J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

D00001–D00003, D00005, D00046–D00053, D00115, D00187, D00191, D00195, D00716, D40210–D40212, D40266

Turner Bequest I A–C, E, III A–D, Ea–d, IV A–C, VIII A, XVII L, P, T, XXIX K

Turner’s earliest dated drawing is the 1787 view of Nuneham Courtenay (Tate D00002; Turner Bequest I B). Other works can be grouped round this, on the evidence of style. Some of the first essays in this group of watercolours and drawings are copies from prints, which exemplify a normal mode of self-tuition for any young artist of the time. Four finished watercolour views in Margate and Thanet, in a private collection,1 have been associated with his early recorded visits there at about the age of nine and eleven, but they are at least as sophisticated, in terms of draughtsmanship and the handling of perspective, as the Nuneham view, and it may be appropriate, as Youngblood has suggested (see under Tate D00047; Turner Bequest III B), to assign them to around 1787, i.e. when Turner was twelve.

The other drawings in this group display a steadily strengthening grasp of technique and colouring, though always within the strictly defined limits, and serving the clearly identified goals, of Turner’s self-imposed objective to become a topographical watercolourist. Joyce Townsend (1990) has identified the principal pigments in Turner’s palette at this time: indigo, gamboge, black, brown madder, vermilion, earth colours and an unidentified organic red occur in the views of Nuneham Courtenay (Tate D00002; Turner Bequest I B) and Radley Hall from the South-East (Tate D00049; Turner Bequest III D). At this early date he is unlikely to have been working on commission, but will have intended to display the finished views in his father’s shop window;2 hence the washline borders that he painted for several of the subjects, now largely trimmed away. A finished subject of this time which did not remain in Turner’s hands is a Distant View of Oxford from the South, which can be dated stylistically to 1789, in a private collection.3 This was not sold from his father’s shop but given to the Narraway family in Bristol with whom he sometimes stayed; see notes on the Bristol and Malmesbury sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest VI).

Notes follow below for five missing drawings of uncertain date (c.1787–91?) catalogued by Finberg. These drawings were presumably lost in the flood of 1928. Finberg grouped them with drawings dated approximately 1787, but they included the copy of St Vincent’s Tower, Naples which is probably a little later. The missing sheets most likely belong, however, to the years before 1792.