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

A single sentence runs across the top of the page:

The word ‘found’ is inserted again immediately below, apparently for clarity, as the tail of the ‘y’ from the end of the first line runs through and obscures the first occurrence.

John Gage and Jerrold Ziff have identified this note, continuing in sequence from folio 39 verso (D07420), as a transcription from the 1598 English edition of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (see the sketchbook Introduction).1 This passage from page 125 falls within the English translator Richard Haydocke’s own commentary, ‘A briefe censure of the booke of colours’, following Lomazzo’s ‘Third Booke: Treating of Colour’. Haydocke notes ‘... me thinkes I coulde frame this definition out of mine Authors discourse’, presenting the explanation as noted (with an added ‘of’) by Turner.

Without recognising the source, and taking it as ‘his [Turner’s] definition’, Jack Lindsay has quoted the note as ‘opposed to the ideas of [Isaac] Newton and [John] Locke ... according to which colour is a purely subjective impression’.2 Ann Livermore had also taken it to be a poetic evocation of ‘the latent colouring of all animate and inanimate things’.3 Gage subsequently related it to Turner’s more informed, scientific interest in ‘recent discussion of the materiality of light and colour’.4

Further passages of Turner’s extensive notes from Lomazzo appear later in the sketchbook, continuing with passages about light opposite on folio 41 recto (D07423).