Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A.

Private Collection, Suffolk, England, circa 1990;

sale, Cambridge, Cheffins, 20 March 2024, lot 200

This recently rediscovered watercolor dates to 1795, the year that Turner visited St David’s Cathedral in western Pembrokeshire as part of an extensive sketching tour to southern Wales. Turner was then still only twenty years old, but this tour would, in fact, be the third time in four years that he had explored the Principality.¹

Full of self-confidence and determination, Turner’s prestigious talent was recognized early at the Royal Academy. He exhibited his first watercolor there in 1790 - View of the Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth - while, in 1793, his The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, Bristol became his first ‘exhibition’ oil painting.² In 1794, his work in that year’s Academy exhibition was discussed in the St James’ Chronicle, which wrote that, in their opinion, ‘his watercolours were among the best works in the exhibition’.³ By 1795, Turner’s reputation as an exciting rising star was firmly established and he was attracting the attention of some of the leading patrons of the day. These included Viscount Maldon of Hampton Court, Herefordshire and Sir Richard Colt Hoare of Stourhead, Wiltshire, who each invited him to stay at their respective estates after the conclusion of his Welsh expedition.

Despite its remote location, situated as it is on the westernmost point of the Pembrokeshire peninsula, Turner would have been anxious to visit St David’s during the summer of 1795.⁴ Founded as a monastery in the 6^th century by St David, the patron saint of Wales, its exposed position meant that it was to suffer numerous attacks by raiding Vikings in its early years. With the arrival of the Normans in 1066 this threat slowly receded, and St David’s became a major center for pilgrimage. The present cathedral complex was begun in 1181 and over the best part of the next millennium, it underwent periods of construction, dilapidation and then reconstruction.

In the present watercolor, which Turner has based on a sketch in his ‘South Wales Sketchbook’, he stands in the ruins of St Mary’s Chapel whose 14^th century vaulted ceiling had collapsed in 1775.⁵ Adopting a very low viewpoint, he looks across to the semi-destroyed tomb of John Hiot, Archdeacon of St David’s (1400-1419), with its sculpted stone effigy staring blankly up at the sky. Immediately behind this, the sun illuminates the finely carved stone entrance to Bishop Vaughan’s Chapel (commissioned in 1509), while to the right, Turner not only allows the eye to travel through a massive arch into the shadowy recesses of the building beyond, but also upwards to the Cathedral’s square tower, looming overhead. Returning to the foreground he introduces the figure of a man, who sits quietly on a block of masonry, perhaps contemplating the magnificence of his surroundings.

Turner has signed this watercolor on its reverse, but more unusually he has also recorded his location with a lengthy inscription in ink. Although he was undoubtedly interested in his subject from a topographical point of view, in this work he has clearly sought, more than anything else, to capture the very essence of the place; something he achieves through the medium of light, which ripples over the surfaces of the ancient stones. A dramatic atmosphere is created which simultaneously conveys both grandeur and a strong sense of the passage of time.

With this watercolor, Turner demonstrates that he has moved away from the priorities of the early exponents of the medium and this shift in focus – namely to explore the very soul of a subject – has set him on an unstoppable path to becoming the preeminent artist of his own generation.

We are very grateful to Ian Warrell for his help when cataloguing this lot.

^1.In 1792 Turner travelled in mid-Wales between Bristol and the Devil’s Bridge (old Cardiganshire) and then, in 1794, he explored the region further north, between Shrewsbury and Flint

^2.See London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 2025, lot 28 (£1,870,000)

^3.E. Shanes, J.M.W. Turner, A Life in Art, Young Mr Turner, The First Forty Years, New Haven and London 2016, p. 89

^4.For further information on Turner’s tour to Wales in 1795, see: A. Wilton, Turner in Wales, Llandudno 1984, p. 45

^5.See Tate Britain: TB XXVI 37. Other on-the-spot drawings of St David’s in the sketchbook include: TB XXVI 35, 36, 39 & 40