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

This is the right half of a double-page spread continued from D12019; Turner Bequest CLIII 14a, opposite, recording the West Lodges at Farnley Hall, with Otley Bridge seen through the gates in the distance. Turner has added various counts and dimensions on this page: ‘11’ [?the width of the gates], ‘11’ [the height of the gate pier?], ‘2’ [? The height of the gate pier capital], ‘4’ [the height of pinnacle and ball on the gate pier], ‘8’ x ‘2 10’ [relating to a plan below right], ‘21’ [relating to the curved wall between the gate pier and lodge, right], ‘10’ [relating to the quoins up the left angle of the right lodge], ‘15’ [lower right] and up the right side ‘14 6’ and ‘7’ [?relating to the height of the lodge and its roof?].

The main sketch on the present page served as the basis of a finished watercolour of the West Lodges, Farnley Hall (private collection) 1, painted for Walter Fawkes about 1818 and mentioned in the list of Farnley and related subjects compiled by Turner in the present sketchbook Tate D12013; Turner Bequest CLIII 11a as ‘19 Old Lodge’.

A sketch in the Yorkshire 2 sketchbook of 1816 (Tate D11042; Turner Bequest CXLV 1) perhaps shows a study of (or for) a detail of one of the gate piers.

This sketch and its finished watercolour echo the previous sketch of the East Lodges (D12017–D12018; Turner Bequest CLIII 13a–14) and its attendant watercolour. Those lodge gates were evidently designed by Turner himself (see catalogue notes to D12017) and more circumstantial evidence suggests that Turner might also have had a hand in the West Lodges. Inside the back cover of the present sketchbook (Tate D40717) is a sketch of one of the armorial plaques above the lodge doorway. In the sketch the plaque is clearly dated 1818, which would make the building of these lodges contemporary with the East Lodges. One difficulty remains that Turner himself referred to the two subjects in the list above as ‘New’ Lodges and ‘Old’. However the lodge buildings here bear some resemblance to a lodge in the foreground of a watercolour of Farnley Hall in the Olden Time (private collection)2 and it is possible that the West Lodges are ‘Old’ only in the sense that they are in an old style, rather than in the more fashionable and ‘New’ Greek style of the East Lodges.

Turner sketched some preliminary designs for lodge gates at Farnley, relating to both to the West and East Lodges, on Tate D34796; Turner Bequest CCCXLIV d 329.