The Castle at Tancarville, Normandy is one of five known gouache and watercolour sketches made by Turner of the landscape in 1832 - others forming part of the 1856 Turner Bequest in Tate Britain.
Worked on a sheet of 17 x 14cm blue paper (now trimmed), it depicts the ruined castle on its rocky platform overlooking the Seine with a crowd to the foreground.
The drawings later formed the basis of two engraved illustrations for the 1834 volume Turner’s Annual Tour: Wanderings by the Loire and Seine, later reissued as Rivers of France.
The sketch comes from the family of Humphrey Neame, a Harley Street eye doctor, who discussed it in a letter dated February 19, 1951 from Charles Gerald Agnew.