Friday, 25 May 2012

Turner and Margate High Street


After yesterdays watercolour of Margate from Westbrook I had a bit of delve to see what other paintings of Margate would be of interest and stumbled upon this one by Joseph Mallord William Turner of Margate High Street. It is undated but my guess is that turner did id it when he was a school in Margate, he was born in 1775 and went to school in Margate when he was twelve, and my guess is he was around twelve when he painted it.

The picture above “A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth” was Turner's first to be accepted for the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in April 1790, the month he turned fifteen and you can see the similarity of style.
Some of Turner’s pictures of Margate are difficult to identify, the one above is Titled “Margate” and I am pretty certain it’s the right way up, perhaps the word I am looking for is, demanding. 


The picture was drawn by G Varlo and engraved for the guide by J Shury, then I am afraid it was coloured by a colour-blind idiot but that is beside the point, which is for some time it was a picture in the main tourist guide to Margate and I guess people would have noticed if The High Street looked completely wrong.  
This is an old photo of the other side of the low buildings on the seaward side of The High Street in about 1860 I think.


You may need to click on it and then click on it again to make it big enough to see the detail.
I will add to this post as I get time
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2 comments:

  1. Don WoodMay 25, 2012 1:24 pm

    I think it is even the same man and woman in each picture

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Michael ChildMay 25, 2012 2:28 pm

      She looks to have been made out of bread doe and risen a bit too much to me Don, I wonder if she will appear in any of his erotic pictures that go on show in The Turner Contemporary tomorrow, could add horror to the adult rating of the exhibition.

      Delete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.