Paintings and Drawings of Whalley Abbey by William Turner RA and Rob Miller RSA
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| Whalley Abbey Cloister Arch Calder River Path oil on board 24x30cm |
More mental meanderings of a plein air artist:- It had escaped my memory whilst I was painting at Whalley Abbey last year that William Mallard Turner had been there drawing and painting about 226 years before me. I had turned up at Whalley 2016 in the rain clutching my pochade box and bag of tricks in search of a coffee in the Abbey coffee shop. After refreshments the rain had gone its way and I decided to explore the grounds and found myself a dry spot by the river. Turner 1799 on the other hand had been commissioned by the Abbot to make sketches for a book on the Abbey. I don't really want to go into the history of Whalley because this blog is concerned with the visual and the act of someone looking at the landscape and recording what they are seeing. But I thought that this time lapse was worth mention as a personal question. Does Turners visit to the Abbey make the place a better place for me to paint? If I follow Cezannes advise then visually no it shouldn't I should paint what I see and not what I think I see. Okay, but there's still something in my mind which fascinates me about mine and Turners joint visit across the centuries. If you take a look at Turners second drawing below you can make out the shattered wall of the cloisters on the far left. Meaning that if we were both drawing there today we would be looking at each other across the river. Ha ha, how brilliant an event that would have made for me and what a finer story I could have told you. Or maybe I watched to many late night episodes of Jamie and Claire in outlander on netflix.
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| Whalley Abbey and Whalley Bridge William Mallard Turner Graphite on paper |
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| Whalley Abbey William mallard Turner Graphit on paper |
Turner went to Whalley, near Blackburn in Lancashire, in the autumn of 1799. He had been commissioned to design illustrations for the Rev TD Whittaker's History of the Parish of Whalley published in 1800–01. This sketch shows him exploring the picturesque potential of the medieval abbey at Whalley. By the time Turner visited it, the building had fallen into disrepair.
Gallery label, August 2004
Drawn with the page turned horizontally, this was used as the basis for the finished watercolour (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool),1 engraved in 1800 for Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s History of Whalley (Tate impression: T05929). The Abbey was a Cistercian house, first consecrated in 1306, with construction continuing throughout the fourteenth century. The view is taken from the Long Walk on the left or town bank of the river. The inner, or north-east, gatehouse, of 1480, is visible at the right, beyond the mill. The house to its left is known as the Abbot’s Lodging. Further drawings of Whalley Abbey in this book are on folios 31 verso and 35 verso (D01961, D01969), and folios 44 recto and 45 recto (D01983, D01984; Turner Bequest XLV 43, 44).
Andrew Wilton, ‘Whalley Abbey: Arches of the Dormitory 1799 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2016, https://www
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