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

Although the slight, diagrammatic quality of the three related studies here makes their orientation in relation to the sketchbook’s foliation uncertain, they appear to show patterns of semaphore signals from a tower. Turner had drawn the Dockyard and Square Tower semaphore stations at Portsmouth from various viewpoints in the first half of this book; see the Introduction. Given their isolation here, it is not clear whether these signals were observed directly or taken from some published source.