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

This image on heavy weight white laid paper with a Whatman watermark was created with graphite pencil ruling, with some freehand drawing for small curved elements, strengthened with ruled lines in black ink. It was used as the top copy in a process which Turner used to generate two surviving copies (Tate D17058, D17060; Turner Bequest CXCV 88, 90).

He 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 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) 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.

This example was copied only once, because only a single incised line follows each ruled line. Its reverse was indented by the copying process, and picked up faint lines from the copying paper, thicker than the incised line on the front and with smudges of a material which fluoresces in ultraviolet light. The copies it generated are of course the same size, and not reversed. The upper copy (Tate D17058; Turner Bequest CXCV 88) was painted with a graded watercolour wash to illustrate realistic rendering of a rounded column, while the other (Tate D17060; CXCV 90) was used to illustrate the construction of a vanishing point that could be used later to build up the outline of a whole building.

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.

There are fragments of sealing wax or a similar-looking material on the reverse, presumably used to fix the diagram to a vertical surface for one of Turner’s lectures.

Turner traced this preparatory drawing of a Tuscan column in perspective to make the guiding outlines of Diagrams 40 and 41 (Tate D17059, D17060; Turner Bequest 89, 90) for his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy. A tracing from the drawing (D40003) on the back of the unrelated Diagram 36 (Tate D17052; Turner Bequest CXCV 82) has been obscured by a mount.

Technical notes:

Peter Bower states that the sheet is Imperial Laid size paper made by James Whatman the younger at Turkey Mill, Maidstone, Kent.1

Verso:

See Tate D40004.