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

Drawn with the sketchbook inverted, and continued slightly on folio 27 (D10630), the subject of Turner’s copy after Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was first published by Ziff. (There is also an old but undated and unsigned pencil note identifying Watteau’s picture in a copy of Finberg now in Tate’s library). The Enchanted Isle (L’Île enchantée) (private collection) belonged to the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, a great admirer of Watteau who owned various pictures by or attributed to him, as pointed out by Selby Whittingham in his comprehensive study of the French artist’s following in Britain. In view of damage and retouching evident in the picture, Whittingham suggests it may have been the ‘fine Watteau’ which Reynolds allegedly ‘destroyed’ for purposes of research, exposing its layers of paint to discover the painter’s distinctive method of colouring,1 and also that Turner might have first seen it in Reynolds’s house while a student at the Royal Academy.2 This drawing, a partial copy in outline, was presumably made in the house of a later owner, the watercolourist James Holworthy, a close friend by 1816. For some years Holworthy had lived at 29 York Buildings, New Road, Marylebone.3

In 1820 Turner borrowed Holworthy’s house while his own was undergoing building work, but he is likely to have made this drawing on an earlier occasion. It is annotated with colour notes, reflecting the continuing interest in this aspect of Watteau’s work among artists and collectors. The main attraction for Turner, however, must have been the subject of an elegant garden party or fête galante as a potential source for his picture England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday (Tate N00502)4 exhibited in 1819. This required similar narrative and incident, while Reynolds’s ownership of the Watteau was pertinent as his country home, Wick House, commanded much the same view of Richmond Hill as Turner was now painting; see notes to folio 10 verso (D10601) for related composition studies in this sketchbook. Whittingham observes that the centre and left of England: Richmond Hill follows the structure of The Enchanted Isle but that the composition as a whole with its parade of figures comes from other pictures by Watteau including L’Accordée du Village (Sir John Soane’s Museum, London) in the collection of his friend John Soane. References to Watteau must have been calculated to catch the eye of the Regent, two of whose pictures attributed to the artist (in fact by Jean-Baptiste Pater) were shown at the British Institution in 1818.

Turner may also have included a memory of The Enchanted Isle in his picture Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules (Tate N00514),5 representing the painter in his studio, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831. With other pictures by Watteau propped on easels, this shows what might be a compressed upright version of it, resting on top of a cupboard in the background.6 Gerald Finley has traced Turner’s interest in Watteau to as early as 1806, on the basis of similarities between the landscape setting of the French painter’s Acis and Galatea and Turner’s The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides (Tate N00477).7 Thomas Stothard’s Sans Souci (Tate N01829), the first of a number of popular pastiches of Watteau by this artist, caught Turner’s eye at the Academy in 1817. Turner painted an overtly Watteauesque What You Will! (its title taken from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night but also a pun on his own Cockney pronunciation of Watteau’s name) for the Academy in 1822 (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts).8