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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Switzerland 1802 > Studies in the Louvre Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Commentary on Nicolas Poussin (Inscription by Turner) 1802

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Commentary on Nicolas Poussin (Inscription by Turner)’ 1802
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 27 Recto:
Commentary on Nicolas Poussin (Inscription by Turner) 1802
D04305
Turner Bequest LXXII 27
Inscribed by Turner in black ink (see main catalogue entry) on white wove paper prepared with a reddish brown wash, 128 x 114 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘27’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘LXXII–27’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
For Turner and the Louvre Poussins, see folio 25 verso of this sketchbook (D04302). After concluding his remarks on Poussin’s Gathering of the Manna begun on folio 26 verso (see D04304 for a full transcription), Turner moved here to a more general discussion of the artist and his pictures in the Louvre, which he believed showed evidence of retouching:
...All his pictures have | been heightened in the Blues and Reds par | ticularly the Woman in Adultery – | the Death of the Wife of Ananias, – and Abrahams Servant and Rebecca the | Baptism of Jesus in red in the shadows | owing to the ground like the Nativity that | Sr Joshua Reynolds mention’d was an historical colour and ought always to | be attended unto. The same but greenish | pervades through the Pest of the Philistines | but they are inferior to the pictures | of Lord Ashburnham and the Sacraments | in the Duke of Bridgewater’s.
The Louvre pictures certainly referred to here are The Woman Taken in Adultery, The Death of Sapphira, Eleazer and Rebecca at the Well and The Plague of Ashdod. The ‘Baptism of Jesus’ is more mysterious since there was no picture of this subject in the collection. It could be St John Baptising the People but conceivably Turner mistook the action of the Louvre’s Christ Healing the Sick – where a blind man is healed by Christ’s hand laid on his eyes – with the Baptism, and indeed that picture is notably ‘red in the shadows’.
Of the other works mentioned, as Finberg noted, the Earl of Ashburnham owned two of a set of three Bacchanals. These, from the sale of Peter Delmé in Paris in 1790, were The Triumph of Bacchus (Nelson Atkins Gallery of Art, Kansas City) and The Triumph of Pan (National Gallery, London). Turner would also have known the latter when it was subsequently in the collection of John Julius Angerstein. Ashburnham’s other Poussins included The Crucifixion, bought in 1794 (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.) and Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (Städelesches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main), of which Turner was later to give a panegyric in his Royal Academy Perspective lectures.1 The Duke of Bridgewater had bought Poussin’s second set of Sacraments – now on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh – in 1798. It is not clear what picture Turner meant by the ‘Nativity’ or what Reynolds had said about it.

David Blayney Brown
July 2005

1
See Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 1981, p.72.

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Commentary on Nicolas Poussin (Inscription by Turner) 1802 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2005, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-commentary-on-nicolas-poussin-inscription-by-turner-r1129714, accessed 24 April 2025.