Seascape: Folkestone
painting by J. M. W. Turner
Seascape: Folkestone is an oil painting created by Joseph Mallord William Turner. It dates to around 1845, when Turner made a return visit to Folkestone. The painting depicts a swirling seascape featuring the shoreline and cliffs of Folkestone with two boats heading out to sea, one a sailboat and the other with a funnel. It is composed mostly of green hues with touches of other pigments. According to Sotheby's, it features the parish church in Hythe and on the left side Saltwood Castle. Turner chose not to exhibit the painting, considering it too experimental after similar works had been criticised.
On 5 July 1984, it was sold at auction at Sotheby's in London to a private collector for $10,023,200, the highest sum paid for a Turner painting at the time. An 1836 Turner painting titled Juliet and Her Nurse had previously sold at Sotheby's in New York for $6.4 million in May 1980. The seascape, along with approximately 200 other artworks, was from the estate of British art historian Kenneth Clark and was sold by his son, Alan Clark, following his father's death. Clark had decided to sell the collection to pay for estate taxes but said that his father considered the Turner to be "the finest painting in the world" and would never have sold it.
“Seascape: Folkestone” enters the record as painting by J. M. W. Turner. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Seascape, Folkestone and painting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Seascape: Folkestone” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Seascape, Folkestone and painting provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21050992. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1845, 1984, 1836 and 1980.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Seascape: Folkestone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.