. The present whereabouts of these pencil drawings, and thus their relationship to the finished watercolours, has not been known to recent cataloguers,² but it is now clear that the finished versions were not taken directly from these pencil sketches.
Turner visited Kent and Sussex in the autumn of 1793, and it was then that he made the drawing of St Mary's in Dover. Other drawings made in Canterbury on the same trip were the basis for another watercolour he exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year.
1. See Warrell 1997, pp. 199-200.
2. See Whitworth 1984, p. 11, and 1996, no. 5.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1998 May-Sept., BM, J.M.W.Turner: Lloyd Bequest, no.1(a)
- Acquisition date
- 1958
- Acquisition notes
- UNDER THE TERMS OF THE BEQUEST, NONE OF THE PRINTS OR DRAWINGS BEQUEATHED BY R. W. LLOYD MAY BE LENT OUTSIDE THE BRITISH MUSEUM (Registration Numbers 1958,0712.318 to 3149).
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1958,0712.391