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

With its sunned or stained, rubbed appearance, this sheet appears to have served as an outer cover of the sketchbook (or sequence of loose leaves – see below). It is inscribed by Turner towards the top, with ‘Tintagel to Bude’ crossed out and the revised itinerary above it probably written as a second thought, ‘Ifacombe’ being Ilfracombe. In fact, the sketchbook as now constituted includes views in the south and west of Devon and Cornwall, not just the limited stretch of their northern coasts between the points Turner notes.

As discussed in the introduction, the pages of this ‘sketchbook’ appear to have originally been loose sheets, and are not recorded in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory of the Bequest, although he subsequently noted the inscription here as ‘“Bude Clovelly Ilfacombe | Tintagel to Bude”’ in a manuscript listing,1 while C.F. Bell gave it as ‘“Bude, Clovely, Ilfracombe. Tintagel to Bude”’.2 Figures usually corresponding to Finberg’s MS catalogue page numbers, which differ from Bell’s sequence, are inscribed on the verso of most sheets, although in this case they appear here, on the recto as now bound.

There is a small, scribbled pencil mark towards the bottom left.

Technical notes:

There are glue stains at the four corners of the page, as the sheet, like all those in this book, appears to have been pasted down previously, in this instance to show the drawing on the verso (D41276). The sheet is slightly wrinkled, possibly as a result of exposure to damp.