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

This image on white wove Whatman paper has been shaded in a carefully graded watercolour wash, to illustrate how to make a column look convincingly three-dimensional. The underlying ‘drawing’ was made with a copying process which Turner used to generate a limited number of copies from other lecture diagrams, and this was most likely the upper of two copies made from a surviving original (Tate D17061; Turner Bequest CXCV 91), whose lower copy also survives (Tate D17060; Turner Bequest CXCV 90) and was used to illustrate the construction of a vanishing point, which was a basis for drawing the rest of the building.

Turner needed several copies so that he could if he chose illustrate the drawing of a single element such as a column alone, then later with perspectival lines going to a single point, or built up to a colonnade of identical columns, or used to illustrate the way to make a column look three-dimensional by shading, He could also use such a colonnade to form an entire elevation of the building. The process seems to have involved placing a blank sheet on a table, overlaying double-sided copying paper, followed by another blank sheet, another sheet of double-sided copying paper, and the image to be copied. Then he pressed down hard on each ruled line of the top copy with a sharp tool run against a ruler, and unpacked the paper stack to reveal one good and one pale copy, with little smudging on the ‘good’ side. If necessary, he strengthened straight lines in the copies, which would both be identical and not reversed, and then he hand-applied the curved elements freehand as necessary and/or painted the lines to make them bold enough to demonstrate to a large audience in a room lit artificially.

Sets of copies identified thus far include: Building in Perspective (Tate D17051; Turner Bequest CXCV 81) which is an upper copy of a lost original and A House in Perspective, Lecture Diagram 36 (D17052; CXCV 82), and Building (D17053; CXCV 83) which are both lower copies of comparable originals; Tracing of Guiding Lines of Diagram of Capital, Tuscan Entablature Worked Out in Perspective (D17077; CXCV 107) which was used as the original for the copies Capital, Tuscan Entablature Worked Out in Perspective (D17076; CXCV 106) and Tuscan Entablature (D17079; CXCV 109); two top copies now called Tracing of Guiding Lines (D17132; CXCV 161) and Classical Columns (D17142; CXCV 171) of a lost original and another copy Part of Classical Buildings, with Columns (D17141; CXCV 170) of the same subject, and the set discussed here.

The lines from the copying process are thin, and can be discerned in ultraviolet light, and by their tendency to repel the watercolour wash, which has a gum-based medium. This is evidence that the material that coated the copying paper was not gum-based. It takes careful observation to establish that the column is not a skilfully painted, unique drawing.

Recipes exist for home-made copying paper, and evidence from three groups of the lecture diagrams – smudges of black material, occasional smears and the incised lines – suggests that a mixture of egg yolk or whole egg with cheap lamp black was involved. Thin paper dipped in such a watery solution, left to dry, and used once, would have worked. The copying papers were not used repeatedly, since all the copied lines are crisp and even, therefore clearly made from virgin copying paper that was so cheap it could be discarded after one use. This process could have been done at home, and repeated on a top copy if more copies were required. There is precedent for using eggs too: a fair proportion of the primed canvases Turner used while his father was alive and assisting him in the studio carry a priming made from lead white and whole eggs. Possibly Turner’s father assisted with the copying as well.

Soap, butter or linseed oil to mix with dry pigments in a variety of colours were also recommended in household encyclopaedias for copying paper: vermilion for red, carmine for reddish pink, blue bice for blue. Some instructions suggested that dry pigment strewn over the back of the top copy, or soft graphite pencil shaded on, could work for generating a single copy. Turner’s lecture diagrams look too tidy and clean on the reverse side for these last methods to have been used, and the making of successive copies off one top copy would surely have led to smudging on the front as well.

In Lecture 3 as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, Turner presented a selection of methods for putting a square and various curved objects into perspective, and then moved on to discussing the architectural orders. Diagram 40 functions as an introduction of sorts to the Tuscan order, to be presented before he focused on the various parts, such the entablature, shaft, capital and pedestal. Turner writes that Tuscan is ‘the most simple of the orders in architecture’ and ‘according to Sir William Wootton’s simile it is labourer and therefore hope he will clear our road from the weedy limes which hitherto has encumbered our way that we can dispense with the plan and section and proceed by measures only’.1 The simile comes from Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), poet, diplomat and afterwards Provost of Eton who provided a detailed description of the orders in The Elements of Architecture (1624).2 Turner habitually called him William or ‘Sir Billy’ and in his Verse Book (private collection) noted variants on the same dictum on the Tuscan order:

Turner presented a perspective construction of this Tuscan column in Diagram 41 (Tate D17060; Turner Bequest CXCV 90). See also Tate D17061 (Turner Bequest CXCV 91) for the preparatory drawing used to trace the diagram’s guiding lines.

Technical notes:

Peter Bower states that the sheet is Super Royal size Whatman paper made by William Balston and Finch and Thomas Robert Hollingworth at Turkey Mill, Maidstone, Kent. Bower writes that ‘all sheets in this batch have some streaking across the sheet, probably from a fault in the sizing’.1

Verso:

Blank, save for an inscription by an unknown hand in pencil ‘89’ top left.