JOSEPH WILLIAM MALLORD TURNER
JOSEPH WILLIAM MALLORD TURNER was described by the leading nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin as the artist who could “most stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of nature”. Turner's youthful genius as a landscape artist is captured in three surviving watercolour sketches of West Malling dated by art historian Andrew Wilton to 1791-2, when the artist was aged 15 or 16. These depict the cascade in Swan Street, Malling Abbey from the north-west, and St Leonard's Tower under a stormy sky (unfinished, but a foretaste of his dramatic landscapes of later years). Two further pencil sketches of Malling Abbey survive dated 1798.
Turner's West Malling sketches have also proved invaluable as historical documents, not least in showing that the cascade was in existence well before 1810 (the date inscribed above the arch) and in recording the condition of St Leonard's Tower in the late eighteenth century.
The circumstances of Turner's visits to West Malling are unrecorded, but he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1790 onwards and may well have been introduced to the picturesque 'antiquities' of West Malling by John Downman ARA, then a seasoned Royal Academy exhibitor who inherited Went House (opposite the cascade) following the death of his uncle in 1783.
Ashford & Tenterden Canterbury, Herne Bay and Whitstable Dover, Deal & Sandwich Faversham, Isle of Sheppey and Sittingbourne Folkestone, Hythe & Romney Marsh Gravesend & Dartford Maidstone Margate, Broadstairs & Ramsgate Rochester, Chatham & Gillingham Sevenoaks Tonbridge and Malling Tunbridge Wells