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

Technical notes:

There is an irregular mark towards the top left, which may be the edge of a hand print or other adventitious mark, or offsetting from a page worked in watercolour. If the latter is the case, there is no obvious match with the corresponding points of any of the seven such leaves associated with the book, now either mounted or held loose within the book’s covers (see the technical notes to the Introduction).

Slight ‘bubbling’ to the surface was caused by small pockets of air being trapped when this white wove paper was laminated to the brown card outer cover to form the paste-down. The sheet is continuous with the corresponding paste-down at the other end of the sketchbook (Tate D33675; Turner Bequest CCCXL 10), which was used for a drawing. The leaves between comprised a single folded gathering, stitched together with these endpapers, before the outer card was applied over the stitching. At some stage the whole page block was likely torn out in one go, albeit carefully, as there are ragged narrow slits along the gutter where the threads were pulled out along with the pages.