In September I had the opportunity to spend the month travelling through Normandy and visited the sites of all of the subjects represented at Leeds.
Dieppe was his port of landing on his first visit to Normandy in He landed in Dieppe on 20 June and put up at the Hotel de Londres on the harbour front. Such records as he did make, however, furnished him with the subjects of three engravings for his Architectural Antiquities of Normandy published in We will look at the beach view here, and in addition see further treatments of the castle from the south. Finally we will climb up the cliff to the north of the harbour to take the view over the whole scene as recorded in the sketch at the Castle Museum that provided the basis of two fine at the Victoria and Albert Museum and P This is a careful soft graphite drawing of the Saint Remy Tower of the Castle at Dieppe as seen from below to the south.
The tower is today very much mutilated, and the subject is recognisable only with some difficulty. A figure is kneeling in the foreground, perhaps drawing water or washing at a stream, and to the left is a glimpse of the drawbridge across the moat leading to the principal entrance to the castle in the west range. The subject is surrounded by a pencil framing line. The bridge to the left in the present drawing is that of the drawbridge to principal entrance in the west range.
Apart from the fact that the Saint Remy tower is but a stump of its former self, the route is now hemmed in, and it is impossible to take a photograph that includes the drawbridge. When the Google Earth Streetview camera came up here, however, a gate to a private yard was open, sufficient to give a glimpse of the relationship of the drawing to the site.
It may be admitted that the present composition is a less than obvious treatment of the castle. As with his treatment of the East End of the church of St Jacques Cotman seems to have very deliberately sought out a difficult, underprivileged angle, that cramped the perspective, prioritised the incidental, and generally contrived to be the very opposite of what most people would have expected in an approach to representing such a major landmark.
