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

This drawing has been related to the richly painted but unfinished Two Women with a Letter (Tate N05501),1 currently dated to about 1830.2 The painting has been seen as a development from the 1827 ink, chalk and gouache blue paper studies Turner made of country house life at John Nash’s East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight (Tate; Turner Bequest CCXXVII a) and Lord Egremont’s Petworth House in Sussex (Tate; Turner Bequest CCXLIV), addressed elsewhere in this catalogue. See also the painting of a Music Party, East Cowes Castle (Tate N03550).3

Martin Butlin suggested that the ‘concentration on the back of the neck and the high-swept hair-style of the foremost girl’ in the first painting may derive from the work of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825),4 Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, who often depicted women with elaborately, even fetishistically, arranged hair, sometimes from the back; see for example Tate N03396 and T10440. He also mentioned a comparable pencil study of a woman in the Seine and Paris sketchbook (Tate D23927; Turner Bequest CCLIV 24),5 now dated to 1832. The Turner and Watteau Scholar Selby Whittingham has described Two Women with a Letter as ‘a more Dutch theme’;6 and while noting Butlin’s mention of Fuseli, he has suggested that the hairstyle was simply the fashion of the day, as seen in the large painting England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday, exhibited in 1819 (Tate N00502),7 and might also derive from one of the recognised influences on that picture and other works by Turner of this period, the French painter of elegant fêtes champêtres, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721).8

Although Anne Chumbley and Ian Warrell have noted that Turner’s ‘pencil is employed with studied delicacy’,9 Evelyn Joll has suggested that the girl in profile ‘is the reverse of elegant and appears to be nothing more than an ill-favoured brat.’10 Nevertheless, the reflected glow within her shadowed face is carefully and sympathetically observed. While the left-hand figure may well have been a source for the painting, the second figure does not appear, although the features and ringlets of the further woman are not dissimilar in effect. Close examination of the drawing shows the faint beginnings of a third head, between the other two towards the top, with an elementary rendering of the headdress and apparent indications to position the chin and neck, suggesting an abandoned full-face pose.

In 2005, two Chelsea College of Art students participating in Tate Britain’s Drawing from Turner project and exhibition, Emma Puntis and Heeseon Byun, copied the present work, and the latter’s interpretation was exhibited beside it.

There is a slight, unrelated drawing on the verso is Tate D34833 (Turner Bequest CCCXLIV 350v).

Technical notes:

The flattened-out sheet originated in a notebook; stitch holes are evident down the centre, but more so from the verso.