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

As Finberg noted in his 1909 Inventory of the Bequest, there is an inscription by John Ruskin, ‘R. Turin’, in red ink towards the bottom of the back cover, written with the sketchbook inverted.1 In the course of his early assessment of the Turner Bequest, Ruskin occasionally resorted to inscribing the sketchbooks directly, as well as making notes on separate wrappers. The ‘R’ may stand for Rome, although there are no views of the city in the book, and likely informed Finberg’s wording of its title (see the Introduction); for numerous views of Turin, see under folio 7 recto (D21676).