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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > Isle of Wight 1827 > The House and Grounds at East Cowes ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures 1827

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures’ 1827
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures 1827
D22761
Turner Bequest CCXLIV 99
Gouache and watercolour on blue wove paper, 144 x 192 mm
Inscribed in pencil ‘[...]’ towards bottom left
Stamped in black ‘CCXLIV 99’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This is among dozens of blue paper studies made in and around East Cowes Castle, presumably during the same visit. For more on the various aspects of the house (demolished in about 1950), and its lost grounds as depicted by Turner, see the Introduction to this subsection. The present drawing was traditionally associated with Turner’s 1827 stay at Petworth in Sussex, after his Isle of Wight visit, where he produced a series similar in technique,1 addressed elsewhere in this catalogue.
There are a few drawings now identified as East Cowes interiors with figures (see also Tate D20851, D20852, D22690, D22694, D22705; CCXXVII a 48, 49, CCXLIV 28, 32, 43). Patrick Youngblood rejected the Petworth connection and identified this one as showing the drawing room at East Cowes Castle, looking south-west towards the smaller of the house’s two conservatories;2 the unusual apsidal form of the end of the room is shown, with its curved corners flanking the doorway, apparently flanked by its fireplace on the left and its deep bay window on the right.3
Youngblood was also the first to identify a painting of about 1835 now known as Music Party, East Cowes Castle (Tate N03550)4 as showing the adjacent Octagon Room, rather than a Petworth interior as traditionally thought; there are no identified drawings of that room, and the painting may have been prompted by a visit a few years later, as noted in the overall Introduction to this tour. The setting of a somewhat mysterious, unresolved painting of the 1830s, formerly linked to Petworth but presently called Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle (Tate N01988),5 has been compared by Ian Warrell to the unusual architectural forms recorded here and in a gouache variation, D22694.6
There is a slight drawing of figures on the verso (D41420).

Matthew Imms
November 2015

1
See Finberg 1909, II, pp.744–6, CCXLIV 1–116, ‘Petworth Water Colours’, c.1830.
2
See Youngblood 1983, p.616; see also Warrell 1989, p.148, albeit with pl.132 titled ‘East Cowes Castle: the Octagon Room’, and Warrell 2007, pp.326 (caption to fig.1), 327.
3
See the photograph of the opposite end of the room in about 1880, Youngblood 1983, fig.56 and Warrell 2007, p.327 fig.2.
4
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp.281–2 no.447, pl.448 (colour).
5
Ibid., pp.282–3 no.449, pl.450 (colour).
6
See Warrell 2007, pp.327, 328 note 17, and Ian Warrell, Turner’s Wessex: Architecture and Ambition, exhibition catalogue, Salisbury Museum 2015, pp.173, 175.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘East Cowes Castle: The Drawing Room, with Figures 1827 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2016, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-east-cowes-castle-the-drawing-room-with-figures-r1182721, accessed 08 February 2025.