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

This drawing may represent the Custom House in London according to Turner scholar Ian Warrell or, as Eric Shanes points out, it may depict the old Greenwich Hospital from the Thames.1 There is a further colour beginning also believed to depict either of these sites (Tate D25349; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 227).

If the present drawing does indeed depict Custom House then it may be a preparatory study for a Views of London design of around 1825 (see Tate impression T06069). On the right, extending into the centre of the composition, is the riverside façade of Custom House built in 1825 by the architect Sir Robert Smirke. The features of its exterior architecture have been undeveloped; they are vaguely implied by horizontal and vertical strokes of translucent wash. Terraced stairs are suggested in the foreground leading up from a mooring point at the banks of the Thames towards Custom House. Figures can be seen on the stairs, rendered summarily in flicks of rust-brown wash. The sky is a brilliant azure, applied in gestural strokes of a dry brush.

For other of Turner’s works which feature the Custom House see the Hesperides (1) sketchbook of between 1805 and 1806 (Tate D05786–D05789; Turner Bequest XCIII 13–5); the Scotland and London sketchbook of about 1820 (Tate D13825–D13826; Turner Bequest CLXX 10–11) and the Tabley No.3 sketchbook of about 1825 (Tate D07039, D07041, D07074, D07076–D07077, D07082–D07083; Turner Bequest CV 40a, 41a, 62, 63–63a, 66–66a). See also two loose colour studies (Tate D25222, D25294; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 100, 172).