Teignmouth

Turner walked the Devon and Cornish coast in the summer of 1811, filling sketchbooks for a series of engraved coastal views a London publisher had commissioned. This oil came out of that tour. He showed it in 1812 in his own gallery in Queen Anne Street, one of six West Country scenes hung together, and the 3rd Earl of Egremont bought it for Petworth. One of the drawings he made on the spot is catalogued as Teignmouth from Ringmore, with a vessel under construction, which is what a small Devon port was doing in the middle of a war with France. In the foreground of the painting a girl drives two cows into the shallows, in front of the old hulls lying further out. The picture was accepted by the state in lieu of death duties in 1956 and allocated to the Tate in 1984, and it has stayed on the wall at Petworth throughout.