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

With the page turned vertically, at the outer end is a pencil study of clouds with the disk of the sun just above a perfunctory horizon. The various notes of ‘red’ probably indicate sunset; see also the monochrome watercolour studies with low suns later in the sketchbook on folio 21 recto (D17874) and subsequent pages.

Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation and overlapping with the sky study are three bands of shallow, pointed arches, studied from downstream of Old London Bridge; one of them frames a slight view west up the River Thames to Southwark Bridge, with a suggestion of the arches of Blackfriars Bridge beyond in turn. Compare the way Southwark Bridge appears through the widest arch in the 1824 watercolour known as The Port of London (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),1 engraved in 1827 as Old London Bridge and Vicinity (Tate impression: T06070), and see the overall Introduction to the present Thames-related section. There are similar quasi-diagrammatic studies on folios 32 verso–33 recto, 34 verso–35 recto and 35 verso (D17889–D17890, D17893–D17895).

More than half the drawings in this sketchbook show the river around the bridge, and are likely to date from 1824; see the book’s Introduction. As the sky study appears to have been made earlier, the narrow range applicable to the book as a whole has been used here.