Turner’s Sunrise over the Sea: ‘It is as if it came off his paintbrush yesterday, it feels amazingly fresh’

When J.M.W. Turner was asked to name the loveliest skies in Europe, he chose a place close to his heart. ‘The Isle of Thanet,’ he said, naming the flat peninsula in Kent, southeast England, with its geologically rich coastline dotted with shingle and sandy beaches.

Turner had first visited the area as a child, when his parents sent him to the fashionable Regency resort of Margate to avoid an outbreak of tuberculosis in London. As a successful artist in his later years, he returned often, escaping the demands of patrons and his duties as deputy director of the Royal Academy in London to gaze upon the North Sea. Here was a place where he could explore the aesthetic principles of ‘the sublime’ — the idea of an untrammelled greatness — using an economy few artists have been able to match since.

Turner stayed at Sophia Booth’s cottage on the seafront at Margate, rising early to observe the progress of the sun and record the changing cloud formations in his sketchbook. He explained to one young admirer that the ‘effects of sunrise’ were ‘far more beautiful’ than the sunsets usually associated with him.

The artist produced a prolific body of work in Margate, comprising sketches, colour studies and preparatory studies for oil paintings — works he called ‘beginnings’. One such watercolour, Sunrise over the Sea, perhaps at Margate, is being offered in the Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours sale in London on 4 July 2023.

The work is thought to have been made in the period between 1845 and 1848, a time when Turner was often in the seaside resort. Although the artist also travelled to France in the summer of 1845, the fact that the sun is shown rising over the sea (which must therefore be to the east) points strongly to this drawing being made at Margate.

The watercolour was originally owned by Mrs Booth, who inherited several sketchbooks after Turner died in 1851. They were later broken up and the pages sold off individually by her son, Daniel Pound.

Christie’s British Drawings & Watercolours specialist Annabel Kishor explains that many of Turner’s Margate works were at one point undervalued because of the artist’s relationship with his twice-widowed landlady. ‘Victorian morality was such that the liaison was seen as improper,’ says Kishor. ‘Mrs Booth was dismissed from the scholarship for a long time.’ The specialist also believes that there was class prejudice involved.

In fact, Turner produced thousands of drawings and watercolours in sketchbooks, along with handwritten annotations and observations about the passage of time.

The artist made no provision for these preparatory works in his will, and it took considerable effort by the art critic John Ruskin to impose some kind of order on them. As such, many of Turner’s late exercises were neglected in favour of more ‘finished’ works of art.

It was not until later that these chromatically complex paintings were appreciated for what they were: explorations of atmosphere, colour and light. They inspired the French Impressionist painters and the Abstract Expressionists; Mark Rothko is said to have observed wryly: ‘This man Turner… he learnt a lot from me.’

Attitudes towards Mrs Booth have also changed. The opening of Turner Contemporary, more or less on the site of her cottage in Margate, has sparked a renewed interest in this late period of Turner’s life, and a recognition of her importance to him.

Sunrise over the Sea, perhaps at Margate  is ‘late Turner at his best’, says Kishor. It was originally thought to have been owned by Ruskin. However, recent research reveals that the watercolour was part of a sketchbook that was broken up, with parts now held in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

‘It is in wonderful condition,’ says Kishor. ‘It is as if it came off his paintbrush yesterday — it feels amazingly fresh. You get the sense that this was done purely for his own enjoyment. It is a work made at the end of Turner’s life in a place that was hugely important to him.’